Wages

Busy Commercial Kitchen

For a long time I was super annoyed at the fancy buildings fast-food franchises erected to house their businesses. I thought it was an extravagant waste of money: if they didn't spend so much money on the building, they could afford to pay their employees a decent wage. Eventually I did some rough calculations and realized the cost of the fancy building was a small fraction of their monthly expenses. Wages are the big factor. Walk into a McDonald's most any time and you are liable to see a dozen people working. Figuring

• $10 an hour
• times 10 people
• times 16 hours a day
• times 30 days a month
• comes to $48,000 a month for wages

Rent / lease / mortgage on a prime location might be as much as half of that. Figure another $25,000 for food and supplies and you are looking at $100,000 a month. That's a heck of a lot of hamburgers.

Opinions differ on minimum wage laws. If our economy was booming, and booming so much that there was a shortage of workers, we wouldn't need such laws. But American industry has become so productive that we don't need very many workers to to keep us supplied with all we need. So we need minimum wage laws to keep people from getting trapped in working poverty. But that also means we have more people unemployed, which is another problem.

What we need is more people willing to step up and start a business. Not everyone has what it takes to start a business, and that might be what the problem is. Starting a business requires an idea, which isn't too hard to come by, but it also takes drive, commitment and a thick enough skin to deal with all the petty bullshit you are going to run into. So the next time you are offended by an obnoxious bull headed person charging through the public plaza, remember, that is exactly the kind of person we need because they are the ones who get things going. (You might ask why they can't be nice about it, but that might just be the straw that breaks that camel's back. Step back, give them some room. You don't want to get any on you.)

P.S. $15 is the hourly rate showing up on help wanted signs around here.

Refugee Camps for the Homeless?

Refugee Camp in Myanmar - APP

One problem in big cities in the USA is the large number of homeless people. Many of the proposed solutions to this problem suffer from their own problem, to wit,they presume is that all a homeless person needs a chance, a leg up, a helping hand, and they could get back on straight and narrow and become contributing members of society. I bought into that idea for a long time. Now I realize that while there may be some people like that, they are a distinct minority. There are a fair number of people whose mental problems make them incapable of holding down a job. But the biggest problem might be those people who are not interested in working and are perfectly happy eking out an existence on the fringes of society.

I'm thinking what we need is a campground for the homeless. I suspect the only reason the homeless congregate in downtown areas is because that's where the soup kitchens are. If we could find an area outside of town that would make a suitable campground and persuade one of these soup kitchens to set up shop there, we might find that the homeless would migrate there of their own accord. Basically we would be setting up a refugee camp for our own citizens who can't, or won't, hack it in our dog-eat-dog capitalist society.

Sorting out who would pay for it and who would govern it would give all concerned plenty to argue about in the coming months (years), but it would alleviate the immediate problem for all concerned. I can't imagine camping on city sidewalks or on the shoulder of Interstate freeways is something people aspire to. Okay, there's one in every crowd, but aside from the occasional nut-case, I think everyone would prefer camping where you aren't getting told to 'move on' by the police, or worrying about whether a stray motor vehicle is going to flatten you.

P.S. About the picture. I looked for a picture of a nice small refugee camp, one you would be happy to send your lay-about friends to, but all I found were pictures of ginormous tent cities. They seem to be becoming permanent fixtures in many parts of the world. Maybe it's time we got on board the express train to purgatory.

What's the caliber again?

Kalishnikov CV-1

Kalishnikov, the same company that brought us the AK-47 assault rifle, is working on an electric car. They unveiled this prototype at the International Military and Technical Forum. The press is all a-twitter with useless noise (more powerful than a locomotive! faster than a speeding bullet!). It's not a bad looking car, though it is reminiscent of 40 year old Russian designs. Maybe it will appeal more to people looking for a practical electric car rather than a flashy status symbol, like the Tesla.

Via Ross

Previous posts about Russian motor vehicles.

• Russian Lux-mobile
• Uber?
• Russian Motorcycles

FORD v FERRARI

FORD v FERRARI | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX
When I was a kid back in high school, I was enamored with Group 7 Can-Am race cars. To my mechanical brain they were the perfect American way to go fast: Big engine, chassis made of flat panels of aluminum riveted together and a handful of mechanical bits to hold the wheels. We didn't need fancy, we did big and simple and went like greased lightning.

The Ford GT-40 was the epitome of this genre. James May of Top Gear fame did a show about it. While it was a great show, it was done in James May style, meaning it was almost totally devoid of drama. This movie promises to be entertaining.

I have learned a bit about myself and people in general in the intervening 50 years. Getting people to work together toward a common goal is, to my mind at least, a much more difficult task than building a race car. I could build a race car. Getting a crew together to campaign it would be dang near impossible task for me.

Previous Ford GT posts.

Via Ross

Very Punny

Via Dad's Deadpool Blog

P.S. This prompted me to see how many Clint related posts I had made. Turns out there are a bunch, so I added the 'Clint Eastwood' label.

Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban

Sébastien le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban

Vauban, for short. Reading the chapter about the attack on Belle Isle in The Knife Man. When the British captured Belle Isle, the French retreated to the Citadel Vauban on the northeast side of the island. The French held out there for a month before they threw in the towel.

Googling "Citadel Vauban" takes me to Lille, which is on the other side of France, which is not what I wanted. One thing leads to another and I find that there were a bunch of Citadel Vaubans in France, all designed by the same guy, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban. He was quite the visionary.

Plan for Citadelle de Lille
Designed by Vauban

Zoom sur Lille has a couple of things to say about this fortress [translated by Google]:

Louis XIV wishes to defend this new frontier . Engineer of the king since 1655, Vauban seduced Louis XIV and Louvois (Secretary of State of the War) thanks to a plan with 5 bastions which conceals the project of a citadel with 4 branches of the engineer Nicolas de Clerville. Vauban, however, retains the location, a swampy area northwest of the city, irrigated by the rivers Deûle and Bucquet . This rather hostile terrain contributes to the defense of the site by a flood system around the stronghold. Indeed when one floods the foot of the ramparts, the work of undermining (digging of the gallery at the base of the ramparts to place mines) is no longer possible. Having successfully managed several seats, he uses his experience as a landlord to draw the one he calls the "Queen of Citadels".

I've heard about sappers "(digging of the gallery at the base of the ramparts to place mines)" and I've heard about moats, but I always thought moats were just a barrier to keep attackers from being able to approach the walls. I never put the two together. I guess that might be why Vauban has a Wikipedia entry and I don't.

When I first saw this image (Plan for Citadelle de Lille) I took it for M.C. Escher-like exercise, but it's not, it's a plan. The blue areas are waterways.

Citadel Vauban Belle Isle

You can see the similarities between the Belle Isle Citadel and Vauban's plan for Lille.

Stabbing

Attack and capture of Belle Isle in 1761 by British forces*

I am reading The Knife Man by Wendy Moore, a book about John Hunter and the birth of modern surgery. After getting his fill of dissecting dead bodies in London, John decides he needs to start earning a living, so he joins the army as a surgeon just in time to embark on an expedition to capture Belle Isle.

While there he gets involved in all the usual army surgeon stuff of the 18th Century, i.e. hacking, slicing and stitching, to put it mildly. But being the kind of guy he is, he also makes some observations, one of which is that wounded soldiers are as often likely to heal without any treatment as they are if subjected to treatment by a surgeon. A case in point is a soldier "shot through and through the breast, recovered perfectly" (page 94).

Konya, Turkey, 1240 or thereabouts

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, deep into Season 4 of Ertugrul, one of the girls takes it upon herself to journey to Konya to stab one of the guys. We won't say who because spoilers. 

Concealed Stabber

Her weapon looks like a big ice pick, possibly because you aren't allowed to carry blades into the presence of Mr. Important (and an ice pick is easier to conceal?). She manages to stab him three times in the abdomen, twice from the back and once from the front. Tragically, in spite of these wounds, he manages to overpower and kill her. Unfortunately, he doesn't die.

Yes, it's a TV show where dozens of people are laid to waste in every episode, and primary characters recover from what appear to be fatal injuries, but still, I thought it showed a little thought by the people making the show. Stabbing someone with a knife blade would more likely have been fatal. Recovering from being stabbed by an ice pick is at least plausible.

I guess as long as you don't cut any major blood vessels, or impact the heart, any kind of injury isn't going to kill you. Of course, being as the body is riddled with major blood vessels, getting stabbed without hitting one of them is pure chance.

*Transcription of the text under the image:
R. Short del,                                                                                                                                                             J Smith sculp,

An exact Representation of the Attack made by the Britifh Fleet, under the Command of 

Adm.¹ Kepple the 8th, of April,1761 at Port Andre, on the Island of Belle Isle.

London,Printed for Rob.^t Sayer Print t;Mapseller,No.53 in Fleet Street.