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The morons in charge either don’t know how to run a business, or they are deliberately lying to you. Data point:

Make no mistake: President @JoeBiden and I intend to cap child care costs at $10 a day for the average family and make preschool free for all four-year-olds.

To do that, we need Congress to act.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) March 12, 2024

As I have said before, price controls never work. Have you seen the price of groceries lately? Even feeding those kids will cost a huge chunk of that $10 per day. Unless you are planning on feeding these kids crackers and water all day.

Capping child care at $10 a day is only about $1.13 an hour. Since the administration also supports a minimum wage of $15 per hour, as well as free healthcare, paid family leave, paid sick leave, and other benefits, then add in the taxes, overhead, and lunch that they want included, each daycare worker would need to watch 40 to 50 children. My math below the fold.

No, the reason why they want to do this is so that all private daycare goes out of business, leaving the government to raise and look after our children, so they can expose them to more porn and propaganda. They can’t be this stupid, so it must be an attempt to lie to you in order to gain more power.

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Here is the math at costs for each day, and I am lowballing this:

• Worker’s pay for a 9 hour day, minimum: $135
• Social Security, liability insurance, etc. $50
• Paid Time Off (1 day per month) $25
• Health Insurance $45
• Other HR overhead $50

Total cost for labor: $275 per day, so labor alone requires 28 children per daycare worker.

Now you have the cost of a facility and its utilities, which comes to another $130 per day:

• Rent of space for watching those 40 kids: $2000 per month
• Utilities (water, power, Internet, phone, CATV, etc.) $600 per month

There are other costs, including furnishings, toys for the kids to play with (unless you plan on having them just sit there), on top of the fact that you will have to feed them. Just to break even, your fictional daycare center will need to pull in $450 a day or so.

If you are doing the math, you are now at 45 children or more for each daycare worker.

People are at the breaking point.

In Minnesota, a proposed law would require all painting to be done by or under the supervision of a licensed painter by restricting the sale of paint in cans one gallon or larger to licensees, establish a paint contractor board, and licensing for paint contractors painters. Companies like Home Depot, Sherwin Williams, and even the local hardware store would enforce that law if it becomes one.

The politician who sponsored the bill (Erin Murphy) has a bit of a conflict of interest. Her husband owns a painting company.

Now even vending machines are watching you. It’s only a matter of time before the government harnesses this on a widespread basis.

Firearms are the mechanism of injury in about 61,000 emergency room visits per year. There are many items in your home that are more dangerous.

1. Floors: 2.135 million hospital visits
2. Stairs or steps: 1.027 million hospital visits
3. Beds or bed frames: 912,000 hospital visits
4. Bathtubs or showers: 431,000 hospital visits
5. Tables: 327,000 hospital visits
6. Chairs: 319,000 hospital visits
7. Interior ceilings and walls: 293,000 hospital visits
8. Sofas, couches, davenports, divans, or studio couches: 211,000 hospital visits
9. Rugs or carpets: 206,000 hospital visits
10. Toilets: 204,000 hospital visits

Assuming that you don’t want to commit suicide and also assuming that you aren’t a criminal, you are far more likely to be injured in a fall than you are by a firearm. Anecdotally, my hospital only sees about 1 patient a month with injuries from gunshot wounds. Just yesterday, I saw three patients with broken bones from falling in their home.

Republicans in Tennessee have just declared to the entire state that they want to lose the next election. Jesus, leave it to the Stupid Party to make Joe Biden look smart. They are trying to pass a law that would make it illegal to serve cold or chilled beer. (Hat tip to wirecutter)

I have said it before, and it bears repeating- “Just because the Democrats are your enemy does not mean that the Republicans are your friend.”

This is why Trump is so popular- he isn’t like all of the other politicians. Was he perfect? No, but remember that he isn’t an expert on everything, because no one person can be an expert in everything. The largest complaint that I have heard about him was the banning of bump stocks. He isn’t, and never was, a gun guy. Not a part of gun culture at all. So he did what any outsider would do- he went to the people who he believed to be experts in gun rights. He consulted the NRA. Everyone in the country who isn’t part of the gun culture assumes that they are the progun experts. Those asshole Fudds over at the NRA told him that bump stocks were useless, and therefore throwaways in gun culture. Not knowing any better, he went with that.

The enemy here wasn’t Trump, it was the NRA.

To me, Trump’s biggest problem was taking people at their word. Being an outsider, he didn’t understand that members of the swamp and of the Uniparty only care about two things: money, and power. They use one to get the other interchangeably. Being a babe in the woods when it came to politics, he frequently made bad choices in adding people to his inner circle, and that naivety cost him possibly everything, including his life.

Big Country is asking for your help with costs associated with his wife’s recent cancer diagnosis. See if you can lend him a hand…

Just heard what sounded like a loud, double sonic boom. Went online, and it turns out to be a reentering spacecraft.

From the posts about plumbers charging $1500 for small jobs. I am NOT saying that the plumber doesn’t have the right to ask for that price. It’s his business, after all. It’s just that all businesses are in competition. Plumber A is in competition with Plumber B, etc. The other half of that is that all businesses that offer some sort of labor are in competition with people who would do it themselves. Restaurants, plumbers, even gunsmiths. There is a limit to what you can charge for services before people say that it isn’t worth paying someone to do it. The customer then either does without, or they do it themselves.

For me, it’s math. I look at what it would cost me to do the job, then how long it will cost. Then I compare what the service business is asking for the job. Take lawn maintenance. I could mow my own lawn, but here in Florida that means about three hours per week to mow, edge, weed eat, and blow down the sidewalks in the summer, plus another three hours a month in winter. Then there is the cost of supplies, maintenance and fuel. So call it an average of two hours per week plus about $15 a month in supplies. My lawn guy charges me $85 a month. That means the guy is doing 8 hours of work for $60, so it costs me $7.50 an hour to get my lawn mowed. I don’t mow my lawn, even though I could.

I look at it as a pure financial transaction. Let’s say (to make the math easy) that you make $50 an hour at your job. It actually would be more beneficial to pay someone to do a job than it would to do it yourself, if the job was costing you less money than you would make in the time it took to do it yourself.

Now suppose that he increased his rate to $200 a month. I might start mowing my own lawn at that point. The plumbing job is the same. The plumber was charging me $1500 parts and labor to do a job that I could do myself for a total cost of $300 in parts and tools and four hours of my time. After materials and tools, I could do it myself and save $300 an hour. That’s far more than I make, so if it’s within my capabilities, it’s worth it to simply do it myself.

There is some risk that I will not do as good a job as the pro, but at what point does the juice become not worth the squeeze? We all need to develop these skills. When TSHTF, they will be worthwhile skills to have, and now is a good time to learn.