Divemedic

This is being touted by the left in an obvious election year ploy:

Paul Saginaw, co-founder of Zingerman’s Deli in Michigan, pays
his 630 employees up to $21/hour, offers health and dental benefits to
all workers, provides paid time off, and 401k retirement plans. This
week, Mr. Saginaw is in Washington lobbying Congress and the restaurant industry to raise wages for all workers! 

 In the article, Saginaw had this to say:

Paying entry wages our employees can live on has contributed to our
profitability and our annual compounded growth rate of 10 percent.
Raising the minimum wage is long overdue.

If paying an increased entry level wage actually increased profitability by itself, then there would be no need to have a minimum wage, as companies would pay the higher wage on their own.


 So I looked up the restaraunt, and they sell sandwiches for $13 each. Fountain sodas cost $2.50 each. Then they require tipping!

Compare that to Subway: A foot long sub for $5, and soda is $1.5. No tipping. I have no problem with a business VOLUNTARILY paying their employees more than the minimum. Just understand that requiring all businesses to do so will raise prices to the point where the increased wages mean nothing. Increasing the minimum wage to $10 an hour, as they are advocating, would increase labor costs in these types of businesses by 45%. Since labor is the biggest expense of most of these businesses, an immediate price increase of about 50-60% would be needed to keep these businesses afloat.


Since the minimum wage would be high, this would remove the desire for skilled trades to go to school and learn skills, because no one would want to work hard to learn a skill, only to earn the same money as a burger flipper. This wage increase would send shock waves through the entire economy and cause incredible inflation as companies struggled to afford the new wages. The Fed would be forced to raise interest rates to tighten the money supply in response. This would slow the economy and eliminate jobs.


I got in a similar conversation with my girlfriend last night. She showed me an article that pointed out how the US is the nearly only country that does not mandate paid maternity leave. She used Canada as an example. She said that Canadian law mandates that an employer pay for 52 weeks of parental leave: For the first 17 weeks, 55% of a woman’s pay ($500 a week maximum), and the remaining 35 weeks can be taken by either parent, and must be paid by the employer at a rate of 55% (maximum $485 a week). To be eligible, an employee must have been employed for 600 hours. 

She teaches courses in how to run a business, and I can’t believe that she did not see the obvious problem: A business is obligated, after 15 weeks, to pay for a woman to take a year off with pay at a cost of over $26,000, or a man 8 months off with pay at a cost of $17,000. The result is obvious: Don’t hire women.


So then she asked, “What about Mexico? Surely the US can match Mexico? They require that women receive 12 weeks of paid maternity leave!”
You mean the Mexico that is currently flooding the US with illegal immigrants that are willing to risk death to sneak through the desert because there are no jobs to be had? The Mexico where the female labor participation rate is only 34%, while the male labor participation rate is 62%? The Mexico where the average household income is less than half of the US average?


People need to stop demanding that the government force others to give them free stuff.

The quote of the day comes from user Elroy53, who was commenting on this article about the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International trade show, which
continues through Thursday at the Orange County Convention Center. The money quote:

“NV-OS is developing a system that will fly its aircraft using an Xbox
360 controller” – that way, they open jobs up for at LEAST two million
potential operators. Most won’t be happy with the job because they won’t
be able to kill anything and say something about another operator’s
mother.

 That is comedy gold, right there.

This performance is stunning.

Government benefits are intended to, according to the government, “help disadvantaged people,” but how disadvantaged are these people, really? Let me use my sister as an example. She is a single mother in her early thirties that has two children by two different fathers. She lives with her current boyfriend, who is not the father of either of her children, as well as their two roommates: the father of her first child, and his current girlfriend.
She is my sister, and I love her, and while I cannot condone her lifestyle, it is her life. The biggest problem that I have is their financial state, and the fact that they are being funded my tax money in the form welfare dollars.
You see, she works as a waitress at a local chain restaurant, and makes quite a bit of money when you count her tips. She takes home about $70-100 a day in tips, most of it as unreported income. If you talk to her, she will tell you that this is because she doesn’t get a paycheck, because taxes take that from her. I reply that I pay far more than that in taxes, and she is getting off easy by not reporting all of her tips.

Her boyfriend makes $12 an hour at his job, but since they are not married, this does not affect her reported income when it comes time to apply for government benefits.

Their roommates include the father of my sister’s first child, and his girlfriend. The two of them pay my sister $300 a month to live in the third bedroom of the apartment. My sister’s two daughters share the second bedroom.

What this means is that my sister and her boyfriend have an after tax income of about $3500 a month. That equates to an income of over $50,000 a year for the couple. She and her boyfriend have annual passes to Universal Studios, and they go out for drinks and dinner 2-3 nights a week. Now I certainly don’t have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is this:

She collects welfare, food stamps, reduced school lunch for the kids, and lives in a government subsidized apartment. In total, she also receives another $900 a month or so in government benefits. This means that her little family takes home about the same amount of money as a family that earns about $64,000 a year.

How is that disadvantaged? This amount of money puts them far above Orlando’s median income of $35,732 a year, and above the US median income of $51,017.

When the US government calculates the poverty rate, they always exclude government benefits. The reason is simple: Most people who work for a living actually make far less money than America’s new entrepreneurs. The most lucrative business is young women having children out of wedlock. Forget college, the average college graduate only makes $44,000 a year upon graduation, which takes four years. By the age of 20, a young woman can be living the high life with almost no effort. All she has to do is get pregnant a few times.

My sister is proof of that. This story is repeated millions of times all over this country, and it is the reason why we will be a third world nation before the middle of this century.

To all of those people who claim that police are the only ones we can trust to carry a weapon, because they are so much more trustworthy than everyone else, explain this:

The Orlando Police Department on Wednesday released a 911 call of a
witness who says a marked police cruiser left the scene of an accident
that injured a bicyclist.

Now that I am dating a new woman for the first time in a long while, I am facing a problem that many in the gun community face: how your date feels about guns in general, and concealed carry in particular.

My new girlfriend was born and raised in New York. The attitude that is fostered there when it comes to guns in pretty well known to those of us in the gun community. My current girlfriend’s opinion towards guns is a sticky problem, but not insurmountable.

She has never fired a gun before, but says that she would love to learn how to shoot. She has never even HELD a firearm before. As far as concealed carry, she states that she once went alone on a 5,000 mile road trip up I95 from Florida to Maine, across to Chicago, and back down to Florida without needing a gun, so she doesn’t see why I feel the need to carry one. After all, she reasons, if an unescorted woman can make a long trip like that without needing to carry a gun, why should a man need one?

We were at a baseball game this weekend (the Rays v the Yankees- she is a Yankees fan) and a fight broke out in the crowd. One of the trouble makers was being escorted out by a cop, and he decided to punch the cop in the face. The cop took the guy down hard with a leg sweep. The assailant landed on his face hard enough that I heard his face hit the concrete from 30 feet away. After it was over, she was visibly shaken, and told me that she doesn’t like violence, and it makes her sick to her stomach. (Of course, she keeps a baseball bat under her bed in case of burglars, so I guess she isn’t TOO afraid of violence. Women.)

I explained to her that I am morally opposed to the initiation of violence against anyone, and that I believe it to be morally wrong for one person to initiate force against another. With that being said, I also believe that we are each responsible for our own protection. I view carrying a firearm to be similar to having a fire extinguisher: It is good to own one in case there is a fire, because when you need one, nothing else will work as well. That doesn’t mean that you are hoping for a fire, just that you want to be prepared if there happens to be one.

Like fire extinguishers, certain situations and neighborhoods demand that you own different fire extinguishers and keep them closer at hand than do others. For example, Orlando has a violent crime rate of 10.34, which is more than double the average Florida rate of 4.87, while the community where she lives has a crime rate of just 1.15. Statistically, you are far less likely to need a firearm in her community than you are in Orlando, or even where I live (which has a violent crime rate of 3.91).

So for now, I have accepted that I just don’t carry when I am in her town. I know that the risk is not zero, the already unlikely event that would require a firearm is even less than where I live. We are talking 90% less. I will teach her to shoot using my .22LR Mosquito, and eventually she will come around to see that guns are not scary. Who knows, I may even stop carrying for good when in her town. We will meet in the middle, I am sure.

What is going to be hard is the road trip we are doing this summer. We are driving from here to New York to see her family. Even if I wanted to have a weapon, I cannot. That will be a new experience for me, as I have carried a weapon for over 20 years.