There are so many potential ways to begin to address resolving the logistics bottleneck on the West Coast.
Overriding city rules about stacking cargo containers (the biggest part of the bottleneck right now is, literally, no place to put more of them).
Or maybe barring the port facilities from barring nonunion truckers.
Or, girl, I suppose you could just impose fines on ships that are waiting in line, so they go… Elsewhere?
The Florida Ports person has been literally begging those ships to come to their ports. The naysayers claim that it would cost more money and about seven days to get to one of them. Big f-ing deal! It won’t cost then any more than sitting off LA waiting. Some have been there 30 days already. There are more trucks and rail serving those ports, too. Florida doesn’t have the ludicrous emissions requirements, so more independent truckers can be hired to move the freight.
Oh! Oh! I’ve got the solution and it’s a two-fer.
Like we all know that Global Warming is going to kill us all in less than two years, so what can each and every one of us do to prevent this horrible disaster?
Glad you asked.
The United States produces 13% of world greenhouse gas emissions, but China produces 30%, so the answer to both the supply chain problem and global warming is obvious:
QUIT BUYING SHIT FROM CHINA!!!!
Completely off topic but time to remind ourselves it’s been a week since Alec Baldwin committed murder and still no charges filed! If only Santa Fe had a Cracker Jack prosecutor like Mike Freeman and a dynamic State Attorney General like Keith Ellison we’d have seen more progress.
golfdoc50,
….or if Alec Baldwin were a Trump supporter…..oh heck or even a milquetoast Republican (whose name was not Liz Cheney).
Which US state has the lowest covid case rate?
Florida.
No mask mandate Florida, no business closure Florida, no vax mandate Florida.
No wonder the Dems are terrified of Desantis.
Math quiz of the day:
You own a container ship sitting off the coast of California. Your ship holds 20,000 containers. If you dock the ship and unload the containers, they will be stacked in the dockyards until they can be loaded on trucks for distribution across the country. The containers can sit on the docks nine days for free, but if distribution is delayed beyond that, you will be fined $100 per container per day.
Question 1: Assume it costs $10,000 per day in ship operations to sit at anchor for 20 days until unloading begins, then takes 9 days for the container distribution process to begin, then containers are distributed at a rate of 5,000 containers per day until all are gone from the docks. How much money will you lose?
Question 2: If you decide not to unload at California docks, you could sail through the Panama Canal to unload in Florida. It would cost you $25,000 per day in ship operations, $150,000 in canal tolls, and take a week because of delays caused by increased shipping traffic. It would also take you another week to get back to California so you can return to China for your next load. Who much money will you lose by choosing this option?
Answer 1 (fines): $200,000 in daily operating cost sitting at anchor. True, you will be socked with enormous fines but you will pass along to the owner of the goods inside the containers, who will pass along the fines to the retailers of those goods, who will pass along the fines to the consumers who buy those goods. The fines are a pass-through which do not affect you – the ship owner – at all. The only expense is unloading delay.
Answer 2 (Florida): None. You will choose Option A. It is cheaper to sit at anchor than to traverse the Canal twice.
Okay, this is a fake quiz. I have no idea what the real numbers are. But it illustrates the complexity of the problem and the difficulty finding quick-and-easy solutions.
Give the Brandon administration credit for creativity, though. Used to be, we taxed it if it moved. Now, we tax it if it doesn’t move. So that’s new.
I have to wonder whether many of those ships can actually make it to Florida without refueling. If I’m trying to maximize the number of containers on board, those tanks might be fairly empty at this point, making Florida a moot point except for those loading in Asia.
And + a lot to the guy who said “quit buying **** from China.” For decades, the insistence that “free trade” means “no import duties” has perplexed me. We are effectively subsidizing Chinese (Thai, Bangladeshi, etc..) industry by funding our Navy, Coast Guard, and ports with the income tax levied on our own citizens. Time to make things a little more equal per what Bastiat noted–protectionism does not mean “any duty levied”, but rather “duties levied in excess of the need for maintenance of trade related obligations.”
Joe Doakes, your analysis misses the point, which is that Tucker Carlson is a bigot.
Of course this administration is going to go with fines. And be sure that 10% goes to the Big Guy.
JD:
The 9 days are for containers waiting to move by rail.
Fine start after 3 days for containers waiting to move on trucks.
Long, but worth it, logistics thread.
“Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport’s partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here’s a thread about what I learned.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/typesfast
Obviously, the solution to the supply chain issue is for the president to take his entire cabinet to a global warming conference in Ireland.
Seriously, the supply chain issue is a custom made problem for the federal government because it involves multiple states and foreign trade.
Enjoy your empty shelves, your high priced energy and your shrinking dollar, Biden voters.
Elections have consequences.
Can’t find the tweet Emery is quoting, but this guy did retreat this:
“Assign all ships, trucks, yards, workers and rules to an app. Call it Port Simulator and the world’s 15 year olds will have it fixed in a week or two. This is litterally every simulation game I’ve ever played.”
https://twitter.com/Mr_CODbackwards/status/1451853683780636676?t=wX4uCsM48Gechmz4QbwZCw&s=19
/What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? Modern finance with its obsession with “Return on Equity.”
Now as we’re facing a hundred year storm of demand, our infrastructure simply can’t keep up. The global logistics companies have no excess capacity, there are no reserves of chassis (trailers for hauling containers), no extra shipping containers, no extra yard space, no extra warehouse capacity./
https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1453753924960219145?s=20
Petey Buttigieg fiddles while Rome burns.
The lesson here is that government is capable of breaking things it is unable to repair.
Some people (like me) saw this coming early on in the pandemic, when governors used emergency declarations to “get around” things like freedom of association, freedom to travel, etc. Once you’ve monkey wrenched the way people have successfully managed their personal or business economies, you can’t really go back to the way things were before, because now every rational person must bake in the chance that their governor will step in, over ride the democratic process, and make a shambles of whatever economic or business plans they have made. This should have been obvious. I saw it coming, and I have a grand total of two semesters of economics at a community college.
Yet the geniuses seem to have missed it.
Looks like woolly being the stable genius he is — found some information the world’s top economists and logistics experts missed.
Today Biden announced that he reached a deal with senate Democrats on a 1.7 trillion spending plan.
Except there was no deal.
Senior administration officials said early Thursday morning that Biden was “confident this framework will win the vote of every Democratic senator.”
But that confidence was shaken when none of the three senators in whose hands the fate of the plan lies — progressive standard bearer Bernie Sanders of Vermont and centrists Joe Manchin, W.Va. and Kyrsten Sinema, Ariz. — publicly committed to voting for the current framework.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/biden-framework-for-build-back-better-social-climate-bill.html
Over four decades in DC and this is the level of incompetence we get from Team Biden. No one can look the other way any more. We have a broken presidency, Worse performance than Jimmy Carter achieved in just nine months.
Elections matter.
^ Hoo boy. Biden’s still living rent free in Woolly’s head!
Biden’s still living rent-free in his own head, and keeps getting lost.
Team Biden began studying the supply chain issue back in February by appointing a supply chain and infrastructure task force. It delivered its final report in June, that is, over four months ago.
You can read it here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/08/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-supply-chain-disruptions-task-force-to-address-short-term-supply-chain-discontinuities/
Virtually everything it lists as its actions are, at best, medium term fixes. Many of them require legislation or rules-changes which have not yet been done. Some require legislation, which has not passed.
So we’ve learned that Team Biden has not expertise to apply to the problem. They’ve shot their wad. They have ignored requests to use FEMA powers or the national guard to supply equipment and operators to mitigate the shortage of big rigs and drivers.
So here is what really happened with the nonexistent “deal.”
In the middle of the worst supply chain crisis since the second world war, Biden has decided to fly his entire cabinet to a useless “climate conference” in Ireland. The “climate conference” isn’t really a conference at all. No negotiations will happen, instead the leaders attending are going to talk about changes in law and policies that they have done within their nations to meet self-determined climate goals. Russia, the nation that supplies most of Europe’s natural gas, is snubbing the event.
Biden had put all of his green legislation into the snubbed spending bill, so there is literally no reason for him to attend. Maybe he’ll talk about putting solar panels on the roof of the White House.
But by pretending a deal has been made, he will be able to put a fig leaf on his failure at the conference — but only if the media cooperates and actually treats his non-existent “deal” with senate democrats as if it were real.
The current U.S. President is busy lighting dumpster fire after dumpster fire via policy and Emery wants to shame MP for noticing?
The dumbest comment: a competition in which Emery competes against himself.
Brandon has ordered his Secret Service detail to catch him a Leprechaun. He’s dying to sniff a Leprechaun; they’re so little.
3rd quarter GDP is disappointing, to say the least, and inflation is up across the board:
Can you say “stagflation”? I think you can. And it won’t get better because the one person with the bully pulpit, the executive officer of the United States, is far gone into dementia. He can’t even resign because that would cost the dems their bare majority in the senate.
Siccing the FBI on protesters at school board meetings ain’t gonna fix this. Neither will a climate conference in Ireland.
We are well and truly f*cked.
An example of the serious brain issues of Joseph Robinette Biden:
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1453156234266349571
This is not just “Joe being Joe.” Watch his speeches from just two years ago. Watch his 2008debate with Paul Ryan, or his 2012 debate with Sarah Palin. Biden has never been this incoherent. This is not a “gaffe” it is an inability to control his thoughts and speech.
Here is Biden in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hs7CptPWI4
Biden supporters should watch this clip of Slow Joe showing distinct evidence of age related vascular dementia yesterday:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1453156234266349571
They should ask themselves if Biden had been this confused and inarticulate back in 2008, would Obama have made him the VP pick?
Well, they voted for Biden to be president last November.
Team Biden’s legislative failure continues snowballing:
House Democratic leaders on Thursday abandoned another attempt to clear the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill as progressives held firm to their refusal back it without a concrete agreement on a separate social spending package.
It’s the third time in about a month House Democratic leadership has punted the bill, and it came after President Biden made a rare visit to the Capitol to beseech House Democrats to help him advance his agenda as a matter of demonstrating that American democracy can still function.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her leadership team wanted to clear the bipartisan infrastructure bill to give Biden a legislative victory as he departs for Europe for a Group of 20 meeting and climate change summit, as well as boost Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/579030-progressives-win-again-no-infrastructure-vote-tonight
I hope Biden resigns or is 25thd out of office in the near future, so we can start to talk about Pelosi’s mental decline. Pelosi is the same age as my mother, and my mother, God bless her, is in good shape, mentally and physically, for a woman of her age. But she is forgetful, and she has a half dozen ailments that require monthly (at least) visits to various doctors.
If we knew the truth about the people who claim to be our leaders; their ailments, the dependence of their spouses and children on jobs in government, or government supported NGO’s, or media, or lobbying, we would be horrified. And I am talking Democrats and Republicans both.
I have been unable to find even one time where a federal budget was put forth by a DemoCommie controlled house. All they can do is spend and those expenses will always be paid by “taxing the rich”. It’s funny that the rich are always defined as people that have more money than any elected Democrat. They have perfected punting and kicking the can down the road.
True, you will be socked with enormous fines but you will pass along to the owner of the goods inside the containers, who will pass along the fines to the retailers of those goods, who will pass along the fines to the consumers who buy those goods. The fines are a pass-through which do not affect you – the ship owner – at all. The only expense is unloading delay.
From somebody who relies on overseas freight – me: sellers no longer sell on a delivered basis, only ex-port. All freight cost is borne by the buyer and is passed on to the customer and then directly to consumer. Seller, Shipper, Freight Forwarder and Buyer bare no additional cost – it is ALL passed down the chain to the customer as a separate line item. Customers have no choice but to pass it down the line all the way to consumer.
Ship owner is also hit – they only get paid if the ship is moving, not when it sits in port. EVERYBODY is fucked. Let’s go Brandon!
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