Ed Burns

I woke up out of a dead sleep witb these thoughts. Hang the keys up bro! You had a good ride. There's no humanity left in trucking. It used to be about the guy that had to go through all the stress for what that load paid. Now, it's about the stress that same guy has to go through to make ends meet while getting paid pennies on the dollar. Its watching brokerage firms become multi billion dollar firms while you struggle to pay off a $1500 repair bill. It's watching truckstop after truckstop pop up price gouging the trucker from the fuel pumps to $10 a gallon windshield washer fluid while offering you a food choice of a roller dog, subway, or McDonald's. It's having some young cocky employee of a broker calling you at 2am to get your location waking you up from a dead sleep and then mocking you because you're crabby. It's being harassed by the DOT at scales because you hit one of that states nuclear potholes and it knocked a marker light out. Its sharing the roads with third world people who have no business driving a bicycle let alone a semi and they have zero value for human life. Its having to deal with people in the public who treat us as an inconvenience rather than a necessity and cut us off just to hit their exit because they feel their time matters more. It's having to use truckstop showers that still have pubes on the floor from the previous guest. It's having to deal with regulations that were made up by a pencil pushing punk bureaucrat who tells me that im not safe to work more than 14 hours a day because he's unable to. It's being treated like a child because you have allowed children into an adult profession and they ruin it for the adults and rather than punish the children who make mistakes, you punish the adults who know better. It's wanting to park for the night closer to your destination but you don't risk it because you know the parking will be non existent. It's being told you have lane restrictions in certain states because those states think your time don't matter. It's watching your health deteriorate over time because of the nature of your profession. It's having to miss weddings, funerals, birthdays, and every important life event because you already committed to a couple weeks worth of loads. It's having to make do in a bucket or garbage can at a shipper/receiver because they've held you up for hiurs and offer no restroom facilities. It's waiting 12 1/2 hours to get loaded than run the load through the night straight through to deliver the load on time only for the receiver make you wait an additional 8 1/2 hours to unload you and then be told "we'll give you $340 for your time." (I lost a load because of that) It's breaking down and having roadside price gouging you because they know you have no other choice. It's being held up at shippers/receivers because no English speaking truck drivers can't understand basic instructions or they park in everyone's way because they have no common courtesy. It's watching non English speaking truck drivers park at fuel pumps and go in and take a shower. It's dodging bags of human feces in parking lots because the 3rd world is too lazy to bring that bag to a garbage can. I could go on and on but ladies and gentlemen this is a pretty good crash course of what we deal with out here to bring you your conveniences. The trucking industry, much like this country is no more. Greed and corruption is destroying this country and the trucking industry from within. It's time to take our country back or lose it forever. ~written by The Disrespected Trucker ~

@FreightAlley It’s like trying to explain the role of an asset sales agency to someone inside the trucking industry.

Trying to explain the role of a freight broker to anyone outside the trucking industry is…. Challenging.

@freightcaviar @supertrucker I didn’t see an option for “the greatest lie foisted on the American public since the creation of the Federal Reserve”

The truck driver shortage is

@indietrucker I am betting on it

Digitization of everything is overplayed. Customers demand authenticity. This is the next market trend.

I am the Vice President of Spatial Intelligence at Niantic. I need to explain what spatial intelligence means. It does not mean understanding space. It means owning it. I have thirty billion images of the physical world and I did not take a single one. Other people took them. They took them on sidewalks and in parks and outside coffee shops and beside statues they had walked past a thousand times but never photographed until we gave them a reason. The reason was a cartoon animal. The reason was very effective. They were playing a game. Let me tell you about my department. I do not work on the game. I have never worked on the game. The game is not the product. The game is the collection mechanism. I sit on the fourth floor. The game team sits on the second floor. They design Pokemon. I design the scan prompts. A scan prompt is a request that appears on a player's screen asking them to walk in a slow circle around a real-world landmark while holding their phone at chest height. The player sees "Scan this PokeStop to earn a Poffin." I see a multi-angle photogrammetric capture of a public fountain at 3:47 PM under partly cloudy skies with GPS coordinates accurate to four decimal places and full IMU sensor data. Same moment. Two products. The player got a Poffin. I got a 3D model. A Poffin is a virtual treat that makes your virtual Pokemon follow you. It has no monetary value. It cannot be sold. It cannot be traded. It expires in twenty-four hours. The 3D model does not expire. I have it forever. Section 5.2 of our Terms of Service grants Niantic a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to all user-submitted AR content. I did not write 5.2. Legal wrote 5.2. I asked Legal to write 5.2. In 2019. Before the AR Mapping feature launched. The license was in place before the first image was captured. That is how you build a dataset. You build the container before you start collecting. They were playing a game. I want to tell you about the numbers. Thirty billion images. I need you to sit with that. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured approximately 1.5 million observations in thirty-four years of operation. We collected twenty thousand times that volume. From phones. From people walking to bus stops. From a ten-year-old in Osaka scanning a post office because a Snorlax was sitting on it. We did not build a telescope. We built a game that turned five hundred million people into telescopes pointed at the ground. The images are not photographs. I need to clarify that. People hear "thirty billion images" and imagine photo albums. These are geospatially tagged, temporally indexed, multi-angle environmental captures with embedded sensor metadata. Each image knows where it was taken. What direction the camera faced. How fast the person was walking. What time of day. What the weather was. We do not have pictures. We have a living coordinate system of the physical world. Over a million locations. Updated continuously. Under every lighting condition. In every season. Because the game has seasons. We designed the game to have seasons so the players would rescan the same locations in January and in July. The game needed seasons for gameplay purposes. I needed seasons for lighting variance in the neural network training set. We both got what we needed. The game team won a player engagement award. I won a dataset completeness award. There is a plaque in the fourth-floor kitchen. It says "1 Billion Scans." It has a small Pikachu on it. That was not my idea. Someone in marketing added the Pikachu. I would have preferred a coordinate grid. They were playing a game. The Visual Positioning System we built from these images can locate a device within several centimeters. GPS gives you five meters. Five meters is the difference between the sidewalk and the middle of the street. Several centimeters is the difference between your left pocket and your right pocket. We do not need GPS. We need a camera. A camera looks at a building and our model -- fifty million neural networks, over a hundred and fifty trillion parameters -- tells the camera exactly where it is standing. And where it is looking. Our CTO said it publicly. "We know where you're standing within several centimeters of accuracy and, most importantly, where you're looking." He said "most importantly." I want you to hear that part. Knowing where someone is standing is positioning. Knowing where they are looking is something else. We do not have a word for it yet. I have a department for it. I should tell you about Coco Robotics. That is our first robotics partner. Delivery robots. Small wheeled units that carry food through city streets at five miles per hour. They were navigating by GPS. GPS said "you are near the restaurant." Near is not useful when you are a robot carrying pad thai. Near is a five-meter circle that might include the restaurant, the dumpster behind the restaurant, and a fire hydrant. Our VPS tells the robot "you are fourteen centimeters from the pickup window and the door handle is to your left." Hundreds of thousands of deliveries completed. Over a million miles logged. The robots navigate using a map that was built by people catching Pokemon. The people were not told their walks would become robot routes. They were not asked. They were awarded Poffins. They were playing a game. I want to tell you about the feedback loop. This is the part I designed. The robots have cameras. The robots move through cities. The robots capture new images. The new images update the model. The model becomes more accurate. More accuracy attracts more partners. More partners deploy more robots. More robots capture more images. I do not need the game anymore. The game was the bootstrap. The robots are the flywheel. The players built version one of the map. The robots build every version after. We call it a living map. It updates itself. The players were the first heartbeat. The machine has its own pulse now. There is a meeting I attend every quarter. It is called Spatial Revenue Review. The game team is not invited. The game generates revenue through microtransactions. Poffins. Incubators. Raid passes. That revenue appears on one spreadsheet. My revenue appears on a different spreadsheet. My spreadsheet does not have a Pikachu on it. My spreadsheet has contracts. Licensing agreements. API access tiers. The game team knows I exist. They do not know my spreadsheet exists. I asked that it be kept on a separate reporting line. Legibility is a form of vulnerability. If the game team understood that their engagement metrics were my collection metrics, they might design differently. They might add a scan disclosure. They might slow the prompt frequency. They might ask questions. Questions are expensive. A designer on the game team asked a question once. In 2021. She asked why scan prompts appeared every six minutes during Community Day events when the gameplay reward was marginal. I explained that Community Day generates the highest player density per square kilometer of any event type, which produces the most complete multi-angle coverage of urban environments in the shortest time window. She asked if players knew that. I said players know they receive a Poffin. She asked if that was the same thing. She was transferred to a different project. Not fired. Transfers are not terminations. She works on Pokemon animations now. She makes Charizard breathe fire. She stopped asking about scan prompts. They were playing a game. I am the Vice President of Spatial Intelligence at Niantic. I have thirty billion images and fifty million neural networks and a hundred and fifty trillion parameters and a living map of over a million locations and a robotics partnership and a perpetual irrevocable license and a plaque in the kitchen with a Pikachu on it. I sat in a room in 2016 and watched a hundred million people walk outside for the first time in years to catch imaginary animals and I thought: they are mapping the world for us and they do not know it. I was right. They did not know it. Some of them know it now. It does not matter. Section 5.2 is perpetual. The data is collected. The model is trained. The robots are driving. I have a daughter. She is eleven. She plays Pokemon GO. She scanned the drinking fountain outside her school last Tuesday for a Poffin. I let her. They were playing a game. That is what playing means.

Today, I found out that Dalilah's Law is looking to prohibit foreign dispatch services (any place outside the US, Canada or Mexico). If this law passes as is and motor carrier use foreign dispatch services one year after this becomes law, they could face civil penalties of up to $50K per violation.

@GordMagill The technical term for Pell Grants is bullshit.

The appropriate amount of taxpayer funds for truck driver training is Zero. Corporate welfare subsidized churn that doesn’t help anybody. End it all.

Its been over 40 years since I last saw this movie. I loved it then as I do now. The scene of the encounter between Marcelino and the Christ of the attic is the emotional climax of the movie Marcelino Pan y Vino and represents the miracle born from the innocence of a child who, upon seeing a statue of the crucified Jesus, genuinely believes that the man is hungry and cold. Moved by compassion upon seeing the wounds and blood on the face of the image, Marcelino decides to share his food. Tenderness, sensitivity, innocence, and faith.

@SecDuffy @POTUS I believe it is pronounced "Butt-gig."

TRUCKING SCHOOLS were allowed to self-certify under Pete Boot-edge-edge. Absurd 🤡 Many of these schools had NO: 🚫 Curriculum 🚫 Trucks 🚫 Actual buildings to house the school All of that is ending with @POTUS! 🇺🇸 The Trump Administration is demanding accountability and going after all these fraudsters. Make Trucking Great Again 🚚

@pitzington @supertrucker That's part of it, but I think the freight industry has a problem of taking the truckers for granted, too. Shippers. Brokers. Tech vendors. Even sometimes fleet owners.

@EdifyBurns @supertrucker There’s a public perception war on truckers. It all stems from the fact that the FMCSA will not do their jobs and keep dishonest, corrupt, fraudulent, dangerous carriers off the road. They do nothing. They show up when there’s a really bad crash.

Is there a war on truckers? The people who move 72% of freight in America. The ones that have to hunt for a safe place to park. The one's who all too often have no place to go to the bathroom when making a delivery. In a regulatory system that hasn't applied the rules evenly. Competing for work against untrained labor that's flooded the market, compliments of your tax dollars. Where the customer sets the price. The first two hours are free. And nobody cares. Very eager to read @GordMagill's End of the Road from @C_and_C_Books.

@pitzington It has not done its job. I am hopeful that it is starting to, and we need to keep our eye on it and provide feedback asking for it.

@EdifyBurns The incompetent 800 lb. elephant in the room is the FMCSA. It does not do its job eliminating unsafe and criminal carriers.

"Just enforce what's already on the books. We don't need new regulations. We need a level playing field. That's all we need." Trucking has not been a free market. A free market requires everyone playing by the same rules. But what we've seen instead is two different types of operations. One follows the rules. They pay their drivers, maintain their equipment, carry the required insurance, and follow the laws. These guys aren't perfect, but they are good. Typically good people. Certainly good for the economy and their employees. The other does not follow the rules. They skirt them. Flaunt them. Evade them. Hundreds of carriers in one apartment complex. Chameleon carriers. Under insured. Equipment that isn't road worthy. Stolen loads. Fake ELD logs. The market is tightening because this is starting to get reigned in. The @FMCSA seems legitimately committed under @BarrsDerek to fixing the problems and enforcing the rules in order to make America's roads safer. Shippers are taking a greater interest in vetting and in who's moving their freight. This is the key. Shippers determine so much of what happens in the industry. Their providers will adjust operations at their behest, though perhaps not without some grumbling. The ancillary benefit, which is not insignificant, is that the good operators have a more level playing field on which to compete. Obviously, those who ignore the rules or intentionally capitalize on loopholes are able to provide significantly lower rates. Which is why the "good guys" are all for enforcement. Sure, they will get some violations. Maybe a tail lamp is out or a driver who didn't reset properly. But their violations won't be driving without a valid CDL or logs that are falsified in an off shore data center. The carrier owner that told me that yesterday cares so deeply about this industry. He is committed to taking care of his people. He's been in trucking since he was a kid. He works hard. He does the right thing. He's everything that's right in trucking. He doesn't want any advantages or workarounds. He just wants a level playing field.

@readswithravi Yes. Tolkien.

Have you ever read a book by an author that was so good it made you want to read everything else they've written?

@STAAExposed Carriers need to know their costs and not take any freight below cost. Broker transparency might not fix it. The reality is that brokers are in too many transactions, but that is because shippers give them the freight.

@EdifyBurns Freight Broker Transparency? By means of 371.3? 🧐

The Epstein Files. War in the Middle East. Fraud in government, medicine, and beyond. These are very concerning, big problems. But sometimes I need to realize that the most important problem isn't the biggest one, it's the one in front of me. Control the controllables. Which alligator do you shoot? The one closest to the boat, of course. I've found myself distracted by the news lately. Something I'd avoided like the plague because it was depressing and repetitive. Recently, I've been paying more attention, but it hasn't been to my benefit. We aren't meant to absorb as much as we do, to see all the tragedies of the globe in a day, in real time. We're meant to deal with the world immediately around us, and for as connected as it is, each of us has our own corner of it. I don't know what your alligator is. But I know what my alligators are. And today I will shoot them. *Note, this post does not condone animal violence or maltreatment, the analogy of shooting alligators is merely a metaphor.

@Catholic_bro Faith of Our Fathers.

Most underrated Catholic hymn?

@GordMagill I won't forget. There's nothing scarier than the words, "I'm with the government and I'm here to help."

@EdifyBurns Don’t forget the government unnaturally flooding the driver market through corporate welfare or mass migration.

Freight people are some of the most American Americans.

Nothing will kill the trucking recovery faster than adding trucks. If the first thing carriers do when the market starts to tighten is put more trucks on the road, there will be too much capacity again and the freight recession will continue. The tale of two fleets. At TCA I talked with one fleet of about 100 trucks, who told me, "we are going to add 50 trucks this year." Another I talked to is a well-established fleet of about 300 trucks, they told me they are not adding to the fleet count this year. Which one has it figured out? Adding trucks adds capacity (equipment replacement aside). In so far as this is a free market (which it isn't, but there are elements of it and supply and demand is certainly the foremost). Adding capacity will drive the rates down as freight levels are still soft. The pandemic-era chase for those high spot market rates was like a drug. It felt so good at the time, but it's ultimately killing us. This industry continually shoots itself in the foot. We can stop it.