I’m in the process of going through some of my older emails and trying to catch up. In my defense, I was without cell service for a while because of a broken phone.
Now that I’m catching up I’m starting to come up with some real gems that have been sitting in my inbox for a while. As an example this little piece of crap from Useless Toady. [1]
It’s it’s an article entitled
“Rigged: Forced into debt.Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing.”
The article’s author is Brett Murphy. No not the actor, as this one is an economics major at UC Berkeley. Frankly I can’t think of anyone less qualified to speak on matters of Economics than anyone having anything to do with UC Berkeley. That point aside…
Los Angeles — Samuel Talavera Jr. did everything his bosses asked.
Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers and Kumho tires to warehouses around Los Angeles, on their way to retail stores nationwide.
He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of his cab and slept in the company parking lot.
For all of that, he took home as little as 67 cents a week.
So, before this guy even gets three paragraphs into the article I have to call BS.
$0.67? Who’s going to work for that? Obviously this was a One-Shot low point brought on by factors that the author doesn’t bother to mention.
16 hour days? I would be most interested in knowing how they manage to pull that one off, since you’re only allowed to drive for 11 hours in a 14 hour period.
Now this is an extremely long article and I’m not going to bother quoting any more of it here, particularly given the already described half-truths and outright lies. But suffice it to say that the central character in the story is the supposedly victim of a trucking company leasing arrangement.
And, before you start getting tuned up about that, I’ll say upfront that leasing arrangements generally speaking don’t work to the advantage of the driver. I have a number of friends in the business who have signed on to lease agreements that I now hear are finding out it’s something they shouldn’t have done.
Now, of course being from Berkeley, he blames all the right people for the problems faced by this particular driver. Greedy shipping companies, greedy trucking companies, greedy leasing companies, and so on. Just the kind of thing that you would expect from the abject morons coming out of UC Berkeley.
What the article doesn’t mention however is this whole chain of events started because of the myth of global warming.
That’s right…. California in its Infinite Wisdom decided to outlaw the trucks these people were making money with. Granted, these owner operators weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but they were making a comfortable living with the trucks that they had. The ones that were paid for.
And Along Comes the California government and outlaws the trucks they had to supposedly save the planet. Now, if you want to stay in that business you need a truck. You also need the capital to buy a new truck which of course the majority of the drivers at the time did not have. The trucking companies want to stay in business as well and the only way that they’re going to be able to do that is front the capital for these guys to get newer Vehicles. So they bought the trucks and leased them back to the drivers. A less than optimal situation for both driver and Company, but it was the only choice to keep the freight moving. Governmental intervention forced them into this position.
Of course the newer with all the mandated anti-pollution garbage on them are not nearly as reliable and on a cost per mile basis are far more expensive to run and insure. More expensive in fact than any of the estimates of the time they came out.
And so nobody’s making money from the LA ports anymore comparatively speaking as a direct result of anti-pollution laws laid down by the California government. And as I say this being the biggest factor of all in these troubles somehow managed to slip by our government educated leftist writing this article.
All this goes directly to what I’ve been saying for 10 years now… If you wanted to screw up an already screwed up economy even further, can you possibly imagine a more effective way of doing it then messing with the hours of service all in the name of safety of course, and messing with the reliability of the trucks that ship every good and commodity in this country,by means of the EPA?
I’m going to leave you with two points about all of this. We have all observed that as goes California with regards to the global warming myth so goes the rest of the country eventually. The problem is that they are experiencing in the transportation industry in California is Raising prices uncontrollably. And of course the government doesn’t care.
The second point is that we now see chatter out in California about outlawing the internal combustion engine entirely and going all electric [2] for both cars and trucks anywhere in the state of California.
Leaving aside for the moment the issues involved with having to replace every gasoline fired vehicle in the state of California what about the trucks? The technology isn’t even there yet for either cars or trucks. I have serious doubts that it ever will be. Even making the overlarge assumption that it will be, the cost that will be imposed by this nonsense is astronomical.
And what about the environment that were supposedly trying to save? Ask the question of how many nuclear power plants they’re going to build in California and how many dollars are going to be spent building out the infrastructure which will never be able to handle the additional load imposed by electric vehicles, will generally end the conversation with any proponents of this nonsense.
Now, as for the truckers out in California, we see an upcoming scheduled protest just after the first of the month, against the federal government as regards to electronic logs. And we see protest being set up in Fresno and other California towns. Of course the demand is for governmental action on the matter. It is certainly an understandable reaction to an overbearing all powerful governments. But it’s misguided.
The problem here is governmental intrusion. Adding more governmental intrusion is not going to solve their problems, it’s going to make them worse. The solution to the issue is getting government out of the way.
Alas, I think as a culture we have lost the idea and the ideal that governments should be restrained and minimalized. What we’re seeing right now is a direct result.