121–130 of 404 posts
Remove the stigma, make it “cool”, and they’ll see more people applying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the interstates are clogged with long haul trucks, it obviously isn't nearly enormous enough.
Trucks are much faster than train. Depending on the cost incurred in having goods be unsellable for some period of time, trucks often make sense. Trains also aren't that much cheaper. I'm not sure why this is, but my hunch is that much of the cost in transportation is pick up from origin and drop off at destination and this essentially has to be done via truck. So, if you're shipping via train, you incur an additiona…
Railroads, on the other hand, pay all their own track maintenance, and even have to pay property taxes on the track. The whole system is tilted against railroads.
I am so sick of this perpetual fallacy about labor shortages. If you can't find enough workers it means you need to raise the price you're offering. (But yasp the article cited one particular firm has already increased prices 15% this year.) Doesn't matter. There is a certain price at which the market will clear. If the market isn't clearing it's because the price being offered is too low. Keep trying.
Labor shortages absolutely exist. If there are 100 jobs requiring a specific skill and only 97 people exist who have that skill, that's a labor shortage. Those companies can compete for those workers all they want, but it doesn't magically create 3 new workers. Those shortages create opportunities and more people train to fill those gaps but it takes some amount of time before 3 new workers are available.
Here's one example of the guy in Stockton paying about 16000(?) versus the people in Napa paying 40000 for the same crop/work (the grapes in Napa are worth more), and Napa farm workers are commuting from the Central Valley.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does make sense, you don’t need “infinite” amount of money. Pay a driver $200k a year. Or give them an 8 hour workday, and week off week on schedules so they can see their family. There’s many solutions, all of them involve incentivizing people to become drivers. If people want their Amazon orders so bad, they’ll end up paying. And if they don’t, then they have to re-prioritize what they want.
I wouldn't re-train as a truck driver for $200k a year? Would you? And you can't just say 'there's lots of people for whom $200k would be a lot of money' because there's a lot of people who whom $50k is a lot of money and those jobs aren't filled either. Short of literally offering a million dollars a year, it's got to be more complicated than how much you offer.
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Free market people understand these things pretty easily. I do not see why you are finding it hard. One obvious fallacy in your statement is that someone getting paid infinite money for talent. I have not seen any such examples so far beside Pentagon who get paid more and more irrespective of their incompetence.
For example CEO salaries have been increasing rapidly for several decades. Are they so much better now than 40 or more years ago?
But CEO salary has nothing to do with the `Talent`. Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella all replaced their predecessors pretty well and will be replaced by someone better in future too.
The real reason for high CEO salaries is mostly about risk associated with replacement. Sundar Pichai got paid $100M in years 2015. Which looks high but when you realise there are 20M shares of Google it is merely $5 per share.
If you are a Google shareholder would you risk Google's steady growth for a $5 dividend per year ? Will you waste your time saving $100M or rather focus on empowering Sundar to find next $10B market to disrupt ?
CEO salaries are high and they will soar with time too as corporations become large and government regulations increase. As regulations and size of corporations increase a person friends with Ajit Pai would matter more than a person willing to take a pay cut.
As a free market person I have no problem understanding it. Whether it is desirable, good or bad those are value judgements but there is no magic or hidden conspiracies at play here.
P.S. : I think Sundar is getting paid really pennies. Justin Bieber made $80 Millions in year 2016. He is just a singer (and a bad one at it). Sundar on other hand is spearheading a company that forms the brain of our civilisational progress at the moment, responsible for employing millions across the globe and saving billions for entire humanity.
What would be the annual billable revenue if you decided to buy a truck and start hauling cargo around yourself, cutting the middlemen? There are people who do this.
Obviously your income is limited by regulations regarding how long you can drive and how long you must rest in between. These physically clamp the amount of time you can do billable work (unless you're driving with a partner and take turns).
I would guess some hundreds of thousands of gross revenue per truck annually, EBITDA is probably a lot less. Would be interesting to know what the books might look like.
Apart from not having a CDL at this time, there is a simple reason why no amount of money is going to make me get a truck driving job. Driving jobs I see advertised require an accident free record, and I had a fender bender a couple years ago (even though it was the other driver at fault). I have no tickets, suspensions, or anything else, but the accident automatically disqualifies you.
As in totally accident-free? The accidents I was involved in in my late teens/early 20s made me a way better driver.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For example CEO salaries have been increasing rapidly for several decades. Are they so much better now than 40 or more years ago?
CEO salaries are not infinite; they are huge but not infinite. If Tim cook continues to ask for more and more and more eventually he will lose his job. But CEO salary has nothing to do with the `Talent`. Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella all replaced their predecessors pretty well and will be replaced by someone better in future too. The real reason for high CEO salaries is mostly about risk associated with repl…
I am so sick of this perpetual fallacy about labor shortages. If you can't find enough workers it means you need to raise the price you're offering. (But yasp the article cited one particular firm has already increased prices 15% this year.) Doesn't matter. There is a certain price at which the market will clear. If the market isn't clearing it's because the price being offered is too low. Keep trying.
Labor shortages absolutely exist. If there are 100 jobs requiring a specific skill and only 97 people exist who have that skill, that's a labor shortage. Those companies can compete for those workers all they want, but it doesn't magically create 3 new workers. Those shortages create opportunities and more people train to fill those gaps but it takes some amount of time before 3 new workers are available.
There's actually no need for truck drivers. People could carry loads on their backs. The reason companies don't hire people for this is because they're much more expensive (ignoring speed/etc.) than truck drivers. So if you're saying there can be labor shortages (in a free market), you could also say there's a severe shortage of human thing-carriers, which is ridiculous.
At a rough point in my life, I was a truck driver for CR England and Knight Transportation for a few days short of 7 months. You don’t start at 80,000 a year. That’s such a lie. You make about 600 a week to start, roughly, depending if you get enough miles. You don’t get the good routes, staying in well populated areas like the i5 corridor, at first. You stay in the middle of no where Arizona, North Dakota, etc. You…
Interesting what you said about I-5 vs middle of nowhere. As someone who has to drive from Denver to south east Texas a few times per year for family stuff, I'd almost always rather deal with an empty great plains highway than traffic on I-5. There are downsides, mainly food and hotel choices of course.