What is causing the supply chain shocks? People have said that its manpower shortages and vax mandates, but aren't most ports in the US union? And aren't they relatively high skilled and high-paying jobs? From what I know about unions, also, the benches are deep enough with newbies that they can keep things staffed. Also, most places vax mandates aren't effective yet or only just becoming effective?
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So why would all these ships be sitting off the shore? You can see them on tracking maps, but can someone confirm that the number of ships is abnormally high? Or is that just some of GAW confirmation bias? Also, under what flag are the majority of these ships domiciled? It looks like some of the tracking sites let you filter by ship's flag, but the ones I looked at required paid subscriptions. So open question for shipfags - whose ships are sitting offshore?
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Further questions. Lets just say you're China, and you want to invade. Of course using merchant ships is an interesting way of moving troops and weapons. Almost like the offshoring movement was 100% to plan for an invasion. Would you be able to use other country's ships as well? Who are proxy nations? Singapore? Iran? Can you use tankers as well? or Just bulk carriers? How would you unload? Would it need to be advance teams at ports? Possible to have helicopters onboard? Finally, lets just say you were going to spring the trap. How would you keep from tipping your hand? Would positioning your ships abnormally give them away? Would you be able to turn off your ship's location? Would that be a giveaway? Or do ship position updates not happen frequently (I saw many on the ship trackers that were 3-4 days old for ships that were clearly still underway)? Once again, shipfags, is this common?
Got to thinking about Chinese cargo ships
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thanks - this is the type of response I was hoping for. Please tell me, what do you think the most likely abnormal things WOULD be, so that we can look out for them. Assuming China would take actions to not have this noticable on AIS, let alone whatever radar and satellites we have following the ships.
As someone commented earlier I'm not saying there's no shortages just that it's not the ships waiting outside. I think the cause of the issues are with truck drivers, railroads, etc. And the effects are what we are seeing offshore.
I cannot testify as to what's going on west coast but those are the largest container ports which would explain the shortages in stores for common goods in stores.
Down in the US Gulf we deal with mainly oil tankers, LNG, and Mississippi River is mostly grain terminals. Things are busier than ever before and even after hurricanes Ida and Nicholas we had the highest monthly sales volume in September in company history.
The container missle issue is VERY REAL and I would imagine space force, DHS may be monitoring each of those container vessels a lot more closely than in the past which could also explain the backlog on west coast
People have said on here (no clue if true or not) that west coast were the ones with more cargo ship issues. This kind of makes sense if you know which crime families run those ports compared to us on the gulf coast. My trucker friend confirmed most of what you said last time this came up around here. He's been trying to get me to step up and get a big boy job either at the port or trucking lol.