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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it.

This is the left-wing fantasy that society is dependent on these people and if they collectively quit society will be forced to heed their demands. What will actually happen is the market will simply adjust to some new equilibrium: new workers will be hired at this new equilibrium . If anything, this would be good for society because the new equilibrium would be more efficient in terms of allocation of resources than the one it replaced, such as too many truck drivers but not enough cleaning ladies.

overpaying for anything is inefficient and bad in that sense.

Truck driving is not a skilled job. There’s this fantasy that it is, but it isn’t. 70 year olds routinely buy gigantic class A RVs and drive them all over the country pulling ridiculously sized trailers all the time.

People buy absolutely massive 5th wheel RVs all the time etc.

I looked it up and while there is data on elderly drivers and crashes, I could find any (large) RV-specific data. It would be interesting to see if they’re a safety risk there.

What is the schooling and licensing for, then? Challenge Mode: answer with a reason that isn't "guild/union-like protection of salaries," as I hear that trucking is not that lucrative for many drivers.

In the EU (and still in the post-Brexit UK), a significant part of HGV driver training is about how to stop illegal immigrants stowing away in your truck.

Regulatory creep. At some point we decided that if people were going to be driving these insane vehicles around mixed in with the public, then they should have some schooling and licensing.

The schooling degraded to the point of not accomplishing anything productive (like coding boot camps), but nobody is ever going to say we should give it up due to safetyism.

One reason for special licensing is to make it easier to prevent truck drivers from engaging in law-breaking arbitrage. Speeding to make delivery times, not sleeping, etc. Once someone is doing something for money there is that extra incentive to break laws. You can see the same thing with Uber - as soon as people started driving for money, there were suddenly a lot more violations of no-stopping zones, transit lanes, parking in bike lanes, etc.

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