This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!"
Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility!
It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.
Flexport's technology had nothing to do with this, though. The CEO literally took a boat ride around the bay and looked at what was happening + talked to some people. He did the thing everyone assumes public officials do, but who clearly are not doing.
But the CEO has a different level of understanding of logistics compared to the major. They may be looking at the same port, but they see different things. The CEO saw bottlenecks like Neo sees the Matrix
Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts?
> Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts?
Because we pay our politicians terribly low compared to other leadership positions.
Our best leaders have gone to Facebook / Google to make better ads. It makes no sense for a 18-year-old going into college to study political theory and become a mayor by 30 or so.
Our political system is broken because there's no incentives to get good leaders into our political system. There's far more leadership positions available in private industry, and they all pay maybe 500% higher.
Remember: Senators are only paid like $180,000/year. Most other positions are paid much much less. In contrast, you can easily get $250k+/year as a VP for... well... pretty much anyone else. (Exxon, Facebook, Microsoft). Reach "3-letter" positions (CEO, CFO, CIO) at FANNGs and you're upwards of $1MM/year.
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Bonus points: a typical VP at Microsoft probably doesn't have to worry about legitimate death threats / assassination attempts like our politicians do. Its a quieter, safer, easier life. You put your family through hell, the media hound you and try to dig up dirt on you constantly. Etc. etc.
Does anyone here actually want to be a politician? Or would you rather continue your path in Engineering / programming / whatever you're doing right now? I'm not necessarily saying Hacker News is the "best and brightest", but... a lot of us are at least _trying_ to be the best-and-brightest in our selective fields. How many of us actually think about going into politics?
This. But it's not like politicians aren't intelligent and ambitious, so many of them look to earn money in other ways, ie the stock market, which gets dangerously close to conflicts of interest because they are, by design, there to regulate industry.
$180K puts you well within the top 20% in income. pay is not the problem. in fact, trying to solve politician quality by increasing pay would likely worsen the problem by misaligning incentives even more. also the assumption that the best and the brightest are managers at tech companies is amusingly naive.
But how much opportunity do they have for graft and corruption? Most of such money does not actually go through the mayor's bank account; instead, it is directed to people who then provide favors, e.g. employing his associates. Informal exchange of favors is the lifeblood of politicians.
You don't seem to be getting what motivates people to go into politics. They are not looking for ways to avoid involvement in corruption. The opportunity to be involved in the favors economy is most of the job's appeal. Paying them more would just cost more.
Because in this case the "solution" doesn't solve the rest of the problem: that their aren't enough truckers or locomotives to haul the cargo inward to their domestic destinations due to the unprecedented demand for shipped goods, which is why containers were piling up in the port in the first place.
This just solves the problem of allowing slightly more ships to offload their cargo before they run out of space again. But as there are 100+ ships currently waiting to offload, this expanded "buffer" still isn't big enough.
EDIT: left out of the one-sided linked article: the city of Long Beach had been planning to waive the stacking requirements for a while prior to the Flexport CEO going on his rant due to pressure from the White House dating back to this summer. Container storage near (not in) the ports actually falls into 3 separate jurisdictions: the ports of LA and Long Beach, and the cities of Long Beach, LA, and Wilmington, and required coordination between all these agencies, coordination with the logistics companies operating at the ports, and coordination with the domestic shipping companies that would be moving containers out of the container storage areas (via truck or train).
> Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started?
(1) Because the Mayor of Long Beach is a primus inter pares legislator; as is the common for cities in California, Long Beach is a Council-Manager system, the chief executive is the appointed City Manager.
(2) But, anyhow, under the City Charter (basically, its Constitution) the harbor is actually governee by the Harbor Commission, anyway, which (like the city itself) also has appointed chief executive (the Executive Director),
So, the question should probably be “Why didn't the Executive Director of the Harbor Commission call in a experts like this..." (or, why aren’t the members and Executive Director of the Harbor Commission experts like this in the first place.)
Because incompetence is everywhere. I think most people assume that high level positions are filled by people who know what they’re doing, but my experience has shown that to be an incorrect assumption time and time again.
It's not a requirement that high level people know what they're doing: in fact, I'd go so far as to say that's impossible.
What is a requirement (when you're a high level person) is ensuring people under you know what they're doing.
It feels like we have far too little of that in our culture.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do enough research to understand if the person who's advising you on rocket science knows what they're about. It takes a good reading list, some time, and effort.
And yet far too many manager+ just... don't.
Which allows frauds to persist on teams, and ultimately breaks things when they're asked to advise or implement things they're unqualified to do.
Every good company I've worked at expected its managers and advisors to get up to speed ASAP on (insert new thing they're working on). Every bad company had a culture that that wasn't a manager or advisor's job, and it was sufficient to repackage the words of direct reports.
What interaction does the mayor (or the administration) of a city normally have with the ports? I mean, beyond keeping an eye on the wear to road surfaces of port traffic.
In this case, its a city operated port, so its different than a private port or one operated by a special purpose public agency outside of city government (but operation is, under the City Charter, in the hands of a Harbor Commission, so its under a special body within city government, so the Mayor, Council, and City Manager—the last holding the executive role lots of people associate with the title “mayor” because Long Beach is Council-Manager model not Strong Mayor model—have less direct role than might at first be assumed from “city operated port”.)
This is inching close to the conclusion that mandatory expert panels are required for government to function.
But then you go back to the problem of "who determines who are the experts". Point in case, the anti-vaccine politicians dredge up the 1 out of a 1000 doctors that spouts whatever fits their narrative. Lots o people die gasping for air unnecessarily as a result...
And we have no idea how to begin to solve that problem while keeping a functional democracy, it seems
Sorry to bring in vaccines into the topic - it's just the clear parallel between these situations that I wanted to draw on.
It might me. If they are just called at random things are fine. However if you do a little work you can figure out who will support whatever position you want.
A few months ago I listened to one "expert panel" called before congress about high speed trail. Most of the people didn't have any useful expertise on the subject. There was the union rep who considered anything good so long as it makes jobs - if they could dig and refill the same hole all day that would be good). There was the you are not listening to NIMBYs enough - without any acknowledgement on how much NIMBYs had been listened to. There were several people who define HSR so slow that Amtrak meets it.
I believe the above is typical of congressional hearings, though I don't have 4 hours to sit through them on a regular basis. (I had a lot of long compiling tasks to do that day)
Yes, it is. And can also result in decisions that benefit your local shipping exec over any other considerations. Informality in cases like this is just another way to say "completely avoids oversight. "
Ryan Petersen is a smart guy with a good perspective but he started Flexport in 2013. He didn't go to Cal Maritime; he went to Berkeley. He doesn't have a deck license or even a CDL; he was a member of Cal Sailing.
He is however smart and smart is good. Time will tell whether his suggestion was a major factor or just a good idea.
I like his Twitter thread:
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? Modern finance with its obsession with "Return on Equity."
Stacking containers and finding more storage space is smart, but I think he also went pretty far outside his knowledge domain when he started talking about messing with train logistics and mobilizing the military (other than maybe using federal land/ depots for storage).
I don't know his background, but I do know trains are all about throughput, which isn't significantly improved by reducing the distance empties get hauled temporarily.
You can recruit all the traction you can find, but those tracks have a fixed limit on outbound capacity.
If anything, making a line a temporary one-way long-haul line would improve the throughput by getting rid of trains waiting on sidages to take turns going different directions. Or if dual track, run running both tracks east for some blocked amount of time.
Pull in new engines from other lines/directions, as needed.
But the bigger point is the guy appears (to me) to be talking out of his ass on at least half of his recommendations, no matter what his title and experience.
Which is why he got the benefit of the doubt until he opened his mouth.
Being a CEO doesn't necessarily mean fully understanding the technical aspects of your companies work, and it certainly doesn't mean understanding technical aspects of adjacent industries, like railroads, or understanding military logistics or operations.
Why is everyone "suspecting" this? The blog post starts by laying out that that was exactly what he did (knew beforehand and put it into a plausible but made-up narrative).
Even so, they should at least phrase it as "I agree with the author that..." rather than making it look like it's some brand new theory they're introducing to the discussion rather than the entire premise of the blog post.
The first section of the blog post goes to great lengths to say "oh this is actually something he figured out after extensive research, and he's making his advice seem more credible by framing it as 'aw shucks I just noticed this on a quick boat trip where I heard [what is actually his own understanding] from Legit Experts It's Okay To Trust' and thus reduce popular resistance to considering it".
*A local city mayor who also happens to have one of the busiest ports in the world in his city. The back up is literally in the global news. It doesn't seem unreasonable for him to, at the very least, ask someone on his staff to give him a gigantic list of problems at the port and spend quite a lot of time figuring out which problems he had the power to solve. He probably speaks at least monthly, if not weekly, with who knows how many people connected with the port.
I agree that the fact it was changed so quickly should be celebrated, but it also gives me pause to think about just how many things could instantly be improved if the people with the power sat up and paid attention.
I don't know. If it's such a problem how can the mayor not be concerned, appraised, and trying to solve the problem? The article says "everyone knew this was happening and didn't do anything". So I'm not sure it's fair to suggest that people simply didn't know and thank god Flexport with it's vested interest in improving logistics took a look".
> Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair.
HNers have pretty much no understanding or respect for what it means to realistically be in public service. They treat the realities as unfortunate errors ripe for optimization.
I don't think this is unique to HNers talking about government, the reverse is also true, with many government officials assuming that most businesses are awash in cash that they can use to solve any problem (true of many businesses to be sure, but in the same way that government officials are scoring own goals, sometimes, not universally).
Your definition from websters is called "the essential meaning" and is literally not the dictionary definition. It is very similar to using definitions from what google returns at the top of a search page - kind of useful but not the same as the definition of the word.
Look below that in the next section. There you will find the definition of bureaucracy. That section is called "Full Definition of bureaucracy"
1a: a body of nonelected government officials
b: an administrative policy-making group
2: government characterized by specialization of functions,
adherence to fixed rules, and a hierarchy of authority
3: a system of administration marked by officialism, red
tape, and proliferation
It is quite reasonable to make fun of people who required a 2 container limit for aesthetic reasons which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain. It was also inarguably effective to publicly shame them into reversing their decision.
I may be going against the grain here, but making fun of people and/or publicly shaming them, while it may temporarily make you feel better, tends to be counterproductive in the end.
You can go to any port town in the US and you will see containers stacked up like tiny towns. The equipment to move the containers is usually the bottleneck not the yard space.
> which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain
Nope - you don’t get to blame a new problem on a 20+ yr old regulation. Changing this will likely help in the short term, but it’s not the cause of the problem.
That is the definition of the word bureaucrat, which was absolutely used in a fair manner to describe the person who caused this issue.
Reason 4 of the cause is what you should rail against: "This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing."
I mean sure without confirmation from Garcia there is no "proof" that the Flexport tweets influenced his decision. But it seems like a reasonable conclusion given that both the problem and Garcia's power to implement the fix existed together for a long time, but he only acted (8hrs) after the Flexport tweets when viral....
> This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem
Isn't that alone an indictment of him or his organization (which, by extension, is an indictment of him)? Why did no one on his team tell him about the container backlog? If they did, why did they not suggest that he allow containers to be stacked higher? This isn't a new problem, it's been going on since at least March if not earlier.
This kind of cross-cutting issue is very challenging for even the best run organizations to deal with. Local government is not equipped to randomly start calling in experts and directing large scale projects because we, collectively, have chosen not to fund and structure our government in a way that allows them to do so.
Also consider for a minute how blindingly obvious it is, in retrospect, to know that containers can -- and should -- be stacked 3+ high vs. how hard it is to walk into a field of 2-stacks and know that they're being stacked inefficiently. Part of the challenge is informational: those that see the problem see it so obviously that they assume that there's a reason why the problem can't be fixed. Those that can't see the problem don't even realize there is a problem!
> This kind of cross-cutting issue is very challenging for even the best run organizations to deal with
Do you specifically mean local governments here when you say organizations? If he were the CEO of Long Beach, Inc, and you were a shareholder, would you consider any of this to be reasonable?
> Also consider for a minute how blindingly obvious it is, in retrospect, to know that containers can -- and should -- be stacked 3+ high
I don't believe that the mayor of Long Beach has never seen a fully-loaded container ship. A good first question might be "Why can we stack them 9-high on a ship that traverses the Pacific ocean but only 2-high on land"?
You appear to assume that the problem described is the problem faced. I bet we don't get a nice neat story about how changing stacking rules didn't actually solve the problem, and after a short time made it worse.
I completely agree. It is just too soon to tell. Moreover, this stacking rule won't change the port; it will change things in the City of Long Beach.
I don't think it will make matters worse but I won't be surprised if it doesn't actually solve the problem. It just seems like a cheap+fast attempt at a solution which is good.
There's a lot of narrative that's going into this discussion, an heroic visionary CEO, a bumbling politician. In fact, the mayor made the change as soon as it was brought up.
But I really like Petersen's thread:
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? Modern finance with its obsession with "Return on Equity."
That seems to also be a disguised pitch against the proposed unrealized gains tax. Whether that tax is good or bad or has fixable problems, I don't know, but there was some clear self-interest going on in that tweet thread.
The port is already stacking five high. The two high rule is for outlying yards. Basically, it will help if it helps. We just don't know yet, but it seems like a really good+cheap idea.
Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility!
It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.