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Comment on Twenty-year truck driver: America’s “shipping crisis” will not endparent

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Everyone understands their own bubble of experience, like this truck driver. But it seems like we often go off the rails on things outside that bubble, as this truck driver does when he starts generalizing (nobody will do this, everybody does that) and assigning motives (greed, stupidity, etc) to everyone else. I am trying to be better about this. It is definitely a bad habit of mine.

I dunno about that. A lot of the article is talking about incentives. The ports enjoy a monopoly, and the manner in which they're handling these delays allows them to charge exorbitant fees to everybody using the port. And, sure enough, cranes are expensive and have a long lead-time, especially when steel is bottlenecked. Fixing this would be costly and the ports are probably concerned about building up capacity that won't be necessary when the problem clears. When the solution is expensive and the problem is profitable, is inaction "greed?"

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