Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
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IIRC, the expectation of something like a grocery store is for the profit margin to be 3-5%.
--Patrick
Unless it's a chain. Always gotta be feeding the system.
Grocery store's not a service industry, though. Retail's a whole different set of equations. Most retailers buy goods for about half what they sell them for (or less, if possible), and that's where their profit is built into the system.
When I was doing contracting work, I was making $80-90/hour, and I know they were charging $250-300/hour for me. That's pretty industry standard for software consulting. Profit's higher on more junior developers, because the swing between what they make and what they're charged at is higher.
But that $160-210/hour difference that the company makes isn't "profit". It pays for all of the administrative staff as well as the overhead of the office. Ten developers can support a small company of 20-30 people + an office + a nice cushy salary for the owner. I assume Gas is in a similar position: The company's charging 5 times what he makes, but a lot of that money goes to feeding employees that don't bring in any money but are still necessary to support the business.
GasBandit
Staff member
We do have 2 administrative assistants and a project assistant. But apart from that, we've got 3 managers and 4 executives. All being held afloat by 2 project engineers (one of whom is me) and about 15 installers, and they're charging 5x for the 17 of us. So that should support way more than 3 underpaid schlubs and 7 guys who each write 3 e-mails and attend 2 meetings a day, and maybe play Wordle if they're feeling ambitious. Oh yeah, and 4 sales guys, but they are paid on commission - far outstripped by the markup on the hardware we're selling (which is something like 30-70% marked up in most cases). Other things - project managers bill their time to the projects (the client). Travel expenses are billed to the client - both mileage and hotels (when needed). So yeah, about the only employees not getting time tracked to the clients' tabs are those 9 people. And I've been told by clients that my company's labor invoices are MUCH higher than our competitors.
The lowest price tag on a project I've been involved with at this company over the last 3 years was something like $28,000. The most expensive was about $3.5 million. And my cut of the latter came out to about $6000.
I'm pretty sure that money isn't going to the assistants.
But boy our execs are sure proud of their shiny new cars and houses.
I was just saying that "5x profit" isn't anything close to a "rule" (not across all industries, at least). I know that as far as products go, 50-100% markup is usually the norm.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
From the few other people familiar with such things that I've asked, I've heard that's a typical number. If they hire a barista, they expect that barista to move 5x their wage in product per hour. If they hire a repair tech, they expect them to do 5x their wage in billable work an hour. Get hired at a Jiffy Lube? Ditto. So on and so forth.
Grocery stores and whatnot, as Tin said, is a different animal, of course, where the labor isn't what's being billed. But trust that where the margins are tighter, the volumes are immense. Just look at the Waltons.
I'm in the wrong industry
GasBandit
Staff member
When I worked for wal-mart they told us the average profit was 17 cents per item, which really put into perspective just how massive the scale of what they do is.
That seems the only job worth having. That or "owner"
In dentistry, as an associate, I might be offered on the low end 25% of what I produce, and on the high end, 35% of what I produce. A specialist, like endo/perio/pros etc might be offered upwards 50% of production. Of course, general dentistry overhead is also like 60% on the low end, and in reality closer to 75%.
5 Fetuses Found in Home of DC Anti-Abortion Activist Lauren Handy: Police
Police have found five fetuses inside the Washington, DC home of anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy.www.nbcwashington.com
Lauren Handy Claims to Have Actually Had 115 Fetuses - Washingtonian
Last week, DC Police found five fetuses in the home of pro-life activist Lauren Handy. During a press conference Tuesday, the pro-life group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising claimed that figure was incomplete: Handy allegedly had 115 fetuses, including the five already in police custody. The...
www.washingtonian.com
--Patrick
"some portion of the Baltimore region’s household electricity is generated by burning fetal remains"
...You guys just claim to have buried a box with 110 fetuses. How many friggin' abortions do you think are happening all around you all the time for this to be in any way a sensible energy solution? It's just.....wha?
Also, while I can somehow somewhere somewhat understand the idea of "we want to give them a proper Christian burial" it really pains me to say that unborn, unbaptized babies cannot be given a Christian burial, as they still have the Eternal Sin stain on them. Stillborns and infant deaths before baptism go to purgatory (or limbo, depending on source).
And "they took such care to treat them with honor and dignity,"....Yeah ,you put'm next to the steak and the pudding in your fridge. That's not "honorable". Those who consider a fetus to be medical waste can treat it as such. Those who consider them baby corpses have a duty to treat them as a baby corpse. And I doubt you'd be OK with someone unknown to you stealing your baby's corpse, sticking it in their freezer, and doing anything with them. I'm sure I can find some Muslim zealot who will help get those babies into their afterlife, would you be OK with that? No? Than get your hands off those damn other people's babies, ok.
Sometimes part of me thinks, I don't think like X, but I can understand (some of) the reasoning that led to that thought pattern. Sometimes...Yeah, no.
...You guys just claim to have buried a box with 110 fetuses. How many friggin' abortions do you think are happening all around you all the time for this to be in any way a sensible energy solution? It's just.....wha?
Also, while I can somehow somewhere somewhat understand the idea of "we want to give them a proper Christian burial" it really pains me to say that unborn, unbaptized babies cannot be given a Christian burial, as they still have the Eternal Sin stain on them. Stillborns and infant deaths before baptism go to purgatory (or limbo, depending on source).
And "they took such care to treat them with honor and dignity,"....Yeah ,you put'm next to the steak and the pudding in your fridge. That's not "honorable". Those who consider a fetus to be medical waste can treat it as such. Those who consider them baby corpses have a duty to treat them as a baby corpse. And I doubt you'd be OK with someone unknown to you stealing your baby's corpse, sticking it in their freezer, and doing anything with them. I'm sure I can find some Muslim zealot who will help get those babies into their afterlife, would you be OK with that? No? Than get your hands off those damn other people's babies, ok.
Sometimes part of me thinks, I don't think like X, but I can understand (some of) the reasoning that led to that thought pattern. Sometimes...Yeah, no.
This is not correct. Many Protestants don't believe that baptism literally saves, so they wouldn't believe this at all. They believe baptism is just a symbol of acceptance of Christ, so they don't practise infant baptism at all.
Catholics, Lutherans, and others who practise infant baptism and do believe it literally saves, also believe that there are methods of salvation outside of the sacraments, known only to God. For example, if you die as an infant, God will preserve you as a matter of justice. In fact, if you're an adult who desires to convert to Catholicism, but doesn't make it to your baptism because you got hit by a car on the way there or something, you would be preserved as a matter of what we sometimes call a 'baptism of desire' - i.e. your intention was real, and God will preserve that.
Limbo was never Church doctrine, rather a 'proposed' place for the righteous unbaptized, but though some Popes have spoken on it, they have never done so infallibly and it is not formal teaching.
Purgatory is not a permanent place. If you go to Purgatory, it is a place where you are purified before Heaven, no one goes to Purgatory and remains there, and no one goes to Purgatory but ends up in Hell. Rather, if you die not in a state of Grace but not in a state of Mortal Sin, then you will be purified in Purgatory before you arrive in Heaven. There are many different understandings of just what this is like, but it is a formal part of Catholic doctrine, unlike Limbo.
I was taught that a regular catholic person can baptize a newborn baby if they believe that he may not survive.
That's true, if you are a Catholic you can baptize someone in emergencies without being a Priest. However if they are 'of the age of reason' they have to consent - no showing up to accident sites and just baptizing dying folks. And I imagine a similar rule would apply to infants - have the parents' consent.
Yup..my family is Church of Christ, and we were literally taught that baptism is something you seek out after you've shown understanding of the meaning and acceptance of Christ the Savior. By the time I was old enough to make that choice, I....chose differently.
Unless you're Mormon, then you just baptise them after they're already dead, even if they're not Mormon or Christian
Yeah, I mean, huge swathes of what the Mormons believe deviates from orthodox Christianity. We view all the sacraments as for the living only.
Well, that's how we got Ancestry.com
This might be a good place to bring up the recent Tennessee proposal that establishes "an alternate form of marriage" which happens to also not have an explicitly stated age requirement.
--Patrick
You know, I was JUST going to mention that! See also: how many states still allow child marriage. (Spoiler: it's 44.
)
GasBandit
Staff member
And here we've been waiting for girls to grow into women who can think for themselves and exert agency like the suckers we are, when we could have been training them to be subservient subhuman breeding vessels all along!You know, I was JUST going to mention that! See also: how many states still allow child marriage. (Spoiler: it's 44.
Wait, they need training for that? I assumed it was the default state and it's only our degenerate decadent lifestyle that caused their devolution into obnoxious self-thinking creatures.
And that's the real reason they are against it.
There's been a lot of "Keep 'em dumb" going around lately. a lot of it.
I considered linking to specific examples from US educational policy, the Russian military, Australian gvt, Canadian gvt, and quite a few others, but I don't feel like I need to do that on this board.
I feel like someone needs to do a respin of the Quagmire .GIF where each bead is yet another one of these proposals.
--Patrick
EDIT: Leave my abbreviations alone, autocorrect!
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2 men impersonated federal agents to get close to the Secret Service, FBI says
They have been impersonating federal agents since early 2020, the FBI says. They allegedly offered favors to several Secret Service agents, including one assigned to the first lady's detail.
www.npr.org
Well, this is a weird one and I hope we get more information.
Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed to the Supreme Court: https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ketanji-brown-jackson-senate-confirmation-vote/index.html
53 votes to confirm (50 D senators + 3 R senators).
53 votes to confirm (50 D senators + 3 R senators).
Their people don't care about this vote enough. If this was a front-and-center visible vote where "anti-Russia" was aligned with "pro-Trump" it'd be close, because obviously you don't want Trump to name you anti-republican. Now, though, nobody will care and it'll pass anyway, so no reason other than making sure it's not anonymous to not side with the winning side.