Category Archives: Business

Business, Government

Another Financial Comparison

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The White House Administration is putting together a plan to combine the Department of Labor and the Department of Education. The move is to remove wasteful spending of money between overlapping programs and goals in the separate departments.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the annual budget of the Department of Labor (DoL). A quick web search yields a plethora of ‘news’ headlines stating DoL requested $9.7 BILLION as their budget for 2018. Some of the articles report that the DoL has over 15,000 employees.

What the ‘news’ reports FAIL to mention is that the almost $10 BILLION in requested budget dollars is a “discretionary” budget number. After some digging the TOTAL BUDGET for 2017 was $46 BILLION of your tax dollars of which more than $12 BILLION was moved about in a “discretionary” manner.  If you want to revue the budget you can read it here,  FY2018BIB.

Let’s look at a comparison between a publicly traded corporation and the Department of Labor. Truth in lending, I hold stock in the company we are going to use to compare numbers. Raytheon Company is a publicly traded defense company listed as RTN on the New York Stock Exchange. From their 2017 financial report the company had $25.358 BILLION in REVENUE. The COST of revenue was $19 BILLION which means they had a gross profit of over $6 BILLION. During the year the company employed 64,000 people worldwide.

Hmmm, They have over FOUR TIMES THE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES when compared to the DoL and they are run on a total expenditure of about 40%, well less than half, of the budget of the Department of Labor. On top of that, they MADE OVER $6 BILLION IN PROFIT!

If it wasn’t for the generosity of YOU the American Taxpayer, the Department of Labor would FAIL miserably as a company.

How much of your money do you think is wasted in “The Swamp”?

Business, Technology

Why Does This Sound Familiar?

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Recently, a well known “celebrity” in the automotive field who is making a high mileage, revolutionary product declared, “… a long list of organizations,” including OIL COMPANIES and Wall Street short-sellers, that “want [us] to die.”

In the 1930s a Canadian inventor named Pogue declared that he had created a high mileage revolutionary product.  Mr. Pogue’s revolutionary invention was a gas vaporizing carburetor that would allow a car to travel 200 miles on 1 gallon of gasoline. All that was required was a simple swap of the standard carburetor with the Pogue device and any car would achieve 200 Miles Per Gallon.

Why don’t we see 200 MPG cars today? It’s been almost 90 years since this miraculous discovery.

The answer over the years is that one of the big American automobile manufacturers and BIG OIL COMPANIES bought Mr. Pogues miracle design and have suppressed it’s use so they could sell more oil. Even today, people still believe this conspiracy theory.  Break out the tin foil hats, folks.

Science time. Fuel vaporization is only a small part of an engines efficiency. The bigger factors of efficiency according to thermodynamics is Th versus Tc or “T-hot versus T-cold”. There’s a fancy equation to figure out thermal efficiency but in simple terms you want the combustion process as hot as possible and the expanding burning gas to become as cold as possible. An engine manufacturer needs to balance these two opposite requirements and make a product that actually works and doesn’t melt down. Again in simple terms the biggest factors of INEFFICIENCY is the heat loss through a car’s engine block and cooling system which are necessary to prevent the engine from destroying itself.  Try running your engine with out water in the radiator and see how well that turns out.  But SCIENCE and FACTS ruin a good conspiracy theory.  Bah humbug to science.  We can have 68 genders according to the wacky social justice warrior crowd even though SCIENCE doesn’t back that up.  So let’s just keep blaming BIG OIL for all the ills in the world.

So who was the automotive celebrity that stated recently that BIG OIL COMPANIES want his company to fail?

Elon Musk the CEO of Tesla Inc.

Business, Culture, Technology

Keyless Killer?

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My Dad brought to my attention a news story that people are dying because of keyless cars. It was from a New York Times article describing how people are leaving their cars running in their garages because the no longer need to turn a physical key to the off position.
As we all know, the Times is the queen of “fake news“, hence I needed to look at the numbers.

The story describes how “dozens” of people have been killed by the deadly assault keyless cars. The total number killed according to the story was 28 which is  4 more than TWO dozen, so it is technically “dozens“. That’s tabloid journalism for you, to make a click-bait headline.  Once again we need to delve deeper into the numbers.

Just as an aside, VEHICLES OF WAR don’t need KEYS to operate.  You can start almost all WAR MACHINES, tanks, humvees, MRAPs, personnel carriers, WITHOUT A KEY.  As a deadly keyless operation assault car, you can turn on and off a VEHICLE OF WAR without turning a physical KEY.  But I digress…

The “dozens” of people killed is over an 12 YEAR period. That makes the “death toll” a bit more than TWO per year. Not exactly headline news. “Stop the presses!  Breaking news!  Last year, two people were killed by because they forgot to turn off their car!  Oh the humanity!”   But let’s delve deeper.

The article says that 8.5 million cars sold annually have keyless operations. Over 12 years that would be more than 100 million assault cars with deadly keyless operations. For a back of the envelope analysis, let’s assume only half of those cars are running today (50 million cars), because some of the cars will have been crashed or have become inoperable.

Say that you park your car in the garage once per day. You need to drive to work, the store, school, whatever and return to the garage. That means with 50 million cars, the cars get parked AT LEAST 5 times per week.  With the 52 weeks in a  year, that gives us 13 BILLIONS opportunities to NOT shut off the car, per year. Over 12 years that would be 156 BILLION opportunities to leave a car running in the garage.

With 28 deaths and 156 BILLION parking cycles, the death rate is 0.000000018% !!!   For the betting folks, that’s ONE IN 5.6 BILLION.

Putting it into perspective, you are 300 times more likely to be hit and killed by a METEORITE.

BUT there is a potentially more sinister latent hazard that isn’t described by the queen of fake news. I’ll cover that in the next entry.