I thought you were pulling my leg so I looked it up and now I can confidently say I understood that reference.
<3
It's all good, bruv. I can't blame you for not trusting journos, plus now you're speaking my language. Have you tried
ditch liquor or
poultry house litter ?
Also, because I suck, I'm taking this opportunity to throw out a few items I found of interest. Sorry, not sorry.
Goldman just figured out why the labor shortage will last for a long time: 60% of the missing workers retired, many for good Dude
just figured it out, but I think I made this point roughly 40 pages ago.
The Truck Driver Shortage Doesn’t Exist. Saying There Is One Makes Conditions Worse for Drivers Rate this hot take for me, trucker bros.
'Puzzling' diesel shortages -- a third of owner-operators report experiencing outages, limitations This is a good sign, right?
I never heard of ditch liquor. Pigs are so weird.
Poultry litter feed has been explained to me as "chicken shit and saw dust." I was told, "some cows will eat it; sell the ones that won't." I have goats, who are, despite what cartoons say, extremely picky animals, so I haven't tried.
To wrap that around to be more relevant to the thread, I've been moving away from high-input land use and exploring more stable pasturing options, including native grasses (little bluestem is ice cream to goats,) improved bermuda-clover mixes (I already have nitrogen-hungry coastal, but maybe I can get a winter self-reseeder to feed it, and provide high-protein winter forage) and no-till winter forage planting.
All because why? Because inflation is really helping with my land expenses, while at the same time making fertilizer, herbicide, seed, protein supplements, and concentrates far less efficient. I stand to do better with fewer animals on the same property. How's that for a knock-on effect? Farms become less productive, because they're more profitable when squeezed less hard under current economic trends. Lower electricity prices and a stronger dollar mean I bring more kids to market in order to make the same money.
It's sixes and half dozens to me, but the consumer feels the pinch.
As for the "trucker shortage not real" article, some random notes.
There is a dearth of *competent* truckers. Holy guacamole but are there a lot of narnars these days. It's noticeably worse than just two years ago. Not just old man gripes like CDL holders who can't drive standard, which means they drive incredibly expensive autoshift transmissions which require a team from NASA to fix. It's shit like "I can't back up to a dock" and worse.
My company had to reject 20 tons of meat recently, because of some bunkleyutz who didn't want to wake up until after he was unloaded. Rather than wait in his truck until it was time to unload, he opened his barndoor trailer and backed in in the middle of the night. Well, guess what! A reefer won't keep meat cold when the fucking doors are open! So yeah turnover is high, and it would be nice to retain more people.
Part of the retention problem is a lot of the people who quit or get fired SHOULD. You can't fix stupid. Not to say OTR conditions are great, and finding somewhere to sleep is a big problem, exacerbated by the dumbass hours system which usually has the perverse effect of robbing you of rest rather than ensuring it. There's nowhere near enough truck parking in much of the US, so you see people parked on the side of on-ramps, and, worse, on the side of off ramps or on the shoulders of highways.
The pay is great for OTR, and if you're not getting paper, you're lazy, stupid, or need to change companies. That said, the 85 plus a year I could be making as a company driver isn't worth it to me compared with my much less stressful job.
"Debt peonage." Top kek. It's like maybe 5.or.6 grand to pay your own way through a trucking school, or you can hook up with one of many companies that will train you to get your CDL if you sign on to drive for them for a year or so. If that puts you in "debt peonage" in an industry where you're easily making that in one month, I dunno, man. Consider suicide.
Poor truckers are in a gig economy. Oh woe what will they do when their pay is directly correlated to what the company makes, rather than a wage that the companies can collude to suppress? Who wrote this, a shipping exec?
I never recommend women drive trucks. Truck stops are not nice places. Many truckers are bad people, and you're far from any sort of support. Thankfully I can say such things on kiwifarms, where recognizing reality isn't taken as "rape apology."
Truck expenses HAVE skyrocketed, and that's the fault of all the retarded gee-whiz elon musk type bullshit they've crammed in. None of it, from autoshift to adaptive cruise to collision warning, is necessary. Indeed, much of it just makes drivers complacent. Mirrors and a clear mind are what you need. Special baby amenities in the sleeper are less of a problem, but still dumb. Why do you have satellite TV? Go the fuck to sleep. Oh OK now I'm doing old man bitching.
All this focus on toys reminds me of boot camp. They brought in a geezer from Chosin to talk to us, and one of the recruits asked him, "how did you keep up your morale?" He blinked, then said, "well, by killing the enemy."
Oh my fuck, simping for California's owner-op ban. Throw this article into Cumbre Vieja.
