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America has a truck driver shortage

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#381

Post by anoncoward111 »

godzilla82 wrote: post #378
anoncoward111 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of most things is a function of labor cost + materials + location where it's made + admin + delivery. In a perfect world, admin and delivery are nearly 0, the warehouse where it's made is once again as cheap as possible, and the materials and labor will decrease over time as more and more laborers acquire the skills necessary to make the product. This is why drone pilot income is rapidly plumetting, along w…

>The price of most things is a function of labor cost + materials + location where it's made + admin + delivery. Sorry, but you are wrong. The price of a good is not a function of these. Price is a function of demand and supply. And demand and supply are in turn also a function of price. For example, you cannot demand a salary based on the cost of your education. The market will decide what is the value of your labou…

I actually don't disagree with you. You describe the system as it is, and I describe the system as I desire it to be.

Humanity should not have to waste its time going through the dog and pony show of every company and every vendor.

Wherever possible, goods and services SHOULD be commodities that are interchangeable. A rune platebody will always be a rune platebody from the grand exchange, no matter who is selling it in Runescape.

Obviously there will be edge cases for custom products and services, that's totally fine. But imagine buying a water bottle or choosing antivirus software after being subjected to 8 different sales guys and their "funnels".

No thanks! Let's bring PRICE as close to COST as possible.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#382

Post by MisterTea »

ocschwar wrote: post #331
burger_moon wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LTL trucking is how just about everything you buy in a store is delivered, and it you ever buy anything online that is large or heavy it is also shipped this way to your house. The UPS truck isn't delivering pallets of bananas to the grocery store.

Nope. But note you said pallet. Nothing stopping those pallets from making the long haul on tracks, and the last mile on a truck. (Except politics, that is)

How does the pallet make it from train to truck in a cost effective way? Adding labor into the equation is grade A bean counter kryptonite.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#383

Post by winstonewert »

joshuamorton wrote: post #186
rileymat2 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point, but I wonder if there has been a shortage of food or water in the last 30 years that more money could not have solved quickly. It seems these happen in poor/war torn areas.

Offhand IDK, I was more thinking in terms of a theoretical resource constrained environment where the population is beyond the carrying capacity. You have a shortage that money cannot solve.

Even there, the situation isn't fundamentally different.

We are constantly in a situation where we do not have enough resources to do everything we'd like to do, we have decide which are the best uses of the resources.

If we don't even have enough resources to keep everyone alive, then we are still in that exact same situation of not having enough resources to do everything we'd like to do. We are going to have to decide how to expend those resources (i.e. which people are going to live)

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#384

Post by Applejinx »

5DFractalTetris wrote: post #105
Applejinx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To people following the way market whims have affected corporate planning, this is an extremely humorous hypothesis. No, I don't think that they are.

Interesting. I notice I have been downvoted as well. Thanks for the slap on the back, everybody.

That part wasn't me, and I'm not in the least mad :)

It's just that the subject is extremely important, though it's seemingly not related to 'truck driver shortage'. Part of the problem with seeking to first justify the way our economics are structured, and then explain the outcomes, is that it ignores externalities that can be important.

You could take the opposite tack and begin from 'wealthy people are inherently evil' and probably be almost as wrong, but then you'd be arguing a deeply anarchic position where leadership is only dominance and subjugation. That ignores things like Elon Musk's elaborate, sci-fi goals which are clearly that of a nerd writ large, and not simply a pointy-hair CEO guy wanting only wealth.

The truth is a lot simpler: value is what you're able to make happen, but compensation is sheer social engineering. CEO pay has absolutely nothing to do with whether they're more useful as a class than truck drivers. I think some of them are more useful than truck drivers, and some are not.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#385

Post by [deleted] »

Karishma1234 wrote: post #169
maxxxxx wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the quality of management is the way productivity of a CEO is managed. So there should be a connection between that and his pay.

No. Pay is always based on what it would cost to replace you. It never depends on what you actually do. (What you are willing to pay for X always depends on what is the cost of replacing X with the alternative).

[deleted]

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#386

Post by HarryHirsch »

toasterlovin wrote: post #110
shiftpgdn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've done an international move surely you saw how horribly the industry is run. It's ripe for "disruption." Most of the pages of companies doing the work look straight out of 2004.

There is a YC company doing this: Flexport.

Their website is full of fluff, and you have to sign up for an account. With your average freight forwarder you just pick up the phone for a quote, and if the quote is outside their area of expertise they'll refer you to someone who can perform. What is their niche, exactly?

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#387

Post by andrei_says_ »

briandear wrote: post #267
andrei_says_ wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, shortage of people willing to forego having a personal life, are expected to speed/break the law daily and risk losing their job as a part of doing their job, are verifiably destroying their health long term in order to do said boring menial job for long hours in exchange for low to medium pay. Of course there’s a shortage. If pay was 200-300% higher and drivers could afford to work 2/3 of the time an…

Are you willing to pay dramatically higher prices for literally everything you buy? Solutions like “just raise wages” are simplistic. Markets don’t work that way. You raise wages, trucking gets more expensive and demand drops, causing all sorts of unintended consequences. What very few people talk about is eliminating taxes on diesel fuel. That would lower costs and increase margins which would result in companies be…

Would it blow your mind if I suggested to raise wages and ... reduce profit? Just a little bit?

How many gap t-shirts does an 18-wheeler transport? Would it be insanely expensive to reduce the profit on each shirt with $0.05 and pay the driver double?

Is this really unthinkable to “economists”? Is maximizing profit for the few who don’t really need it the only unchange-able variable in this equation?

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#388

Post by andrei_says_ »

corodra wrote: post #270
briandear wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to pay dramatically higher prices for literally everything you buy? Solutions like “just raise wages” are simplistic. Markets don’t work that way. You raise wages, trucking gets more expensive and demand drops, causing all sorts of unintended consequences. What very few people talk about is eliminating taxes on diesel fuel. That would lower costs and increase margins which would result in companies be…

As the salty guy that sparked off this whole thing that use to do truck driving, I would honestly say that a lot can be fixed on labor demands if a few things were fixed and not change pay all that much. A lot more respect has to be thrown onto the driver's life. Trash truck drivers still go home at the end of the day. Yes, it's a shitty job too. But the biggest benefit, you go home at the end of the day. Long haul,…

I think this sounds like a solid plan. Have you thought getting involved with organizing? Do you know people who are?

There are a lot of truck drivers out there, they have families and friends. And I hope that there are unions.

I refuse to be cynical about the “unchangeability” of laws because that makes me powerless. Better go for it and fail until it’s done.

Such legislation is not impossible.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#389

Post by camdenreslink »

somberi wrote: post #250

A related read (1): Things I found interesting from the article: a. Approximately 150,000 Sikhs (my edit: Sikhs are a subset of Indians and to a smaller extent Pakistanis) in trucking, 90% of whom are drivers. b. Those numbers are growing rapidly, with 18,000 Sikhs entering the industry in 2017 alone. c. Sikhs control about 40% of trucking in California. d. (In the US and Canada) - A network of Indian truck stops is…

How do you even stay in business w/ 90% turnover rate. That's insane!
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