Category Archives: Business

Posted on by

Big Brother is watching you! Do you want Elon Musk looking over your shoulder?

All of those electronic ‘convenience’ things in our lives, such as debit cards, just mean that businesses and the government have more ways to keep you under surveillance. From USA Today:

Authorities use Tesla data to track Cybertruck before bombing, raising privacy concerns

by Kathleen Wong | Thursday, January 2, 2024 | 8:58 PM EST | Updated: Friday, January 3, 2025 | 12:08 AM EST

Tesla vehicle telematics and records from a Cybertruck are providing key insights into the New Year’s Day explosion in Las Vegas – data that may not have been available decades ago but which raise troubling questions about how governments and companies track personal travel information. Continue reading →

Posted on by

How does it work, going on strike in a job for which a replacement can be trained in half a day?

This site reported, back in June, how the ‘baristas’ at the OCF Coffee Shops in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia moved to unionize, and then owner Ori Feibush simply closed all of the shops he owned.

Now the Starbucks Workers United union has announced, on Bluesky, that they ain’t going to take anymore, that they’re going out on strike!

In the heyday of unionization, unions were representing workers who actually had some skills, workers who could not easily be replaced, because their skills were needed to do their jobs, and it took a long time to develop those skills. Perhaps, just perhaps, pulling a cup of coffee isn’t that difficult a skill to learn?

I’ve mentioned it before: rather than driving to a coffee shop, and paying $3.50 or $4.25 or whatever for a ‘barista’ to pull a cup of coffee for me, I can make it at home, in less than a minute, in my Keurig, for roughly 50¢. I’m saving money on the coffee, saving the environment a paper cup to be recycled or thrown in the trash, saving however much gasoline I would burn to get to such a coffee shop, and saving however many miles of additional wear-and-tear on my truck to get me there and back.

I am wryly amused.

Posted on by

Oh the poor little lambs who don’t want to return to the office!

During the COVID-19 panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error, but is spelled exactly the way I see it — employees who could work from home were told to do so. As it happened, my younger daughter, an IT/communications professional, worked from our farm. Fortunately, I had already installed an outdoor electric receptacle on the screened-in porch, and she did a lot of her work there.

A cup of raktajino — Klingon coffee — in a mug celebrating my status as a descendant of white, Christian, settler colonialists to start the morning.

And she was quite honest about the whole thing: she was just not as productive working at our home. With cats and dogs and chickens, with fine Kentucky spring and summer weather, there were simply too many distractions.

And it’s good for the employees as well . . . as long as they are not Jeffrey Toobin. A cup of coffee in the morning costs me 50¢, not $4.50 at Starbucks.

Logically, if most employees were as productive working from home as they are at the office, employers would love that. Having employees working at home means that employers could maintain smaller offices, have smaller parking lots, reduced janitorial services, reduced office ‘perks’ expenses, just a whole host of things. It only makes sense to require people who could work from home to come into the office if productivity is a real issue.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Meet the People Who Refused to Go Back to the Office and Lost Their Jobs

These people are coming to terms with the fact that they might never work from home again

by Callum Borchers | Wednesday, December 11, 2024 | 9:00 PM EST

If you’re reading this from your home office, it’s time to consider whether you’re prepared to lose your job over a return-to-office mandate. Continue reading →

Posted on by

Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right More work for Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency

Does $3,000,000,000 for 93 postal delivery trucks sound like a lot?

One reason I prefer newspapers to other forms of the credentialed media is that newspapers can, and do, provide readers with some detailed, deeply investigative stories, something that television news just doesn’t do well. Fox News or CNN or MSNBC aren’t going to do the kind of deep digging that Washington Post reporter Jacob Bogage has done. According to the story, Mr Bogage has covered the United States Postal Service since 2020 and reviewed more than 20,000 pages of internal agency and company records for his latest story. Heck, I can’t even imagine CBS News retaining a reporter who specialized in the Post Office.

The Postal Service’s electric mail trucks are way behind schedule

Defense contractor Oshkosh had only delivered 93 trucks by November — compared to 3,000 originally expected by now. The delays put Biden’s climate goals at risk.

by Jacob Bogage | Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

A multibillion-dollar program to buy electric vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service is far behind its original schedule, plagued by manufacturing mishaps and supplier infighting that threaten a cornerstone of outgoing President Joe Biden’s fight against climate change. Continue reading →

Posted on by

The Democrats say we need more affordable housing, but look what has happened when they were in charge of it

Jim McGovern is the United States Representative from the Second Congressional District in Massachusetts. After being in the House of Representatives since 1997 — that’s 14 terms! — he tweeted:

I’m on the floor talking about how we need to cut grocery prices, lower people’s mortgage and rent costs, and make it easier for folks to get ahead.

The Distinguished Gentleman from Massachusetts was whining that people’s grocery bills are too high, and that mortgages and rents are too high, and need to be brought down. And yes, those are issues on which former and future President Donald Trump, and the majority of Republican congressional candidates ran, but the point is obvious: those costs skyrocketed right after President Joe Biden took office, taking office with Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, though the GOP won a bare majority in the 2022 elections, the Republicans winning largely on the high inflation during Mr Biden’s first two years, inflation which drove those grocery and housing prices so high.

Why, it’s almost as though the Democrats’ policies didn’t work.

“Affordable housing” has been the Democrats’ theme of late, but that raises an obvious point: what is “affordable housing” like in cities run by the Democrats? From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The death of Jah’Nae Campbell underscores the lax oversight of Philadelphia’s low-income rental housing | Editorial

As repeated complaints went unheeded, the 12-year-old’s family blames substandard living conditions inside their West Philly affordable housing complex for her death.

Continue reading →

Posted on by

Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and hate!

It is entirely possible that I have been, believe it or not, too charitable to our friends on the left. In my recent article, Will Bunch uses his Freedom of Speech and of the Press to tell us that he hates Freedom of Speech and of the Press, I mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch for his tirade against MSNBC’s (supposed) journalists, Joe and Mike Scarborough for having gone to Mar-a-Lago and meeting with former and future President Donald Trump. Mr Bunch told his readers about the brave “journalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era,” but trashes two (purported) journalists who have gone to cover a story about the next President of the United States as somehow “supplicants,” showing fealty and making obeisance to him. Uhhh, you can’t “keep asking the tough questions” to Mr Trump if you are unwilling to talk to him in the first place.

I would have thought that a journolist, oops, sorry, journalist like Mr Bunch would appreciate freedom of the press and the willingness of journalists to go into hostile territory, to get their stories, to report the news, even from people who didn’t like or respect them. Continue reading →

Posted on by

That this has led to fraud is no surprise at all!

My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, has an article this Friday morning on the Biden Administration prosecuting a major ‘carbon offset’ sales company for fraud:

C-Quest Capital LLC Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Newcombe, who stepped down as CEO in February, was indicted Wednesday in New York on wire fraud and commodities fraud charges. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the most serious charges.

C-Quest develops emission-reduction projects to earn carbon credits that can then be sold to companies or other entities that wish to offset their own emissions. Newcombe, a onetime Goldman Sachs Group Inc. managing director and World Bank official, founded C-Quest in 2008.

You can read the rest on Mr Teach’s fine site.

But this one speaks to me, due to my experience. It was 2003, and carbon offset salesmen came and made a presentation to the concrete company at which I worked. Ready-mixed concrete producers use pozzolans, materials which are not cementitious alone but when mixed with Portland cement during the production of concrete utilize the excess calcium hydroxide liberated to become cementitious. We use them because they are less expensive than cement. The two most frequently used are flyash, which is harvested from the ignition byproducts of burning coal in power plants, and ground granulated blast furnace slag, the material left over from the smelting of iron ore.

The manufacture of Portland cement is a major carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter, so by the partial substitution of flyash, ready-mix companies reduce their carbon footprint. The salesmen told us that we could gain carbon credits every time we used flyash instead of cement, and that we could sell those carbon credits to other companies, to make it look like they were doing something to help fight global warming climate change, but, since it wouldn’t have changed how we did business since we were already using flyash — other than requiring some bookkeeping — it wouldn’t have reduced CO2 emissions at all! It was simply a way to take money, taking it from one CO2 emitter and giving it to a company which emitted less CO2; virtue signaling for the first, without having to actually spend significantly more money to reduce their emissions, and extra money for us, for doing what was already in our own economic interest.

Is anyone really surprised that fraud would be involved? When it comes to global warming climate change, the scammers and fraudsters will always be buzzing around.

Posted on by

Democrats talk a good game, but when they have had the power, their policies have not worked! 3½ years of President Biden have produced record homelessness

Philadelphia’s last Republican Mayor, Bernard Samuel, left office on January 7, 1952, when Harry Truman was still President of the United States, and George VI was still King of England. In the 21½ years since January 3, 2003, Republicans have been Governors of Pennsylvania for just four years, with Tom Corbett leaving office on January 20, 2015. And since January 20, 2009, a Republican has held the White House for only four years. So, if homelessness is rising in the City of Brotherly Love, it isn’t exactly the GOP’s fault.

Homelessness in Philadelphia increases for third consecutive year

The number of homeless Philadelphians exceeded 5,000 for the first time since 2020.

by Layla A. Jones | Monday, September 23, 2024 | 3:09 PM EDT

The number of homeless Philadelphians increased for the third consecutive year, according to the annual point-in-time homelessness count conducted by the Office of Homeless Services.

The count was conducted in January and includes unsheltered people and those living in emergency shelters, safe haven and transitional housing. In 2024, the total number of homeless people reached 5,191, up from 4,725 the previous year — a 10% increase.

Mandated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the annual point-in-time count is a snapshot of homelessness on one day in January.

Philadelphia’s count calls on volunteers, armed with clipboards, socks, and gloves, to spread across the city interviewing and cataloging people who are homeless.

How is it, if Democratic Party policies work, that homelessness is increasing in Philly? The Keystone State has had Democrats as Governors, and the city is a one-party, Democratic town. Mr Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes in 2020, 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377674 (48.84%), but only because he carried Philadelphia 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), a margin of 471,050 votes. That’s how Democratic Philadelphia is![1]Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%). Whatever the Democrats wanted to do in Philadelphia, they had the votes and the officeholders to do.

High – but declining – poverty, the opioid epidemic and a lack of affordable housing are to blame for the rising numbers of unsheltered people, according to a summary of the city’s winter count.

“Poverty remains a factor, irrespective of poverty trends/trajectories,” said Sherylle Linton Jones, spokesperson for the Office of Homeless Services.

More than 20% of homeless people had either been evicted or displaced for another reason in the preceding 90 days, showing how impactful an issue affordable housing is in Philadelphia.

If poverty is declining, why would homelessness increase?

The drug crisis is certainly a factor, as former Mayor Jim Kenney concentrated on hugely important things, like an additional tax on Big Gulps from Seven/Eleven, but, other than that, had pretty much checked out of doing his job, and the Kensington section of the city had become not just a local laughing stock, but a nationally and even internationally known drug wasteland.

Let’s tell the truth here: Democrats talk a good game, but when they have power, their policies have not worked!

Philadelphia’s rising homelessness comes after the office overspent its budget by almost $15 million, pressured by a mandate to keep people sheltered.

The Democrats tell you that they are going to do something, but even with having overspent their budgets, they don’t get the job done!

Philadelphia’s numbers are in lockstep with a nationwide trend of rising homelessness. In 2023, homelessness grew 12% to the highest level ever recorded. More than an estimated 650,000 people are homeless in the United States, the largest number since the country started tracking the annual point-in-time survey in 2007. The rising homelessness crisis led the conservative-leaning Supreme Court to rule that municipalities could ban sleeping in public places, effectively outlawing unsheltered homelessness.

It hasn’t been just Philly. Under President Joe Biden, and the Administration’s oh-so-sympathetic attitude, homelessness nationwide has still soared to record levels. Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff has been telling us that she’s going to solve the problem by building 3,000,000 new, ‘affordable’ homes, but whatever her ideas to do that are, she never presented it or persuaded President Biden to do it. Once again, the Democrats are talking a big game, but they’ll fail miserably.

Mrs Emhoff is, as the Democrats always say they are, big on labor unions, but if her ‘plan’ includes pushing union labor on building those three million new homes, then she will have automatically made them more expensive, and less ‘affordable.’

Millions of people will vote Democratic this November, but those people will be voting for promises that cannot and will not be kept.

References

References
↑1 Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%).
Posted on by

Once again, the left want to restrict our choices It's all for our own good, right?

I have said it many times before: today’s left are pro-choice on exactly one thing, prenatal infanticide. In everything else, they want the government to take control of your lives. William Teach noted that the Biden Administration are trying to shut down existing coal-fired electricity generation plants through emissions regulations which would force them out of business. The Democrats tried to force every American to take an experimental and long-term untested ‘vaccine’ against COVID-19, punishing those who refused with loss of their jobs. They have put in regulations designed to ban the sales of new gasoline-or-diesel-powered trucks and automobiles by 2035, even as the Administration threaten to shut down the coal-fired generation plants, even though 16.2% of our electricity is produced from burning coal. I’m not quite sure how the math works out in trying to push plug-in electric vehicles and concomitantly reducing our electric generating capacity.

Not only do they want to force people into plug-in electric vehicles, the government also wants to regulate the choices we have in those vehicles:

As cars and trucks get bigger and taller, lawmakers look to protect pedestrians

by Joel Rose | Friday, August 23, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

RUCKERSVILLE, Va. — In a cavernous white room full of bright lights, video cameras and microphones, a driverless cart hurtles at 37 miles per hour into the side of a large SUV.

Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have crash-tested thousands of cars and trucks like this one over the past three decades at their facility in central Virginia.

But a few years ago, they noticed that those vehicles were getting bigger and heavier. So they decided to make the cart that crashes into them larger, too.

“It was meant to represent a small pickup or a midsize SUV, and those vehicles have gotten heavier and heavier over time,” says Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at IIHS. “So it’s 500 kilograms more weight because that’s what the vehicle fleet now reflects.”

Americans’ cars and trucks are getting bigger and taller, while roadway fatalities have also climbed sharply over the past decade.

Why have cars and trucks gotten bigger and taller? Because those are the vehicles that the car-buying public have chosen to buy. American automobile manufacturers have moved to produce the vehicles that their customers want to buy. Article continues below the fold, because it contains an embedded video. Continue reading →