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 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).
(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.)
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.
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.
Experts are what you want them to be
Notionally, one would think that's what the existing Harbor Commission is.
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."