History For The Short Attention Span Crowd

h/t tsk tsk should've known better

AKA "Don't pee on my head, and tell me it's raining."

A mere fraction of the Port Of Los Angeles

Once upon a time, there were four rich men. The were called nabobs. It was shortened to "nobs". They all decided to build lavish homes in the same neighborhood in San Franshitco (back when it was a bustling thriving nexus of commerce, rather than an open festering sore, open-air outhouse for the homeless, and running national joke), and all those homes on the same hill there. It is called Nob Hill to this day.

The four named themselves The Association, and were comprised of

Leland Stanford (former 8th governor of California, later U.S. senator from CA until his death, and Central Pacific and Southern Pacific RR president; you may have heard of a small private college he founded).

Collis P. Huntington (CPRR VP, director, and chief legal counsel, and whose nephew, who started the first inter-urban train transit  in SoCal himself, has a city in L.A., another city and beach in OC, and his lavish San Marino mansion and grounds all named after them).

Mark Hopkins (treasurer of the CPRR, the Trump of his day, and on the former site of whose mansion there's a landmark Frisco hotel that still bears his name).

Charles Crocker (railroad route chief engineer, and later financier, who once controlled Wells-Fargo and served as its president; he had a wee bank of his own once too; their commercials in my youth introduced the world to a struggling brother-sister singing act, before the bank was consolidated back into the Wells-Fargo financial empire).

Among the pasttimes of these rich kids, as noted above, was running a wee railroad, known as the Central Pacific Railroad.  The one that spanned the country by 1869. Later, it was consolidated with the Southern Pacific RR, at which point, in 1909, it connected the sleepy little nowhere cow-town of Los Angeles with the small wharves of San Pedro/Wilmington and Long Beach, the greatest natural harbors on the western coast of the continental U.S., after San Francisco Bay itself.

The sprawling openness thereabouts, however, with more open land all around than all of peninsulated San Franshitco County, allowed that by 1920, that Port (actually two adjacent ports) would surpass Frisco, and become the pre-eminent port of entry for the entire nation, remaining so unto the present day.

I provided copious links, because I'm a giver, and because You Could Look It Up.

We told you that story to tell you this one:

Railroad tracks run right to dockside in Los Angeles/Long Beach to the present day, a fact which makes fairytales about green truck mandates being responsible for the current goods bottleneck so recockulous as to cause open-mouthed gawping at the spectacle, and at the jackassery necessary to palm such a load of bullshit off as steak.

The fact that there are a finite number of berths, cranes, and longshoremen, with a commensurately predictable maximum number of containers that can be offloaded per hour, and thus a similarly predictable number of ships per day, expressable for one-, two-, and three-shift days, is rather tediously obvious to anyone who can do math with their shoes on.

You can't starve a python for nearly eighteen months, than suddenly try to feed it an entire herd of elephants, and expect that everything will proceed smoothly through from there.

This shouldn't have had to be said, yet here we are.

Just part of what's waiting to unload locally

There are, at latest reports, some multiple dozens (61 ships, per NYSlimes as of 9/21) of loaded container ships sitting offshore from just those twin SoCal ports.

The average container ship hauls between 500 and 7500 40' containers, or TEU equivalents (one TEU is a 20' conex, and container ships range from 1000 to 15000 TEUs of capacity).

The average freight train carries 200 and more 40- and 53-footers, apiece.

The average truck pulls one. A double trailer, with 53' boxes, could manage 2½.

Yet no one is squawking mountains of bullshit about how trains are backed up 97 deep trying to fit all the containers on them and pull them to points eastward, because that'd be patent horseshit.

And if picking up loads at the ports were really "the root cause", even a gifted dimwit would simply platoon the compliant trucks at the port, carry the containers from there a couple of miles from the port, to any one of hundreds of nearby SoCal truck yards, and transfer the loads to the millions of trucks that can't use the ports, but which nonetheless transport goods all over the rest of the Golden State 24/7/365, as anyone who's spent 5 seconds on the freeways hereabouts can attest; they would not haul the loads all the way to the motherfornicating Califrutopia state line, hundreds of miles away, FFS!

Conflating "port of" with "entire state" for the Fucktard Win!

The idea that there is any shortage of trailer trucks operating on California's highways, especially in the corridor from the Ports to every other interstate highway accessible from same is so recockulous as to fail the sniff test for 0.2 seconds with anyone who drives here for more than 5 minutes. But cleverly, they invented a heavy-duty workaround where truck traffic can be hauled entirely independent of the highways we drive on, at hundreds of times the capacity of a tractor-trailer rig, for 95% of every journey for every pound of cargo carried, and it's been around since the early 1800s. We called them railroads.

So please do some basic dumbshit math before trying to claim that lack of new compliant trucks is why nothing is moving through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, as if that could ever be true, and pretending like they couldn't just get the containers straight onto railroad cars and ship them directly to 47 other states by the literal trainload, taking the trucks out of the equation entirely.

The entire pipeline is overfull; it's no more complicated than that. Pythons can't digest elephants overnight.

When containers are stacking up at 500 freight yards by the railroad tracks, you can tell me there's a truck problem. Not before. Not even in Califrutopia.

The bullshit passed by the idiots here in Excremento is big, and unquestionably stupid and short-sighted, but it isn't omnipotent, and it isn't the reason that they can't unload cargo any faster or get it to your local Dollar Store, so pull the handle on that sort of nonsense, and send it to the sewer it crawled out of, rather than passing it off as gospel.

And try shaving people's arguments with Occam's Razor.

Fucktards gonna fucktard, but you don't have to listen to them if you can do basic thinking.

Posers discuss strategy. Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics. Geniuses learn all of them from history.

But maybe that little historical wander is why we keep telling you to look at history like James Burke does. Wheels within wheels, all spinning and interconnecting. The guy should be the chairman emeritus of History for the world, for life.

UPDATE: FAR more likelier explanations:

1) New transport regs making it harder for truckers to make a living, so they've gradually bailed out. Nobody notices the dog that doesn't bark until after the burglar's been and gone.

2) Jab mandates at rail and truck companies (see Winston Smith in Comments), playing hell with staffing. Wait until this becomes a longshoreman issue as well, and grab your ass then. You can't replace them, and without them, just like truckers and rail workers, literally NOTHING moves. The Vaxxholes are about to pee on the third rail. Grab your popcorn.

3) Paying @$$holes too much welfare for far too long to sit on their asses playing X-box instead of going out and getting hard and relatively dangerous transportation jobs.

4) Leaned-out (times 30 years) jackassical "just-in-time" port infrastructure, with no elasticity to ramp up or down for higher capacity imports or exports, let alone both simultaneously. You can send more ships, or trucks and trains, but you can't whistle up more docks, cranes, and operators overnight.

5) Anyone can stop an economy, or a car engine, by shooting a big enough bullet into the engine block. What you can't do is restart it just as fast, simply by grabbing pliers, and just pulling the slug out afterwards.

We repeat for emphasis: Anyone of even average intelligence should have known this without being told.

Which is why none of it occurred to any government, from city to state to federal, nor likely will ever. They're simply not packing the gear to grasp that.

STILL TL;DR? Read the concise analysis by Noveske's Rock, below. It's tight, right, and flawlessly reasoned.

One definitionof insanity is trying the same thing, over and over, despite the fact it doesn't work.