Crazy Eddie, I tell you!

Los Angeles Will Fine Cargo Ships That Can't Unload

Because it's OBVIOUSLY their fault...

Los Angeles ports will fine cargo ships waiting to unload their goods in an attempt to relieve congestion that is as desperate as it is gobsmackingly stupid.

It’s a fine so pointless and wrong that, of course, Presidentish Joe Biden has chimed in with his support for it.

According to CNBC, the White House is “hopeful” that fines will “ease the intensifying logjam of cargo ships” waiting to unload at Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles. Together, the two account for 40% of the country’s seaborne imports.

Carriers will have to pay “$100 per day for each container lingering past a given timeline” starting on the first of the month. Containers moved by truck will have nine days before they’ll start paying, and containers moved by rail will have just three days.

They're All Crazy Eddie

 The worst part is, Crazy Eddie is in charge...

"Renner, I must tell you of a creature of legend." 

"Say on." Renner's image dialed for coffee. Coffee and stories, they went together. 

"We will call him Crazy Eddie, if you like. He is a . . . he is like me, sometimes, and he is a Brown, an idiot savant tinker, sometimes. Always he does the wrong things for excellent reasons. He does the same things over and over, and they always bring disaster, and he never learns." 

There were small sounds of whispering in MacArthur's wardroom. Renner's image said, "For instance?"

Renner's Motie's image paused to think. It said, "When a city has grown so overlarge and crowded that it is in immediate danger of collapse . . . when food and clean water flow into the city at a rate just sufficient to feed every mouth, and every hand must work constantly to keep it that way . . . when all transportation is involved in moving vital supplies, and none is left over to move people out of the city should the need arise . . . then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions."

Niven, Larry; Jerry Pournelle. The Mote in God's Eye (Mote Series Book 1) (pp. 225-226). Kindle Edition. 

Pass a law requiring Uber and Lyft to deduct taxes as if the drivers were their employees, and in the process destroy owner-operated trucking.

Pass another law essentially banning a semi truck built after 2010. 

Then wonder why you have all those fully loaded container ships anchored offshore...

Not to mention vaccine AND face mask mandates. 

And... well, you know. a lot of the stuff that has stopped me from posting more often the last year and a half.