“
I looked over at her; if women knew how good they looked in the dash light of oversized pickup trucks, they'd never get out of them.
”
”
Craig Johnson (Death Without Company (Walt Longmire, #2))
“
Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft.
”
”
Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City)
“
What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.
”
”
Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)
“
Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Balloygan Road. That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular. Where no truck anymore. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road on the way from A to Z.
”
”
Samuel Beckett (Company)
“
Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom.
”
”
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)
“
It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.
”
”
Finn Murphy (The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road)
“
Well,” said Mma Ramotswe, “I have felt that anger. I felt it when I saw that the van had gone. I felt it a bit in the truck on the way back. But what is the point of anger now, Mma? I don’t think that anger will help us.” Mma Makutsi sighed. “You are right about anger,” she said. “There is no point in it.
”
”
Alexander McCall Smith (In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, #6))
“
Brennan. Brennan was president of his own Detroit Teamsters local and had an arrest record for violence that included four incidents of bombing company trucks and buildings. Brennan referred to Jimmy as his “brains.” Hoffa
”
”
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
“
(First lines) Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no trains or buses headed in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies at the nextdoor town of Paradise Chapel; occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Ratcliffe. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brandnew cars pretty fast, and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country, and here in the sunken marshes where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark water like drowned corpses. Often the only movement on the landscape is a broken spiral of smoke from a sorry-looking farmhouse on the horizon, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling endlessly over the bleak deserted pinewoods.
”
”
Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
“
Later, at the sink in our van, Mama rinsed the blue stain and the odd spiders, caterpillars, and stems from the bucket.
"Not what we usually start with, but we can go again tomorrow. And this will set up nicely in about six, eight jars."
The berries were beginning to simmer in the big pot on the back burner. Mama pushed her dark wooden spoon into the foaming berries and cicrcled the wall of the pot slowly.
I leaned my hot arms on the table and said, "Iphy better not go tomorrow. She got tired today." I was smelling the berries and Mamaa's sweat, and watching the flex of the blue veins behind her knees.
"Does them good. The twins always loved picking berries, even more than eating them. Though Elly likes her jam."
"Elly doesn't like anything anymore."
The knees stiffened and I looked up. The spoon was motionless. Mama stared at the pot.
"Mama, Elly isn't there anymore. Iphy's changed. Everything's changed. This whole berry business, cooking big meals that nobody comes for, birthday cakes for Arty. It's dumb, Mama. Stop pretending. There isn't any family anymore, Mama."
Then she cracked me with the big spoon. It smacked wet and hard across my ear, and the purple-black juice spayed across the table. She started at me, terrified, her mouth and eyes gaping with fear. I stared gaping at her. I broke and ran.
I went to the generator truck and climbed up to sit by Grandpa. That's the only time Mama ever hit me and I knew I deserved it. I also knew that Mama was too far gone to understand why I deserved it. She'd swung that spoon in a tigerish reflex at blasphemy. But I believed that Arty had turned his back on us, that the twins were broken, that the Chick was lost, that Papa was weak and scared, that Mama was spinning fog, and that I was an adolescent crone sitting in the ruins, watching the beams crumble, and warming myself in the smoke from the funeral pyre. That was how I felt, and I wanted company. I hated Mama for refusing to see enough to be miserable with me. Maybe, too, enough of my child heart was still with me to think that if she would only open her eyes she could fix it all back up like a busted toy.
”
”
Katherine Dunn (Geek Love)
“
Local waterways had long been contaminated from many sources. But in 1987, the state at last issued a seafood advisory for Bayou d'Inde, the Calcasieu Ship Channel, and the estuary to the Gulf of Mexico. ... From net to plate—fishermen, grocery stores, trucking companies, and restaurant workers—all were furious at the government officials who had declared the seafood advisory.
”
”
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
“
Roads deteriorated in the autumn rains, and a dearth of spark plugs, fan belts, and tools hampered mechanics; one company with forty-one trucks possessed a single pair of pliers and one crescent wrench.
”
”
Rick Atkinson (The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy))
“
Hoffa and Brennan formed a trucking company called Test Fleet. The “brains” and his partner put that company in their wives’ maiden names. Test Fleet had only one contract. It was with a Cadillac car carrier that had been having union problems with its Teamsters union independent owner-operator car haulers. This group of Teamsters held an unsanctioned wildcat strike. Angered by this break of union solidarity, Jimmy Hoffa ordered them back to work. With Hoffa’s blessings the Cadillac car carrier then terminated its leases with the independent Teamsters haulers, put many of them out of business, and gave hauling business to Test Fleet. This arrangement helped Josephine Poszywak, aka Mrs. Hoffa, and Alice Johnson, aka Mrs. Brennan, make $155,000 in dividends over ten years, without doing a single minute’s work for the Test Fleet company. Hoffa
”
”
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
“
DEAR MISS MANNERS:
Should you tell your mother something if it is important when she is talking to company? I am six.
GENTLE READER:
Yes, you should (after saying "Excuse me"). Here are some of the things that are important to tell your mother, even though she is talking to company:
"Mommy, the kitchen is full of smoke."
"Daddy's calling from Tokyo."
"Kristen fell out of her crib and I can't put her back."
"There's a policeman at the door and he says he wants to talk to you."
"I was just reaching for my ball, and the goldfish bowl fell over."
Now, here are some things that are not important, so they can wait until your mother's company has gone home:
"Mommy, I'm tired of playing blocks. What do I do now?"
"The ice-cream truck is coming down the street."
"Can I give Kristen the rest of my applesauce?"
"I can't find my crayons."
"When are we going to have lunch? I'm hungry.
”
”
Judith Martin
“
A healthy company culture is a set of norms and behaviors that support high performance and supports the team as they move towards ultimate success. Visit these norms regularly. Everybody visits them regularly, from the CEO to the Truck Drivers.
”
”
Beth Ramsay (#Networking is people looking for people looking for people)
“
She’d just come back when Marvel tapped the computer screen and said, “See, what happened was, this guy, Representative Diller, got the licensing fees on semi-trailers reduced by about half, so they’d supposedly be in line with what they were in the surrounding states. He said he wanted to do that so the trucking companies wouldn’t move out of Minnesota. But what you see over here is a bunch of 1099 forms that were sent by trucking companies to Sisseton High-Line Consulting, LLC, of Sisseton, South Dakota. Over here is the South Dakota LLC form and we find out that a Cheryl Diller is the president of Sisseton High-Line Consulting. And we see that she got, mmm, fifty-five thousand dollars for consulting work that year, from trucking companies.” “So if these two Dillers are related . . .” Lucas began. “I promise you, they are,” Marvel said. Kidd said, “Marvel’s a state senator. In Arkansas.” Marvel added, “This shit goes on all the time. On everything you can think of, and probably a lot you can’t think of.
”
”
John Sandford (Silken Prey (Lucas Davenport #23))
“
Kind of what?" Gordon challenged, cutting his eyes to Kevin even as a mental image of himself in the back of Aiden's truck popped into his mind. Shredded jeans in a ball on the floorboard and riding the Outlaw with the athleticism of an Olympic gold medalist in ass fucking.
”
”
Santino Hassell (Evenfall (In the Company of Shadows, #1))
“
But airport security is meant mostly to impress honest citizens and insurance companies, and secondarily to catch hijackers and other crazies. There is no security against a man with his own truck and his own clipboard, and Inter-Air Forwarding was a safe, reliable financial success from the beginning.
”
”
Donald E. Westlake (Dancing Aztecs)
“
Glimco was having a problem with a freight hauler that was resisting the union and wouldn’t rehire a shop steward they had fired. It made Joey Glimco look bad to his men, and he wanted me to take care of the matter. I told him nobody needed to paint anybody’s house. I told him to give me a case of Coca-Cola that used to come in those old-fashioned bottles. I said give me one of your men and we’ll handle it. I got on a bridge just down the street from the freight company. When a truck would pull out and drive down to go under the bridge, the man and I dropped bottles of Coke down on the truck. It sounded like bombs going off, and trucks were crashing into the bridge abutment without knowing what was happening. Finally, the drivers refused to take trucks out of the yard, and the freight company came around and rehired the shop steward, but he didn’t get his back pay. Maybe I should have used two cases of Coke. I
”
”
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
“
Another significant factor in the problem that blacks faced in getting over-the-road truck driving positions was the refusal of white truck drivers to ride with them. In 1966, The Wall Street Journal reported that one Teamster official asked, “Would you like to climb in a bunk bed that a nigger just got out of?” Another said, “To my knowledge no law has been written yet that says a white man has to bed down with Negroes.”[102] Teamster officials protected union men who were discharged by a company for refusing to ride with a black driver.[103] Seniority rules, the refusal of white drivers to ride with black drivers, and the Teamsters’ highly discriminatory job-referral practices contributed to reducing black opportunities for jobs in the trucking industry.[104]
”
”
Walter E. Williams (Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press Publication Book 599))
“
Kassian arched a brow at Boyd as they made the short walk to Boyd's house. "You have no idea at all? I'm looking for an SUV of some kind although I'd prefer another truck. I can't drive those tiny ass cars they make now. I feel like if I get in an accident I'll be crushed instantly."
"That's why I want one that's fast and easy to handle," Boyd said wryly. "To get out of the way of you crazy SUV drivers.
”
”
Ais (Afterimage (In the Company of Shadows, #2))
“
Speaking of glimpsing a hidden truth,” Langdon said, looking suddenly amused. “You’re in luck. There’s a secret symbol hiding right over there.” He pointed. “On the side of that truck.” Ambra glanced up and saw a FedEx truck idling at a red light on Avenue of Pedralbes. Secret symbol? All Ambra could see was the company’s ubiquitous logo. “Their name is coded,” Langdon told her. “It contains a second level of meaning—a hidden symbol that reflects the company’s forward motion.
”
”
Dan Brown (Origin (Robert Langdon, #5))
“
The next day—Christmas Eve—Musk called in reinforcements. Ross Nordeen drove from San Francisco. He stopped at the Apple Store in Union Square and spent $2,000 to buy out the entire stock of AirTags so the servers could be tracked on their journey, and then stopped at Home Depot, where he spent $2,500 on wrenches, bolt-cutters, headlamps, and the tools needed to unscrew the seismic bolts. Steve Davis got someone from The Boring Company to procure a semi truck and line up moving vans. Other enlistees arrived from SpaceX.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
“
Jimmy Hoffa’s first notoriety in union work was as the leader of a successful strike by the “Strawberry Boys.” He became identified with it. In 1932 the nineteen-year-old Jimmy Hoffa was working as a truck loader and unloader of fresh fruits and vegetables on the platform dock of the Kroger Food Company in Detroit for 32¢ an hour. Twenty cents of that pay was in credit redeemable for groceries at Kroger food stores. But the men only got that 32¢ when there was work to do. They had to report at 4:30 P.M. for a twelve-hour shift and weren’t permitted to leave the platform. When there were no trucks to load or unload, the workers sat around without pay. On one immortal hot spring afternoon, a load of fresh strawberries arrived from Florida, and the career of the most famous labor leader in American history was launched. Hoffa gave a signal, and the men who would come to be known as the Strawberry Boys refused to move the Florida strawberries into refrigerator cars until their union was recognized and their demands for better working conditions were met.
”
”
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
“
The most common reason people dig up their pets is because they are moving. They can’t bear to leave Growler the Pekingese behind, and don’t want some new family who didn’t even know Growler building a swimming pool and sending his bones away in a dump truck. But they might also be feeling squeamish about what Growler looks like eight months after burial. Enter companies that will come to your house, dig up Growler, and have him cremated and brought back to you. Now residing in his bone-shaped urn, Growler is ready to travel to his new home.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies)
“
The year Zach was born, I began acting inappropriately with my UPS delivery guy. I don’t mean that I tried to seduce him (it’s hard to be seductive with milk stains on your T-shirt). I mean that whenever he delivered a package—which was often, given the need for baby supplies—I would try to detain him with conversation simply because I craved adult company. I’d strain to make small talk about the weather, a news headline, even the weight of a package (“Wow, who knew diapers were so heavy! Do you have kids?”) while the UPS driver fake-smiled and nodded as he not-so-subtly backed away from me to the safety of his truck.
”
”
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
“
It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.
”
”
Finn Murphy (The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road)
“
I hope you blow up and bust with your gluttony. You eat up our land like a filthy hog, you banks do. You and your flunky loan companies. I hope all the banks in America eat themselves to death. We poor people will then have to eat the corpse. We’ll be good and hungry by then. Understand? Good and hungry.” She moved toward him, shaking her finger. “You tell the rest of ’em that—all the banks in the big places, all your bosses. You tell ’em for a farmer’s wife who’s worked hard and honest.” Her weathered brown hand shook nearer his face. He flattened against the swinging gate and backed in. She stopped suddenly and laughed. She turned and walked out, still laughing, a great strong laugh that shook her body and echoed through the bank. She walked into the street and climbed into the old truck and drove off. Her hearty laughter trailed down the street above the sound of the motor.
”
”
Sanora Babb (Whose Names Are Unknown)
“
The companies that hauled the oil away were called renderers. Besides restaurant oil, renderers also collected animal carcasses—pigs and sheep and cows from slaughterhouses, offal thrown out by butcher shops and restaurants, euthanized cats and dogs from the pound, dead pets from veterinary clinics, deceased zoo animals, roadkill. Mounds of animals were trucked to the rendering plant and bulldozed into large pots for grinding and shredding; then the raw meat product was dumped into pressure cookers, where fat separated from meat and bones at high heat. The meat and bones were pulverized into protein meal for canned pet food. The animal fat became yellow grease, which was recycled for lipstick, soap, chemicals, and livestock feed. So cows ate cow, pigs ate pig, dogs ate dog, cats ate cat, and human beings ate the meat fed on dead meat, or smeared it over their faces and hands. Rendering was one of the oldest industries in the country, going back to the age of tallow, lard, and candlelight, and one of the most secretive.
”
”
George Packer (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America)
“
Wal-Mart can't seem to grasp an essential fact: in 2006, the company has exactly the reputation it has earned. No, we don't give the company adequate credit for low prices. But the broken covenant Sam Walton had with how to treat store employees, the relentless pressure that hollows out companies and dilutes the quality of their products, the bullying of suppliers and communities, the corrosive secrecy, the way Wal-Mart has changed our own perception of price and quality, of value and durability--none of these is imaginary, or trivial, or easily changed with a fresh set of bullet points, an impassioned speech, and a website heavy with "Wal-Mart facts".
If Wal-Mart does in fact double the gas mileage of its truck fleet, and thereby double the gas mileage of every long-haul truck in America, that will be huge. It will change gas consumption in the United States in a single stroke. But it hasn't happened yet. And even if it does, it will not make Wal-Mart a good company or a good corporate partner or a good corporate citizen.
”
”
Charles Fishman (The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy)
“
Dear Mr. Vermylen: Your company has been one of our good customers for fourteen years. Naturally, we are very grateful for your patronage and are eager to give you the speedy, efficient service you deserve. However, we regret to say that it isn’t possible for us to do that when your trucks bring us a large shipment late in the afternoon, as they did on November 10. Why? Because many other customers make late afternoon deliveries also. Naturally, that causes congestion. That means your trucks are held up unavoidably at the pier and sometimes even your freight is delayed. That’s bad, but it can be avoided. If you make your deliveries at the pier in the morning when possible, your trucks will be able to keep moving, your freight will get immediate attention, and our workers will get home early at night to enjoy a dinner of the delicious macaroni and noodles that you manufacture. Regardless of when your shipments arrive, we shall always cheerfully do all in our power to serve you promptly. You are busy. Please don’t trouble to answer this note.
”
”
Dale Carnegie (How To Win Friends and Influence People)
“
Size Matters. A lot.
How much you have and more importantly how much space it will take up in a movingtruck are the first things you need to know when planning a long distance move. Professional movers charge by weight because it is an easier and more uniform way to determine exactly how much you have. They literally drive the truck onto a large scale before loading your goods to get a light weight and return after loading your stuff to get a heavy weight, with the difference being the weight of your shipment. The moving company’s estimate, however, is based on coming to your home and surveying the total cubic feet, or estimated size of all your household goods.
They then convert that figure into a weight estimate by multiplying the cubic feet (cubes) by the average density of 6.5 pounds per cubic foot. A small 2-bedroom house for example might have 1,000 cubic feet which when multiplied by a density of 6.5 (lbs) would equal 6,500 lbs. If this sounds like brain surgery then I would ask you to try and remember the last furniture mover you met who struck you as brain surgeon-ish.
”
”
Jerry G. West
“
People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern businesspeople and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales. The legend of Peugeot affords us a good example. An icon that somewhat resembles the Stadel lion-man appears today on cars, trucks and motorcycles from Paris to Sydney. It’s the hood ornament that adorns vehicles made by Peugeot, one of the oldest and largest of Europe’s carmakers. Peugeot began as a small family business in the village of Valentigney, just 200 miles from the Stadel Cave. Today the company employs about 200,000 people worldwide, most of whom are complete strangers to each other. These strangers cooperate so effectively that in 2008 Peugeot produced more than 1.5 million automobiles, earning revenues of about 55 billion euros.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
THE SK8 MAKER VS. GLOBAL INDUSTRIALIZATION This new era of global industrialization is where my personal analogy with the history of the skateboard maker diverges. It’s no longer cost-effective to run a small skateboard company in the U.S., and the handful of startups that pull it off are few and far between. The mega manufacturers who can churn out millions of decks at low cost and record speed each year in Chinese factories employ proprietary equipment and techniques that you and I can barely imagine. Drills that can cut all eight truck holes in a stack of skateboard decks in a single pull. CNC machinery to create CAD-perfect molds used by giant two-sided hydraulic presses that can press dozens of boards in a few hours. Computer-operated cutting bits that can stamp out a deck to within 1⁄64 in. of its specified shape. And industrial grade machines that apply multicolored heat-transfer graphics in minutes. In a way, this factory automation has propelled skateboarding to become a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry. The best skateboarders require this level of precision in each deck. Otherwise, they could end up on their tails after a failed trick. Or much worse. As the commercial deck relies more and more on a process that is out of reach for mere mortals, there is great value in the handmade and one of a kind. Making things from scratch is a dying art on the brink of extinction. It was pushed to the edge when public schools dismissed woodworking classes and turned the school woodshop into a computer lab. And when you separate society from how things are made—even a skateboard—you lose touch with the labor and the materials and processes that contributed to its existence in the first place. It’s not long before you take for granted the value of an object. The result is a world where cheap labor produces cheap goods consumed by careless customers who don’t even value the things they own.
”
”
Matt Berger (The Handmade Skateboard: Design & Build a Custom Longboard, Cruiser, or Street Deck from Scratch)
“
Looks like everybody's asleep. Don't they keep a light on for you?"
"They probably figured I wouldn't be needing it."
"Sorry to disappoint your cousins."
"Not to mention me.I'm gravely disappointed at the way this evening has ended.You're going to ruin my reputation as a lady-killer." He flashed her one of his famous smiles.
He opened the door and climbed down.When he rounded the front of the truck, he paused beside her open window. "Good night,Marilee. I appreciate the ride home. I just wish you didn't have to make that long drive back to town all alone."
"I'll be fine.I've got my radio to keep me company."
"You could always coe inside and bunk in my room."
"What a generous offer.But once again, I'm afraid I'll have to decline,though I have to admit that I've had more fun in a few hours with you than I've had in years."
The minute the words were out of her mouth,she wanted to call them back. What was it about Wyatt that had her trusting him enough to reveal such a thing?
Though she barely knew him,he'd uncovered an inherent goodness in him that was rare and wonderful.
This had been one of the best nights of her life.
Still,he'd gone very quiet.As though digesting her words and searching for hidden meanings.
As he turned away she called boldly, "What? No kiss good night? Just because I refused to spend the night with you?"
He turned back with a smile, but it wasn't his usual silly grin.Instead, she noted,there was a hint of danger in that smile.
He studied her intently before reaching out as though to touch her face. Then he seemed to think better of it and withdrew his hand as if he'd been burned.
His eyes locked on hers. "I've already decided that I'll never be able to just kiss you and walk away.So a word of warning,pretty little Marilee. When I kiss you,and I fully intend to kiss you breathless,be prepared to go the distance. There's a powerful storm building up inside me,and when it's unleashed,it's going to be one hell of an earth-shattering explosion.For both of us."
He walked away then and didn't look back until he'd reached the back door.
Startled by the unexpected intensity of his words,Marilee put the truck in gear and started along the gravel lane.
As her vehicle ate up the miles back to town,she couldn't put aside the look she'd seen in his eyes.The carefully banked passion she'd taken such pains to hide had left her more shaken than she cared to admit.
In truth,she was still trembling.
And he hadn't even touched her.
”
”
R.C. Ryan (Montana Destiny)
“
The thing I really like about Jase is that he’s as obsessed with ducks as I am. I rarely took my boys hunting with me when they were very young. In fact, I never took them when I was still an outlaw. “Not this time, boys, we might be running from the game warden,” I’d tell them. But after I repented and came to Jesus Christ, I started taking my sons hunting with me, beginning with Alan. Before we moved to where we live now, it was a pretty long haul from town to the Ouachita River bottoms. Alan got carsick nearly every time I took him hunting, but he didn’t think I knew. We stopped at the same gas station every time, and he’d walk around back and lose his breakfast before he climbed back into the truck. I was proud of him for never complaining.
I took Jase hunting for the first time when he was five. He was shooting Pa’s heavy Belgium-made Browning twelve-gauge shotgun, which he could barely even hold up. It kicked like a mule! The first time Jase shot the gun, it kicked him to the back of the blind and flipped him over a bench.
“Did I get him?” Jase asked.
I knew right then that I had another hunter in the family, and Jase is still the most skilled hunter of all my boys. I trained Jase to take over the company by teaching him the nuances of duck calls and fowl hunting, and he is still the person in charge of making sure every duck call sounds like a duck. Not only did Jase design the first gadwall drake call to hit the market, he also invented the first triple-reed duck caller. Jase and I live to hunt ducks. We track ducks during the season through a nationwide network of hunters, asking how many ducks are in their areas and what movements are expected. Then we check conditions of wind and weather fronts that might influence duck movement. We talk it all over during the day and again each morning, before the day’s hunt, as we prepare to leave for the blind.
When Kay and I began to ponder becoming less active in the Duck Commander business, we offered its management to Jase, who had been most deeply involved in the company. But he had no desire to get into management. Jase likes building duck calls and doesn’t really enjoy the business aspects of the company, like making sales calls or dealing with clients and sponsors. Like me, Jase is most comfortable when he’s in a duck blind and doesn’t care for the details that come with running a company. Jase only wants to build duck calls, shoot ducks, and spend time with his family (he and his wife, Missy, have three kids).
”
”
Phil Robertson (Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander)
“
Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.” Ellison had a reputation for being easily bored by the process of running a business and often took time off, leaving the shop to senior colleagues. One of the reasons often trotted out for Oracle’s success in the 1990s was Ellison’s decision to hire Ray Lane, a senior executive credited with bringing order and discipline to the business, allowing Ellison just to do the vision thing and bunk off to sail his boats whenever he felt like it. But Lane had left Oracle nearly eighteen months before after falling out with Ellison. Since then, Ellison had taken full control of the company—how likely was it that he would he stay the course? One reason to be skeptical was that Ellison just seemed to have too many things going on in his life besides Oracle. During the afternoon, we took a break from discussing the future of computing to take a tour of what would be his new home—nearly a decade in the making, and at that time, still nearly three years from completion. In the hills of Woodside, California, framing a five-acre artificial lake, six wooden Japanese houses, perfect replicas of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century originals in Kyoto, were under construction. The site also contained two full-size ornamental bridges, hundreds of boulders trucked in from the high Sierras and arranged according to Zen principles and an equal number of cherry trees jostling for attention next to towering redwoods. Ellison remarked: “If I’m remembered for anything, it’s more likely to be for this than Oracle.”3 In the evening, I noticed in Ellison’s dining room a scale model of what would become his second home: a graceful-looking 450-foot motor-yacht capable of circumnavigating the globe. Already the owner of two mega-yachts, bought secondhand and extensively modified (the 192-foot Ronin based in Sausalito and the 244-foot Katana, which was kept at Antibes in the South of France), Ellison wanted to create the perfect yacht. The key to achieving this had been his successful courtship of a seventy-two-year-old Englishman, Jon Bannenberg, recognized as the greatest designer of very big, privately-owned yachts. With a budget of $200 million—about the same as that for the Japanese imperial village in Woodside—it would be Bannenberg’s masterpiece. Bannenberg had committed himself to “handing over the keys” to Ellison in time for his summer holiday in 2003.
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Matthew Symonds (Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle)
“
Is Twee the right word for it, for the strangely persistent modern sensibility that fructifies in the props departments of Wes Anderson movies, tapers into the waxed mustache-ends of young Brooklynites on bicycles, and detonates in a yeasty whiff every time someone pops open a microbrewed beer? Well, it is now. An across-the-board examination of this thing is long overdue, and the former Spin writer Marc Spitz is to be congratulated on having risen to the challenge. With Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film , he’s given it a name, and he’s given it a canon. (The canon is crucial, as we shall see.) And if his book is a little all over the place—well, so is Twee. Spitz hails it as “the most powerful youth movement since Punk and Hip-Hop.” He doesn’t even put an arguably in there, bless him. You’re Twee if you like artisanal hot sauce. You’re Twee if you hate bullies. Indeed, it’s Spitz’s contention that we’re all a bit Twee: the culture has turned. Twee’s core values include “a healthy suspicion of adulthood”; “a steadfast focus on our essential goodness”; “the cultivation of a passion project” (T-shirt company, organic food truck); and “the utter dispensing with of ‘cool’ as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin.
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Anonymous
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Around 45% of accountants, 50% of IT workers, and 70% of truck drivers were working for contractors rather than as employees at the companies for which they provided services.
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”
Sarah Kessler (Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work)
“
In May 2017, the company replaced Fields as CEO with Jim Hackett, who had been responsible for Ford’s autonomous driving efforts. To realize its forward-looking vision and become a leader in automotive technology, Ford would need the services of the world’s best software developers, which would mean competing not only against other automakers but also against Silicon Valley’s hottest companies. In the new era of automotive, software is king. With that shift comes an opening for software-focused companies like Tesla. “In many cases, large car companies or truck companies are not focused on software, they’re not focused on sensors or batteries,” Straubel said in 2016. “And this gives an opportunity for innovation for new companies and new entrants to play on a bit more of a level playing field than there ever was in the past.
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”
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
“
Maruti was called upon to take a difficult decision soon after the first bookings had been made. The pick-up truck, a purely commercial vehicle that was part of the original project along with the 800 and the van, got a very poor response—bookings of just 2,000. In the project report, the pick-up truck was expected to account for 20 per cent of total production. The booking response showed that the customers did not want this vehicle, and manufacturing it in small volumes would not be viable. The company realized it had made a serious error of judgement in not recognizing that petrol-driven commercial vehicles could never compete with diesel-driven ones, as the government-determined price of diesel was much lower than petrol. SMC had estimated that the pick-up truck would be very successful because of good experience in other Asian countries. In Pakistan, it was used for rural transport, after being fitted with a canvas top, and sold in large numbers. However, India had a vehicle called the Tempo, which carried a load slightly more than the pick-up truck and ran on diesel. The highly value-conscious Indian customers immediately realized that the pick-up truck would always lose out to the Tempo, because of the Tempo’s lower operating costs. Realizing that the truck would be a failure, Maruti decided to drop its production and to write off the costs incurred till then in tooling and other related activities. This experience was a reminder to Maruti on the importance of correctly assessing the behaviour of Indian customers, and the dangers of transferring experience of other countries to India, without careful examination.
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R.C. Bhargava (The Maruti Story)
“
The load was so great that Andersen summoned a shredding truck from a local disposal company called Shred-It. (The company’s motto: “Your secrets are safe with us.”)
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Bethany McLean (The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron)
“
Steve drove the next morning as we made the turn for the Burdekin River. The single-lane dirt road, as small as it was, ended there--but we had another two or three hours of four-wheel driving to go. We navigated through deep ravines carved by the area’s repeated cyclone-fed floods, occasionally balancing on three wheels.
“Hang out the window, will you?” Steve shouted as we maneuvered around the edge of a forty-foot drop. “I need to you to help counterbalance the truck.”
You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. But there I was, hanging off the side of the bull bar while Steve threaded his way over the eroding track.
As we pounded and slammed our way deep into the bush, Steve talked about the area’s Aborigines. He pointed out a butte where European colonists massacred a host of the Aboriginal population in Victorian times. The landscape was alive to him, not only with human history, but with the complex interrelatedness of plants, animals, and the environment. He pointed out giant 150-year-old eucalypts, habitats for insectivorous bats, parrots, and brush-tailed possums.
After hours of bone-jarring terrain, we reached the Burdekin, a beautiful river making its way through the tea trees. It was a breathtaking place. We set up camp--by which I mean Steve did--at a fork in the river, where huge black boulders stood exposed in the middle of the water.
I tried to help, but I felt completely out of my depth. He unpacked the boat and the motor, got it tied and moored on the river, rolled out the swags, and lined up containers of fuel, water, and food.
Then he started stringing tarps. What a gift Steve had for setting up camp. He had done it countless times before, month in and month out, all by himself, with only Sui for company. I watched him secure ropes, tie knots, and stretch canvas like he was expecting that we’d have to withstand a cyclone. It was hot, more than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but Steve didn’t seem to notice.
Sui found a little shallow place at the edge of the river and immediately plopped herself in. I saw Steve look over at her as if calculating her chances of being snatched by a croc. Crocodiles are the ultimate camouflage attack predators, striking from the water’s edge.
There would never be “down time” for Steve. No time to sit down and unwind. We were off in an instant. We grabbed Sui, jumped in the boat, and headed upstream. White Burdekin ducks startled up in front of our boat, their dark neck-rings revealed as they flew over us. Cormorants dried their feathers on the mid-river boulders, wings fully open. It was magical and unspoiled, as if we were the first people ever to travel there.
”
”
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
“
When Bindi, Robert, and I got home on the evening of Steve’s death, we encountered a strange scene that we ourselves had created. The plan had been that Steve would get back from his Ocean’s Deadlist film shoot before we got back from Tasmania. So we’d left the house with a funny surprise for him.
We got large plush toys and arranged them in a grouping to look like the family. We sat one that represented me on the sofa, a teddy bear about her size for Bindi, and a plush orangutan for Robert. We dressed the smaller toys in the kids’ clothes, and the big doll in my clothes. I went to the zoo photographer and got close-up photographs of our faces that we taped onto the heads of the dolls. We posed them as if we were having dinner, and I wrote a note for Steve.
“Surprise,” the note said. “We didn’t go to Tasmania! We are here waiting for you and we love you and miss you so much! We will see you soon. Love, Terri, Bindi, and Robert.”
The surprise was meant for Steve when he returned and we weren’t there. Instead the dolls silently waited for us, our plush-toy doubles, ghostly reminders of a happier life.
Wes, Joy, and Frank came into the house with me and the kids. We never entertained, we never had anyone over, and now suddenly our living room seemed full. Unaccustomed to company, Robert greeted each one at the door.
“Take your shoes off before you come in,” he said seriously. I looked over at him. He was clearly bewildered but trying so hard to be a little man.
We had to make arrangements to bring Steve home. I tried to keep things as private as possible. One of Steve’s former classmates at school ran the funeral home in Caloundra that would be handling the arrangements. He had known the Irwin family for years, and I recall thinking how hard this was going to be for him as well.
Bindi approached me. “I want to say good-bye to Daddy,” she said.
“You are welcome to, honey,” I said. “But you need to remember when Daddy said good-bye to his mother, that last image of her haunted him while he was awake and asleep for the rest of his life.”
I suggested that perhaps Bindi would like to remember her daddy as she last saw him, standing on top of the truck next to that outback airstrip, waving good-bye with both arms and holding the note that she had given him. Bindi agreed, and I knew it was the right decision, a small step in the right direction.
I knew the one thing that I had wanted to do all along was to get to Steve. I felt an urgency to continue on from the zoo and travel up to the Cape to be with him. But I knew what Steve would have said. His concern would have been getting the kids settled and in bed, not getting all tangled up in the media turmoil.
Our guests decided on their own to get going and let us get on with our night. I gave the kids a bath and fixed them something to eat. I got Robert settled in bed and stayed with him until he fell asleep. Bindi looked worried. Usually I curled up with Robert in the evening, while Steve curled up with Bindi. “Don’t worry,” I said to her. “Robert’s already asleep. You can sleep in my bed with me.”
Little Bindi soon dropped off to sleep, but I lay awake. It felt as though I had died and was starting over with a new life. I mentally reviewed my years as a child growing up in Oregon, as an adult running my own business, then meeting Steve, becoming his wife and the mother of our children. Now, at age forty-two, I was starting again.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
“
These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings.2 These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets—and most tenants don’t even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb. Families
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
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Bad Job I got a gig at a trucking company, loading freight, And damn it was bad, sweating in a suicidal St. Louis Summer night And the dudes in the place were scary looking and numb, Most of them were around thirty to fifty years of age, most Were supporting families; and I was only, twenty-one at the time. My trainer showing me the ropes and the wharves, as it all seemed Too much for me at the time, As the planets in my head swirled One had to do so much to earn a living… so much The guys so scary looking, they had been there so long That were beginning to look like the truck, the trailer, The freight, the skids and the boxes As
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”
Damion Hamilton (Internet Poetry)
“
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I Bid Safely Inc.
“
Back to the cake. You were down to the seam of coal.” “Yeah, well, once they find the coal, they bring in more machines, extract it, haul it out, and continue blasting down to the next seam. It’s not unusual to demolish the top five hundred feet of a mountain. This takes relatively few workers. In fact, a small crew can thoroughly destroy a mountain in a matter of months.” The waitress refilled their cups and Donovan watched in silence, totally ignoring her. When she disappeared, he leaned in a bit lower and said, “Once the coal is hauled out by truck, it’s washed, which is another disaster. Coal washing creates a black sludge that contains toxic chemicals and heavy metals. The sludge is also known as slurry, a term you’ll hear often. Since it can’t be disposed of, the coal companies store it behind earthen dams in sludge ponds, or slurry ponds. The engineering is slipshod and half-assed and these things break all the time with catastrophic results.
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John Grisham (Gray Mountain)
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So why do these guys hate your guts?” “Because they believe strip-mining is a good thing. It provides jobs, and there are few jobs around here. They’re not bad people, they’re just misinformed and misguided. Mountaintop removal is killing our communities. It has single-handedly wiped out tens of thousands of jobs. People are forced to leave their homes because of blasting, dust, sludge, and flooding. The roads aren’t safe because of these massive trucks flying down the mountains. I filed five wrongful death cases in the past five years, folks crushed by trucks carrying ninety tons of coal. Many towns have simply vanished. The coal companies often buy up surrounding homes and tear them down. Every county in coal country has lost population in the past twenty years. Yet a lot of people, including those three gentlemen over there, think that a few jobs are better than none.” “If they are gentlemen, then why do you carry a gun?” “Because certain coal companies have been known to hire thugs. It’s intimidation, or worse, and it’s nothing new. Look, Samantha, I’m a son of the coal country, a hillbilly and a proud one, and I could tell you stories for hours about the bloody history of Big Coal.
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John Grisham (Gray Mountain)
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Jenny Hopkinson, a Politico reporter, obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $ 80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT& T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés. “In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.
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Michael Lewis (The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy)
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Clark’s real estate agent turned out to be one of those loud, garrulous people who, as they drive, insist on making eye contact with the passengers in the back seat. ‘You want to see Scott Cook’s house?’ she hollered over her shoulder to a terrified Mr and Mrs Jim Barksdale. Scott Cook was the chairman of Intuit, the financial software company. ‘Is it for sale?’ asked Barksdale. ‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Then I don’t want to see it,’ said Barksdale. Clark’s realtor ignored him and squealed through this enormous bronze gate and into Scott Cook’s driveway. Out of the house shot Mrs Scott Cook to investigate this intrusion. Clark’s realtor had panicked, backed up and tried to make a quick getaway but ended up rolling back into Mrs Cook’s newly planted garden. There she became stuck in the mud. Wheels spun, plants flew. Mrs Cook was livid. She looked at Barksdale as if he were some kind of criminal. They had to call a fire truck and a tow truck to extract him, his wife, and Clark’s realtor from the garden. The episode lasted an hour.
”
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Michael Lewis (The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story)
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Many major automakers have established research centers in Silicon Valley to work on autonomy, including Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, and GM. The newcomers—Apple, Lucid Motors, Faraday Future, Byton, and Nio—have made autonomy central to their business models and established software development teams in California. Che He Jia and Singulato Motors are working on the technology in Beijing and Shanghai. In the meantime, other tech companies and start-ups, such as Uber, Lyft, Comma.ai, Nauto, Luminar, Aurora, Caracal, Starsky Robotics, and Zoox, are all chasing variations of the self-driving prize, be it for cars, buses, or trucks.
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
“
So, dinner for thirty-five, forty people. Dagou flips through his notebook. All of his earlier plans now are meager and uninteresting, except for the fresh ducks brining in the refrigerator. Brenda has never eaten Peking duck. He imagines her biting into the finest, most crackling chestnut skin. Enjoying, in addition, a few banquet plates to keep it company. Cold chicken, and the hollow-hearted greens. Plus the stew he promised Winnie. And chicken. He's already reserved the chicken, but his mother believes in combining flavors, she believes in many meats. He has promised her seafood---he can go to the seafood truck. For shrimp to accompany. There must be a shrimp dish---shrimp with mounds of diced ginger and scallions, or salted shrimp in the shell---or both, perhaps. Also, a second seafood dish. To serve only shrimp would be petty and small. Shrimp themselves, so very small. What else? Fish, of course---he's been planning to have fish all along. Soft-shell crab? He imagines how Brenda will glow when he serves platter after platter of soft-shell crab. Of course, she's never tasted it---he knows this because every bit of Chinese food she's ever eaten came from his own hands. He imagines her crunching through the crisp shell.
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Lan Samantha Chang (The Family Chao)
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MSA
“
A company can sustain a premium price only if it offers something that is both unique and valuable to its customers. Apple’s hot, must-have gadgets have commanded premium prices. Ditto for the high-speed Madrid-to-Barcelona train and the trucks Paccar creates for owner-operators. Create more buyer value and you raise what economists call willingness to pay (WTP), the mechanism that makes it possible for a company to charge a higher price relative to rival offerings.
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Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
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A second representative question is, Can you position your company where the forces are weakest? Consider the strategy developed by heavy-truck maker Paccar. This is another industry with an uninviting structure: There are many big, powerful buyers who operate large fleets of trucks; they are price sensitive because trucks represent a large piece of their costs. Rivalry is based on price because (a) the industry is capital intensive, with cyclical downturns, and (b) most trucks are built to regulated standards and therefore look the same. On the supplier side, unions exercise considerable power, as do the large independent suppliers of engines and drive train components. Truck buyers face substitutes for their services (rail, for example), which puts an overall cap on truck prices. Between 1993 and 2007, the industry average return on invested capital (ROIC) was 10.5 percent. Yet over the same period Paccar, a company with about 20 percent of the North American heavy-truck market, earned 31.6 percent. Paccar has developed a positioning within this difficult industry where the forces are the weakest. Its target customer is the individual owner-operator, the guy whose truck is his home away from home. This customer will pay more for the status conferred by Paccar’s Kenworth and Peterbilt brands and for the ability to add a slew of custom features such as a luxurious sleeper cabin or plush leather seats.
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Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
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I write all day. I have no idea what I’m doing. I have never heard of narrative structure or theme or concept or act 1, act 2, act 3. I work entirely on instinct. I’m writing, as I said, about Burton Lines, about the trucking company. I’m writing about myself.
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Steven Pressfield (Govt Cheese: A Memoir)
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What has carried this company so far so fast is the relationship that we, the managers, have been able to enjoy with our associates. By “associates” we mean those employees out in the stores and in the distribution centers and on the trucks who generally earn an hourly wage for all their hard work. Our relationship with the associates is a partnership in the truest sense.
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Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
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These good white liberals want monuments and wilderness to protect the places they recreate, to keep out companies that want to suck the fossil fuels out from under the sandstone. But the oil and gas will be burned by and large by them, to travel to Utah’s public lands. And it’s used by us - you in your big red Cadillac and me in my Toyota truck - although I’ve recently downgraded to a more fuel-efficient Subaru, the preferred method of transport that’s most often frosted with bike, ski, and boat racks for outdoor enthusiasts across the nation.
The land and those who live off it know this arrangement breeds no symbiosis. We all want to get to, and get off on, a body corralled and commodified. Our orgasmic need for release and relief eclipses the fact this is the living, breathing body of the Beloved - the naked desert that has demarcated and delineated - ribbed, we believe, for our pleasure.
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Amy Irvine (Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness)
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Rig On Wheels
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MORE THAN SEVEN million people in the Chicago area, something like ten million road vehicles, but only one white truck had been reported stolen in the twenty-four-hour period between Sunday and Monday. It was a white Ford Econoline. Owned and operated by a South Side electrician. His insurance company made him empty the truck at night, and store his stock and tools inside his shop. Anything left inside the truck was not covered. That was the rule. It was an irksome rule, but on Monday morning when the guy came out to load up and the truck was gone, it started to look like a rule which made a whole lot of sense. He had reported the theft to the insurance broker and the police, and he was not expecting to hear much more about it. So he was duly impressed when two FBI agents turned up, forty-eight hours later, asking all kinds of urgent questions.
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Lee Child (Die Trying (Jack Reacher, #2))
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Andy Anderson was able to redraw the meatpacking business in part because he was new to the industry2. He was a city boy, whose first job in the meat business was in an urban butcher shop, not a slaughterhouse. This last part helps explain perhaps the most important innovation behind IBP, the one that made the grocery store butchers loathe the company. Just like Tyson, IBP figured out that it could butcher meat more efficiently at its meat factories than butchers could do in their stores. IBP was the first company to popularize a product called “boxed beef.” Rather than ship whole carcasses to retail locations, like the other meatpackers, IBP cut up the cattle along a factory line. It bagged the parts in airtight packages and shipped them in boxes in refrigerated trucks. Boxes, needless to say, could be stacked in a truck a lot more neatly than carcasses. IBP didn’t ship the parts of a cow that butchers cut off and threw away. Boxed beef was the most efficient way to ship beef, and IBP had developed its own shipping network to do it, saving money every step of the way. Boxed beef drove butchers out of business and caused many of them to launch boycotts against IBP. But the boycotts were pointless. The American appetite for convenience made boxed beef a fixture in all the big retail chains during the 1960s and 1970s. Beef finally started to catch up with chicken as something that could be plucked off the shelf and cooked in a hurry.
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Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
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But just across the U.S. border, up in the tar sands of Alberta, there is another equally horrific image. A gaping pit, an abyss on its way to becoming the size of Florida, exists where Imperial Oil -- the largest company in the world -- is using the wild Athabasca River to pressure-wash underground sand formations that they gouge up like honeycombs, using huge amounts of energy and clean fresh water to steam the oil from those sands. Native people in the area are dying from drastically abnormal incidences of rare cancers, and Imperial Oil is seeking to transport more giant mining equipment -- on trucks over two hundred feet long and three stories high-- up the Snake River to Lewiston, Idaho, along the same route where the Nez Perce tribe rescued Lewis and Clark and directed them to the Pacific, shortly before the U.S. betrayed the Nez Perce and chased them toward Canada before killing them. (Rick Bass)
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Melvin McLeod (editor)
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banging sound comes from within the truck, and I wrench open the front door to see what’s going on. I jog outside just in time to see my husband emerging from the truck with one of his friends who has agreed to help with the move. I wanted to hire a moving company, but he insisted he could do it himself with his friends helping. And I have to admit, we need to save every penny if we want to make our mortgage payments. Even at ten percent below asking, our dream house wasn’t cheap. My husband is holding up one half of our living room sofa, his T-shirt plastered to his torso with sweat. I cringe because he’s in his forties and the last thing he needs is to throw out his back. I expressed this concern to him when we were planning the move, and he acted like it was the silliest thing he’s ever heard, even though I throw out my back every other week. And it’s not from lifting a sofa. It’s from, like, sneezing. “Will you please be careful, Enzo?” I say.
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Freida McFadden (The Housemaid Is Watching (The Housemaid, #3))
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It was the early nineties, and Palahniuk was employed at a Portland, Oregon, truck-manufacturing company called Freightliner. Many of his colleagues were well-educated, underutilized guys who felt out of sorts in the world—and they put the blame on the men who’d raised them. “Everybody griped about what skills their fathers hadn’t taught them,” says Palahniuk. “And they griped that their fathers were too busy establishing new relationships and new families all the time and had just written off their previous children.
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Brian Raftery (Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen)
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Any historian who sets out to search for a hero will almost inevitably uncover something of the scoundrel. Heroism, it seems, is visible only through a long lens. And so it was with Nikolai Rezanov. I followed the man's shade from the boulevards and palaces of St Petersburg to the squat rain-dripping counting houses of Pskov, where he passed a dreary provincial apprenticeship. Travelling by train, coal truck and bouncing Lada, I tracked him from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, once the capital of Russia's wild east, into the land of the Buryats and to the borders of China. I crunched along the black sand beaches of Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka and the black sand beaches of Kodiak Island, Alaska, at opposite ends of the Pacific. I stood in the remains of the presidio where Rezanov had danced with Conchita and shivered in the rain on the windy outcrop known as Castle Rock in Sitka, once the citadel of New Archangel, where he had spent the cold, hungry winter of 1805–6. And I spent hours – many hours, since Rezanov was a bureaucrat, a courtier and an ambassador who wrote something almost every day of his life – in the company of the reports, diaries and letters in which Rezanov described his ideas and circumstances voluminously, but his feelings only barely. It is only in the last three years of his life, far from home and viciously bullied by the officers of the round-the-world voyage he believed he was commanding, that the man himself begins to emerge from the officialese, indignant and in pain.
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Owen Matthews (Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America)
“
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Edge Auto Rental
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Our towing company is highly experienced in unwanted car removal or emergency towing of vehicles. As one of the largest and most respected towing company in Los Angeles CA, we have established our brand being recognised as most reliable, professional, on-time and affordable. Our customers have come to rely on consistent high level of service they receive from Emergency Towing Service in Los Angeles CA. With over 8 years of experience you have repeated this line delete it from one place.
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Tow Truck Los Angeles Towing Service
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Emergency Towing Service has the latest technology & equipment in their towing trucks, so they can transport your motor vehicle or motorcycle damage free. We also transport boats and remove Old cars. We are equipped with car ramps for your lowered vehicle & professional handle bar tie down straps for your Motorcycle or scooter. Emergency Towing Service offer their customers top notch 24 hours a day 7 days a week, door to door service. Our experienced towing staff in Oceanside CA will pick up and deliver to any location that is accessible to our fleet.
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Tow Truck Oceanside CA Towing Service
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His latest job [My Dad] had been as a truck driver, picking up and delivering diapers. For months, he had complained bitterly about the odor and the mess, saying it was the worst job in the world. But now that he had lost it, he seemed to want it back.
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Howard Schultz (Pour Your Heart Into It - How Starbucks Built A Company One Cup At A Time)
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Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so different from Travis in some ways.5.22 He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,” Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so much more he could have accomplished.” Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him. His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines. Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again. By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores, was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it. That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in more than fifty countries.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)
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Emergency Towing Service has the latest technology & equipment in their towing trucks, so they can transport your motor vehicle or motorcycle damage free. We also transport boats and remove Old cars. We are equipped with car ramps for your lowered vehicle & professional handle bar tie down straps for your Motorcycle or scooter. Emergency Towing Service offer their customers top notch 24 hours a day 7 days a week, door to door service. Our experienced towing staff in La Jolla CA will pick up and deliver to any location that is accessible to our fleet.
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Tow Truck La Jolla Towing Service
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Emergency Towing Service has the latest technology & equipment in their towing trucks, so they can transport your motor vehicle or motorcycle damage free. We also transport boats and remove Old cars. We are equipped with car ramps for your lowered vehicle & professional handle bar tie down straps for your Motorcycle or scooter. Emergency Towing Service offer their customers top notch 24 hours a day 7 days a week, door to door service. Our experienced towing staff in Poway CA will pick up and deliver to any location that is accessible to our fleet.
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Tow Truck Poway, CA Towing Service
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The club owns a legit security company that travels alongside semi-loads of expensive goods to guarantee that the truck makes it to point B from point A without any problems. People don’t know it, but trucks being jacked for their loads happens more often than one would think. The security company is a ride-along bouncer.
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Katie McGarry
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She had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater number of everyone I'd known. I felt then that these men - these 'fathers' - were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in our ranks. The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more - that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never truly know. And she was the kind of black girl who'd been told as a child that she had better be smart because her looks wouldn't save her, and then told as a young woman that she was really pretty for a dark-skinned girl. And so there was, all about her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same knowledge I'd glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach for his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living room, watching the golden-haired boys with their toy trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great barrier between the world and me.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
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These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings.2 These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets—and most tenants don’t even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb.
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
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Google’s trucks would pull up to libraries and quietly walk away with boxes of books to be quickly scanned and returned. “If you don’t have a reason to talk about it, why talk about it?” Larry Page would argue, when confronted with pleas to publicly announce the existence of its program. The company’s lead lawyer on this described bluntly the roughshod attitude of his colleagues: “Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law.” In this case precedent was the centuries-old protections of intellectual property, and the consequences were a potential devastation of the publishing industry and all the writers who depend on it. In other words, Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions. What motivated Google in its pursuit? On one level, the answer is clear: To maintain dominance, Google’s search engine must be definitive. Here was a massive store of human knowledge waiting to be stockpiled and searched. On the other hand, there are less obvious motives: When the historian of technology George Dyson visited the Googleplex to give a talk, an engineer casually admitted, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” If that’s true, then it’s easier to understand Google’s secrecy. The world’s greatest collection of knowledge was mere grist to train machines, a sacrifice for the singularity. Google is a company without clear boundaries, or rather, a company with ever-expanding boundaries. That’s why it’s chilling to hear Larry Page denounce competition as a wasteful concept and to hear him celebrate cooperation as the way forward. “Being negative is not how we make progress and most important things are not zero sum,” he says. “How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?” And it’s even more chilling to hear him contemplate how Google will someday employ more than one million people, a company twenty times larger than it is now. That’s not just a boast about dominating an industry where he faces no true rivals, it’s a boast about dominating something far vaster, a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.
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Franklin Foer (World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech)
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That was when he knew he had to get a job somehow on the Powell estate to allow him to be there without arousing suspicion. He drove past Powell’s property and observed the oversized truck with the PERFECT ESTATES sign on it. He looked up the company and applied for a job. As a kid he had worked for a landscaper and picked up everything he needed to know about the job. It didn’t take a genius to mow a lawn or clip hedges and bushes or to plant flowers in the places pointed out by the boss.
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Mary Higgins Clark (I've Got You Under My Skin (Under Suspicion, #1))
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Of course, it turned out that there is no more reason for one company to own networks all over the world than there is for UPS to own all the roads on which its trucks travel.
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Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
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Sure—I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.” The driver, getting slowly into the truck, considered the parts of this answer. If he refused now, not only was he not a good guy, but he was forced to carry a sticker, was not allowed to have company. If he took in the hitch-hiker he was automatically a good guy and also he was not one whom any rich bastard could kick around. He knew he was being trapped, but he couldn’t see a way out. And he wanted to be a good
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Anonymous
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Immaculate Carpet Cleaning offers you the best in cleaning services. We use the best and most advanced processes and techniques to clean your carpet, tile, grout, and mattresses the right way. Our truck-mounted high-powered steam extraction process heats water to 185 to 200 degrees, a temperature that allows us to loosen and remove stains while also killing germs, bacteria, and dust mites on contact. Cleaning your carpet the right way will make your carpet last longer and save you money over the long run.
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Jamie Palmer
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Who better than Wal-Mart, after all, to make a kilowatt of electricity go twice as far, or a gallon of fuel move our trucks move three times the distance?" -Wal-Mart ad
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Charles Fishman (The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy)
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So why do these guys hate your guts?” “Because they believe strip-mining is a good thing. It provides jobs, and there are few jobs around here. They’re not bad people, they’re just misinformed and misguided. Mountaintop removal is killing our communities. It has single-handedly wiped out tens of thousands of jobs. People are forced to leave their homes because of blasting, dust, sludge, and flooding. The roads aren’t safe because of these massive trucks flying down the mountains. I filed five wrongful death cases in the past five years, folks crushed by trucks carrying ninety tons of coal. Many towns have simply vanished. The coal companies often buy up surrounding homes and tear them down. Every county in coal country has lost population in the past twenty years. Yet a lot of people, including those three gentlemen over there, think that a few jobs are better than none.” “If they are gentlemen, then why
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John Grisham (Gray Mountain)
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In that case, the truck driver took the stand, swore to tell the truth, then lied for three hours. He said Gretchen crossed the center line and caused the wreck, made it sound as though she was trying to kill herself. The coal companies are clever and they never send down one truck at a time. They travel in pairs, so there’s always a witness ready to testify.
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John Grisham (Gray Mountain)
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Schools had let out early and most businesses were closed in anticipation of the storm. My last ride dropped me off in Belfast, telling me that he was trying to get as far as Augusta, before State Road 3 became impassable. Standing alongside the two-lane coastal highway with darkness not far off, I was half thinking that I should turn back. My mind was made up for me when I stepped back off the road, making room for a big State DOT dump truck with a huge yellow snowplow. His airbrakes wheezed as he braked, coming to a stop, at the same time lifting his plow to keep from burying me. The driver couldn’t believe that I was out hitchhiking in a blizzard. This kind of weather in Maine is no joke! The driver told me that the year before a body had been found under a snow bank during the spring thaw. Never mind, I was invincible and nothing like that could happen to me, or so I thought. He got me as far as Camden and suggested that I get a room. “This storm is only going to get worse,” he cautioned as I got off. I waved as he drove off. Nevertheless, still hoping that things would improve, I was determined to continue….
My next ride was not for quite a while, but eventually an old car fishtailed to a stop. It was a clunker, covered with snow and I couldn’t really see in. Opening the front door, I realized that both seats were occupied. “Sorry, I’ll get into the back,” I said. Opening the back door, I saw that both people in the front were women. The car was cold and they explained that the heater didn’t work but they sounded like they felt sorry for me. “Where are you going, sailor?” the woman behind the wheel asked. “It’s going to snow all night,” the other one added. Again, I didn’t know if I really wanted to continue. “Well, I was going to New Jersey but maybe I should find a place here in Camden.” “What? No way!” I heard them say. “Come stay with us,” the younger one said with an interesting smile. She looked cute peering at me from under the hood of her green parka. The fur surrounding the hood still had some snow on it, so I assumed that they hadn’t come from that far away. I don’t know what I was thinking, when I agreed to their offer of staying with them, but it didn’t escape me that the woman driving was also attractive. I assumed that she must have been in her late thirties or early forties. The woolen scarf around her neck was loosely tied and her brown hair was up in a knot. “We’re just coming into town to get some bacon and eggs for breakfast,” the older one said. “We could use a little company. Come on,” the younger of the two, invitingly added. How could I say “no” to this kind of flirtatiousness? Giving my name, I said, “I’m Hank, and I certainly appreciate your offer.” They pulled into the snow-covered parking lot of a local food market. “We’re Rita and Connie. Let’s get in out of the cold before we freeze to death.
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Hank Bracker
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Supplying buns to McDonald’s was the break of a lifetime for many of these men. Mary Ann Bakery, for example, was a small organization when it started dealing with us. Now it has a plant with a quarter-mile-long conveyor belt for cooling buns after they’re baked. The firm uses more than a million pounds of flour a month to make buns for us. Mary Ann also has a trucking company that services McDonald’s.
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Ray Kroc (Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's)
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Under Tyson, all these businesses have been drawn onto one property. The company controls every step of meat production, with each aspect being centrally directed from the company’s headquarters in Springdale. The company’s control spans the lifetime of the animals it raises. Before there is a chicken or an egg, there is Tyson. The company’s geneticists select which kinds of birds will be grown. They breed and crossbreed the avian bloodlines to engineer meaty breasts and rapid metabolism in the same way automobiles are first cut from clay, then engineered on a drafting board before they’re built. The birds begin their brief life at the Tyson plant, within the heated hive of its industrial hatchery. The company produces more than two billion eggs a year, but none of them are sold to consumers. They are all hatched inside the company’s buildings and the chicks are transported in Tyson trucks to Tyson farms. The Tyson trucks retrieve the birds six weeks later, bringing them back to the plant, where the chickens are funneled into chutes in the side of the slaughterhouses
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Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
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Back in Springdale, Don Tyson focused almost exclusively on the McDonald’s account for long stretches of time. As he explained it to Jim Blair and Joe Fred Starr, Don planned to piggyback on McDonald’s franchise system to bring processed chicken to every street corner. In his estimation, McDonald’s had the best distribution system of any fast-food franchise in the country, and that’s what drew him to the company. Rather than deliver Tyson’s product to several depots of refrigerated warehouses, Tyson could deliver to just one location: the McDonald’s distribution center. Then the restaurant chain would use its own trucks to ship the product out to its network of stores.
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Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
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The task was possible because Erwin had discovered a profitable loophole in the U.S. tax code. Unlike most U.S. businesses, family farms were allowed to use an outdated form of bookkeeping called “cash-basis” accounting. Virtually every other company had to use a different kind, called “accrual” accounting, which better reflected the true profitability of complex corporations. Cash-basis accounting is simple. A company records its expenses only when it pays out the actual cash for them. And it only books income when the actual cash comes in the door. By contrast, companies using accrual accounting methods record their expenses when they sign a contract to pay someone, even if the cash hasn’t actually left their account yet. Farmers were allowed to use cash-basis accounting because it was simpler, and Congress didn’t think small farms had the money to hire accountants for complicated recordkeeping. So a farmer would only record his expenses for seed when he paid for it, and he only booked his income for grain when he cashed the check. Erwin realized the cash-basis tax provision might apply to Tyson Feed and Hatchery. The company employed nearly four hundred people, many of them working in factory conditions in the slaughterhouse, and it invested millions of dollars in industrial plants for the feed mill, hatchery, and fleet of trucks. But Tyson’s sole purpose was producing meat. Don and John Tyson maintained a majority ownership, and they were certainly family. So under U.S. tax code, their multimillion-dollar corporation was a family farm.
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Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
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The structure of operations also encourages connection. Any employee can attend meetings of any department, including Zingerman's board meeting. A truck driver can help plan a menu, and a chef can help strategize on the online marketing strategy. To Ari [Weinzweig], part of the benefit of this is disabusing people of the notion that leadership always knows what they are doing. It's okay to acknowledge that everyone is fallible even as they strive to make the company stronger.
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Vivek H. Murthy (Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness)
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Truck Driver Recruiting - Exhausted truckers may have slower reaction times, damage senses, and difficulty staying awake behind the wheel. Truck Driver Recruiting Companies always focus on active driving; and for this trucker needs a Healthy Work Schedule. To know more contact us.
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Rig On Wheels
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The Shwe Byain Phyu Group of Companies founded its first company, Manaw Thitar, In 1996. Manaw Thitar, founded by SBP’s Founder and Chairman Mr. Thein Win Zaw commenced its operation in Yangon by trading and distributing petroleum products with 6 by 1 barge and 3 tank trucks. Since then, SBP has grown to become a wholly family-owned business comprising of several private companies.
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Thein Win Zaw
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In attendance tonight will be Dominic Kincaid, one of the biggest traffickers of guns and coke. He runs it all through his national trucking company, DK Trucking. MyKyng Masters, who is the official CEO of the CF ports and boss of the Masters family. Samad “Shadow” Baker and Kaleb “Cannon” Barnes, who also control guns and cocaine in the city. Ironically, I learned this week that Kaleb is actually Rhian’s cousin.
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Charity Shane (One Eighty)
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Yes.” “This house,” she continued, “contains a few thousand books. They are mostly novels. I grew so disillusioned with psychology and all the social sciences that I trashed every book of that kind. At one time, I enjoyed reading history, but most of what is published these days is so unhistorical that one of my primary arteries, less elastic year by year, will pop if I read more of that. I engaged a document-disposal company to come by with a truck-size shredder and watched while they turned all those volumes into confetti. I came to the conclusion that truth could be found only in good fiction, and for years I took enormous pleasure in reading well-written novels. But a moment came when I’d had more than enough of the truths those works conveyed, and since then I have read nothing other than books of jokes intended to be left by the toilet for those occasions when one’s system is not functioning optimally. I’ve kept all the novels for sentimental reasons. You may read any you wish, but you must never attempt to have a conversation with me about them. Is that clear?
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Dean Koontz (The Bad Weather Friend)
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From the railroads to trucking firms to warehouses, major companies had long treated their workers like costs to be contained rather than human beings with families, medical challenges, and other demands. Employers assumed that they did not have to worry
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Peter S. Goodman (How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain)
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Farmers take out bank loans to finance the operations, and rural banks have become proficient at helping the farmers become indebted. The banks have learned to break down a farmer’s debt payments into a schedule that perfectly coincides with the life cycle of a flock of chickens. The farmer pays the bank every six weeks or so, just when his paycheck arrives from Tyson. In many cases Tyson cooperates with the bank and draws the loan payment from the farmer’s pay, directly depositing it into the bank. So with every flock, the farmer is racing against his debt, hoping the birds Tyson delivers will gain enough weight to earn a payment that will cover the mortgage and bills for electricity, heating fuel, and water. Tyson has offloaded ownership to the farms, but it maintains control. The company always owns the chickens, even after it drops them off at the farm; it doesn’t sell baby chicks to the farmer and buy them back when they’re grown. So the farmer never owns his business’s most important asset. Tyson also owns the feed the birds eat, which is mixed at the Tyson plant according to the company’s recipe and then delivered to the farm on Tyson’s trucks according to a schedule that Tyson dictates.
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Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
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Tell me more about how you know Matteo.” “As you may know, his family runs the waste management industry in the city. The large number of trucks they run requires a substantial amount of auto parts and tires throughout the year, which he acquires through a contract with my boss’s company.
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Jill Ramsower (Impossible Odds (The Five Families, #4))
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It is not easy to hold this kind of quality leadership for three big reasons. First, no one will believe you have the longest-lasting trucks until they have already lasted a long time on the road. It’s a reputation that takes a while to earn and can be lost quickly. Second, designing a very high-quality piece of machinery is not a textbook problem. Designers learn from other designers over time, and the company accumulates these nuggets of wisdom by providing a good, stable place to work for talented engineers. Third, it is usually quite difficult to convince buyers to pay an up-front premium for future savings, even if the numbers are clear. People tend to be more myopic than economic theory would suggest.
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Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
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AFTER TEN HOURS OF hard labor beneath a hot sun, Elsa climbed down from the truck. She had her work chit in one gloved hand. It wasn’t worth much, but it was something. The company store charged the camp residents ten percent to convert the chit to credit, but they couldn’t cash it anywhere else; if they wanted cash instead of credit, they had to pay interest. So, in point of fact, as little as they were paid, it was really even ten percent less.
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Kristin Hannah (The Four Winds)
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For instance, companies like Schneider National, a leading TL firm similar to Leviathan with about fourteen thousand trucks, decline many applicants based on motor vehicle records, criminal history, or spotty work histories. In 2004, Schneider reported fielding 320,000 inquiries about jobs and sending out 112,000 applications. It got about two-thirds (74,200) of these applications back, and interviewed about half (37,700) of those workers. Just twenty-seven thousand passed Schneider’s interviews. Only 9,959, less than three percent, of those who inquired that year were ultimately hired.3
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Steve Viscelli (The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream)