Exactly. Imagine believing you have accomplished something by hauling butter 3000 miles to Pennsylvania.
Check out this gentleman, a 4th generation onion farmer in upstate NY who cannot sell his onions at any price. Like many farmers in the northeast, he’ll be bankrupt in a few months.
https://twitter.com/ChrisPawelski/status/1173339453332643840...
Produce buyers use cartel tactics to suppress prices and Canadian farmers are dumping product on the market well under cost.
His plight speaks to why futures markets are important. His costs and production plans were set many months ago, yet his revenue is only decided now. With futures he could hedge downward exposure.
There are definitely big changes in how produce is being purchased now, with closed-market strategic sourcing replacing older markets that were more transparent. Producers are paying for increasing consumer competition in grocery.
Better working conditions..less accidents..data collection. Fast delivery..efficiency?
Without that, trucks are no different than cable companies, airlines, or other capital intensive businesses. They’ll consolidate over time into oligopoly. Whatever efficiency gains appear will be eaten up by the lack of market forces.
> San Francisco-based self-driving truck startup Embark Trucks, which last year completed a five-day, 2,400-mile cross-country trip. But that truck carried no freight.
Still, you'd think they'd ship something in abundant supply in California and short supply in Pennsylvania. Optimism, maybe.
Even if it entirely eliminates human beings, it means the person who’d be driving the truck will be able to do better paying or other fulfilling tasks. Who knows...study or become an artist or spend more time with children etc.
I also don’t see how migrant workers are being exploited? How is anyone exploited if they are not driving long haul truck routes?
Retraining is a really important part of our modern reality. The idea that we can simply turn off the tap of advancing technology so that the hardest working, lowest paid workers can continue to toil for peanuts is super shitty. There are some incredibly intelligent people who stumbled in their development who really deserve a second chance at jobs that aren't ass.
Once upon a time, horse drawn carriages transported people and there were stables and groomsmen and carriage drivers and those who provided food and board for the horses. That entire industry and those jobs disappeared when the motor cars came along. They found other jobs. We moved on.
Because you are making it cheaper to transport from California agribusinesses who are known for violating labor laws to Pennsylvania who is known for enforcing labor laws.
This is in opposition to local manufacturing which becomes more economically feasible the more transport costs.
"Verify: Are half of California farmworkers undocumented?" https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/verify/verify-are-h...
Deporting illegal workers is causing farm workers to finally be above minimum wage: "Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job" https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/
I chose those two articles because they are quite a bit more "pro-immigration" than others and most likely to blunt the knee-jerk "Yer a raciiiiist!" idiots.
The real problem is that rather than deporting all these people we should be hitting the agribusinesses with gigantic fines and jail time for exploiting them in the first place. If some CEOs wound up in jail for employing undocumented workers and not paying minimum wage instead of just getting a slap on the wrist, this problem would self-correct.
"Citizenship" A celebration of all the moments our children will remember as the beginning of the end, thanks to our desire to change the world for the butter.
As a citizen, I wonder if it’s a moment our children will celebrate or remember as the beginning of an end.
I imagine the point is that it hauled a refrigerated fragile load, and it arrived unscathed.