Monday, August 25, 2014

Monday's Missives

  • PSY's Gangam Style video has over 2 billion views on the Yoochoobs. That is bind moggling to me.
  • If I had a business my promotional gimme caps and coffee mugs would be the coolest ever.
  • It would be interesting to know how much the search efforts for Bowe Berghdal cost and if any lives were lost or men were wounded looking for him. The cost had to be in the  millions. At least some of the missions used FA18s for air cover which are bound to cost 30,000 dollars (semi educated guess) per hour to operate. Plenty of other missions were bound to have Apache CAS.
  • Update: Yesterday (06/13/2014) I heard on the radio 6 soldiers were lost in the searches for Berghdal. I just read these losses only had tenuous links to Berghdal as they weren't missions sent out to look for him.



  • Neon trees Animal
  • Turner Falls and putt-put are on the list for this weekend (06/14/2014). Lets hope I get to use my new Columbia rain jacket. I cannot imagine it being any drier. Yesterday I saw a tree chasing the neighbors dog trying to get itself peed on.
  • Speaking of the super Hornet- that aircraft costs over a 40 billion dollars a piece. That doesn't even sound real. As my concept of money goes that can't be right- right?! That is a small country GDP and we have made over 500 of those things. Correction: It was supposed to be 40 million- which is still wrong. 40 billion?! The Donald is right as usual- they're closer to 70 million.









  • Life and death evidently abound at Clark Gardens. The little disturbances in the water are minnows eating it's guts where a baby turtle had previously been working.

    See what I mean? Death everywhere up in here!
  • A friendly acquaintance bears a passing similarity to Kiera Knightly. If I asked you who she looks like you may or may not independently call it but if I gave you the nudge then yeah, you would absolutely see it. The weird thing? I am nearly sure she intentionally plays the resemblance up in the way she smiles.
  • I have never played hooky from work at my present job as we each have about all the work we want to do- when we are fully staffed to share the load. My nursing buddies seem to feel the same way. If they lose any part of that ethic though, mine will likewise go right out the window.

    A duck laid an egg on the little dock. I think her motherly instincts are a tad lacking. I watched a red eared slider turtle think about crawling up on to the dock and was hoping mightily he would eat it.

    You thought I was kidding about the death thing.

  • An old get out of work trick: When you call in tell the boss you have diarrhea. The phone call will end in about 4 seconds flat as they don't want to talk about it any further. Then when you come back to work they will not ask if you're better etc. as they again- don't want to talk about it.
  • On my wedding day I will sing this song to my darling bride and no one there will ever forget it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

F/A-18 cost was about $70 million a copy. B2s ran about 10x that in unit cost, but a tad over $2B each when all R&D/program costs factored in. Stratospheric costs killed the F-22, and I predict some parallels with the JSF program.

- El Donaldo

an Donalbane said...

4 billion eyes traumatized by a pop dork? Seems to be the state of the 'culture' today. I'm thinking those four horsemen on the horizon might not be the Cartwrights...

Back to the airplanes, Jefferson - the initial projected unit cost per JSF was supposed to be comfortably south of $100M, but the 2012 deliveries were running a tad above that, with current/near future deliveries about $150M (or about the cost of the F-22) across the variants, and longer term deliveries now projected at $200M per copy.