131–140 of 404 posts
The shortage, if there is one, won't last long once the autopilot-enabled truck convoys get going.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By your logic entire concept of labour shortage is outrageous because any shortage will clear with high enough price. But for any job such as that of Truck drive the market value of that job is only X. Paying more than X would mean you should look for alternatives and get out of that business. As the truck diver salaries go up cost of everything that relies on transportation also goes up marginally. Suddenly the stru…
If the prospect of mass unemployment and the infliction of considerable misery on a large portion of the population is considered "the brighter side" then your argument contains some pretty consequential unstated value judgements. What, exactly, is the point of commerce in the first place? Is it measured by some abstract efficiency metric or do real life humans figure into your analysis at all? If so, which humans co…
Very good question. The point of commerce is that people be able to buy other people's time willingly for a rate they voluntarily negotiate. When you can buy someone else's time you save time for your own self to do something that interests you. Everyone time you fill gas in your car you are buying perhaps 0.5 seconds of a guy who chose to work on a Oil rig in Alaska and 1 second of a government servant in Washington DC working for Energy department.
As long as people have free time there is never a problem of mass unemployment unless government makes it a crime to work on voluntarily negotiated terms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the nature of truck driving, the headline has been $100k/yr job without the need of a degree for years, but in actuality, only those who work very hard & cheat the books get close to that. Are you willing to drive while sleepy, break regs when the customer is demanding you drive longer to deliver their products (due to traffic delaying you or similar)? Its a really screwed up industry.
Agreed, my hope is that it isn't a foreshadow for other industries. Once breaking regs and cheating (whatever that looks like for a given industry) become part of the revenue forecast. It’s pretty hard for market participants to compete without doing those things.
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.
Truck driver's are basically consultants. They generally have to cover the costs. So 100k has a lot of expenses attached to it. Plus long hours and time away from friends and family. And long boring drives in the middle of Nebraska. I don't think I would want to do that for 45-65k take home pay.
Either way, most are paid by the ( loaded ) mile which makes them some weird bizarro version of Uber drivers.
From the article: A few drivers told The Washington Post that they earn $100,000, but many said their annual pay is less than $50,000 (government statistics say median pay for the industry is $42,000). As for the bonuses, driver Daniel Gollnick said they are a “complete joke” because of all the strings attached. Yet the headline talks about 80 kUSD/year.
There was a truck driver on NPR a while back giving an interview. He noted the same thing. Only very few drivers with specialized skills make a good living. Everyone else is tied to a very low net salary structure. It was an interesting observation that he contrasted to this myth of the independent truck guy working for himself... when really most are just as tied to company whims and rules that they have nothing to…
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35025680-the-long-haul
Here's an HN discussion of the book:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310849
A passage from the introduction on the hierarchy of truckers that probably has some relevance here:
To the casual observer all trucks probably look similar, and I suppose people figure all truckers do pretty much the same job. Neither is true. There’s a strict hierarchy of drivers, depending on what they haul and how they’re paid. The most common are the freighthaulers. They’re the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are the car haulers (parking lot attendants), flatbedders (skateboarders), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers), chemical haulers (thermos bottle holders), and hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys). Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truckstop coffee counter or in the driver’s lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters, when there is one, mainly because I don’t have time to waste, but also because I don’t buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse. I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a three-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks, and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.
I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.
They are terrible jobs. Years ago I had a class B and drove dial-a-ride buses. All-in-all it wasn't a terrible job because I got frequent breaks between passengers and could get out of the truck on those breaks and hang out at a mall or get something to eat. My counterparts that drove the city buses had to stay in their seat for 8 hours driving in circles around town. The other thing that people don't realize about t…
Becoming a truck driver currently doesn't seem a wise choice when self-driving trucks are on the horizon.
Humans can barely handle it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Are corporations better managed today, than a few decades ago, when CEO's earned much less ?