Bill Packets

your friendly neighborhood freight broker

[Bill Packets @BillPackets]

@carrierwhisper1 @CollinRugg this made me laugh way too much

[sarah @tradepartty]

My bf will be like let me put something on tv and it’s a YouTube video of a guy deep frying action figures and then he’ll start touching my boobs

[Bill Packets @BillPackets]

@John__Ferguson are those benchmarks linked to anything or just what you've noticed?

[Bill Packets @BillPackets]

@John__Ferguson this is nice. goes right along with what i firmly believe, which is that you pretty much need 1-2/3 data points to get whatever it is that what you want to get

this is such a great short hand to get a really good feel for the overall market

[₿ΞΞnThereDoneThat Capital 賢い @BeenThereCap]

OMG, what did Citibank due to @matt_levine over the weekend to make him mad? This is hilariously brutal. Enjoy. Although you kind-of need to have read his accounts of the Citibank screw-ups over the years to fully appreciate the build-up to this capstone literary event.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I requested a simple band of rubber from my host. She gestured to a drawer, and the very gesture told me everything I needed to know about American chaos.

One drawer. Every household. Always in the kitchen, and it holds the same things in every home in the nation: batteries of unknown charge. Rubber bands. A screwdriver too short for any screw. Birthday candles. Soy sauce packets. Three pens, one of which works. And a key.

The key is the part I cannot release. I have now surveyed eleven households. ALL have the key. NONE know what it opens.

"What does this open?" I asked Sue, holding it up.

"No idea. Been there since we moved in."

"Then why keep it?"

She looked at me as if I had proposed burning a shrine. "You can't throw away a KEY."

She is right. I felt it the moment she said it. A key answers to a lock somewhere. To discard it is to abandon a door you may never find. Eleven households, each guarding one orphaned promise, between the candles and the takeout menus.

In Japan, we made a national art of putting things in their proper place. I assumed the junk drawer was that art's absence. Wrong. The junk drawer IS the proper place — for things whose place has not yet been revealed. Not disorder. Faith, with a handle.

I confess my crime. I once organized Dale's junk drawer while waiting for him. Small bins. Categories. He opened it, stood silent, and said, "Where's the thing?" He could not name the thing. He knew only that it could no longer be found. I had alphabetized a treasure map. We do not speak of it.

The drawer does not need order. It needs to be opened with hope, and closed with acceptance.

I keep a junk drawer of my own now. This week it accepted a battery, a twist tie, and a key I found in the yard. I do not know what the key opens.

Into the drawer it goes. Someday, the door will announce itself.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen.

I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify.

In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather.

"Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully.

"Honey, that's what it looks like."

The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it."

I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it.

I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South.

It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent.

"Well?" the waitress asked.

"I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed."

"Everybody does, hon."

Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it.

Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating.

I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden.

It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In America, a warehouse store. A fully roasted chicken costs five dollars, the raw chicken beside it costs seven, and I stood between them like a man between two truths.

Golden. Hot. Seasoned. Spinning in glory under the lights, in a line of its brothers. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents.

I checked the raw birds. Seven dollars. Pale. Cold. You must do everything yourself.

This is not commerce. Commerce does not move backward. Somewhere in this building, mathematics lies defeated.

I asked the man at the counter. "How is the cooked bird cheaper than the raw bird?"

"Been five bucks forever. They keep it that way."

"But the store loses."

"Yep. On purpose."

On purpose. I held my receipt with both hands.

In my land, a lord who lowered the price of rice in a hard winter was remembered for generations. They built him a small shrine. This store does it every day, with chicken, and tells no one.

A woman behind me grew tired of my reverence. "It's just a chicken, sir."

It is not just a chicken. It is a wound the merchant takes on purpose, so that anyone, on any day, with five dollars, eats like a lord. The bird is the message. The price is the vow.

I will confess: I bought two. I did not need two. The second was not hunger. It was gratitude, and it was delicious.

Some prices are not prices. They are promises.

I return every week now. I take one bird. I bow toward the deli, briefly, so as not to alarm the staff. They have begun nodding back.

The vow holds. The bird turns. Five dollars.

Long may it spin.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

The best causal explanation is Obama

[Aaron Cannon @AaronLCannon]

I started talking to my co-founder like Claude

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

“Why haven’t you adopted a child?”

“The 2020 election.”

This has got to be one of the funniest fucking things I’ve ever seen.

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

A Chinese robot wearing a clown wig kicked a child in the stomach.

[Bill Packets @BillPackets]

@FreightAlley still in awe at the psychology of a lot carriers rn. i've offered loads to regulars, they say no, then i tell them what i ended up paying, they say "i would have done it for that but didn't want to offend"

that is playing out everywhere right now. it's insane

[Bill Packets @BillPackets]

@FreightAlley not sure if there's hard data out there but data center construction i am convinced is putting a lot of pressure on open deck loads

[Bill Packets @BillPackets]

@FreightAlley dont think its possible across all equipment types but guarantee on some reefer/open deck lanes you can get that rn...right time/right place

[Cameron Bradford @camerobradford]

My parents would do a bit where my mom would tuck me in and my dad would come in as the "tuck-in inspector" and find my mom's job to be subpar. He'd step out in the hallway and fire her and she'd scream, begging and pleading for her job, even offering sexual favors sometimes.

[Bill Packets @BillPackets]

@barker11818 @FreightAlley i just wait for a load to get dropped and pushed enough to where they just ask me for a rate outside of any tms system...just need a couple of those

[Freight Bandit @Freight_Bandit]

Truckers are COLLUDING to drive up market rates!

They have an asset advantage that brokers simply can never have.

These rates are unfair and no truck driver should EVER be making 20%+ margins. PERIOD.

CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN! WE NEED TRUCKER TRANSPARENCY😡

[Bill Packets @BillPackets]

@TennisTV it wasn't even close, bro got to the ball when it was still above the net

what you talkin bout 'how'