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From: Lance (Transportation Issues)
Date: 18 May 2003
Time: 20:24:04
Hey World, are you watching what is going on this year with the Trucking Industry? Are you studying the trends, which affect American Business and therefore affect the World Wide markets for every commodity, currency and service known to man? The markets, which drive policy and change, politics and wars? Well what is going on in the transportation sector is nothing short of intense. Fed Ex bought American Freight Ways, also owns Viking and bought RPS previously, now these all make up the Fed Ex Ground Team. Fed Ex has been buying Computerized Custom Clearing houses. Swift Transportations main stock holder bought Dick Simon Trucking who this week acquired Westways. Westways allowed many pieces of new equipment to be turned back in prematurely to Freightliner, who owns the used truck sales division, Select-A-Truck and Sterling. Freightliner is owned by Daimler Chrysler who also owns Western Star Trucks. US Express has bought six smaller trucking companies this last year while 1000s of smaller trucking companies folded due to increased fuel costs and Logistic Online help to improve efficiency. Now in the midst of all of this the OSHA people decided that 8 hours is all that should be allowed for truck drivers to drive. Citing Safety as a reason yet could not come up with any concrete evidence that fatigue was causing accidents. Probably Union PAC driven. Now there are road projects going full speed in many states due to surpluses from last years tax boom because investors realized increase tax liabilities from making money in the stock market, yet all that money is now lost in a year that ends with a tally as bad as the worst year in the 1970s. So with all this construction traffic is slowed, railroads hit hurdles due to UPS yelling foul for railroad consolidations even though UPS is one of their biggest shippers. With the construction and the hours allowed to drive reduced, more trucks are needed yet cannot be afforded as trucking companies consolidate and resort to hiring parolees as drivers due to the fact there is no drivers. No rest stops to hold the trucks either due to the increase. Many cities rebelling with no trucks allowed on city streets such as in New Jersey. Stay on the freeway and keep driving even though it is now against the law to drive more than eight hours and traffic is increased due to number of trucks, increased permit regulations, down sizing of state staff to issue permits, reduced hours to issue permits. What is going on here? OFR, over-fucking-regulation, on top of fuel price increases. By messing up Americas distribution system we are crippling America, and I would not be surprised if there is a nation wide truckers strike. You want to see this nation fall to its knees. It would take less than 6 days. There would be rioting in the streets, runs on what was left at the grocery stores, no power, nothing. Also in the news Clinton got passed the reduction completely of Sulfur in Diesel Fuel by 2006. Sounds good? Wait, will that be another excuse to raise fuel prices by 10-20 cents per gallon? At this point we cannot sustain that hit. If Diesel keeps creeping up we may see it at another 45 cents per gallon. Why, we have everything we need to control those prices. Engines run a little less hot without the sulfur, which activates on compression with other compounds in the fuel and heats up. If Diesel fuel in Northern states in the winter do not burn hot then we will lose critical engine life of all existing diesel engines. Good for manufacturers of engines yet those engines will need the torque to pull the heavy loads and triples and 53 footers with 90,000 lbs. Otherwise you will have more trucks on the road and more inexperienced truck drivers who do not speak English and cannot read road signs. Trucks cannot drive by themselves yet. Railroads also hurt and the tonnage will require more engines with less power. We have the technology to use air-cushioned rail cars with high speeds and little power needed due to reduced friction and that will require little fuel. Hydrogen celled Trains? Yes easy with air-cushioned technologies. But who is going to pay for it? If we destroy our transportation sector through immediate retrofitting then how will the industries leaders pay for all the costs associated with the recent paper-swap mergers, and who will get burned? The Fishes, stockholders owning worthless paper. Automated trains, they are coming. Automated aircraft? Yes that too, the new jet airliners nearly fly themselves in 0/0 visibility from V-1, V-2 to deceleration on the runway upon landing and the Navy has jet fighters that can deliver ordinance and fly home, bomb without seeing, fly without training or fatigue. Trucks maybe that too. Could be twelve to fifteen years. Trains could be less than 6. Aircraft 10-15. People are not needed, yet the quality of life issues are at stake here, yet who is looking forward? I see no articles in financial papers, economic papers, magazines, and essays. I see some in Aviation Week and Space Technology, Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, yet all these are too specific to a given subject with authors who are industry experts in only one or two fields. Tomorrow is sooner than you think. And Hydrogen Cell Car Wash Trucks? Four years away. And they are easier to keep clean due to the dirt is more dusty than sticky, requiring less soap, again good for the environment. If Sulfur left out of gas drives costs of trucking companies and transportation companies up, then we will all pay more for everything. We will have little chance for a continued high-flying economic run. Speaking of which, I do not care one-way or the other. We do better in a down economy anyway. But there is that quality of life issue so important to our middle class anomaly. If this continues we will have a breaking down of the middle class and no market to sell to. Yes we will have a weak dollar, but this is no way to achieve it. Sure we can make stuff and sell it all over the world, but how can we match productivity of 3.5 billion Chinese once that machine is using all our technologies in manufacturing? All our accounting methods, and accepting our currency for payments. Our education system, techniques? And what about an economic machine, which becomes war based over there? Of course if they have us as their biggest market then they cannot start a war with us, otherwise their economy crashes too. So you want to take the Sulfur out of Diesel Fuel? Great, but not now. Require in two years that every truck manufacturered not need it, and then eliminate the fuel in six years by raising the cost slowly as trucking companies trade in old units and retrofit those before re-sold. By that time we will all be looking into other technologies anyway. Slowing down the dollar and having a weak dollar may seem like the answer to improve the impending trade deficit, but at what cost? Why should we give back all of our economic expansion because other currencies and countries cannot legitimately control their corruption or protectionism long enough to improve themselves? We are allowing those who are not forthright with their own affairs to be rewarded and the United States who is doing everything correctly and a Fed, which has controlled its growth to be penalized. How can we tell other nations to follow our lead when we purposely screw up our own success. If the IMF cannot get the European community in line and the Asian Markets wish to play games, why should we slow down now? We are great and we earned our right to be the best. Let us take some of this expansion to improve the systems we use to produce more, faster and therefore we can sell for less. We are a sophisticated and brilliant group of entrepreneurs and we always rise to the occasion. Let free enterprise develop and adapt new methods to achieve more out put. I think everyone should read; Finite Capacity; it is a great book on the fundamentals of manufacturing and starts where Deming left off. It was written by one of our own and we should not forget the pass and learn from our mistakes. We need to stop this ridiculous committee, politics based decision-making and favoritism to certain industries and companies and get with a more global strategy of winning for the people. We, need those people to buy from us so we can provide jobs and productivity to create, innovate and propel the human race into the future and simultaneous clean up the Planet a little and lead the rest of the World by example. Those who do not step into line will be left behind. Those who do not like it can watch. Those who try to fight us, crush them. Diplomacy takes too long, it is a waste of breath for those who stand around and look for a hand out. Having a weak dollar against other World currencies is a great strategy for yesterday, but for tomorrow, not too sure. Let the entrepreneurs of today figure out a way to make it cheaper, and faster here in America. Give this generation of innovators a chance to prove themselves. Just because a few large corporations reported lower than street expected earnings for a few quarters due to the inability for the Europeans to shore up the Euro, is no reason to change everything midstream. Otherwise as they screw up worse and their currencies weaken again we will be driven down into a recession trying to balance they trade game. We need to fix ourselves by becoming better at what we do, better than everyone else in the World. Just because Multi-National Conglomerates cannot make a huge killing over there every quarter is no reason to sacrifice our standard of living here. The European economies would like to be on the same page as us as far as a standardized Euro=Dollar, and that would be great, but not until tariffs disappear so we can make the stuff here too. Also what happens when we change our chess game for a weak dollar and then they restrict our goods to save their corporations and job base there? We are different cultures and different political whims and the book Future Perfect sounds great, but there is a reality check on many of the notions of this type of game plan. Why choose a plan, have several plays ready to execute, ones which will not affect our middle class and job base. If we concentrate on quality, strength, innovation and have a great economy then entrepreneurs who built America can continue to find funding to explore new fields, and continue to hit milestones like Chuck Yeager did while we watched our technology break the sound barrier. Look at Intel, and Andy Groves vision, protecting our intellectual property and producing smaller, faster and more powerful chips exponentially. Do we need to weaken the dollar for companies like that? NO, we simply sell our wares a little cheaper in those markets which require us to or we simply do not sell there. Is it the roll of government to decide that for us? By lowering our standard of living until the dollar reaches a lower rate against the other World Currencies? Especially considering that those other currencies are much less stable than ours and those markets may disappear at anytime if they collapse. Then is it up to us and the IMF to bail those economies out, when they fail to listen to reason, pollute the World, steal the money is and bow out gracefully when it is time to return the money? Look at this last round in Russia, 1/3 of the money to clean up the nuclear problem of Chernople, gone. Russian Nuclear Subs of the Arms Race Era docked in a muddy inlet, some on their sides. And the money given to clean it up, where did it go? They built a new fighter jet to compete with our newest. Why, not go clean it up ourselves or just forget it? We may as well put to work America factories to build rockets and shoot them into the sun for fun. Or build devices to go on the back of cows to capture the methane to use as fuel to run steam generators to make electricity. We are also seeing the Fred Smith’s Brilliant plan to challenge American Ingenuity paid off. He said to the industry, build me a delivery van that uses 50% of the fuel as our current units and emits 90% pollution and he will by 19,000 of them. Well guess what, it worked. Thus proving that Free Enterprise can solve the problems of the human race five times faster than any government intervention or regulation. http://www.environmentaldefense.org/pressrelease.cfm?ContentID=1620 ------ http://www.afdc.doe.gov/pdfs/execsm-3.pdf ----- What we see is that anything is possible and with the right incentives it happens faster. In CA they tried the opposite approach mandating that manufacturers must produce X amount of electric hybrids, Fuel Cell Cars by a certain date. They had to back track or be without the sales tax revenues from car sales and some 400,000 lay offs. In June of 2003 the Trucking Associations are going to going to drive the speed limit of 55 mph to protest the ticketing of trucks in the state. The state is without budget and now are writing about 600% more fines and tickets to truck drivers. They often allow the truckers to drive up to 65 mph without tickets. The truck drivers are so mad they are going to slow down freight in the state, by driving 55 or 20% slower. By driving 20 percent slower, 20% more trucks will be needed to deliver the freight. Of course there are not 20% more trucks allocated or even drivers to deliver that many more trucks into service, therefore everything will not get there on time and thus hurt inventories, productivity and CA with her needed tax base. Everyone loses and the truckers are pissed. I cannot blame them Just thought everyone should realize the ramifications of the path we are on and that there are alternate routes and like packets traveling across the Internet, we do not have to choose the most direct route to all arrive at the same conclusion. Carnivores eat as they go but if we take many routes they cannot eat the hole enchilada and our economy can arrive unharmed through all of this even if the One rate, One World, One Planet American Conglomerates have to wither the storm of decreased long distance earnings for a few quarters. Because in the end we will still have our quality of life and a chance at that elusive American Dream we keep promising the next generation. Riddles are cool, I hope you can see what I am saying here. In summary, it does not take the Rand Corporation to figure out this equation, just look out the window (washed by www.windowwashguys.com ) and see for yourself. Pay attention America and watch for wind shears on final approach. This discussion is the sole opinion of Lance, and does not reflect any views of the Teams listed below: ---- http://www.jetwashguys.com ----- http://www.truckwashguy.com ----- http://www.carwashguys.com ----- http://www.teamyellow.com ------ http://www.homewashguys.com ----- http://www.tractorwashguys.com -----
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