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Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

This gives me the sads. I grew up around truck drivers. Back in the 80s, it was considered a good, middle-class job. I knew plenty of families that were supported by truckers.

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Trucking is an industry that while it does have good jobs for people, it is just a pure cost for literally everybody. Everybody except the truckers themselves would benefit from lower trucking cost.

> Trucking is an industry that while it does have good jobs for people, it is just a pure cost for literally everybody. Everybody except the truckers themselves would benefit from lower trucking cost.

Right, this is exactly the neoliberal argument for importing and outsourcing jobs.

Yeah, it is, but it is also true

A single truck degrades roads thousand times more than a personal vehicle, yet they don't pay the equivalent on taxes because these costs need to be externalized in order to ensure that trucking remains redituable because of how fundamentally and structurally important it is for modern nations

Generally the best offset is just to reduce the amount of truckers needed for last mile delivery and just use railways for most of the travel as trucking again, relies on a high degree of externalities, be them social, economic or environmental to remain revenue positive

Again, trucking will forever exist, because it is important on a fundamental level, but ideally you would use railways as much as possible for logistics transport etc

I also wonder about the road damage issue. I wonder if when truck drivers are controlling fleets of vehicles that follow along, whether the weight can be distributed much better like a train and would therefore not damage the road as much because the unit pressure intensity would be lower.

This seems to be true for literally any job, or do you have a counter example?

There are certain areas companies strategically benefit from spending in, usually capital expenditures or payroll, and certain costs companies don’t (paying suppliers, shipping, taxes, interest). The costs companies want to pay tend to be oriented around improving the product set for the future, like R&D, or improving profitability, like marketing or sales.

Is “<insert-working-class-job> nostalgia” an everywhere thing, or limited to America?

It's not nostalgia. It's an observation that the middle class is shrinking. There used to be lots of jobs that supported families that are now subsistence labour. "Well, you shoulda been a programmer" is not a satisfactory solution to the problem.

Behold, the shrinking American middle class:

https://twitter.com/scottlincicome/status/144006410544490496...

Doesn't that graph non-critically equate cost of living increases with monetary inflation? I other words, it doesn't take into account the fact that many assets (such as housing) have increased in price much more than inflation would suggest, nor does it takes into account changes in basic necessities (one landline vs 3+ mobile internet subscriptions, one new POTS phone every 10 years vs 3+ new cell phones every other year).

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