One year ago today: November 27. 2021, remember that golden time
Five years ago today: November 27. 2017, kiss Miami good-bye.
Nine years ago today: November 27. 2013, 22 lawyers.
Random years ago today: November 27. 2015, plastic Pegasus.
Y’day was a workout, moving all that wood. Honest, I took it easy. Remember those pilots who were fired because they would not get the jab? Guess who is begging them to come back? Yep, because so many vaxxed pilots are dropping dead, some in the cockpits, that passengers won’t get on the planes. Guys, hold out for ten times your already outrageous pay. Tell the airlines it is necessary because now you know they could go rogue again at any moment. The British army is now the smallest and weakest in 200 years, what a fall. Samsung TVs can be remotely disabled if the serial number is listed as stolen. (It never stops there, so watch out Samsung owners.) TVBlock is being sold, naturally, as a “safety measure”.
Some Iranian advisers who were helping Russians target suicide drones have been picked off by the Ukrainians. Two things got my interest, one is there is no news how the Ukrainians managed this. The one is the drone. Known as the Shahed 136, it has a range of around 1,000 miles on a scaled-down 50 hp Volkswagen engine that you can buy for about $10,000. It can burn fuel mixed with mineral oil and sounds like a lawnmower. The big draw is the entire weapon only costs $20,000, so cheap they are launched in banks of five at a time from a truckbed. While other countries build drones that carry munitions, the Shahed (Farsi for “witness”) is a suicide weapon. It’s 11 feet long and the payload is 88 pounds.
If the bad guys decided to launch, say, 200 of these things against almost any target in the world, there would not be a thing anybody could do about it. They require a small rocket booster to get airborne and began production around a year ago. The Ukrainians claim the Ruskies have 2,400 of them. The Iranians deny everything. And the Moroccans went full chimp-out on downtown Brussels after a soccer game. Serves them stupid Belgians right. Seventy years ago, a McDonalds hamburger was 15¢, a cheeseburger 19¢, and a triple-thick shake 20¢. I don’t recall when I first ate at a McDonalds but it was some twenty years after I first saw them. Oddly, I did not at first associate the clown advertising with McDonalds or even with food. One year in my teens I live a couple blocks from a McDonalds but never went there until years later when I returned in my 30s.
I’ve run the spreadsheets on building those pallets in batches of 80. The labor is not the assembly, but moving that amount of lumber to the site and then to the buyer. Last Saturday’s picture shows only half the size of a lumber pile needed for a single production run. That is, for the simplest pallet with three skids (which require a forklift blade slot to be cut) you require 240 skids and 800 slats. I want to talk to the guy’s daughter to get the numbers better, as I have a hard time with his accent. The sheer volume of wood that has to be handled makes the price offer much too small.
But I did notice such lumber as he had were already cleaned and neatly stacked, as if they had been delivered by fork lift. A second spreadsheet isolating just the cost of manufacture shows a different story. The pallet place is less than a half-mile away but if they’ll pick up and deliver we might be on to something. Other than that, it is clear already that the other guy knows nothing of decimal points, rather only how to do the work. One thing I calculate is that a fair price for 80 pallets is $800 and the offer is half that.
Village in Greenland.
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A real day of rest, will there be more? Later in the afternoon, unloaded the lumber and piled it right. I filld air tank and went over to the hotdog cart. The flat is now filled and I took the bolt cutters to the padlock. However, Agt. R once again was nowhere to be found. My new van does not have a trailer hitch. He does, on his truck, even it if is a foot and a half off the ground. He promised to get the cart here today but it is now an hour after dark so that’s not likely to happen. Here's a view of the parts being collected for my sawdust vacuum.
A hot shower and it’s movie time. I have two unfinished. The journey to the center and the Crocodile Dundee western spoof. Neither holds my attention long so it’s been days. I should pile in the van and go to Tennessee where I know a gal who likes good old-fashioned theater movies like I do. That, and my health has improved remarkably in the past six years, though there have been times. Except for the dogs, I don’t walk as much as I used to. Sigh, the days when I used to walk 15 miles for something to do, all gone. And in 1998, who could have imagined I’d be in Florida in these circumstances. Double sigh.
The world population has passed 8 billion. We were told this was not possible without peril for the human race. The issue is time-worn, as there is no population crisis in the developed world. I wish they would quit lumping everybody together in the woeful predictions. There is no food or medicine or population problems in our world, while in their’s the problems have recurred over the centuries no matter what the population. Some people make an issue that Africa is poor because it was colonized by Whites, forgetting that so was America. I could point out another 50 inconsistencies with that colonization angle. If Africa keeps letting in the Chinese, one day they will pray for a return of the English.
What is with all the sudden recipes for breakfast sandwiches? Have I missed some big announcement that the world now must have bacon and eggs on bread. I have not touched bacon in living memory and I like my potatoes on the side.
ADDENDUM
Arizona has declared the thief the winner. It was done by the dozens of laws, restrictions, and deadlines quietly slipped into place over the years. The favorite, Karie Lake, won on a recount but not by a large enough margin to win over the original count. Only a systematically corrupt system can put such regulations in place and calculate in advance when to pull them out of the woodwork. Time and again you get Democrat candidates winning a massive election by less than a hundred votes, yet they are only 16% of the population.
