Career Shift: Truck Drivers

Throughout high school, I had a total of one teacher that suggested an alternative to a four year college degree. Unfortunately, I wish she had gone into more details about how to become an electrician, plumber, construction worker, or truck driver. She simply summed all these options up as going to vocational school. Going to a trade school.

She told us that a trade school only takes 2 years and offers paid training. However, being the brainwashed little teens that we were at the time, we were convinced that a four year college degree was the way to go. How naïve we were.

Recently, I've heard a report that the American Trucking Association is predicting a shortage of 50,000 truck drivers in the industry. This article from CNN Money has the title that companies are willing to pay truck drivers $73,000. Stumbling upon this headline was shocking. After all, I did a quick google search to look up the median salary for a truck driver. The statistic was as recent as 2012 and said that the median salary for a truck driver was only $38,200. There seems to be a large disconnect between these two articles.

I listened to Christopher Cantwell's radical agenda last week and heard that this one guy was offered a truck driving job that paid $60,000 a year. On a different episode of the same show, one caller was talking about how desperate companies were for truck drivers that they were taking almost everyone regardless of the quality of their driving.

I talked to my buddy the other day, and he was telling me his dad signed on with a company that is paying him a six figure salary. Of course, my friend's dad had been driving for close to ten years.

On a more personal note, I've seen trucks themselves painted with ads trying to recruit drivers and even stating how much a driver got paid per mile.

I'm not sure what is causing this shortage but I can understand why young people wouldn't want to drive tractor trailers. You can be away from home for several weeks at a time and your entire job is a commute that never ends. If there is a shortage, I can only assume that the workloads are very tough in this economy. But, if you don't have a wife or kids (and don't want them either), this could be the perfect opportunity for any man going his own way.

The training would include getting a commercial drivers license and I'm sure companies might require an extensive training program before delivering loads.

I think that driving trucks might be one of the better job opportunities out there. This might a period of a few years where a lot of money can be made driving trucks. Well, at least until tractor trailers become automated like the self driving Tesla cars.

Tent cities across America

Linked directly from ZeroHedge, I stumbled across this article talking about tent cities popping up all over America. The title of the article alone was alarming enough for me to actually read this article. When "tent cities" in America is mentioned, the first images that come to mind are images of America during the Great Depression. But since it is 2016 (the current year), it is hard to imagine that tent cities should exist in a significant number. At least it should be significant enough to be reported on.

Low and behold, the article states that more than 500,000 Americans today are homeless. Considering the population of America is 320 million, the total percentage of homeless Americans is a mere fraction of a percent.. However, to put things in perspective, 500,000 is about the total population of Sacramento, California.

The article further links to Wikipedia a list of recognized tent cities all across America (with several being in California and Oregon). These tent cities only accommodate dozens of people so it can be assumed that there are far more tent cities that are unrecognized.

By looking at the list of tent cities, it looks like a lot of them cluster around big liberal cities with really high costs of living.