Not that it isn't worth noting, but I'm much more interested in overall volume across all of the nation's ports, and especially the West Coast ports.
What's not to follow? Numerous articles have been published with sensational headlines like "the Port of Seattle is empty". It's the smallest port on the West Coast.
As others have posted, LA is down 35%. That's useful information, not "this much smaller port is empty!"
The total cargo volume seems to be falling only now, what still may be just noise.
Even if tariffs are reduced/eliminated, there will still be a lag of 3-6 weeks before destination-port cargo traffic picks up again, assuming that there is product overseas ready to be shipped.
But also LA and Long Beach are effectively a single port, so per your enumeration … Seattle is the second biggest port on the west coast? Seems like that’d be one to look at when we’re talking about transpacific trade?
[0]: https://volumes.portoptimizer.com/ . NB The predictions for subsequent weeks are based on historical data AFAICT, and haven’t been accurate. The actual are good data though.
Long Beach has almost the traffic as Los Angeles, so by your logic Seattle is only 1/6 the volume.
Seems like that’d be one to look at when we’re talking about transpacific trade?
Which one? I would be looking at LA and LB.
Again, LA/LB are basically the same port. One would also want to look at the next biggest geographically distinct port, which on the west coast is Seattle
https://gaports.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Monthly-TEU-T...
Still don't have updated data for April and May published.
LA Port is down 35 percent so far.
[0] https://gcaptain.com/as-trade-talks-begin-chinese-exporters-...
A lot of companies are shifting to production in India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and it's easier to ship through Suez to the east coast from there.
I’m sure imports will be down though, as that’s the point of the tariffs
https://youtu.be/QCyB-Ym0ryk?t=947
(the timestamp links to the "May 2025 Estimate" chapter)
Seattle/Tacoma Seaport schedule: https://www.nwseaportalliance.com/cargo-operations/vessel-sc...
This article from Dec, '24 says port volume is expected to be lower than pandemic levels until 2029. A lot of chatter around the issue centers on local politics and leaders: https://www.postalley.org/2024/12/26/seattles-port-faces-a-c...
Highly recommend watching his stuff if "shipping" is your new sudden "expertise" because it's the hot new thing the media cycle wants you to focus on.
But calling this "a random journalist" when the article directly quotes Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins is minimizing the truth.
From the article:
"I can see it right over my shoulder here, I'm looking out at the Port of Seattle right now, and we currently have no container ships at berth," Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins told CNN on Wednesday.
"That happens every once in a while at normal times, but it's pretty rare," he added. "And so to see it tonight is I think a stark reminder that the impacts of the tariffs have real implications."
Are we looking at this moment as one of those times? It sounds like he is unsure if it is truly tariff impacts or not if he has seen it before.
- Any one-off data point could be just random decrease or tariff impacts and we do not have a forward-looking time machine to accumulate more data
- It doesn't really shed any light at all if volumes are less or more: both outcomes can be spun as a success (if they're less, great, American Juche continues unimpeded, if they're more, great, then we just debate if the manufacturers ("China") are "paying for" the tariffs by decreasing list prices to the importer enough that the importer can maintain the same price for customers) ("China" cannot literally pay for the tariffs, they are paid for by the US company or individual accepting the shipment from the dock)
It's sort of like if it was February 2020, Wuhan was overrun and Italy was exploding, and people spent a lot of time in the nuances of if the US double digit case was up more this week than it was last week or two weeks ago
People crave conclusions with early, messy data.
Often people in pseudo-intellectual circles conflate aligning with that extreme with intelligence when it’s equally as foolish.
Just because I can invent a reason someone else can write it off...well, that doesn't shed any light either.
It's clear you can always find at least 15% of some group who will find a reason to write anything off.
(I'm basing that off of some stats I saw re: moon landing denial recently)
It's like climate change: sure, historically you naturally get years with lots of hurricanes or really strong ones.
But if you get, on average, more and more hurricanes and the hurricanes themselves are stronger? That's a trend.
Historically he does this, use outrageous distractions to diffuse negative attention from his perceived failures.
What kind of master negotiator creates a deadline that only applies to himself?
So now he doesn't care what any court says.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43844708 ("Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week (cnbc.com)" — 657 comments)
If the latter happens, will a domestic company come in and undercut the international sellers?
There needs to exist a domestic supplier to be able to fill the gap. My guess is that for many products, there simply isn't one.
Larger businesses like Apple will cut deals. Smaller businesses will just fold.
Now we have no trade and a drop in demand for US currency.
Trade hasn't been this fair to the US since before WWII.
This is painting the bullseye around the arrow - while this was entirely predictable, when did anyone in the administration state that this[1] was the goal? This goal is obviously is contrary to another stated policy goal of lowering inflation.
1. Initially, the stated goal was to make trade imbalances "fair"
Also the fact sheet[0] uses a paper which found a reduction in trade with China as evidence for why they should do this which I think is evidence enough that they are hoping for at least a modest reduction in trade "A 2023 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission that analyzed the effects of Section 232 and 301 tariffs on more than $300 billion of U.S. imports found that the tariffs reduced imports from China and effectively stimulated more U.S. production of the tariffed goods, with very minor effects on prices."
[0]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
Hanlon's Razor suggests that your statement is incorrect.
Tariffs need consistency and stability to be effective rather than purely disruptive.
You can see this in how much more effective the countries applying tariffs against the US are handling things. Since they are applying tariffs and leaving them in place, the incentives are working properly, and they are disconnecting from the US businesses.
In the US, by contrast, businesses are either shutting down or holding their breath in the hopes that tariffs will pass.
This is democracy.
Only this is not amusing.
Are you feeling great yet, Americans?
People in this discussion here argue that article was written by bad lying journalist, because other sources say there is 35 percent drop in shipment and ports rarely have empty port.
Like, ok.
During the India-Pakistan conflict on May 7, 2025, Pakistan claimed that it used a J-10C fighter jet to shoot down an Indian Rafale jet. The possible reasons below for the Rafale being shot down are quite a read. I listed some below. And I'm not sure how many people realized this: each J-10 sold for only 50M, while each Rafale sold for north of 200M. And when a dark factory in China churns out a thousand PL-15s a day like the US used to be able to do, how do we even fight that if there is indeed a war?
All the technologies list below used to be the envy of China, yet now China can make them. They may not as good as the western, but good enough with cheap enough will win, right?
What's even more sad is that we seemed content that we can export lots of agriculture products and raw materials to China. I thought that used to be what a colony did: Britains mandated that colonies couldn't produce advanced products and could only export raw materials. And our founding fathers fought a war so we didn't have to be a colonized country. Well, history is full of irony.
Now some technical stuff about J-10 vs Rafale:
Radar Performance Gap: The J-10C is equipped with the KLJ-7A active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, which uses gallium nitride (GaN) technology and includes over 1,200 T/R modules. It can detect a 5 m² target at a range of up to 220 km. In contrast, the Rafale’s RBE2-AA radar uses only 836 gallium arsenide (GaAs) modules, with a detection range of about 150 km and weaker resistance to jamming. This allows the J-10C to lock onto the Rafale first, putting the Indian aircraft at a disadvantage.
Missile Range Advantage: The J-10C can carry the PL-15 ultra-long-range air-to-air missile, with a range exceeding 200 km, enabling it to engage targets from a distance. The Rafale is armed with MICA air-to-air missiles, which have a range of less than 100 km. Even when fitted with Meteor missiles, the range is only about 150 km, clearly inferior in comparison.
Electronic Warfare Capability Gap: The J-10C can carry advanced electronic warfare pods such as the RKL-700A, which can disrupt the Rafale's radar and communication systems. Moreover, the J-10C operates in coordination with the ZDK-03 early warning aircraft, which can penetrate cloud cover to locate targets and transmit encrypted coordinates to the J-10C via a jam-resistant data link, enabling a “silent kill.” On the other hand, the Indian Rafale, due to its diverse sourcing and poor data link compatibility, is at a disadvantage in electronic warfare.
China has something like 20x the number of people working in manufacturing. They also have a deep local supply chain.
Putting those things together, they can efficiently handle smaller orders or bespoke things.
This whole situation is stupid.
This past isn’t just glorified by MAGA. You also see it glorified by the Sanders/AOC wing of the Democrats at times.
Unfortunately neither side’s solutions will get us back there.
To get back there we’d have to attack the problem from two ends.
We would have to raise minimum wage, offer more assistance for health care or even full single payer, and to make the minimum wage increase work we probably would have to do a little of the tariffing and border enforcement MAGA likes… but not as much, and with better strategy.
But we would also have to implode the housing market. We’d have to MHCA (Make Housing Cheap Again). Real estate cost is one of the major reasons you can’t live like this anymore. Real estate cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. We have opted in the past 50 years to protect the latter. We would have to switch and go for the former, which would destroy home equity.
It would cause problems. See, part of what we have done with housing is turn it into a stealth shadow second social security system for the middle class and the wealthy. Once you get on the housing treadmill your later life and retirement is subsidized by real estate appreciation. It’s a regressive tax, both economically and age wise as it’s essentially a tax on the young trying to get started.
But killing that system to make housing affordable would suddenly leave a ton of elderly people with no savings. The government would have to step in here too.
… which would mean both tax increases and spending cuts, and neither is popular.
Simply tariffing like mad and kicking out immigrant competition for labor won’t work because it won’t fix the cost disease.
If you wanted to go back you would have to kick women and minories out of the workforce so a man could earn double and have a percentage of young able bodied men killed or broken a generation before (through a war) before to get that demand where a highschool dropout who becomes a mailman can buy a house for a few thousand dollars.
Existing built home prices are going to go up in value if your society growing expanding. If you want declining home prices you need to reduce people/demand. The problem today is everyone wants to live in the biggest cities mostly because of jobs and everyone wants to setup a business because greater selection of employees. If the work from home movement succeeds this can break one of the pillars of why people need to be in big cities and cheaper houses can be built elsewhere.
On overall market cap, yes. What I'm not sure about are the numbers in key industries. For instance, we rely on China on key pharmaceutical ingredients. Heck, we were even in a crisis of shortage of salient solutions when there was a supply crunch from China. China manufactured more than 90% of the ships in the world. China manufactured many types of low-end chips we use in power supplies, in cars, and etc. The cost of our custom components on airplanes and battleships have been increasing through the roof because we simply can't rely on civil factories to make them cheaply. The list can go on.
Are there any incentives to make household items here? How is it possible to compete in price with the Chinese factories? If the plan is to use 100% automation and robots, that defeats the purpose of creating jobs, right? I genuinely don’t understand this whole thing.
TBH I'm not sure. My charitable interpretation is that the US government said they would try but never did, or at least not successfully. At least Trump's government is willing to try in broad daylight, and Vance explicitly called out that it is a pipe dream that a nation could enjoying drawing boxes in air-conditioned offices and hope that we have technology superiority forever, as innovation only came from doing. So, I'm willing to give them benefit of doubt and wait for months if not years to see how things pan out.
> Are there any incentives to make household items here?
My naive view is price is the incentive. True capitalism means when price is too high to have space to arbitrage, the investment will pour in or the bootlegging will proper. I hope it's the former.
> If the plan is to use 100% automation and robots, that defeats the purpose of creating jobs, right?
My optimistic view is that we would create a lot more jobs in different categories if we can achieve certain level of automation.
P.S., super successful people like Balaji basically said that it's hopeless now. The western world can't bring manufacturing back because we don't have talent or know-how or great workforce any more. That saddens me greatly. China didn't have talent or know-how or great workforce 20 or 25 years ago. If we read the newspaper then, we would see everywhere that western talent and professionalism were the envy of the entire nation. Most people thought owning a car was a pipe dream, let alone making their own AEW or 5th-gen fighter jet. It was Japanese, Taiwanese, Americans, and Europeans who brought investment and know-how to China to boostrap the great nation. Yet now we throw the towel and thhink we can't rebuild out talent? Our fate is becoming a neo-colony?
ljf•6h ago
BJones12•6h ago
Perhaps they should make another page for the newest claims. But again, the situation is very different than this article's headline.
tokai•6h ago
kristjansson•6h ago
> However, the ships calling into port were arriving with unpredictable volumes of cargo — sometimes 30% less than anticipated
And Snopes felt comfortable rating “mostly false” to the top level claim? I get that they’re trying to navigating treacherous waters, but “there’s still ships, they’re just 1/3 empty” is as much support for the top level claim as it is contradiction
echoangle•6h ago
kristjansson•5h ago
Is 30% underutilized / partially disused tantamount to empty? Maybe not. But it’s in the ballpark in a way the snopes rating undersells.
lurk2•5h ago
It is not remotely in the ballpark. The word “empty” is not understood to mean “70% full” anywhere in the English-speaking world.
michaelt•2h ago
For comparison here's Tilbury, near London in the UK: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=GBTIL001 you'll note that big cargo vessels are shown in yellow.
And here's the port of Seattle: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=USSEA001 You'll note a distinct lack of yellow. If you zoom out a bit you can find some 'bulk carriers' but those aren't container ships.
So when the article quotes the Seattle port commissioner who says "we currently have no container ships at berth" that might be literally true right now at that specific port.
Other US ports seem to be doing better - Perhaps Seattle is badly located or expensive, and has taken a disproportionate fraction of the 30% drop in volumes? There are certainly larger ports on the same coast https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Top_container_ports_...
HotHotLava•5h ago
watwut•2h ago
lowbloodsugar•6h ago
mikem170•4h ago
mtillman•5h ago
lurk2•5h ago
plopz•5h ago
Retric•5h ago
Keep removing 1 cup of water and add 2/3 cups and eventually it goes to zero. For a port that very well may be sending people home early on an ‘empty’ port. Even if tomorrow brings in new ships for now it looks like a ghost town.
And then at one port on one day zero cargo ships showed up.
lurk2•5h ago
That is irrelevant.
gamblor956•5h ago
The specific claim was that the port no longer had any container ships on that specific day. And that claim was true.
Yes, there were other ships in the port. But that's irrelevant. A container ship is a specific kind of cargo ship used for international cargo shipments. In an article about international shipments, that distinctions matters.
ok_dad•4h ago
lurk2•3h ago
ok_dad•3h ago
noworriesnate•1h ago
If a boy was watching the sheep, saw a wolf, and cried "Dragon! Dragon!" and then the king and his army came to fight the dragon, and when he was criticized for lying, he said, "You're talking in technicalities, there was indeed a wolf," that is what this feels like to me. But then if he refused to ever call the wolf a wolf, and this happened over and over again, and he always called it a dragon--well, a lot of people would just ignore him.
Like, why not just say "Yeah, it's not true. Not sure what this guy's agenda is, but easily-disproved exaggeration doesn't help make the case. There IS a problem though, and let's try to have that conversation while ignoring obvious alarmism." You would sound reasonable and mature, and possibly even convincing.
ipaddr•1h ago
echoangle•1h ago
dialup_sounds•52m ago
The fact that the terminals are not empty doesn't mean the economy isn't fucked, so there's no reason to argue about it either way.
ok_dad•34m ago
anigbrowl•5h ago
danesparza•6h ago
This article was written in May, and directly quotes Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins.
TheBozzCL•5h ago