I respect the freedom of speech of my enemies as much as of my friends.
It's unfortunate that liars are protected equally, but I see no easy solution.
Would you want a 'ministry of truth'? How would you protect that from corrupting influences? As long as you allow unrestricted private ownership of the media and
no restrictions on who can fund it and advertise on them, there's going to be grifters.

Pork production in the U.S. has an estimated $23.4 billion of gross output per year, with around 26% of the nearly 2.2 million metric tons of pork and pork products produced exported to other countries.

This comes from Successful Farming.

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I seem to remember gas being 5.00 dollars a gallon when joe Biden’s home boy obumma was in office

Why do you continue about that Keystone pipeline. If it had continued, the first drop of crude would have FLOWED 10 years from now. By that time there will have been at least one Republican administration. Do you really think the world’s oil market would have waited 10 yrs to put the squeeze on us?
The signal it sent to the world was we have enough oil, we don’t need one more pipeline,and we certainly don’t need your oil. Behave or we’ll take our business elsewhere

Quit your belly-achin'! I wish gas was $2.83 in southeastern Michigan but gas has been $3.259 and look at dgraff's post, gas is $3.85 in Pennsylvania! Oi!

It’s $3.15 in South Florida

It don’t matter what is driving the price of gas up as long as sleepy joe is behind the wheel all fingers get pointed at him just like every President before him

Well lollipop, stick a 🧨 Roman Candle up your ass and light it.

2015 jeep wrangler...I live less than a block from work. A few blocks from the grocery store. A mile from the mall. Just about half a mile from the doctor. I was driving 128 miles a day and now I barely drive.

Lollipop, the economy is like a slow freight train across the Sonora Desert. It keeps chugging along but it’s impossible to stop it or turn it, and God forbid if it stops because it’ll never have enough traction to go again. '

Okay, I was not aware that that was the point you were trying to make.

Mountain Man, you are getting opinions from a very small and localized group. Think you at their age. The only difference between you and them is the age and experience. You became an auto mechanic and business owner. A mechanic’s job is hard. It’s dirty, hot, and needs long hours of dedication. You didn’t say,” I’m going to have a career flipping burgers. Most young people are hungry like a young lion. They want to take on the world and chew it up. Now, I will give you this. MickeyD’s sounds great to a teen doing 8 hours of classes in high school. With $200 a week they can feel like Kings. Girls, unlike boys, usually aim for much less.

I think that you are basically right. my friends and I have talked of the expectations of young people today quite often. They are very different from when I was a young adult.
I accept what I am about to write is an oversimplification and generalisation.
Today is a very different consumer world to the 1960s, where I grew up, and a lot of young people want highly paid jobs right away on leaving college so that they can buy all the things companies are convincing them that they need. When I was young a low paid apprenticeship was respected and eagerly taken up as in the medium to long term you would earn big money as a skilled tradesman. today, however, instant gratification is the word for so many people - and not only young people.
I do think that even low skill jobs should pay enough for someone to be able to live on a weeks wages but the skilled tradesman should definitely earn a premium over low skilled jobs to reflect the time he was had to spend learning and studying his trade while on low wages.

An interesting thought is that old civilizations suffered the same problems with the Roman and Greek citizens not wanting to do 'menial task'. They solved it with slavery.
In the UK before Brexit we solved it with cheap Eastern European immigrants or seasonal workers. Now as a result of Brexit we no longer have access to that pool of labour and suddenly there are not enough Brits who are willing to do these jobs that immigrants were more than happy to do.

Just an f.y.i., I applied for a bus driver position. I will let you know what becomes of it.

Dgraff, this was in Yahoo News. The story ran about a week ago.

Cargo ships are piled higher with containers than they’ve ever been, according to data from analyst firm IHS Markit. And the crowding is worst onboard ships sailing into US west coast ports. At the Port of Long Beach, which has been mired in record backlogs for months, the average ship now brings in 7,000 containers—up 70% from the pre-pandemic average of roughly 4,000 containers.

Obviously you have a better understanding how a vessel operates, however, from what I was able to find out was that ships during the last 10 to 20 months where operating BELOW their maximum. Perhaps they shipped with partial ballast. I don’t know but the glut of ships waiting to unload in Pacific ports (California for one) is 10 days behind at least.
On top of that there’s not enough truck drivers, not enough storage room.
You, of all people, should know the news does not always give you the whole pic