12 ms·

I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job r

by avgDev 5y ago

I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job requirement. Drive 48 hours? No problem. This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books. Edit: Just want to add some additional information. Trucking companies at least were my friends worked, were extremely toxic. They made close to $100k. However, their personal life suffered greatly. Dispatchers would call them non-stop, even when they had doctor visits/family gatherings scheduled. The dispatchers would give them loads, that were basically humanely impossible to be delivered on-time by the book. Some of them would be awake all day, and leave in the evening then drive 24 hours+. Dispatchers would often scream at them, when they would call because they were falling asleep and were not going to make the delivery on-time because they needed a nap. Some of them actually crashed, because they saw a "deer" lol.....they fell asleep. These friends were uneducated, and made terrible financial decisions, such a purchasing expensive cars and modifying them. Little to no savings. This put them in an awful position in which they had to keep driving no matter how toxic the environment was. Unfortunately, I don't really know how they are doing today, as we grew apart.

imtringued 5y ago
>These friends were uneducated, and made terrible financial decisions, such a purchasing expensive cars and modifying them. Little to no savings. From a macroeconomic perspective these guys are heroes.
duxup 5y ago
Yup, there was a big hit to guys driving extra hours when it became easier to spot them. It was easy to make extra money, but it was at the cost of all of their time. It kinda inflated how good a living you could make...at least looking at the end results. But it also wasn't very realistic.
- watwut 5y ago
  Driving too much is not just at the cost of time. It is at the cost of life, drivers and whoever he crashes into.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >Driving too much is not just at the cost of time. It is at the cost of life, drivers and whoever he crashes into. Do you really think a middle aged truck driver is (was) holding the steering wheel for 16hr straight as a matter of routine business? Of course not. Tropes like that make for easy online virtue points but that wasn't the reality for the overwhelming majority of people who were cooking the books. These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order. And occasionally someone would go overboard, drive 36hr straight and cause a crash. And because that's an easy thing for people who have zero knowledge of industry incentives and feedback loops to get their panties in a knot over they made it "extra illegal" because you can't make being an idiot illegal. And so now the industry cuts far less tasteful corners and pays everyone crap and you have drivers who have barely memorized the pre-trip, have barely and hours behind the wheel, can't read english, and who choose a different career in short order and are likewise treated as disposable. So the net effect is more or less a wash but a handful of people get to get big raises and some politicians can pat themselves on the back for "solving" logbook fraud.
    - piva00 5y ago
      > These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order. And how does this justify as something safe? When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while. Safely behind a computer. If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives. I really don't understand your counterpoint here.
      - Clubber 5y ago
        >When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while. >If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives. I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?
michaelbuckbee 5y ago
That's really interesting. I've a similar anecdote from a different industry: pizza delivery. I'm old enough that my first job was right at the cusp of computerized order entry (as opposed to handwritten tickets) at the small pizza shop I worked at in high school. Prior to the computer order entry system drivers would routinely "lose" one or two tickets a shift and just pocket the cash for the order. One of them told me that the computerized ticketing basically halved their actual take home pay.
- massysett 5y ago
  I take your point but I wouldn’t call theft “take home pay”…
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Except if everyone does it and nobody really gets busted for it, then it is. You just don't like business being run that way. The end result of 30 years of deunionization and relentless downwards pressure on wage growth and you wind up with employees cheating the system wherever they can. Something is certainly going to break in this society/culture in the next 5-10 years, because we're not on a sustainable path. A wage-price spiral and a lot of inflation would probably be the least-painful thing to happen.
    - halJordan 5y ago
      I understand that the dictionary follows usage, and i get that you have a rhetorical goal, but with that logic Enron was simply overpaying its employees.
      - Gunax 5y ago
        I think there's an aspect of whether it's expected or not here. If the culture of the delivery drivers was that this was a perk of the job that everyone sort of knew about, then I think it's reasonable to call it a type of compensation. Sort of like how unreported cash tips are a type of perkany rely on, even though no contract could ever stipulate that.
mywittyname 5y ago
The electronic logs are probably the reason these rules have been relaxed recently. When you could cheat, everyone just cheated because you needed to in order to make a living. Now you can't cheat and the industry is speaking up about it.
petre 5y ago
In the EU it got harder and harder to cheat the digital tachographs. The latest generation of smart tachographs record GPS coordinates of start/stop points so one can no longer cheat with a magnet on the wheel's Hall sensor. Everything is signed cryptograpghcally, even the wheel sensors have a crypto seal, the only way to cheat is to use tampered firmware, which carries huge penalties. I'm surprised at how deregulated the US transportation market is by comparison.
- avgDev 5y ago
  EU is way ahead of the US when it comes to trucking safety. US is a weird place sometimes. Business/Money trumps safety. Regulations are often met with huge push back even when they can potentially save lives.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    EU and US is just fundamentally different. It is hard to overstate that. But it comes with trade-offs. Workers in EU, in general, have better standards at work than in US. It helps that in EU, healthcare is not directly part of employer cost ( everyone pays into it ). EU tends ( I do mean tends, because it seems to vary greatly ) toward unions, whereas US truckers seeem un-unionized by and large.
aeturnum 5y ago
> This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books. I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the next 50 years. We have a lot of laws and standards that, in effect, allowed people to cheat a little but not too much (or break a few traffic laws but not too many, etc). All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system. We are going to need to do a lot of work to find new equilibrium points where the various parties can cheat less. It will be made especially difficult because technology penetrates industries more quickly these days so it would be best if everything changed at once, but that also makes it more difficult.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Maybe the state will have to outsource enforcement of these issues so that it doesn't have to admit to allowing some rule breaking. Anyone want to co-found Selective-Enforcement-as-a-Service?
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    That's called "the cops".
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      Also Public Service Commissions.
- black6 5y ago
  The anecdotes I hear about "cheating the system" before electronic logs are mostly along the lines of: stuck in stand-still traffic for 30 minutes, I'll log it as a break. Whereas according to the electronic log you're still driving.
  - UncleEntity 5y ago
    That’s not even close to how it used to work. Say you have a truck governed at 68mph which means you can log an average of 65mph without raising any eyebrows. So what we would do is log the miles you drove/65 and not the actual time you drove. Or, how I used to run, keep your logbook behind so you can backfill the driving hours and breaks so you can eventually be legal again — usually at a shipper or receiver you could catch up as they commonly would keep you there for 6-8 hours. What’s the buzzword, eventually consistency? Not even mentioning “loose leaf” logbooks where one could rewrite whole days to gain hours. Those days are long gone now…
rednerrus 5y ago
Isn't the key to drive as a team?
- avgDev 5y ago
  I actually talked to a guy that drove as a "team" but really just solo. He was proud he drove 48 hours non-stop and made more money.
jimmytucson 5y ago
> ICC is a checking on down the line > Well I'm a little overweight and my logbook's way behind - Dave Dudley, "Six Days on the Road" 1963 The give-and-take between making a living and obeying the law in truck driving is well established in our culture. Anyone who's interested I'd encourage to check out Dave Dudley's music. It's all there: racing time, avoiding the law, fatigue, loneliness, bodily harm, drug abuse, etc.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Electronic log books are not "a lot more difficult." Google "truck electronic log cheat" In some cases it's just pulling a fuse or the right connector. In other systems you can literally tell the e-logger that you're doing a kind of driving that 'doesn't count' and the system goes "oh okay" and that's that. Reportedly a lot of state police commercial vehicle cops don't bother to check e-loggers because they're lazy and it's not as easy as flipping open a paper book.
milliondollar 5y ago
Actually remember a presentation from one of the logbook startups from a few years ago. The key feature that skyrocketted adoption was the ability to fudge (...er, "correct") the logbook manually. When it was automated, they had issues because it would basically lock them down to the rules.
short12 5y ago
Depending on how the driver is contracted 100k is not a big deal. Because the take home is not even close to that. For instance take off the fuel costs off that 100k just for starters

by avgDev 5y ago

imtringued 5y ago

>These friends were uneducated, and made terrible financial decisions, such a purchasing expensive cars and modifying them. Little to no savings. From a macroeconomic perspective these guys are heroes.

duxup 5y ago

Yup, there was a big hit to guys driving extra hours when it became easier to spot them. It was easy to make extra money, but it was at the cost of all of their time. It kinda inflated how good a living you could make...at least looking at the end results. But it also wasn't very realistic.

watwut 5y ago
Driving too much is not just at the cost of time. It is at the cost of life, drivers and whoever he crashes into.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >Driving too much is not just at the cost of time. It is at the cost of life, drivers and whoever he crashes into. Do you really think a middle aged truck driver is (was) holding the steering wheel for 16hr straight as a matter of routine business? Of course not. Tropes like that make for easy online virtue points but that wasn't the reality for the overwhelming majority of people who were cooking the books. These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order. And occasionally someone would go overboard, drive 36hr straight and cause a crash. And because that's an easy thing for people who have zero knowledge of industry incentives and feedback loops to get their panties in a knot over they made it "extra illegal" because you can't make being an idiot illegal. And so now the industry cuts far less tasteful corners and pays everyone crap and you have drivers who have barely memorized the pre-trip, have barely and hours behind the wheel, can't read english, and who choose a different career in short order and are likewise treated as disposable. So the net effect is more or less a wash but a handful of people get to get big raises and some politicians can pat themselves on the back for "solving" logbook fraud.
  - piva00 5y ago
    > These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order. And how does this justify as something safe? When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while. Safely behind a computer. If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives. I really don't understand your counterpoint here.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      >When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while. >If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives. I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?

michaelbuckbee 5y ago

That's really interesting. I've a similar anecdote from a different industry: pizza delivery. I'm old enough that my first job was right at the cusp of computerized order entry (as opposed to handwritten tickets) at the small pizza shop I worked at in high school. Prior to the computer order entry system drivers would routinely "lose" one or two tickets a shift and just pocket the cash for the order. One of them told me that the computerized ticketing basically halved their actual take home pay.

massysett 5y ago
I take your point but I wouldn’t call theft “take home pay”…
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Except if everyone does it and nobody really gets busted for it, then it is. You just don't like business being run that way. The end result of 30 years of deunionization and relentless downwards pressure on wage growth and you wind up with employees cheating the system wherever they can. Something is certainly going to break in this society/culture in the next 5-10 years, because we're not on a sustainable path. A wage-price spiral and a lot of inflation would probably be the least-painful thing to happen.
  - halJordan 5y ago
    I understand that the dictionary follows usage, and i get that you have a rhetorical goal, but with that logic Enron was simply overpaying its employees.
    - Gunax 5y ago
      I think there's an aspect of whether it's expected or not here. If the culture of the delivery drivers was that this was a perk of the job that everyone sort of knew about, then I think it's reasonable to call it a type of compensation. Sort of like how unreported cash tips are a type of perkany rely on, even though no contract could ever stipulate that.

mywittyname 5y ago

The electronic logs are probably the reason these rules have been relaxed recently. When you could cheat, everyone just cheated because you needed to in order to make a living. Now you can't cheat and the industry is speaking up about it.

petre 5y ago

In the EU it got harder and harder to cheat the digital tachographs. The latest generation of smart tachographs record GPS coordinates of start/stop points so one can no longer cheat with a magnet on the wheel's Hall sensor. Everything is signed cryptograpghcally, even the wheel sensors have a crypto seal, the only way to cheat is to use tampered firmware, which carries huge penalties. I'm surprised at how deregulated the US transportation market is by comparison.

avgDev 5y ago
EU is way ahead of the US when it comes to trucking safety. US is a weird place sometimes. Business/Money trumps safety. Regulations are often met with huge push back even when they can potentially save lives.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  EU and US is just fundamentally different. It is hard to overstate that. But it comes with trade-offs. Workers in EU, in general, have better standards at work than in US. It helps that in EU, healthcare is not directly part of employer cost ( everyone pays into it ). EU tends ( I do mean tends, because it seems to vary greatly ) toward unions, whereas US truckers seeem un-unionized by and large.

aeturnum 5y ago

> This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books. I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the next 50 years. We have a lot of laws and standards that, in effect, allowed people to cheat a little but not too much (or break a few traffic laws but not too many, etc). All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system. We are going to need to do a lot of work to find new equilibrium points where the various parties can cheat less. It will be made especially difficult because technology penetrates industries more quickly these days so it would be best if everything changed at once, but that also makes it more difficult.

Y_Y 5y ago
Maybe the state will have to outsource enforcement of these issues so that it doesn't have to admit to allowing some rule breaking. Anyone want to co-found Selective-Enforcement-as-a-Service?
- tehjoker 5y ago
  That's called "the cops".
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    Also Public Service Commissions.
black6 5y ago
The anecdotes I hear about "cheating the system" before electronic logs are mostly along the lines of: stuck in stand-still traffic for 30 minutes, I'll log it as a break. Whereas according to the electronic log you're still driving.
- UncleEntity 5y ago
  That’s not even close to how it used to work. Say you have a truck governed at 68mph which means you can log an average of 65mph without raising any eyebrows. So what we would do is log the miles you drove/65 and not the actual time you drove. Or, how I used to run, keep your logbook behind so you can backfill the driving hours and breaks so you can eventually be legal again — usually at a shipper or receiver you could catch up as they commonly would keep you there for 6-8 hours. What’s the buzzword, eventually consistency? Not even mentioning “loose leaf” logbooks where one could rewrite whole days to gain hours. Those days are long gone now…

rednerrus 5y ago

Isn't the key to drive as a team?

avgDev 5y ago
I actually talked to a guy that drove as a "team" but really just solo. He was proud he drove 48 hours non-stop and made more money.

jimmytucson 5y ago

> ICC is a checking on down the line > Well I'm a little overweight and my logbook's way behind - Dave Dudley, "Six Days on the Road" 1963 The give-and-take between making a living and obeying the law in truck driving is well established in our culture. Anyone who's interested I'd encourage to check out Dave Dudley's music. It's all there: racing time, avoiding the law, fatigue, loneliness, bodily harm, drug abuse, etc.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Electronic log books are not "a lot more difficult." Google "truck electronic log cheat" In some cases it's just pulling a fuse or the right connector. In other systems you can literally tell the e-logger that you're doing a kind of driving that 'doesn't count' and the system goes "oh okay" and that's that. Reportedly a lot of state police commercial vehicle cops don't bother to check e-loggers because they're lazy and it's not as easy as flipping open a paper book.

milliondollar 5y ago

Actually remember a presentation from one of the logbook startups from a few years ago. The key feature that skyrocketted adoption was the ability to fudge (...er, "correct") the logbook manually. When it was automated, they had issues because it would basically lock them down to the rules.

short12 5y ago

Depending on how the driver is contracted 100k is not a big deal. Because the take home is not even close to that. For instance take off the fuel costs off that 100k just for starters