Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "How Ocean Shipping Works (And Why It's Broken)" video.

  1. The video is correct until the end. What's screwing the entire system up is empty containers that are choking what a software engineer would term 'the buffer.' (Buffer overload ruins software stability, too. It's an age old computer hack, too, when deliberately done.) The CCP stopped the transit of scrap cardboard, aluminum, -- and much else, by edict some months back. Ever since, empty containers normally sent back east to Red China (with recycling materials, overwhelmingly cardboard and scrap metal) have been gradually (not so gradually) piling up in and around the west coast ports... all of them. [ All of the stuff America is separating for recycling is now consigned to the county dump.] Think of the parking lot at any big box retailer during the holiday buying binge. Once the parking lots are absolutely jammed, sales collapse, and no-one can quite put their finger on exactly what the problem is -- because by now -- EVERYTHING has gone awry. Even the store employees can't easily get to work. The proximate solution is astoundingly simple. Our rail system needs to haul empties out into the Great American Desert and park them there -- same as if they were excess rail cars. The latter are parked, just so, all of the time, BTW. Otherwise, the rail grid would collapse every season, too. Right now, you'd be astounded as to how many man-hours are wasted as crews try and find a new place to stash EMPTY containers. Said crews are then unavailable to heft actual cargoes. Truckers, from their cabs, don't get the full picture. For them, it's a mystery as to why they're choked at the terminal. This narrowness of vision is replicated by every other player in the system -- to include the Original Poster. No-one has yet doped out that 'over-loading the buffer' does to freight flow that which haunts software engineers: it seizes up the logical flow// ie the flow of freight. ( Your computer 'freezes' when this happens. Any CPU always needs empty registers... ditto for freight carriers. ) The gear required to unload train container cars of their empties does not exist in the sticks. We're going to have to ship heavy equipment off to the high desert (jumbo fork lifts) just for the purpose of parking containers -- no different than the rail roads have done with their empty box cars -- going back forever and ever. It really is that simple. So, the Original Poster has it all wrong. You want to park said empties right next to the BNSF main line -- and its peers -- where the land requires essentially no ground prep at all. Such land exists near Edwards Air Force Base -- and points east. Naturally, the owners// long-term lessees of said empties will object to said parking lot -- as they are desperate for any next user to rent them (This rental is built into the freight fee.) for another trip. Once it becomes obvious that brand new Red Chinese built (That's where they're all coming from.) containers really have only one trip in them, the demand for new-builds will utterly collapse. The transit fees will be re-jiggered such that the return of empties will be built into the cost of the Asia to America freight fees. This dynamic has long been seen by Matson, the monopoly carrier into Honolulu. (Yeah, there is barge traffic, too.) It's trade is totally unbalanced, too. So anyone in Hawaii importing goods from California is actually paying for the freight cost to return the empty containers required to balance the traffic. No-one bats an eye, the cost is THAT low. Unbalanced oceanic trade is easily handled - if you plan for it. But that is not what has been going on.
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