I doubt the truth of November jobs created number.

I don't really care what you call them. Eight and a half million people dropped out of the work force. They are not working or looking for work Some have legitimate reasons, but many are just plain lazy.

 

What I am saying isvery odd is that over 800 trucking firms can go out of business in a supposed booming economy???

 

We don't keep statistics on the reasons for leaving the labor market; we only keep statistics on the status flows of the labor market (e.g., from employed to not in labor forced, not in labor force to unemployed, etc.) so I don't know how you know this.

 

I don't know the reasons. I only know that there are many reasons including being lazy because I know some lazy people who have quit working and quit looking for work.

 

It is called bad management or they were serving the wrong area or the wrong market. That is why they pay successful managers the big bucks.

 

That is true. Furthermore, the number of people receiving unemployment benefits has risen. A step-change of 49,000 in a week.

"Initial claims for state unemployment benefits surged 49,000 to a seasonally adjusted 252,000 for the week ended Dec. 7, the highest reading since September 2017, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The increase was the largest since August 2017."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/12/us-weekly-jobless-claims.html

 

You do know that electric cars are made out of lollipops and rainbows, right?

 

Breaking records is what happens when we have the largest labor force, and lowest unemployment in fifty years.

 

Drivers don't get paid enough, and being away from home so much makes it about impossible to maintain any personal relationships. Plus they deal with a lot of stress from all of the horrible drivers sharing the road. Other hassles associated with making timely deliveries, truck and cargo inspections and the boredom.

A person can get paid the same as a trucker, just working at Taco Bell

 

Having recently retired, after 23 years of driving, I can say that I probably know a bit about the business. Even though I was strictly an employee, I stll picked up something about the business.

I don't know if 800 companies is more or less than the average, but businesses fail all the time. One thing to note is that one guy can buy a truck, obtain his own operating authority, and call himself a trucking company. As a result, there are more than a half million trucking companies in the US.

One thing that put a lot of stress on the smaller companies, this year, is the electronic logging device. It not only stops the cheaters, it also reduces the productivity of the essentially honest drivers.

Let me provide an example of a thing that I did when I still used paper logs:

Sometimes truckstops are few and far between.

Let's say that I pulled into a truckstop for a bathroom break. The next truckstop is 50 miles down the road and I have one hour left that I can drive. So, what happens when I get to that truckstop and all the parking spots are filled? I would log the end of my day there, drive to the next truckstop, then start the next days log as if I started from that full truckstop. I would borrow time from the next day and then subtract it on that next day.

With the the electronic logs, once I had a parking spot at that first truckstop, I couldn't take the chance that there wouldn't a spot 50 miles down the road. The way the rules are written, sometimes a driver can make up that lost 50 miles, but most often he can't. It's just lost money.

 

Well we know for a fact that one of those which went under was one of the top ten largest in the country.

 

Something else which makes me doubt the accuracy of data coming from our government is the recent figures on exports and imports which say our trade gap has narrowed this despite the fact our largest dollar volume exporter Boeing has not exported any planes in months????Something just does not add up.

 

If it were anybody but Trump were in the WH would you believe those statistics?

 

I am sure you can find all sorts of reasons to doubt the numbers and most likely could have done so in the past, had you been inclined to do so. Arbitrarily picking and choosing rarely proves anything.

 

On page 73 of volume 2 of Whitehead and Russel's Principia Mathematica the authors prove that 1+1=2.

A similar proof of 1+1+1+1=4 is easily extrapolated from that proof so:

1+1+1+1=4
(1+1) + (1+1) = 4 (that addition is associative is all proven by W+R)
hence
2 + 2 = 4

 

Hmm...

That looks like an appeal to authority argument.


(joke)

 

I believe the numbers but I think the increase is due to seasonal hiring and come January they'll be cut loose since they will no longer be needed.

As technology improves, various jobs become obsolete and those people will be on the street, many of them with no employment opportunities. I know they do say that new technology creates new jobs but I don't think they create them on a one-to-one basis. If 50 people are laid off due to technology and 25 are hired for the new technology, that leaves 50% without jobs. Plus those laid off won't have the spending power they formerly did and that will impact negatively on the economy as well.