Friday 18 July 2014

The Ultimate Pizza Delivery Job

A couple of miles south of White Lake, along highway 2 in North Dakota.....is Stanley.  It's not much of a town....maybe 1,700 folks living there.  Being around forty miles south of Canada...it's a place where you wouldn't really think much about business operations....salary.....or capitalism.

This past week....off the Carpe Diem site....someone put up an ad related to Jimmy's Pizza (local franchise).  They needed a driver to deliver pizzas.  Typically, you don't make much.  But this is the era of oil rigs, fracking, and guys making $100,000 a year easily.

Jimmy's needs a delivery guy bad....noting they will pay $36,000 a year ($3k a month) on base salary.  Jimmy's is willing to put up to $100 a month into a retirement account for you (matching of course).  Jimmy's is offering one week of vacation for every six months of employment, along with $1,000 as part of the vacation deal.

The hinge to the deal?  Well....there are several....positive and negative.

First, they want you to work six days a week....for roughly 49 hours.  Most guys get negative about anything beyond forty hours.  So this might be difficult to accept.

Second?  There's tips, and Jimmy is hinting that you might be able to pull in $20,000 a year on delivering pizza.  You sit there and kinda work on the math....figuring forty-nine hours a week, and probably 200 deliveries possible, with a tip of $3 per episode....equaling $600 a week....times fifty-two.  In actuality.....you might be able to even take more than $30,000 if you figure the math right.

Third?  Stanley is about far north as you can get and winter starts early around late September with a stiff breeze and cold temperatures.  You might have to use snow-chains a couple of times during the winter, and your delivery vehicle might ought to be a four-wheel-drive jeep.

Fourth?  The sun goes down early in this region during the winter months, and the sun stays up fairly long in the summer months.

The odds here is that they will find a person to quickly sign up.....then deep into December's brisk weather....find that this guy just doesn't have what it takes and is quickly leaving for some warmer region.

Delivering pizzas?  For probably $3,000 a month (taxable) and another $2,000 a month (tips on the impossible to tax game)?  A guy could live out of a RV trailer.....do this for fifteen years, and retire by age forty as a pizza guy.  If only things were that simple.  

Book Review: The English Tradesman (1726)

By Daniel DeFoe

Well....it's a curious book.  DeFoe is supposed to have only written one great book in his life....the rest are just pushed aside.  I've been picking up several of the other books and now come to disagree....most all of them...are good reads.

I should note....this book (published in 1726) was updated a hundred years later (1839) with some better footnotes and fresher material (long after DeFoe died).

The English Tradesman is a book which DeFoe goes to educate the English on craftsman skills.  Yes, it's the first book written over business and how to be a complete tradesman or businessman in the world.

Chapter by chapter....he lays out the various skills that you require.  From writing in a concise way....to being pleasant but firm in your attitude.  Stories of a personal nature are thrown into the mix, and make for better reading material.

If you were taking a college business section.....needing to write a report on skills of the tradesman in the 1700s...compared to today, this would make an excellent platform to base the paper upon.  In essence....nothing much has changed in 300 years.  Craftsman today....need basically the same skills as they needed in the old days.

Simplified book....easily read over a weekend.  Not complex.....and certainly written in a easy format.  I'd recommend it for the 16-to-20 year old crowd....in the midst of a high school project or college course on business.

Simply Observations

Yesterday, about an hour after the Malaysian flight was shot down over the Ukraine....I flipped my TV over to RT (Russia Today).....Russian news....minute-by-minute....in English.  They had their two guys covering this and giving a pretty accurate picture of what is seen at the site.....lots of images sent from Russians down in the region.  So there's folks calling in and giving eye-witness commentary.  In fact....these two guys in a row.  So these two Russian bystanders.....eyewitnesses....giving a vivid image of what's going on and the wreckage.....all being translated from Russian into English.  Strangely enough....both get to some point about a minute into their commentary.....that the local Russian militia (the freedom fighters going against Ukraine)....don't have the missiles to reach this height.  It was rather odd.....two bystanders....saying virtually the same thing....almost word for word as the translator did the comments.  Yes, rather odd.  In fact, to the point that I'd think this was all thrown into the media mix to convince people of something.....when it's possibly not true.  RT might be an innocent bystander in reporting what comes in.....but you get this odd feeling that some folks in Russian-Ukraine did something rather stupid and need to cover it up.  As for Putin's reaction?  I'm guessing that his chief down in Ukraine is visiting these idiots who fired the missile today, and suggesting they need to clear out and get as far from the civilized world as possible.

From over in Israel, if you really dig deep into the news (not the standard ABC, CBS, NBC stuff).....you will note that the Israeli military asked the UN to allow them to inspect a UN school site in Gaze (controlled by the Palestinians).  It's written into the rules that the UN must allow inspections.  Oddly enough.....there in a storage room....missiles.  Now, in the real world.....there's just not much of a reason for a school to house missiles.  So the UN is terribly dismayed by this episode, and promising to explain this later.  As for ethical consequences here?  Why would you not target schools and hospitals....if you kinda figure out they've got missiles hidden there?  What idiot would put missiles into schools and hospitals?  Just makes you wonder.

Some statistical guys came out and basically said there are approximately 1.6 percent of American society which is gay.....with another .6 percent saying they were bi-sexual, and one percent just saying they weren't gay, bi-sexual or straight.....leaving you to wonder what the heck they were (my suggestion is bondage, or an alien species).  The study....from the government naturally....says very strongly that there is no health difference between the groups, but then oddly enough admits that a fairly high number of gays are binge drinkers, and suffer from various psychological ailments.  Oddly enough....straight women were more likely to say they were really healthy....when compared to lesbians who noted various ailments.   What's the bottom line to the survey?  Well....out of 300-million Americans, there are probably 4.2 million gays.  The survey didn't know the state-status or urban versus rural part  of the story....maybe for a good reason.  If you knew more straights lived in Arkansas than any other state....it might disturb you, or if you knew that twenty-percent of California is gay, with the rest of the nation near .02 percent....it might disturb you.  As for the "other-minded" folks (neither straight, gay, or bi)?  Well....three million stretched across America....doing something, but we aren't sure of what.

Finally, Edward Snowden (our NSA guy) gave a brief interview of sorts....commenting on a number of things.  One of them.....that he's firmly convinced that IF he'd just be allowed a jury-trial rather than a judge-trial.....he'd get an innocent type situation, and his "peers" would see the truth.  Maybe if this was Hawaii or California.....in an OJ-like setting, he might be right.  In the other forty-eight states?  I'm fairly convinced that the charges laid out....would be noted on a guilty situation for Snowden.  He kinda noted at the end.....negotiations with the State Department are kinda stalled on this idea of him returning to conditions that he prefers.  My humble guess is that he'll live out his life in Russia, unless the Germans rig up some bogus deal to bring him into Germany.  Otherwise, he'll never touch US soil ever again.