Trucking 'bloodbath': 4,500 truck drivers lost jobs in August | Hacker News Reader

Trucking 'bloodbath': 4,500 truck drivers lost jobs in August

businessinsider.com

45 pointselorant22 comments

4,500 / 3,500,000 = 0.1% decline in truck drivers.

The industry probably has outsized exposure to the escalating trade wars and increasing tariffs.

AFAIK there is a greater percentage of trucking businesses going down than truck drivers. Consolidation. Amazon, etc.

Article even says "It was the first time since March that truckers saw job losses."

This point wasn't clear to me reading the article. I got the impression that many of those bankruptcies were independent owner/operators but that the reporter was trying to downplay that and rather let us believe these were large operators on the brink of collapse.

Orders for new Class 8 trucks are down about 80% year over year. https://ftrintel.com/news/latest-orders/index.php

It seems however that 2018 was a “record year” so maybe it’s just back to “normal”?

Apparently they are "[the] lowest since 2010": https://www.truckinginfo.com/337568/july-class-8-orders-lowe...

Probably waiting to see how the electric trucks pan out before purchasing.

Probably not. Demand for investment goods just varies very strongly with economic cycles.

4500? That's almost noise level. Certainly it's not anything close to a bloodbath. Truck drivers are the #1 job in the US, @ 3.5mm drivers.

But then again, it's BI so ...

What is 3.5mm supposed to mean? Million? What's the second m?

It's a matter of preference.

M = mega (in metric) = one million

MM = two of the roman numeral M = one thousand thousand = one million.

Both are correct.

I see, so when people use nMM they're using roman numerals to indicate million units?

TIL

That seems rather spurious and ambiguous, considering people generally use nK for thousand units, and mixing roman numerals now makes metric nM a collision with thousands.

MM is a financial abbreviation. It used to be "the standard" but nowadays they also use M.

Compare with the "M" in CPM, which is not the roman 'M' but the French 'Mille'.

So, "M" is sometimes ambiguous. In this case it wouldn't be, but I always use mm or MM to mean million, and bn or BN to mean billion.

The confusion is that they used small 'm', which in metric is a meter. "mm" is a millimeter in metric, 1/1000 of a meter.

milimeter?

i dont understand, everybody was saying theres a million trucker jobs unfilled

It’s PR to keep truck driving wages artificially suppressed.

Then a bunch of unfilled jobs would do the opposite (it would raise wages).

Not if they don't exist, and are just PR to keep wages artificially suppressed

If there is in reality a glut of drivers, then repeating that there was a lack of drivers would bring in more drivers in spite of the glut, depressing wages.

Woohoo just like the engineer “shortage”

Tons of unfilled jobs that pay at or below minimum wage...

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