Cellmate of Boethius: Progressives Are Driving Themselves Into Extinctio...

Cellmate of Boethius: Progressives Are Driving Themselves Into Extinctio...

Donald Trump insults Catholicism.

There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President. We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.

New York State Conference of Catholic Bishops. 

Trump, in something that's supposed to be a jest, posted a photograph of himself dressed as a Pope, no doubt generated by the onrushing curse of our age, AI.

I'm not going to post it.

This should serve as as warning to Trump supporting Catholics.  Trump, who received widespread Evangelical Christian support and who has housed an faith advisor office in the White House which is staffed by a rather peculiar Evangelical pastor, shows no signs at all as taking religion seriously, and never has, but he is comfortable with coopting it.  In spite of that, and this was inevitable, he doesn't mind mocking the oldest and original Christian religion.

That tells you what you need to know.

I've long held that a real Christian can't be comfortable with either of the two major US political parties or with their recent leaders.  Only the American Solidarity Party comes close to being a party Christians can really be comfortable with.  The presence of Catholic politicians at the forefront of either party does not change this.  Biden advanced the sea of blood objectives of the infanticide supporting Democratic Party.  J.D Vance has supported the IF policies of the bizarre Trump protatalist agenda and that's just a start.  The Church has rarely attempted to hold Catholic politicians directly to account for reasons known to itself.

Before the Trump regime concludes, this is going to get worse.  Trump will conclude that he doesn't need Catholics for anything, because he does not.  A religion which is catholic, ie., universal, by nature will not ultimately be comfortable with a political philosophy which aggressively nationalist and nativist.  This, indeed, has been the history of Catholicism in the US, with it only being after the election of John F. Kennedy that things changed.

Some will claim, of course, that this means nothing and its just Trump trying to be funny. That's politically disturbing enough, as Trump is already an embarrassment to the country.  But those who think this should ask if Trump would have dared to depict himself as, for example, an imam. . . not hardly.

Trump's insult is offered as its safe to offer it.  As has sometimes been noted, anti Catholicism is the "last acceptable prejudice".  Trump offered this insult as it fits in nicely with his contempt for Christianity in general, but more particular, for his contempt for the Church, something that fits in nicely with the most extreme of his Evangelical supporters.

Catholics need to review the meaning of The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus.  We're part of something larger, and once we surrender to something smaller, we need to be cautious.  We can expect to be mocked and held in contempt, and if we aren't, there may well be something wrong with our witness.

But we don't have to accept the situation, nor tolerate it, where we do not need to.

Blog Mirror: Wyoming Catholic College Students Surrender Their Cellphones For Four Years

 

Wyoming Catholic College Students Surrender Their Cellphones For Four Years

No focus, no fights, and a bad back – 16 ways technology has ruined my life

 No focus, no fights, and a bad back – 16 ways technology has ruined my life

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

• Twitter has banned searches for Taylor Swift.

This tells us something about the danger of AI, as what they were searching for is AI generated faux nudes of the singer.

It also tells us something about entertainers we already knew.  Yes, their art counts, but part of their popularity, quite often, is that they're a form of art themselves. Which leads us to the next thing.

Everything about this is wrong on an existential level.  AI, frankly, is wrong.  

And once again, presented with the time, talent, and money to be sufficiently idle to do great things, we turn to the basest. 

• There's a creepy fascination going on with Tyler Swift

I don't know anything about Tyler Swift, other than that she's tall, and from the photos I've seen of her, on stage she wears, like many female singers, tight clothing.  She appears to be very tall, and is sort of a classic beauty.

I suppose that's the root of it.

Apparently, right wing media and MAGA people are just freaking out about Tyler Swift.  This has been headline fodder for some time, but I only got around to looking it up now, as I don't follow entertainment at all and don't care that much.

Swift is dating some football player.  I don't follow football either, so that doesn't interest me.  Beautiful female entertainers dating sports figures, or marrying them, isn't news, and it isn't even interesting.  Consider Kate Upton and Marilyn Monroe.  Indeed, under the evolutionary biological precept of hypergyny, most rich women in entertainment would naturally gravitate in this direction, as much as we like to pretend that our DNA does not push us in one direction or another (lesser female entertainers, such as Rachel Ray and Kathy Ireland, tend to marry lawyers).  Billy Joel may have sung about the opposite in Uptown Girl, but that truly is a fantasy.  There's really very little direction from them to otherwise take, whether they are cognizant of it or not.

And so now we have this total weirdness:

Right wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec: 

People who don’t understand why I have been commenting on Taylor Swift and Barbie are completely missing the point and NGMI These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.

Newsmax host Greg Kelly:

They’re elevating her to an idol.

Idolatry. This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!

Far right activist Laura Loomer:

The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open … It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.

Donald Trump fanboy and poster child for political train derailment, Vivek Ramaswamy:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall …

And if all of that isn't weird enough for you, a host on the right wing  OAN claims the Swift football dating is a deep state psy op, because sports brainwash kids when they should be focused on religion. 

This is insane.

Liz Cheney warned us that idiocy had crept into the nation's politics.  What more evidence of this is required than this?

• Celebrity endorsements.

Some of this stems from a fear that Swift might endorse President Biden.  I read something that claimed she had in 2020.

I don't know if she did or not, and I don't particularly care.

There are a host of celebrities who have endorsed Trump.  Nobody seems to get up in arms about that, or even notice it.  So why the concern.

Probably because Swift is seen as the voice of her generation, and that sure ain't the generation that MAGA is made up of.  I.e, she's young and an independent female.  

Look at it this way, would you rather have her endorsement, or Lauren Boebert's?

I frankly don't get celebrity endorsements anyhow.  I don't know why we care what any actor or singer thinks about anything.  Freaking out about it is just silly.

• Jay Leno is seeking to be the guardian and conservator for his wife, Mavis, who is 77, and has dementia.

This is a tragedy.

It's also a tragedy in the nation's eye. Most of the time really notable figures endure something like this, it's out of the public eyesight.  We didn't watch Ronald Reagan decline on the news.  Of course, we're unlikely to see Ms. Leno endure this either.

But this serves as a warning.  Old age, we often hear, isn't for wimps.  And one of the things about it is that those who remain mentally fit have to take care of those who do not.  Most families find this out.

But what about when they're running for office?

• The National Park Service reports a 63-year-old man died on a trail in Zion National Park.  Heart attack.

This headline tells us something, too. 63, we're often told, isn't old. But then we're not too surprised when a 63-year-old dies hiking, are we?

• A concluding thought.  We're getting scary stupid.

Freaking out about Tyler Swift, letting two octogenarians run to carry the nuclear football, engaging in endless weird conspiracy theories. . . we've really let the dogs of insanity out big time.

Frankly, a lot of the time the "elite", by which we mean the educated elite, the cultural elite, etc., kept a lid on this.  It wasn't as if the opinions of "the people" didn't matter, but they were tempered.

That's not happening in the country now at all.  Swift is part of a left wing conspiracy, efforts to prevent gender mutilation are due to right wing meanness.  This is out of hand.

Last Prior Edition:

The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.

Saturday, December 29, 1923. The dawn of television.

Russian-born engineer Vladimir K. Zworykin filed for a patent on his Television System, which would evolve into television.  He was employed by Westinghouse at the time, having immigrated to the U.S. during the Russian Civil War.  He died in 1982, living to an undetermined age in his early 90s.

Television advertisement from 1939.

Zworykin wasn't the only individual working on televised images, and his system wasn't the only one that was around.  A system by a rival inventor,  John Logie Baird, would be the first one on the market, coming at an amazingly early 1928, with the first television station, WRGB, then W2XB, broadcasting from the General Electric facility in Schenectady, NY.  For various reason, however, television didn't really take off until after World War Two, with the 1950s really seeing an explosion in its use.  Even at that, however, many households did not have televisions until the 1960s.  I can recall the first television our family had, which must have been acquired in the mid 1960s.  My mother bought it as a gift for my father, but had as an additional motive the hope that he'd spend more evenings at home rather than stop by to visit his mother, who lived a couple of blocks away.  Indeed, my father took to television (my mother never did), and her hopes were realized.

Test pattern from when local television stations quit broadcasting at night, and reappeared in the morning, with this image.  I can recall this appearing on our television early in the morning when my father first turned it on.

That experience really shows one of the frankly negative aspects of what would prove to be a groundbreaking technology.  Prior to television, while radio had arrived, there was still a great deal of "make your own entertainment" and the visiting of friends and relatives in the evenings.  Television helped end all that, which proved to be a radical shift in long held societal patterns.  Interestingly, television itself has never portrayed that change, and continues to depict life in large part as it had been before its arrival.  You don't see television programs in which people sit around and watch television.

As we've noted here before, early television was all locally broadcast, from locally owned stations.  Indeed, the FCC strictly regulated this latter aspect of television, which of course broadcast over the public airways.  Cable made major inroads, however, not television and a near deregulation of the industry has mean that it now broadcasts over multiple channels, in multiple ways, 24 hours a day, with local ownership often not existing.

Televisions ultimately became so common that by the early 2000s, most American households contained three of them.  The number is now down to 2.5, reflecting the advance of computers, which has cut into television use.  

All in all, while undoubtedly there are other opinions, television has been enormously corrosive and detrimental to society.

Germany agreed to pay France's and Belgium's expenses for occupying the Ruhr.  The UK objected to the French collecting taxes on a British owned mined in the region.

The SS Mutlah disappeared in the Mediterranean with all of its 40 hands lost.

The Mexican Federal Army was advancing towards Vera Cruz, the rebels having been routed. . . and industrial school girls were on the warpath.

The Saturday magazines were out.

Wednesday, October 17, 1973. The Arab Oil Embargo begins.

OPEC having doubled prices the day prior, Arab oil producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia, now went further and cut production overall by 5% and then placed an embargo on the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, West Germany,  Japan, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Portugal.  Western oil producers Venezuela nor Ecuador refused to join the embargo.

This causes us to recall part of what we recently posted here:

Friday, October 12, 1973. President Nixon commences a transfer of military equipment that leads to a Wyoming oil boom.

Congressman Gerald Ford was nominated to be Vice President by Richard Nixon.  

Also on that day, President Nixon authorized Operation Nickel Grass, the airlift of weapons to Israel.

 

M60 tank being loaded as part of Operation Nickel Grass

The operation revealed severe problems with the U.S. airlift capacity and would likely have not been possible without the assistance of Portugal, whose Azores facilities reduced the need for air-to-air refueling.  The transfer of equipment would also leave the United States dangerously short of some sorts of military equipment, including radios, something that was compounded by the fact that the U.S. was transferring a large volume of equipment to the Republic of Vietnam at the same time.

This would directly result in the Arab Oil Embargo, which had been threatened. The embargo commenced on October 17.  

U.S. oil production had peaked in 1970.  Oil imports rose by 52% between 1969 and 1972, an era when fuel efficiency was disregarded.  By 1972 the U.S. was importing 83% of its oil from the Middle East, but the real cost of petroleum had declined from the late 1950s.

The low cost of petroleum was a major factor in American post-war affluence from the mid 1940s through the 1960s.  The embargo resulted in a major expansion of Wyoming's oil and gas industry, and in some ways fundamentally completed a shift in the state's economy that had been slowly ongoing since World War One, replacing agriculture with hydrocarbon extraction as the predominant industry.

We often hear a lot of anecdotal information about this topic today.  

In this context, it's interesting to note that petroleum consumption is not much greater today in the U.S. than it was in 1973, but domestic production is the highest, by far, it's ever been.  Importation of petroleum is falling, but it's also higher than it was in 1973, but exportation of petroleum is the highest it's ever been, exceeding the amount produced in 1973.  If experts are balanced against imports, we're at an effective all-time low for importation.  In effect, presently, all we're doing with importation is balancing sources.

People hate this thought locally, but with renewable energy sources coming online, there's a real chance that petroleum consumption will fall for the first time since the 1970s, which would have the impact of reducing imports to irrelevancy.  Any way its looked at, the U.S. is no hostage to Middle Eastern oil any more.

It turned out that Europe wasn't hostage to Russian hydrocarbons either, so all of this reflects a fundamental shift in the world's economy.

Price has certainly changed over time.

Juan and Isabel Person were sworn into office as the elected president and vice president of Argentina

Judge John Sirica ruled that the Senate Watergate Committee was not entitled to have access to President Nixon's tape recordings, but that the U.S. Department of Justice special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, could subpoena them as evidence.

Motorola Corporation's engineer's filed for a patent on the DynaTAC, the first hand-held cellular telephone.  It would be issued two years later and our long modern nightmare would accelerate.

The DynaTAC would not enter production until 1983.

The Mets took game four of the World Series against the A's.  I surely would have watched that on the television with my father.

Blog Mirror. Testing Without Intermission: Life is hard but it's not all traumatic

 

Testing Without Intermission

Life is hard but it's not all traumatic

Privacy on iPhone | The Waiting Room | Apple

Not as funny, and a little scary, but somewhat funny.

Newsprint finis. The Casper Star Tribune.

With a history dating to 1891 with the weekly Natrona Tribune, published by the Republican Publishing Co., but with a name, reflecting mergers and a somewhat complicated history, dating to 1961, the Casper Star Tribune has ceased printing a Sunday edition.

Volume VII of the Natrona Tribune, the first year of its publication.

Today's edition was the last print Sunday tribune.

The Trib has tried to put a happy face on it, but it's not a happy story.  Clearly the paper is in economic trouble and part of that is online competitors, of which Wyoming has at least three substantial ones at the present time.  It already quit issuing print papers on Mondays, and now it will only issue two print papers per week, and mail them to subscribers from Scotsbluff.

Mail?

Yeah.  That's useful.  Having said that, the two print copies we got per week didn't arrive super quickly.  I'd usually read the electronic edition before that.

A sad end to an era nonetheless.

I prefer the print edition.  Maybe that's just me, but I like to be able to thumb through the paper, and frankly I pick up more content reading it that way.

Well, no more.  I'm not going to continue having a print subscription for Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which is now the option, had get them a week later when the mail gets here for them.

A few technological observations

1. Once the wrong phone number gets in a record of any kind, it's permanent.

It doesn't matter how many times you tell the record keeper you gave them your wife's cell phone number by mistake. They aren't correcting it, ever.

And it doesn't matter that your old landline number that you never use is in the records, and you've tried to replace it with your cell phone number, they aren't going to.

2.  Once you give your cell phone number to somebody, even with a "use for official business this one time only", that's the number you are going to.  It doesn't matter if you have a receptionist employed full time to take calls, they'll bypass it.  Even if your cell phone voice message instructs the caller not to do this, they're going to do it anyway, leave a message there, and not call your office number.  Ever.

3.  Anyone you give a cell phone number to for work purposes will take up texting you at night and on weekends.

Manual Jobs that have disappeared. Railroad Crossing Watchman.

This is the Out Our Way cartoon from April 21, 1923, courtesy of Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub.

The thing that surprises me here is that it never occurred to me that there were human manned railroad crossings, but as this photo shows, they existed into the 1940s at least:

Railroad crossing, Beaumont, Texas, May 1943.

Indeed, in looking it up, it seems like the modern type of crossing with the lowering arms came about in the 1950s.  An earlier automatic type called a "wig wag" was patented in 1909, but it must not have had universal use.

By Richamos - I took the picture with my own camera, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6347827

This brings up a number of interesting things, including that signals just weren't what they now are.  This likely explains why railroad crossing accidents were seemingly so common, such as this one, which was discussed in the Casper Daily Tribune about an April 20, 1923 accident.

But another matter, while the world is seemingly getting safer, there's less of a role for humans in it.

We've discussed this before, but automation is eliminating jobs, and has been, for a century.  Crossing guard attendants probably filled that job for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons likely was that some of the occupants of that position simply were suited for a job with pretty much no skills whatsoever, and were fine with a long day to themselves.  Where are they now?  Some of them are unemployed and unemployable.

And with the arrival of AI, this will rapidly expand into the white collar and professional world. We're making a world we literally can't live in.

Primitive seasons, modern technology

 An item linked in from one of the blogs we follow:

ARROWRIFLES DURING ARCHERY SEASON IN OK

I'm not a bow hunter.  A lot of the hunters I know are, including ones my age and a little older. Some quite a bit older.  I note that as it's not merely a matter of having grown up before there were bow seasons.  At least, I think I did.  I know it wasn't popular in the state until I was in my early 20s, and it followed the Game & Fish allowing some large caliber handguns to be used for hunting. I recall that coming first.

I'm an avid hunter, but I'm a modern firearms' hunter.  If bows were my only option, I'd use them, but they are not, I don't. They seem retrograde in a way that isn't appealing, as firearms are more deadly, and we owe the animal that.  I'm not going to get preachy about it, however, and the few hunters I know really well that bow hunt are very proficient, and no doubt highly deadly with a bow.

Anyhow, I'm okay with their being bow seasons, but the way that people use early seasons as simply a vehicle to get out first, and then evade the spirit of the original thought I don't care for. The spirit of bow hunting was to hunt with something that humans used that required skill and reflected our hunting nature in earlier times.  Basically, if Ötzi would have recognized it, well then it was good to go.  I'm not demanding a bow that Welsh archers or Sioux warriors would have used, but a real bow.

Catalan depiction of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1086.

Well, soon enough, some people wondered if they might use crossbows.

I should know more about the history of the crossbow than I do, but I think of it as a weapon of war.  It was sort of the magnum strength projectile launcher of its day, launching a heavy bolt through armor or mail.  I didn't realizes they were legal for hunting anywhere until a colleague asked me about it, as he wanted to buy one, thinking that he didn't have the physical strength to use a bow.

Hmmm.

Mind you, I don't mind archery at all.  I think it's really cool, and I've thought about doing it in the backyard just for fun.  And I wouldn't mind pinking with a crossbow.  I'm just not going to hunt with either, and I don't think that using a crossbow meets with the spirit of the original concept.

The same evolution, I'd note, occurred with "primitive rifles".

Following the movie Jeremiah Johnson, there was a blackpowder rifle craze that developed and it never really stopped.  I like blackpowder rifles and I wouldn't mind at all hunting with one of them.  I guess they cross the threshold of lethality enough for me that and they appeal to my interest in history.

What doesn't appeal to my interest in history is modern "muzzle loading" rifles that are expressly designed to evade the rules and be as close to modern hunting rifles as possible while still being "muzzle loading".  They don't have a big following in Wyoming as Wyoming doesn't have primitive rifle seasons, but they do have one where they're allowed.

Now, as the item above notes, there are "arrow rifles". This is really a bridge too far, and is a technological development solely to get a person out before rifle season, with something that's really a rifle.

This really ought not to be allowed, and frankly, it's a good reason to go back to the original concept.  Seeing that technology will always find a way to evade the spirit of something, and somebody will always avail themselves of it, there are places to restrict it, and this is one.

This add was entitled something like "The Future Of Work Sucks".

And while it is just an ad, it's pretty much right on the mark.

 

Get a Vision. Get Off Your Cellphone. Get to Work. - Minding The Campus

Get a Vision. Get Off Your Cellphone. Get to Work. - Minding The Campus: “I think that you appreciate that there are extraordinary men and women and extraordinary moments when history leaps forward on the backs of these individuals, that what can be imagined can be achieved, that you must dare to dream, but that there’s no substitute for perseverance and hard work …” – FBI Special Agent Dana […]

Mid Week at Work: WHEN TECHNOLOGY CHANGES THEN SO DOES EVERYTHING ELSE

 WHEN TECHNOLOGY CHANGES THEN SO DOES EVERYTHING ELSE

Friday Farming. The Farm, Comrades.

A news announcement from Governor Gordon:

Wyoming Lands World’s Largest Vertical Farming Research Facility

 

CHEYENNE, Wyo. –  Governor Mark Gordon has announced a historic economic development investment, as the State Loan and Investment Board (SLIB) approved a grant to support development of the world’s largest and most advanced vertical farming research center in Laramie. The project will support the retention and creation of nearly 200 high-paying jobs in the community.

The company, Plenty Unlimited Inc., is dedicated to advancing the emerging technology field of indoor agriculture. The new research center in Laramie expects to utilize an internship-to-employment pipeline to hire local workers, as well as hire recent University of Wyoming graduates. The investment by the Wyoming Business Council supports the new direction of the Council, by adding value to Wyoming’s core industries and activating new economic sectors. 

“Wyoming is proud to invest in the continued success of a business that was first innovated here in Wyoming by one of our own and demonstrated at the 2015 World Expo,” said Governor Mark Gordon. “The level at which Plenty will be operating in this new facility will truly advance Wyoming’s preeminence as a global center of indoor agricultural research. This center gives us a tremendous opportunity to promote a state-of-the-art R&D cluster and further diversify our state’s economy.” 

The $20 million Business Ready Community Business Committed grant from the Wyoming Business Council to the City of Laramie will be applied to construction and infrastructure costs for the 60,000-square-foot facility, which will be built on 16 acres at the Cirrus Sky Technology Park in Laramie. Additional funding, land and support for the project is being provided by the City of Laramie and the Laramie Chamber Business Alliance (LCBA).

Plenty has its origins in Laramie. Chief Science Officer Dr. Nate Storey co-founded Bright Agrotech as a University of Wyoming graduate student in 2010 and established an innovation center in Laramie.This eventually led Storey and a group of entrepreneurs to found the startup Plenty Unlimited in 2014, which later bought Bright Agrotech. Today, Plenty has more than 400 employees nationwide and the company’s R&D work over the past two years drove more than 100 new patent filings for innovations as diverse as new crop growing systems, a way to detect plant stress and new tomato plant varieties.

“As a Wyoming native, I have devoted my career to advancing plant science in my home state and am proud to be a part of helping the State play a leading role in advancing a new field,” said Storey. "This state-of-the-art facility will not only accelerate our R&D pipeline but will also create an incredible opportunity to attract and employ a talented workforce to further innovation and diversification for Wyoming."

With the SLIB’s approval, the project will be shifting into the design phase, with plans to begin construction later this year and open the facility in early 2025. Plenty’s team and research work will transfer to the new facility from its current Laramie location once it is completed.

-END-

M'eh.

Vertical farming is a real thing, but the expectation that it's going to produce all of our food in the future is frankly unlikely, and a freaking nightmare.  It's industrial agriculture at its scariest, often accompanied by a vision of the future in which this has become necessary due to vast overpopulation of the planet.

Careful demographers, even if they provide overpopulation warnings, are now at the point where they tend to give them with a footnote, as it's now well known that we're darned near at the point of peak population right now. That is, while population continues to go up in some places, it's not really going to for that much longer, and it's declining, or even crashing, in much of the world  It would be declining in the United States but for the fact that up until recently: 1) the GOP saw all immigrants as their lawn care workers, working cheap; 2) the Democrats saw all immigrants as future Democratic voters, and the entire nation still thinks the "nation of immigrants" thing means that the US has to take in immigrants at an absurd level forever.  The falsity of those nations is now beginning to sink in, in no small part as the American people basically fill the country is full up and things need to back off.  If they were allowed to, like every other European country, and like Japan, and like China, our population would be declining.  At some point in this current century, the entire globe's population will be declining.  By next century, it'll be crashing.

And that won't be a crisis.

Part of the reason it won't be a crisis is that it'll allow people everywhere to live more natural lives. But in the meantime we keep getting suggestions like this.

It's interesting how Communist collective agriculture and Corporate industrialized agriculture tends to arrive at the same point.  Agriculture that's industrialized and of scale.

People don't really like it.

Moreover, people need a connection with nature, and agriculture is part of that. 

Well, if some have their way, there'd be less of that.  Rather, we'd be free from the burden of our serfdom comrade and liberated to work in the cubicles.

Nifty.

Meet The Press: Social Media.

The January 1, 2023, episode of Meet The Press was a special on the social media companies.

It was truly frightening, and it featured politicians in Congress from the left and right who were in agreement on that.

Well worth listening to.

Teamsters.* They aren't what they used to be. And that's sad in some ways.

Teamster, Toledo Ohio, 1920s.¹

It was the only thing in the parking lot.

My 2007 Dodge 3500 that is.

It was parked there, all alone.  My wife took it to work, as I drove the 1997 Dodge 1500 to the shop for an exhaust repair.

A Haliburton driver drove into the lot, apparently one of the numerous misdirected truck drivers that take the exit, wrongly, and need to turn around in the parking lot.  He had plenty of room, but he hit my 3500 anyway.

He was driving a tractor trailer combo.

He was from Nigeria.². 

I have nothing against Nigerians.  I've had one friend from Nigeria.  But I have to ask the question.

Are there any American truck drivers anymore?³. 

I work on trucking accidents quite a bit.  The last one I worked on featured a Polish driver.

In one I'm working on now, the drivers were Somalian.  I had a prior one where a driver was a central African who died driving a pickup truck in the first snowstorm he ever experienced.

Some time ago I worked on one where one of the drivers was Ukrainian.  

I see them all the time where the drivers are Russian.

I used to see them where the drivers were from Mexico.  No more, however.  Mexican drivers made sense, given NAFTA, which makes me wonder who is now driving the trucks in Mexico.

What's going on here?

Supposedly the US has a truck driver shortage to the tune of 80,000 drivers.  By the end of the decade that figure is expected to be 130,000.

Maybe the drivers just are paid so little, in context, that Americans have other options and won't do the job.

Indeed, I think the entire concept of a labor shortage in a country of 300,000,000+, which isn't gaining any more land, is a complete crock.  Truly, at that level of human settlement, if there are jobs going wanting, it makes sense that they be exported overseas.

But you can't, of course, export trucking jobs.

Supposedly the percentage of immigrant truck drivers is around 18.6%, just a little higher than the percentage of immigrants in the workforce, which is 17%.  That demonstrates its own oddities, again, for a country that now is likely exceeding its carrying capacity for human habitation, or at least the capacity at which it doesn't become extremely limiting and overall unpleasant for the inhabitants.  But just considering that, 18% is a lot.

So, might we note, is 17%.  That figure we'd also note resulted in one of Chuck Todd's accidental points against the point he was trying to make in a fairly recent post COVID Meet The Press in which he blamed inflation on the Trump era reduction in immigration, the logic being that the price of labor was going up as we weren't taking in as many immigrants.  And, indeed, that may be a factor, but the point would be that we're artificially keeping wages low by depressing wages by taking in those who are willing to undercut those already here.  It's like shipping jobs overseas, but by importing the overseas workforce instead, with the express intent of keeping wages in the country low.⁴ 

Which brings us to this point in the current inflation finger pointing.  Part of this is just wages being readjusted to the level they should have been at long ago. And part of that, although probably not all that much, can be offset by reducing the obscene wages the upper management at a lot of large American corporations receive.

That aside, the 18.6% doesn't reflect what we're seeing in accidents.

An industry source reports the following:

Research Summary. Using a database of 30 million profiles, Zippia estimates demographics and statistics for heavy truck drivers in the United States. Our estimates are verified against BLS, Census, and current job openings data for accuracy. After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that:

• There are over 957,311 heavy truck drivers currently employed in the United States.
• 5.9% of all heavy truck drivers are women, while 94.1% are men.
• The average age of an employed heavy truck driver is 48 years old.
• The most common ethnicity of heavy truck drivers is White (62.8%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (18.9%) and Black or African American (12.0%).
• The majority of heavy truck drivers are located in Houston, TX and Fort Hood, TX.
• Heavy truck drivers are most in-demand in Colorado Springs, CO.
• Heavy truck drivers are paid an average annual salary of $54,369.
• Bakersfield, CA pays an annual average wage of $68,921, the highest in the US.
• Heavy truck drivers average starting salary is $39,000.
• In 2021, women earned 88% of what men earned.
• The top 10% of highest-paid heavy truck drivers earn as much as $75,000 or more.
• Wyoming is the best state for heavy truck drivers to live.
• Heavy truck drivers are more likely to work at private companies in comparison to public companies.

Well, I don't know what you make of that other than that truck drivers are, on average, not paid that great.  That probably explains why people don't want to do it.  Living away from home, for wages that aren't as high as you could get doing something else, why would you want to do it?

Twenty mule team.

Which likely explains why we see as many immigrant truck drivers as we do. Whatever they're making here is more than they'd make where they are from.  We noted some of this earlier here, before it really applied directly to us in the form of collision:

Some of those who don't want to go back are truck drivers. The country is short 20,000 truck drivers right now.

In recent years the country has actually imported a lot of truck drivers, something the general public seems largely unaware of.  Anymore, when I read the names of people involved in truck driving accidents, I expect the drivers to be Russian, and I'm actually surprised when they are not.   What happened here overall isn't clear to me, but over the last fifteen years technology has developed to where it's much easier for trucking companies to keep tabs on their truckers while on the road and things have gotten safer. At the same time, this means, as it always has, but perhaps more so, that these guys live on the road.  According to Buttigieg the industry has an 80% annual turnover rate.

An 80% annual turnover rate doesn't sound even remotely possible to me, but that there's a high one wouldn't surprise me.  It's a dangerous job and contrary to what people like to imagine, it doesn't really pay the drivers that well as a rule, or at least fairly often.  Often the drivers are "owner operators" who own their own super expensive semi tractor and who are leasing it to the company they are driving for.  That in turn means that they're often making hefty payments on the truck.  I don't blame anyone for not wanting to do it.

I can blame the nation for putting itself in this situation, however.

Trucking is a subsidized industry, but people don't think of it that way.  Its primary competitor is rail. Railroads put in their own tracks and maintain their own railroad infrastructure. When you see a train, everything you were looking at, from the rails to the cars, were purchased by private enterprise. When you seem a semi tractor, however, it's always traveling on a public conveyance.

It's doing that fairly inefficiently compared to rail.  Rail is incredibly cheap on a cost per mile basis, and it's actually incredibly "green" as well.  It's efficient.  Trucks are nowhere near as efficient in any fashion.  Not even in employment of human resources.  Trains have, anymore, one or two men crews, the same as semi trucks, but they're hauling a lot more per mile than trucks are with just two men.

Well, sooner or later people are going to have to return to work.  When the money runs out, that's the choice you have.

But this isn't going to return to normal. Whether we'll stabilize soon in a new economy, and we better hope that we do, or keep on enduring this, which will be wiping out savings and destroying earning capacity, remains to be seen.  The current Administration will be a key to that. 

What this also shows is the impact of technology.

It was trains, not trucks that moved most American goods and products prior to the 1950s.   We've addresssed that here as well too:

Following the Second World War the U.S. saw a rising expansion of over the road trucking.  By the late 1950s the US was, additionally, overhauling its Interstate highway system via the Defense Department's budget with new "defense" highways, which were much improved compared to the old Interstate highway system.  With the greatly improved roads, by the 1960s, interstate long haul trucking was in an advance state of supplanting the railroads for a lot of American freighting.  At the same time, the diesel engine supplanted the gasoline engine for semi tractors.  A very uncommon engine for motor vehicles in the United States prior to the 1950s, diesels started coming in somewhere in that period and by the 1960s they'd completely replaced gasoline engines for over the road semi tractors.  Now, of course, diesels have become fairly common for heavy pickups as well, and are even starting to appear in the U.S. in light pickup trucks in spite of the higher cost of diesel fuel.

 

 Mack tractor, 1942.

The change was dramatic, although few people can probably fully appreciate that now, as we are so acclimated to trucking.  Thousands of trucks supplanted thousands of rail cars, and entire industries that were once served only by rail came to be served by truck.  The shipping of livestock, for example, which was nearly exclusively a railroad enterprise up into the 1950s is now done entirely by truck, a change which had remarkable impacts as rail shipping required driving the livestock to the railhead, whereas with the trucks they are simply scheduled to arrive at a ranch at a particular time.  Likewise, businesses that at one time located themselves near rail lines, so that they could receive their heavy products by rail, no longer do, as they receive those items by trucks.  For example, pipeyards, once always near a railhead, are not always today.

Not that the railroads have disappeared.  Indeed, in recent years they've once again been expanding, as they're very cost efficient and even more "green" than trucking, as they point out.  But trucks have, in the past 60 years, gone from something that was really for short hauls, for the most part, to something that is now common for long hauls, and indeed the bulk of American shipping is now done by truck.  Trucks have an advantage in being able to go more selectively and directly from "port to port", and the surface on which they travel is of course, put in by the public, making it a partially subsidized industry.  So they aren't going away soon, in spite of a revitalized rail industry.

And trucks have became part of the American vehicular fleet in a way that would have been hardly imaginable even 50 years ago.  As they've become more comfortable to drive, and easier to drive, they've been a common family vehicle, which is not what they once were.  Pickup trucks used to be pretty much only owned by people who had some need of them, even if that need was recreational.  Now, they're common everywhere.  Indeed, the Ford F150, Ford's 1/2 ton pickup truck, has been the best selling vehicle, that's vehicle, not truck, for the past 32 years.  So, so common have trucks become in the United States that one model of 1/2 tone truck is the number one single high selling model of vehicle.  Pretty amazing for a vehicle that started off as utilitarian and industrial.

But here's something I hadn't considered, even thought it's referenced in the post above.

And trucks have become part of the American vehicular fleet in a way that would have been hardly imaginable even 50 years ago.  As they've become more comfortable to drive, and easier to drive, they've been a common family vehicle, which is not what they once were.  Pickup trucks used to be pretty much only owned by people who had some need of them, even if that need was recreational.  Now, they're common everywhere.  Indeed, the Ford F150, Ford's 1/2 ton pickup truck, has been the best-selling vehicle, that's vehicle, not truck, for the past 32 years.  So, so common have trucks become in the United States that one model of 1/2 tone truck is the number one single high selling model of vehicle.  Pretty amazing for a vehicle that started off as utilitarian and industrial.

That is, they've all become more comfortable to drive.

Semi's too.

Early semi tractors were pretty hard to drive.  Transmissions were not synchronized, and the drivers had to be able to double clutch and work two transmission levers simultaneously, while also driving something that had manual steering.  I've actually seen this done, FWIW, on 1950s era 6x6 trucks, although it took somebody who really knew them well to do it. Early truck drivers did, often shifting with both hands while hooking an arm through the steering wheel, something that sound frighteningly dangerous.  By the time I was young, however, big rigs had evolved considerably.  Nonetheless, they still required the ability to really work a manual transmission.

As I haven't kept up on this, it was only fairly recently, due to an item of litigation, that I learned manual transmission trucks are on their way out.  Indeed, almost all of the big rigs you seen on Interstate highways have automatic transmissions.  Trucks coming in and out of oilfield locations, if owned by contractors, are probably manuals, but they're also older as a rule.  If you see new trucks, even there, coming in or out of one, its an automatic.

And frankly, anyone, with just a little driving experience, can drive an automatic transmission semi.  Maybe not well, but you could drive it.

And hence the problem.

By the time I was a college student the romance of truck driving, and yes it was once regarded as romantic, had gone.  Locals started disliking the heavy trucks and the people who drove them, as they were regarded as dangerous.  I recall that coming up, oddly,in a geology class once during which the professor, from rural Montana, noted that he thought the decline in truck drivers was sad, as he had an uncle who was a truck driver when he, the prof, was young, and he was such a good driver.

And he probably was.  This conversation would have occurred around 1983.  The uncle probably drove trucks in the 40s and 50s, when they remained pretty hard to drive. People working skilled equipment are, well, skilled, and skill develops professionalism as a rule.

Now the trucks have become so easy to drive the real skill has faded, and with that, I suspect, the job has become dull in the way that skillless jobs become.  It doesn't pay well, and people don't want to do it, save for those who almost have to in some circumstances.

Footnotes:

*. The name teamsters refer to men who used horses and wagons.  I.e., they drove a team.  That shows us, really, how old the term is, and how old the Teamsters Union is.  Having said that, horse-drawn teams were still in use for some things as late as the 1940s.

1. See footnote above.

A relative of my wife's, I'd note, was a teamster driving 20 mule teams locally when the oilfield still used them and when the refinery required them for heavy construction.  All a thing of the past, but something also requiring vast skill, which is relevant to this discussion.

2.  "He doesn't speak English" was a text I received right away from my wife.  "Russian?" was my reply, suspecting this must be the case.  "Nigerian" came the reply back.

In fact, she knew that right away.  We are friends with a Nigerian Catholic Priest and their accent is very distinct.  She just didn't want to embarrass the man by assuming his nationality, but he volunteered it.  Nigerian accents can be quite difficult to understand, as compared to other African accidents.

3.  I should note that it was clear that truck driving was probably only part of this individuals job.  He was dressed appropriately in FRs and likely was driving to a frac location.  Indeed, he noted he had to get to Shoshoni.  

But this raises its own interesting questions.  His "day boss" came to the location, driving in from Gillette, and taking a lot longer than he estimated it would take him.  The day boss was from Oklahoma or Texas, as his soft southern accent made clear.  The Haliburton trailer was licensed in Oklahoma. Haliburton used to have a yard here, but it no longer does.

I've encountered a lot of Mexican immigrants in oilfield service jobs, but up until recently I didn't encounter any African ones.  This is only the second time that I have, but here too, it's an interesting phenomenon.  For years, it's been a bedrock belief of Wyomingites that the oilfield provides good, high paying, jobs, and that certainly has in fact been true.  But for some time now, quite a few companies are actually staffed by out-of-state crews in some instances.  Locals still work on a lot of crews.  But now we're starting to see, at a very low level, I think, small numbers of immigrants who have come from overseas to work in these industries.

Again, who can blame them?  Nobody. But what is the overall impact on wages and employment?  Right now, probably not much, but some evolution seems to be going on.

4.  This is one of the things that gave rise to Donald Trump and the populist right.  A large number of Trump supporters came out of the Rust Belt Democrats who simply grew tired of having their traditionally well paying manual labor and skilled labor jobs erode economically due to intentionally bringing in an immigrant population that would work for lower wages.  This lead to a strong anti-immigrant feeling amongst them which mirrors a less virulent overall feeling in the country, save amongst liberals, that immigration into the country is at far too high of a rate.

This sense dates back all the way to the 1970s, but repeated generations of Democratic and Republican politicians have flat out ignored it, with the Democrats erroneously believing that every immigrant is a future Democratic voter and the Republicans cynically believing that this serves the interest of industry by keeping wages depressed.  With Trump's express adoption of this long suppressed view, many Rust Belt Democrats bolted their party and became Trump Republicans.

There is a lesson there about ignoring a long held concern of a large section of the country.  Not only has this now come into one of the two parties in force, it's become malignant in certain ways as well.

Related Threads:

Automotive Transportation I: Trucks and Lorries

Supply Chain Disruption and Other Economic Problems

Wednesday, January 21, 1942. Banning pinball

On  this day in 1942 a court in New York ruled that pinball machines were games of chance, not skill, and therefore banned them.

There had been somewhat of a public campaign against the games in New York for some time.  Associated, to a certain degree, with youthful idleness and vice, there was evidence that gaming in New York was controlled by the Mafia, which brought some urgency to the effort by authorities.

I've never really liked pinball machines myself, so its a bit of a mystery to me why they were ever popular, but they were hugely popular at one time, enjoying a big swing of interest in the 1970s, just before video games arrived and basically wiped them out.

Rommel, pushed across North Africa, counterattacks:

Today in World War II History—January 21, 1942

The counterattack, which would reverse much of the gains of Operation Crusader, was a surprise to the British forces and emblematic of the seesaw nature of the fighting in North Africa.