Pigeons are doves. They are rock doves, and I wonder if we began to call them that if people would hesitate to hate them, as doves have that history as messengers of peace. It is true that in my neighborhood nobody hates the mourning doves, dusky and elegant with wings that squeak as if they flap on rusty hinges. They roost on the wires like little Audrey Hepburns, while the pigeons troll the ground, tough and fat, some of them look like they should be smoking cigarettes. They look poor and banged up, like they could kick the mourning doves’ asses but are wise to the divide-and-conquer tactics we use on one another, so they coo wearily at the mourning doves and waddle forth in search of scavenged delights. What you may not know is when you call a pigeon “a rat with wings” you have given it a compliment. The only thing a rat lacks is a pair of wings to lift it, so you have named the pigeon perfectly. When you say to me, “I hate pigeons,” I want to ask you who else you hate. It makes me suspicious.
I once met a girl who was so proud to have hit such a bird on her bicycle, I swear, I thought that it was me she hit. I felt her handlebars in my stomach and now it is your job to feel it also. The pigeons are birds, they are doves. They are the nature of the city and the ones who no one loves. When people say they hate pigeons, I want to ask them if they hate themselves, too. Does it prick the well of your loathing? Do they make you feel dirty and ashamed? Are you embarrassed about how little or how much you have, for how you have had to hustle? Being dirty is not a problem for the pigeon. You can ask it, “How do you feel about having the city coating your feathers, having the streets gunked up in the crease of your eye?” and the pigeon would say, “Not a problem.” You will now stop blaming the pigeon. It is not the pigeon’s fault. The pigeon was once a dove, and then we built our filthy empire up around it, came to hate it for simply thriving in the midst our decay, came to hate it for not dying. The pigeon is your ally. They are chameleons, gray as the concrete they troll for scraps, at night they huddle and sing like cats. Their necks are glistening, iridescent as an oil-slick rainbow, they mate for life, and they fly.
The trucking industry has a retention problem, not a recruitment problem.
The stories inevitably cite a report from the American Trucking Association that says the industry is short 80,000 drivers and quote experts who blame the alleged shortage on a lack of people interested in these difficult jobs. Yet, in California alone, there are 640,445 people who hold active Class A and Class B commercial driver’s licenses, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Meanwhile there are only 140,000 “truck transportation” jobs in the state, according to the state Employment Development Department.
Those numbers speak to the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people who become truck drivers every year—some with their training subsidized by the government—only to find that the job pays much less than they’d been led to believe, and that working conditions in the industry are terrible. [...]
In fact, there are so many truck drivers right now that brokers are able to pit them against each other and worsen conditions, says Sunny Grewal, a Fresno, Calif.-based driver. Grewal, 32, has been driving since 2010, and has a refrigerated truck, which he uses to haul fruits and vegetables. It costs him $1.75 to $2 to drive a mile empty, so any job that pays less than $3 a mile isn’t worth it, he says. Yet as brokers see more drivers looking for jobs, they post more loads that pay less and end up requiring a lot of unpaid waiting around. “If they know there are a lot of carriers, they treat you like crap,” Grewal says. [...]
Ironically, the louder the narrative becomes about the “shortage” of truck drivers, the more resources pop up to funnel people into driving. In 1990, the trucking industry figured it needed about 450,000 new drivers and warned of a shortage; in 2018, before the pandemic, the industry said it was short 60,800 drivers.
During the pandemic, government money paid for even more people to attend truck driving school. California paid $11.7 million to truck driving schools in the state in 2020, up from just $2.4 million in 2019, primarily from federal money through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. The recently-passed infrastructure bill includes initiatives to grow the trucking workforce, including creating an apprenticeship program for drivers under 21 to work in interstate commerce. But the vast majority of the people who pay for truck driving school don’t end up becoming truck drivers. [...]
Many people take out debt to get a CDL, or enter into what Viscelli calls “debt peonage”—essentially going to school tuition-free but promising to work for a certain trucking company to pay off their debt. But getting your CDL is just the first step, says Wood. After you get your CDL, most drivers have to get further training, where they team up with another driver and learn how to drive and maneuver a truck, by actually doing it on the road. These other drivers are often not specialized trainers—sometimes they only have a little more experience than the newbie driver. This model is especially detrimental to women, many of whom have filed complaints about being sexually assaulted by their partners, who are responsible for determining whether they get the final okay to drive. Long-haul trucking company CRST settled a lawsuit in May brought by a woman who says she was raped by the lead driver, terminated, and then billed $9,000 for her training.
It’s during this stage that many people drop out, either because their trainers aren’t helpful, or they get intimidated by ice on the road, or because they’re not making much money as a team driver. But long-haul trucking companies move a lot of their freight through student-driver partnerships like these. When student drivers quit, the companies just has more trainees to sub in, fed into the industry by the myth of a trucker shortage. “Over-recruiting is the biggest part of the problem,” says Wood.
If you want to report water waste by Disney, Nestle, Universal, Palm Springs Golf Course, etc., go here and select “multiple types of waste”, because nothing else actually fits real wasters like them. (The other nine options are about ratting out your neighbors [7], complaining about cleanliness in hotels [1], or complaining about restaurants serving water unasked [1]. Fuck all of these.)
“Multiple types of waste” requires a comment, but somehow I don’t think anyone on Tumblr will have any problems sharing their opinion. In vast detail, if necessary.
You can also take photos of Disney’s, Knotts’, Universal’s, etc. water waste and attach it to the report.
i will post a link tonight but i finished setting up patreon! i’ll do an official post after i get back from work but if anyone is interested these are what i’m offering for tiers : D
An artist : Aw man! I saw my arts were reposted on Instagram. I’ve asked them to take my arts down but they ignored me.
Me : Say no more! Click this link, then click ‘fill out this form’. Fill the form and wait for about 1-2 days, the staffs will remove the image you were reporting from the reposter’s account :^)
Alena Velichko
guiding light
close to the sun
any minute now
top of the world
castle in the sky
sky mirror
cold red light
sundown
draw breath
the secret place
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
titsay
jbbartram-illu
