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This is: An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach, published by Zvi on LessWrong.
A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to
Understand what happened.
Make sure everyone knows it happened.
Understand how and why it happened.
Understand how we might cause it to happen again.
Update our models and actions.
Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization.
That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial benefits and no defenders and scrapping it, certainly not within a day. If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 2021.
Here’s my understanding of what happened. First, the setup.
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together are responsible for a huge percentage of shipping into the Western United States.
There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
This is despite the whole point of shipping containers being to stack them on top of each other so you can have a container ship.
This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing.
If you violated this rule, you lost your right to operate at the port.
In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal.
Thanks to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers.
Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages.
Trucking companies started accumulating empty containers.
The companies ran out of room to store the containers, because in many places they could only stack them in stacks of two, and there was no practical way to move the containers off-site.
Trucks were forced to sit there with empty containers rather than hauling freight.
This made all the problems worse, in a downward spiral, resulting in a standstill throughout the port.
This was big enough to threaten the entire supply chain, and with it the economy, at least of the Western United States and potentially of the whole world via cascading problems. And similar problems are likely happening elsewhere.
Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.
None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away.
A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously.
Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down.
He in advance arranges for various sources to give him a signal boost when the time comes, in various ways.
He designs the message for a format that will have maximum reach and be maximally persuasive.
This takes the form of an easy to tell physical story, that he pretends t...
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