Comments By Taxman

So, what I didn't know is that a wrecker cannot pull a loaded trailer without having it hooked to a truck. So he proceeds to hook the trailer back to my truck and towed the whole kit and caboodle back to our Indy yard. So yeah, he towed a perfectly good truck.

Don't know why, but this reminds me of something that happened 30 years ago.

Towing service with only one heavy duty wrecker gets called to tow a semi rig. Heavy duty wrecker breaks down after hook-up.

So the dispatcher sends another guy out with a F350 with a wheel lift stinger on the back. F350 driver picks up the heavy duty wrecker with semi tractor and trailer attached. Lansing city cop pulls them over, tickets the F350 driver. They drop the semi and tow the big wrecker home with the F350. I can't remember if they towed the semi with another F350 or handed the job off to another towing company. I'm thinking those clowns towed the semi with an F350.

When they got back to the shop, F350 driver was griping about his overlength ticket. I thought the cop was doing him a favor if that's all he wrote it for.

Is entering the trailer an essential job function?

Is it a reasonable accommodation to have to make arrangements to maintain the interior of your trailer without involving your one legged driver?

OTOH, anybody who brings up the Americans with Disabilities Act in a job interview is going to be as welcome as lump of plutonium.

On the other other hand, how much harder is it to climb into the trailer with a portable ladder than to climb into the cab, considering that getting into the cab clearly is an essential job function? (serious question, I'm not the guy who has to get around on 1 1/3 legs)

https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/accommodation.html

He needs to be at or below 12k on the steers. I don't think he had enough available holes to move almost 3000 pounds off the drives.

Oh, I see now (says the blind man). If I'm over 46k, I CAN'T balance the fifth wheel, because if I've got a 12k front axle I'd be putting it over GAWR until I got back to the dock to have them put some weight on the tandems.

A bit presumptuous for someone not in school yet...

Again...your point for asking these questions?

Asking questions is presumptuous?

The reason for asking: I thought the steers and drives looked out of balance from what I was learning, and I wondered if there was a reason for that that I wasn't aware of.

And either the rig weighed more than I expected it to, or the shipper understated the load weight, and I was curious which it was.

Yes, my fifth wheel is pretty far back. I just got a new truck with 33 miles on it and waiting to get a decent load of 40-44k to set my fifth wheel. Have happened yet. Lol.

Looks like you had 47,500 on your steers and drives today. Would balancing it to 12,100 + 45,400 have gotten your fifth wheel in a good enough spot?

2 Questions:

What's your tare weight?

Why is your fifth wheel that far back?

I think most of them have a snapshot button.

The Spytec A119 (get the real one, there are cheap copies out there) shoots 1080 at 30 or 60 fps or 1440 at 30 fps, has 160 degree field of view. If you hit the menu button once while it's recording, it takes a snapshot. Or you can just take screen shots out of the video later.

Brett mentions stabilization which is probably necessary for viewable video, either built into the camera or post processed with a video editor.

I'm not sure if individual frames from a dash cam would be sharp or blurred if the video was shot from a semi galloping down the freeway. (on some stretches of I-69 near me, the trucks actually appear to gallop like horses, it's definitely not a smooth ride)

What's your idea of high resolution, 1080p, 1440p, higher? A lot of them have viewing angles between 160 and 180 degrees, is that enough?

https://dashcamtalk.com/best-dash-cams-of-2017/

Roll prevention?

Is that an alarm to tell you you're turning too fast, or a mechanical system like auto braking?

Does it run you off a freeway ramp to keep you from flipping your rig on the ramp?

Whenever progress displaces current jobs, unions protest and fight, but it does them as much good as it would have done a gaslight maker to demand a ban on electricity 100 years ago.

That said, autonomous CMVs are absolutely not an issue in your career future if you're 40 years old. And probably not if you're 21.

My dad has quite a collection of mainstream science magazines. Popular Science, Science and Mechanics, Popular Mechanics, Mechanix Illustrated, I read them all, from the mid 1950s forward. In the 1950s, they had serious articles, describing how we'd be driving to work in George Jetson jet cars by 1975, complete with serious scientific explanations of how it was going to happen. Well, my dad didn't fly to work in 1975, I didn't fly to work in 2015, and I can guarantee I'm not flying to the office in 2025, nor is an autotruck going to drive itself from the Port of Los Angeles to the WalMart distribution center in 2035.

If you're 21 and single and want to be a trucker, just do it. Put $1500 a month in the 401k, $5500 a year in an IRA, and invest it all in a year 2050 target fund. And if robots take your job in 30-40 years, just retire as a millionaire. I know a retired transportation worker who pretty much did that, the president killed his dream job before he was 25, so he stayed with the job he was in until he got fed up with it, then quit and rolled his 401k into an IRA and started taking $80k a year out of it while he waits to reach social security age. He has more in that IRA now than he had before he started taking distributions. (now it's one thing for me to say "stick $18000 a year in your 401k" but it's another thing to actually do it if you decide to go the wife and kids route, the guy I'm talking about with the ginormous IRA is still single and he's older than me)