Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Vol II – Episode 96: Shipping, Over-Regulation, and Thai Boat Noodle Soup

Political Satire:  Having trouble surviving these times?  You’re not alone.  Join us in columnist John F. Di Leo’s exploration of an alternate universe, where we imagine the impossible:

Joe Buckstop, an aging, corrupt old fool, somehow becomes president in his basement, and every night, an aide has to bring him his soup and discuss the events of the day as he prepares to receive his nightly meds…

Note: We continue reprinting roughly every other chapter from Volume Two. In today’s episode, Joe Buckstop’s new soup aide, Porter Norfolk, teaches the old man a little something about international trade.

Shipping, Over-Regulation, and Thai Boat Noodle Soup

Dateline: July 10. Begin Transcript:

“Good evening, sir… May I bring in your soup, sir?”

“Sure, sure, come on in, put it down. I’m hungry.”

“Right away, sir. I just don’t know if I’m supposed to wait or call out or what, sir. There’s no door to knock on; I round the corner from the foot of the stairs, and I’m in your office; I don’t want to interrupt something, like a top secret conference or anything like that, sir.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. You just bring me my soup. There’s nothing you could say that my military and national security advisors wouldn’t be allowed to hear.”

“Umm, i know that, sir, my concern is that they might say something that I’M not allowed to hear, sir.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, they don’t say any secrets down here with me.”

“They don’t, sir?”

“Nahh. I don’t have that kind of security clearance.”

“Excuse me?”

“So tell me, now, what’s the soup today?”

“Well, sir, the cook called it Thai Boat Noodle Soup, sir. Apparently it’s a beef noodle soup from Thailand, sir.”

“Oh. Hmm… Dark broth. Interesting.”

“She said it’s usually made with blood, but she left that out, sir. Couldn’t find it at the grocery store, I suppose, and the local family planning clinic was closed…”

“What’s that? What is it again?”

“Thai Boat Noodle Soup, sir. Just think of it as a southeast Asian beef noodle soup, sir.”

Oh. What does it have to do with boats?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. I didn’t invent it, sir. Or name it.”

“Oh. Right. Hmm… smells good… Are there crackers?”

“Yes sir, right in front of your nose, sir. Soup, crackers, napkins, spoons, sir.”

“Oh, goody.”

“The soup did get me to thinking about boats, though, sir… so I was wondering about that executive order that you signed yesterday, sir.”

“Which one? I issue so many of those, a normal mortal man can’t keep track.”

“And you’re anything but normal, sir.”

“Huh? What’s that?”

“Well, sir, this was a distinctive one. 72 separate initiatives. Really big E.O. Might have given its author a hernia, just to set it on your desk to be signed, sir.”

“Oh, the big one! Yes. Was that just yesterday? It seems so long ago…”

“Well, sir, I sat down to read it, and I was really thrown by the section on transportation, sir.”

“Oh? There’s a section on transportation?”

“Didn’t you write it, sir?”

“Come on, man! I have people for that.”

“Oh, well… umm… didn’t you read it, sir?”

“Come on, man! I have people for that too!”

“Ah. Well, sir, wasn’t it developed in response to policy meetings you had held, sir?”

“What?”

“I asked, wasn’t it developed in response to policy meetings you had held, sir?”

“Was what developed?”

“Yesterday’s E.O., sir!”

“What E.O. is that again?”

“You know, sir, I had heard rumors, but I honestly just didn’t believe them…”

“Oh, that’s right. You should never believe roomers. Nasty immigrants in boarding houses. Listening at keyholes, like old gossips…”

“No, sir, I meant… oh, never mind.”

“This is good soup. Who are you again, young man?”

“Porter Norfolk, sir. I started yesterday, remember?”

“Yesterday?”

“Yes sir. So this is only my second night on the job, sir.”

“Oh. What job is that?”

“They called it ‘soup aide,’ sir… I’m supposed to serve you soup and chat with you while you eat, to keep you alert so they can give your your vitamin shot before bedtime, sir.”

“Oh, is that it?”

“Yes sir. They said your Doctor said it’s best on a full stomach, sir. I assume they’re referring to the vitamin shot, sir.”

“Oh. Most likely.”

“Could I ask a question, sir?”

“Oh, sure. After all, the worst I can say is ‘I don’t know.'”

“That’s probably the best you can say, too…”

“Huh? What’s that? You’ve got to stop mumbling, boy.”

“Umm…. It’s not really a vitamin shot, is it, sir?”

“What isn’t?”

“Oh, never mind. I have another question, sir. About your E.O.”

“Oh, goody, I loved the vowel song.”

“The what, sir?”

“The vowel song! You know, at the end of the alphabet song. ‘A, E, I, O, U!’”

“I don’t think I know that song, sir.”

“Oh, it’s a good one. Handy too. It helped me pass third grade that second time.”

“Ah. I see, sir. Well, I was wondering, sir, about the section on transportation in your EO, sir.”

“Oh, there’s a section in transportation in there? That thing WAS big, wasn’t it? That EO was a really big deal!”

“Yes sir. Well, here’s what I was wondering, sir. In your message, you complained about how ocean carriers’ schedules and domestic rail service have become terribly unreliable, doubling transit global transit times and quadrupling ocean transportation prices, sir.”

“Right. I did hear something about that. I should do something about it, shouldn’t I?”

“Well, sir, you think you did… you addressed it in this E.O., sir.”

“Oh, goody! Then I’ll just return to this bowl of soup, already in progress, then…”

“Well, no, sir, that’s the thing… you rightly identified a terrible problem, sir, but you totally blamed the wrong parties, and just wrote rules to make things worse, not better, sir.”

“Come on, man! I didn’t write any rules. I just signed an E.O., that’s all.”

“Yes sir, well, I see, sir, but… you blamed the steamship lines and the railroads for all the problems, sir.”

“Well, yeah! You just said they’re overpriced and slow!”

“Well, yes sir, but they’re stuck with the effect; they’re not the cause, sir.”

“Huh?”

“The problem is exploding need for containers that don’t exist, and ports and railyards that aren’t big enough to handle the throughput, sir. These aren’t the railroads and shipping lines’ fault, sir. They’re suffering just as everyone else is.”

“You lost me.”

“It’s a matter of cause and effect, sir. You’re blaming the carriers for not being able to get cargo through the ports, instead of blaming the unjustifiable explosion of cargo demand and the inability of these ports and railyards to grow fast enough to handle the throughput.”

“The what?”

“The throughput, sir.”

“When did we switch to talking about the olympics?”

“We didn’t, sir. I couldn’t possibly care less about the olympics, sir.”

“Come on, man! Why are you talking about the shotput if you don’t want to talk about the olympics?”

“Uhh… well, sir… umm… I wasn’t talking about shotput, sir. I was talking about throughput. Throughput is the volume of shipping containers that move in and out of a port or rail hub, sir.”

“Oh. Well then, what’s a shotput?”

“It’s a ball that athletes throw.”

“Why?”

“Why do they throw it? To prove their strength, or aim, or something like that, I suppose. I really don’t know anything about shotput, sir.”

“Well, then, why did you bring it up?”

“I didn’t, sir. You did. I was talking about throughput, sir.”

“What’s that then?”

“Oh boy. Let’s see, sir. How much do you know about ocean cargo shipping, sir?”

“Oh, to be safe, why don’t you just assume I know nothing.”

“Probably a safe assumption on any subject, sir. Okay, let’s see then. You know how, for thousands of years, cargo was shipped by pallet or crate or carton or bushel? That is, if you had something to ship on a boat, you’d drive up to the port with your oxcart or horse and carriage, and you’d load the cargo on to the ship, then the ship would sail to the destination where it would be unloaded. Right?”

“Sure, that makes sense. What’s your point?”

“Give me time, sir. This is complex, and I’m trying to be thorough.”

“Oh, like the author?”

“What author?”

“Henry David Thoreau! Don’t you know anything?”

“Umm… well, maybe not, sir. Anyway, let’s see now. Shipping cargo the old way took an enormous number of ships, because everything was mostly-manually loaded and unloaded, and it couldn’t really be stacked up high. Back in the 1940s and 50s, Malcolm McLean solved this problem by creating the intermodal container.”

“The what?”

“The intermodal container, sir. Ships started to be built to handle stacks of these very big, heavy, strong 20 foot long, and 40 foot long, and 45 foot long, steel boxes. You could load your cargo into one of these boxes at the factory and then instead of loading and unloading cargo one pallet at a time, you could now load and unload in these 40,000 lb lots.”

“Really? Wow! Cool!”

“Yes sir. Now there are cranes at the rail yards and the sea ports, and they can lift these intermodal containers from truck to train, from train to ship, and back to train and back to truck at the destination country, sir.”

“Well that’s neat. So what?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Well, so what? What’s your point? Because to tell you the truth, I’m a little bored.”

“Okay, sir. Here’s the thing. Ships are no longer in the business of moving freight. They move these boxes. The surface transportation industry is now all about moving these 20′ and 40′ and 45′ boxes all over the world. They can’t really handle loose freight at all, because the ships and trains are designed for transportation stacks of these steel boxes that the freight moves in.”

“Oh, I see. Neat.”

“So do you see my point, sir?”

“Nope. No idea why you’re wasting my time here.”

“Okay, here’s the thing, sir. The USA is importing an insane amount of stuff, from consumer goods to machine parts to finished appliances and everything else under the sun … from one place now – Asia – which means that they need a wildly imbalanced supply of empty containers in Asia to load cargo in, to carry it across the sea and bring it into the USA to be delivered, and then return those containers, usually empty, back to Asia for the next load. Got that? As global shipping increases, more containers are needed, see?”

“Okay, sure. So what?”

“Well, sir, you can see that they need to have more and more of these containers as they are given more and more cargo to move, right, sir?”

“Okay. So what?”

“Oh boy. Okay, now. They build bigger and bigger ships every year. They go really fast. They can cross the ocean in ten, fifteen, twenty or thirty days, depending on from where to where. Then the containers are swung off by crane at the destination onto a railcar or a truck for inland movement, okay?”

“Okay. So they have big ships holding lots of containers. So what?”

“Well, sir, there are bottlenecks. The ships can move just as fast as they ever could. And the carriers keep building bigger and bigger ships, to hold more and more containers than ever. 5000, then 10,000, now even 20,000 containers on a single ship. And there are hundreds of them. So the carriers are doing everything they can to handle the increased volume, sir.”

“I’m really getting sleepy. Does this end soon? I’m going to need my vitamin shot, and I have to stay awake for it…”

“Yes sir, of course. Well, what has grown with the increased cargo demand? The fleets of ships, both in numbers of ships and numbers of containers they hold. The carriers are doing what they can, sir.”

“So why is everything such a mess?”

“Because the ports and the rail yards have NOT been growing, sir. Or they have grown, but nowhere near enough. For example, Los Angeles built the Alameda Corridor fifteen years ago, but it’s already overwhelmed; lots of ports have added a few berths when they should have doubled in size. Lots of railyards are landlocked, surrounded by residential or industrial areas, so they can’t expand. And they need to.”

“Huh?”

“It’s what I said before about throughput, sir. The ports and railyards are bottlenecks, sir. They haven’t expanded. So no matter how many ships the carriers send into a port, they can’t all get handled, so the ships just sit in the bays for two or three weeks waiting for the ports to catch up. They can only swing these containers off the ship and onto the trucks and trains so fast, sir. It takes forever now.”

“I don’t understand. I’ve been told that they won’t even provide these boxes to American exporters. What’s your excuse for that, kid?”

“Well, sir, how many containers should the carriers need in their fleets, sir?”

“I don’t know!”

“Right, sir. And nobody does, exactly. So they figure out how long each container is used on one shipment cycle, and they order enough containers to handle that many movements.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s say each shipment takes 35 days on average, from pickup to delivery. You figure out how many slots you have on your ships, and you make sure to stock enough containers, at 35 days per shipment, to fill the ship. Okay? You base your number of containers on how long it takes to move them, shipment by shipment.”

“Sure.”

“Well, now we add in the problems of overwhelmed ports and railyards. Transit times are now doubled, or worse, because of these bottlenecks. Now all the carriers’ containers are tied up twice as long as planned. Instead of one move taking 35 days, it’s taking 70 or 80 or even 100 or more. So they find they have only half as many empty containers as they need for this new reality.”

“Well, what are they doing about it???”

“All they can do is buy more containers, sir. And they’re all ordering them as fast as they can. But you can’t make a 5000 lb steel box in five minutes, sir; it takes time, and they need millions.”

“So what are you saying, kid?”

“I’m saying that we need to stop blaming the shipping industry, and start blaming the towns that have refused to let our railyards expand, and the port cities that have refused to let the ports expand. We need to blame the port authorities and the cities and states that operate them for not expanding faster.”

“Oh.”

“And we need to stop the moronic social distancing rules and other idiotic pandemic-hogwash that has reduced the working staffs of a lot of our ports and railhubs by as much as half or more for the past year. The ports and yards need every crane working.”

“So that’s it? You’re saying we need bigger ports?”

“Well, yes. And bigger rail hubs, and an end to the stupid social distancing rules that hamstring and slow our ports, and we need more containers and railcars and chassis… I mean, there’s a ton of trouble here. But the real big issues are that the ports are so small (relative to volume) they’ve become a bottleneck, and the fact that people are ordering too darned much from China.”

“What’s that? China? China’s our, umm, strategic, um, friend, I mean, boss, I mean, rival, I mean… umm…. what’s China again?”

“We just need to stop ordering from China, and you won’t have a problem with getting your stuff from there. Order locally. American business schools are responsible for that piece of the puzzle… driving companies to outsource to the third world for 40 years was a horrible decision, and the bill is coming due now.”

“Wow. That explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

“Well, sir, I tried.”

“Pity I won’t remember any of it.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“I can’t remember information like this more than five or ten minutes at a time. But it was really neat. almost as good as this soup!”

“Oh dear.”

“Hey, speaking of which, could I have some soup?”

“You’ve had your soup, sir.”

“Oh, well, can I have some more?”

“Sure, sir. At least there’s no bottleneck on the stairs. On my way, sir.”

Copyright 2021-2024 John F Di Leo

Excerpted with permission from Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volume Two, from Free State West Publishing, available in paperback or eBook exclusively on Amazon.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.

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