Wood

 

48", square-pallet. I am guessing about half of a face cord on that pallet.

My fireplace insert burns about four-and-a-half pounds of wood an hour or about 2kg. The pile of wood on that pallet will weigh about 600 pounds after drying which pencils out to 130 hours of burn-time. 

Green Wood

I cut a wedge out of a 6" diameter round and dried it in the microwave. I learned that freshly cut, October Black Locust is 37% water-by-weight.

According to the internet, that means that I can expect 10.6 MJ/kg of wood in heat if I burned it "green". If I dry it down to 12% moisture, the net heat jumps up to 15.8 MJ/kg which is almost 50% higher. 20% moisture is about 14 MJ/kg.

The real issue with green wood isn't the loss of heating value, it is condensate in the chimney and incomplete combustion. Those two combine to create flammable deposits inside of the chimney and, in time, chimney fires. 

Other almost-useless information

The technique for using a microwave to determine the dry-matter content of pasture grasses or the moisture content of wood is to place a weighed sample in a ceramic or corelle ware bowl and microwave it for a short period. My sample started out at 372 gargoyles so I microwaved it for 4 minutes.

Then I weighed it. After that, I microwaved it in 2 minute increments and weighed it each time. The weight of the sample dropped 36g, 22g, 36g, 27g and then 17g. The hot wood filled the kitchen with the smell of Mexican street corn.

I started to microwave it one more time but I could smell scorching and I terminated the dehydration. 

Wind

My plan had been to drop another Black Locust today but the wind was gusting in the mid-20 mph range. The tree is easily twice as big as the one I cut yesterday.

Discretion is the better part of valor so I postponed the mission.

It looks like Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday will be excellent days to drop trees based on the predicted winds

I not only have Black Locust to cut, I have White Pines and Black Walnuts to thin out. 

They are all on the Eaton Rapids property. Given the fact that Saturday will be both not windy and Quicksilver will not be here, it makes sense to just drop the trees and buck-them to size some other day.

Some of the Black Locust are leaning over a fence, so I will drop the fence from the fence-posts before I cut those trees.

I really miss having cows, but it is much easier to do this kind of maintenance when they are not on the property. 

On the eve of All Saint's Day

 

Plastic straw

Plastic straw and a hot-dog

Grab bag

Michigan Democrats introduced a bill into committee to "find" funds to pay for exactly one month's worth of the Federal SNAP benefits.

Michigan receives about $800 million from the Feds for various food-security programs. The committee in Michigan's Senate (controlled by Democrats at this point) introduced a bill allocating $70 million. They promptly announced the effort to the press. The bill must pass out of committee. Then it must pass the full Senate. It must be passed by the Michigan House (narrowly controlled by the Republicans at this time). Then it must be signed into law by Governor Whitmer (a Democrat).

Cynically, this might be more about trying to control the damage to the Democratic brand than it is about helping hungry people. It will be a miracle if the bill is signed into law before Christmas.

Beet leaves

The video in the recent post on the Ukrainian women prominently featured the leaves of sugar beets.

The woman picked the older, lower, shaded leaves from the beet plants and ground them up along with various weeds for animal fodder.

Beet leaves are rich in oxalic acid at 800mg/100 grams wet-weight. Swiss Chard (botanically the same plant) have been selected for lower oxalic acid levels and have about 350mg/100g wet-weight. Spinach, rhubarb, sorrel (Rumex) and amaranth greens have even more oxalic acid than beets with up to 1300mg/100g wet-weight.

80% of kidney stones are composed of calcium oxalate that crystalizes in the kidneys. Unlike some kidney stones, CO stones are sharp and jagged, like the barbs on a fish hook.

For the record, vegans have a higher rate of Calcium Oxalate kidney stones than the regular population due to their high consumption of leafy-greens rich in oxalic acid.

Greens from sugar beets, which are not selected to be low in oxalic acid, are probably best fed to chickens and sheep. 

Africa being Africa (revisited)

The conflict between pastoral people and agricultural people is older than history. If you think about it, it was the canvas that the story of Cain and Abel was painted on. The farmer puts his fields in the best-watered meadows and then resents when the shepherd or camel-herder drives his flock over the crop to get to the water. Homicide results.

Throw in Africa's population over-shoot and "bore-wells" which can lower the water table enough so that surface water disappears. The pastoral people depend on surface water for their animals. 

Antifa going free-agent

Eric Hoffer wrote a book titled The True Believer back in the early 1950s. In it, he explained how NAZI zealots were able to flip from being rabid Fascists to rabid Communists without missing a beat.

If men are primarily motivated by the quest for "respect" and women crave "belonging", then both can find meaning in joining an organization that promises them a place in the vanguard of history.

Key points: The organization has to present as being unstoppable (like The 1000 Year Reich or Marx claiming Capitalism must inevitably collapse due to its internal contradictions). It has to protect its members. It has to promise that the early-adaptors will have elevated, responsible/respected positions in the future.

If you look at how modern culture raises our children, especially our boys, you have to admit that most of them feel rejected, disrespected and sentenced to a life in the Aisle-of-Misfit-Toys. Antifa as the thuggish arm of the "Progressive" (progressive sounds inevitable, right) movement offered the Misfit-Toys everything Hoffer identified as critical for attracting mindless zealots. Acceptance in return for absolute loyalty and a license to inflict respect/fear from those they saw as their tormentors.

And now the pendulum is swinging the other way. The problem isn't Trump and his rhetoric. It is that the Progressives created and legitimized another generation of Brownshirts. They alienated the boys ---3/4 of the kids in Special Ed are boys---. They set up an aristocracy based on exclusive mean-girl clubs.

Traffic counts

One of the comments suggested that I use two cameras to get a more accurate count.

That is a good suggestion but the 100-to-150 per day is accurate enough to satisfy my curiosity. 

Yesterday

I cut down a Black Locust tree and bucked it into 15" lengths. Today will be moving it and starting to split it.

I also have a lunch date with my siblings. 

We are not the same

 

Source

You have to go off-site and noodle-around on multiple sites to learn that there are at least three planes-of-cleavage.

Many of the victims belonged to the Fur Tribe in Darfur

 

Many others were members of the Berti tribe

1. The attackers are primarily Zaghawa who are nominally Sunni Muslims. The victims are primarily Christians and Animists.
2. The attackers are ethnically north-Africans/Mediterranean (like Berbers, Egyptians and Moroccans). The victims are Blacks (sub-Saharan Africans). Note that the government of Sudan is dominated by Arabs/north-Africans.
3. The attackers belong to a tribe that is historically nomadic/pastoral. The victims belong to tribes that are historically sedentary/agricultural. 

Also of interest to those of us in the United States, the attackers played free-agent since 2003, siding with whatever political movement happened to give them the best support (weapons) at any given time. The reason that I think that is important is because whoever controls the purse-strings controls Antifa, whose loyalty is not tied to principles but to expedience. Their flipping allegiance (perhaps not probable in the next five years but it IS possible) would be devastating to U.S. cities.

Another thing to keep an eye on is that the RSF (attackers) changed their name from Janjaweed in 2013 in a sort of rebranding, market-relaunch. 

Also like the United States (and Iraq and Afghanistan and the Balkans), the ethnic diversity has a high degree of granularity, something like a Christmas fruit-cake. 

Many will dismiss the genocide as "Africa being Africa". That is short-sighted. We have African-tribalism (and Iraqi and Afghani and Balkan tribalism) living in our cities. We also have the inexorable drifting apart of Left and Right, much like a canoe that was untied from the dock.

North America is not "Africa", yet. 

Traffic estimate

Based on a couple of week-days of traffic, I estimate that our average daily traffic is between 100 and 150 per day. That includes traffic traveling in both directions.

There is some guess-work involved because the camera is much more capable at seeing vehicles going away than it is coming toward it. I suspect that the trigger is in the IR portion of the spectrum and tail-pipes are a very crisp signal. 

Rural Life: Two women in Ukraine

This post will be a deep-dive on a rural video recorded in Ukraine approximately one month ago.

There are two women shown in this video. One of them might be 55-to-60 years-old. The other might be 35 years-old. The younger woman is wearing a ring on her left ring-finger. The older woman has a ring on her right hand but not her left. I assume they are a mother-and-daughter.

After the intro images, the video goes live at the 0:50 when the older woman (let's call her "Granny") bring a horse in from the pasture on a long lead. The video shows us how she gets water out of the well (water-table 15' down) and how she put the various harnesses and tack on the horse to pull the wagon.

At 3:28 the two women drive the wagon out of the farm-yard.

One of the things I found interesting about this video are the breeds of livestock they had on their farm. The horse isn't a hot-blooded Arabian or Morgan. It is a stout work horse of 1200-to-1500 pounds. Maybe Lucky will venture a guess regarding breed, height and weight.

The chickens are a mix of tall game-fowl and more typical egg-layers. The sheep appear to be Romanov which have multiple (as many of four or five) lambs at a time.

Their destination is a slough or stagnant canal and their task is to wade out, into the water and to collect duckweed. The wind is blowing and the air temperature is probably in the 55 degree F range.

At the 8:36 mark they stop at a row of corn plants and harvest some ears and some cucumbers that were climbing on the corn-stalks. It looks like the multi-cropped them or perhaps a volunteer. Granny feeds the green corn-husk to the horse as a reward. On the left side of the frame is a flower garden with marigolds or zinnias

A milk-cow appears at the 9:40 mark. It might be 3/4 Holstein and 1/4 Angus. 

At 12:44 the two women take an old Ford Transit van over a two-track to a distant vegetable field. It looks like they are getting a little bit of sleet as they harvest (sugar) beet leaves. This looks like another mixed planting because I see cabbages in the sugar beets. Maybe they transplanted cabbage plants into the rows of beets where there were gaps.

At the 14:24 mark I see the younger woman do something that makes this video look "authentic". She automatically pulls a weed and pitches it to the side as she is harvesting the sugar beet leaves. It does not appear staged or artificial. It is just something she does. Serious gardeners cannot walk through a garden without pulling weeds.

At 14:30 it shows them pulling culinary (red) beets. 14:44 they are pulling carrots which they transport with tops attached. At 15:35 they start digging potatoes. The potatoes are exceptionally clean and scab-free.

16:25 shows the younger woman tying they corners of a blanket together to use it as a bag to transport some of their bulkier vegetables.

The cargo on the return trip

At 17:05 we learn that the van has a manual transmission, an option not available in the U.S.

At 17:15 the sheep appear.

Maybe a little bit of Beagle. Maybe some Jack Russel.

Many of these kinds of channels start out showing "real life" but the tools gradually get newer and fancier. This basin isn't new if the scarred enamel is any indication.

At the 19:50 mark, the younger woman takes cull vegetables and potato peels to a mill to grind them in an electric mill that looks like it is at least 40 years old.

The ground-up vegetables are cooked to soften them.

24:15 Potato pancakes are on the menu for the humans

The toy quad (too small for an adult) near the lower, right corner of the image is the only evidence I saw of a child. Not that the front wheels are pointed in different directions. Perhaps he is the one shooting the video.

The way the berries glow in the muddy light makes me believe that they are fluorescing under the UV light that is penetrating the cloud cover.

At 26:20 The women start picking the most beautiful raspberries imaginable. It is a much larger planting than what they would need for home use, so I think they sell them as a commercial crop.

These are bearing on primo-canes so it might be the varieties Polka or Polana.

31:45 The leaves from the sugar beets are ground up with other vegetation for animal feed. This grinder is also an antique with cast iron flywheels and driven (perhaps) by a large displacement, low RPM gas engine. 

Miscellaneous notes

Other crops I saw were grape-vines, a very small orchard of fruit trees. There was a cameo appearance of Highbush Cranberry (Viburnum opulus)

The wood in the wood-stove appears to be prunings from fruit trees and a little bit of broken pallets. The large round piece with the pronounced medullary rays is most likely oak but could be chestnut. Medullary rays are the features that look like the spokes on a bicycle wheel.

Many of the large trees look like Siberian Elm.

The women seem very matter-of-fact about life. The younger woman seems to be in a very good space as she is peeling potatoes.

I never saw the end-use for the duckweed. 

Trump isn't "Hitler". Trump is "FDR"

It is a rare day when I can write a blog-post that has the potential to piss-off every one of my readers.

Today is one of those days.

Trump is more like FDR than Hitler

FDR was a disrupter. He liked stirring the pot and twisting peoples noses. For example, he appointed Joe Kennedy, Sr. as ambassador to the Untied Kingdom. Kennedy was a very low-brow Irishman who hated the English and whose fortune was based on running illegal booze during the prohibition. The royal family wouldn't have hired Joe Kennedy to walk the family dog.

FDR exploited new communication technology. FDR gave masterful, fireside chats to connect directly to the voters as-a-real-person. Trump has been equally agile in using internet-based social media.

FDR's policies were constantly embroiled in legal challenges.

FDR was a meddler and experimenter.

FDR gleefully appointed people who were tasked with goals that worked at cross-purposes of other people he had launched. 

FDR struggled to have constancy-of-purpose, seeming to chase after every gum-wrapper blowing down the street. 

FDR was POTUS during times of unprecedented change and stress.

The national debt exploded under FDR.

The reason this comparison will piss-off so many

The liberals are scandalized by this comparison because the constant rewriting of history made FDR an unblemished saint in their eyes. Until Obama came along, there was no other politician who could be considered even close to him in greatness. To say Donald J. Trump is a lot like FDR is heresy and burning at the stake is too good for somebody who dares to think that.

Liberals are also horrified that Trump might be only the second president (after FDR) to serve more than two terms. 

The conservatives are scandalized by this comparison because FDR's policies resulted in enormous growth in government and wholesale losses in personal freedoms.

An old man's grumblings

Warren Buffet once stated that he didn't invest in any business he didn't understand. I think that was in 1999 and he made that comment when a business journalist asked why he wasn't stuffing his portfolio with dot-com stocks.

I don't understand crypto-currency. From Eaton Rapids, Michigan it looks like somebody auctioning off "Prime Numbers" or selling stars in far-away galaxies.

I understand the value of a half-dozen, freshly caught bluegills, five-pounds of potatoes and a couple of freshly pulled onions. To me, those have tangible value although to many people they have less value than .jpgs of those same items. The difference is that I know how to turn those items into food while many people would find them repulsive and be bothered by the effort required to throw them into the rubbish.

Maybe that plays into the allure of crypto: The figurative has become more valuable than the literal due to ease of manipulation. It is child's play to move a million dollars electronically from New York to Singapore or Hong Kong at the end of the business day, then to Europe and then back to New York for the start of the next business day. Try doing that with a grain of rye or a single bean seed. The abstract is easily moved. Actual goods, not so much.

Artificial Intelligence

I must confess to having similar positions on Artificial Intelligence.

For one thing, even infinite knowledge about a finite event or item does NOT have infinite value. For example, even if I know to within one millionth of a millimeter the location of an eight-point buck...the maximum value of that information is the worth of that eight-point buck.

Is one-millionth of a millimeter meaningful when we are talking about an animal? Is a millimeter meaningful? Are we talking about the center-of-gravity of the heart? Maybe the brain? Perhaps the center-of-gravity of the animal? Does that include the content of its intestines (the deer shit)?

Another aspect of AI that isn't discussed are the fragilities that reliance of AI is baking into the system.

Dependence upon sensors

I worked in an truck plant (now closed) that struggled to "make rate". That is, it was unable to make the required number of truck cabs needed to make enough trucks to make the plant economically viable.

Every issue was addressed by adding more sensors and more "error proofing". The body shop ran slower and slower due to electronic "hardening of the arteries".

The chunk of the body shop I was given responsibility was from Zone-A to Zone-R. It didn't take long to figure out that the same issues were biting me many times a day.

For example, there was a magnetic position sensor in every station to verify that the skid had entered or left the station. That was to prevent the front of one skid from crashing into the skid in front of it.

The expulsion from the weld guns sprayed on top of one of the sensors* and in a few hours the welder had deposited enough magnetic weld dust on it that the sensor indicated that the skid had stalled on top of it and the line shut down.

The electrician had to hear the call sing-song, read the marque, walk over to the cell where the fault originated, lock-out the cell, wipe the dust off the top of the sensor, remove his locks, clear the faults and restart the cell. Guaranteed fifteen minutes of downtime every time it happened.

They had run like that for YEARS.

"Hey, Ron...when you getta minute can you meet me at cell K-40?" I called him on the radio.

"Sure, Joe. What's up?" Ron Muzurek asked (no harm in using his name. Great electrician, by the way).

"Easier to point it out than to try to tell ya" I responded.

 The cell was running when he ambled up.

"Do you see how the robot on the left side that is welding the rear roof-bow is spraying weld sparks on the sensor?" I asked.

"Yeah" Ron said. It was as clear as day.

"Do you suppose you could tip the orientation of the weld gun just a little bit so the spray went somewhere else?" I asked.

"I could try, but I gotta have your permission to do that because I will have to shut the line down" Ron replied.

"You got it. Just be a little bit smart about it so we don't strip the system dry" I told him.

Two hours later, Ron waited until K-zone was about to be blocked out due to down-time in the system it was feeding (L-zone) and stopped the cell. It took him five minutes to program the robot so it tilted the gun and shot the sparks inside of the cab instead of backwards-and-down.

That fault, in that station disappeared forever.

So...run that process in reverse. 

If you are running your enterprise on AI then you are totally dependent on sensors somewhere. Many sensors. Sensors struggle in dirty environments.

If a problem can be fixed in five minutes it can also be created in five minutes, either through malice or "noise" in the inputs.

*Some of the newer plants had the sensors mounted vertically and they looked at the side of the skid. The old plants had them mounted horizontally and they looked at the bottom of the skid and were vulnerable to weld slag accumulation.

One of the newer plants did have horizontally mounted sensors and they were vulnerable to "un-making" when a warped skid came into station and rocked when it stopped. The controls guys fixed it (five years after the plant went operational) by latching when the sensor made or only looking at the sensor's state at the back of the stack of inputs to give the skid time to stop rocking.

They also changed the decel from a step function to a ramp which helped with rocking and overshoot.

Little fiddly stuff that grows exponentially as sensors are added to a system.

Random fact

NVIDIA is 7% of the market-cap of the S&P 500 and it has a Price/Earnings ratio of 53. That high P/E indicates that the market believes that NVIDIA's profits will continue to grow exponentially.

To me, stock in NVIDIA looks like the last ticket on the Titanic. 

Dinosaur Eggs

I brought a couple of these home from the Hill Orchard yesterday.

Quicksilver was awake from her nap but not eager to get out of her bed when I got home.

So, talking to Mrs ERJ I said, loudly enough to carry down the hallway, "Yep. I brought home some Dinosaur Eggs." 

An excited, young voice piped back at me "Dinosaur Eggs?"

"Yep. Dinosaur Eggs. They look like they are ready to hatch."

Pitter-pat, pitter-pat, pitter-pat. "Me hold!!!!"

I growled, keeping my face expressionless. "Better hurry" 

All of a sudden, she wasn't wanting to hold them. 

I am sure I will have a few things to answer for when I get up to the Pearly Gates. This will probably be one of them. 

Work

I fabricated a built-up column to add to the deer stand yesterday morning. That was the most complicated part of finishing up the last wall. It started as a 10' long, treated 2"-by-4" and I added various cleats and backers so I could attach it to existing structural 4-by-4s that hold the stand up.

I built it at home. 

Then I drove out to the orchards and installed it. I had to do a little bit of trimming to make it fit. That burned up more than an hour of time.

I planted the peony divisions I bought from the lady in Lansing.

I planted daffodil bulbs.

I cut brush and sprayed the cut-stumps with 10:1 water:glyphosate concentrate solution.

And just-like-that, I was exhausted and probably dehydrated.

Today's Work Ticket

Today's work ticket has cleaning out the garage as the first item. We used the garage as a staging area during the bathroom remodel and Mrs ERJ would like to park inside during the winter.

The second item is to box up the heater that cannot be used in bathrooms and get it to the Amazon Return UPS store.

I am sure many other tasks will pop up to make it a full day. 

Fifty-seven images on the ERJ traffic-cam

Three school buses, two pedestrians, one bicycle, three combines, one tractor.

The camera is still too slow. I am missing fast moving vehicles. I can tell because I can see shadows in some of the early morning images that were left by vehicles traveling west-to-east. I also have one image of the mail-truck when there should also be a picture of the truck on the return leg. 

Only fools expects things to always be easy

 

Source

I purchased a radiant heater for the new bathroom. Nowhere in the item description did it say that it could not be used on vinyl floors nor can it be used in bathrooms, kitchens, basements, garages, or porches.

Ceramic tile.

The vinyl floor issue is fixable. I can put it on a slightly raised pad topped with ceramic tile. The bathroom has GFI protected outlets but Mrs ERJ says "No".

So it goes back to Amazon today. 

I got training yesterday

I got training yesterday in using a trencher. 

My instructor was hand-digging the start of the trench near the house when he hit a gas-line at 10 inches of depth. The local building code is 24".

It was not a case of "At ease. Smoke-em if you got-em". 

Consumers Energy was on the site 41 minutes after the call-in. The responder did not need to use his "sniffer" to find the leak. 

It was a short lesson. Class is rescheduled for another day.

Traffic monitoring

The trail-cam's response time was too slow for where I mounted it on Sunday. The clues were that I had 415 images. Most of them were empty (except for the background), a few of them showed slow vehicles like farm tractors and even fewer showed the tail-lamps of a vehicle leaving the frame.

I repositioned the camera at 8:15 a.m. Monday and will see what we catch later today. 

Busy day

God willing, today will be a busy day. Quicksilver will be doing other things. The weather looks promising. A boatload of outside tasks await my attention.

Bonus images

A Sugar Maple growing in town

This firearm-scope combination has issues. The first shot was about 4" low at 100 yards. I adjusted up 10 clicks which I expected to have it go up 2-1/2". It went up about nine inches. Then I made 5 clicks down and it went down seven inches.

The firearm is a CVA  Wolf which is a break-open action. Three possibilities come to mind. The scope mounting might be bad. The scope might be junk. The final option might be that the "lock" that holds the breech-end of the barrel in position might not be repeatable. 

Of the three options, the last option is the most painless to investigate. A dab of grease to ensure the sliding surface does not bind and firmly pushing the actuating lever forward to help the spring ensure that it is fully seated. Less painful is not painless. THose three shots took fifteen minutes. Add the cleaning time afterward and it still soaks up a lot of time. It is, after all, a muzzle-loader.

Unions about to relearn...

 

Bonus joke

A priest, a lawyer and an engineer were in line to be beheaded by a guillotine.

The blade dropped and unexpectedly shuddered to a stop a scant inch from the priest's Adam's apple.

"God chose to save me! You have to let me go" the priest exclaimed.

The soldiers shrugged and let the priest go free.

The lawyer was next. Again, the razor-sharp edge of the blade stopped an inch from the man's neck.

"You have to let me go. To try again would be double-jeopardy" the lawyer informed his would-be executioners.

The soldiers complied. 

Finally, the engineer's neck was put atop the chopping block. Staring up at the apparatus and knowing that his life would be ending in seconds, the engineer shouted "Stop!  I think I see the problem." 

Fine Art Tuesday

Francis (Frank) Bernard Dicksee was born in 1853 in London, England and died in 1928.

A tip of the hat to "Amazed" who left a comment on the post about tramps and hobos. They used the lead image as their avatar.

Some challenges in getting EBT crowd to work 20 hours a week

According to the book When Money Dies by Adam Ferguson, there were several times in the early 1920s when authorities in Germany's Weimar Republic misdiagnosed the causes of rising prices. They decided that the reason people could not afford basic necessities was because there was not enough money in circulation. So they printed more.

More money chasing the same amount (or less) goods bids up prices. The additional money in circulation fosters hoarding and has a negative net-impact. The authorities printed even MORE money. It was like watching a Dachshund chasing its tail.

I thought "How can they be so STUPID? The problem is as plain as the nose on their face and they cannot see it!"

Today

Today we seem to be in the early stages of accelerating inflation. We are the golf-ball rimming the cup. 

We are paying people money to stay unemployed. Out of a misplaced sense of altruism, we feel sorry for them and continue to expand the pool of benefits they are eligible for.

We send(sent) millions of dollars to score of foreign countries to fund Gay-pride parades and to fund "gender studies". 

We are propping up the military all around the world. And it is not just "poor" countries. We are subsidizing Europe's defense and they look down their noses at us. We are propping up Ukraine in the bear's armpit and Israel in the middle-East.

We are subsidizing spendthrift states and cities. We are blindly throwing money at Pharma. We get seduced by The Next Big Thing whether it is Green Energy or AI and the Goobermint pumps money into them, too.

(tiny violin playing) And the law-makers and the Fed say "Gee, Johnny and Joanie can't afford a house. We better goose the economy with stimulus".

BAM!

Just like the Weimar Republic. 

But now it is a virtual dog chasing a virtual tail. Progress!

Putting people back to work

"More money chasing fewer goods"

Presumably, if more people are working, more goods-and-services are produced. That defuses one side of the inflation spiral. Getting able-bodied people off of the dole is mandatory if we are going to avoid hyper-inflation.

From the comments: "I think asking 20 hours out of every 168 hours is already lenient. If it were up to me, I'd have them fall in and call it boot camp for layabouts.
Section 8 is hereby known as barracks. Lights out at 2100." 

Human bodies are plastic and adapt to the physical demands placed on them. Muscles grow. Callouses develop. Stamina increases. Pain perception shifts. Time perception calibrates. Intervals for defecating adjust.

Otherwise healthy men in the late teens are the most "plastic". Women, lacking testosterone, harden-up more slowly. As we age, our cells speed of growing and dividing decreases and we are adapt more slowly.

But even young men have limits. Almost three-quarters of young men are unfit for military service (although some of them are unfit due to drug use and/or criminal records). Dropping an unfit person into boot-camp means they will be red-lined due to blisters, sprains, back-issues or repetitive-use pathologies.

If you played football in high school, think about the first practices of the season. The coach started at two-a-day with (maybe) one hour each of actual exercise. Then three-a-day (with recovery periods between them). Then practice with pads and uniforms.

This is who is going to show up for "work day". Mid-thirties. Not very fit.

"I am a knowledge worker. I don't sweat"

"I can't get my shirts dirty"

On the civilian side, IT IS WORSE. They will show up to the first day of work in flip-flops, crocs and high-heels. They will be wearing spandex and lacy camisols. They will have long, artificial nails, fingers covered in rings, false eyelashes and ridiculously long dreadlocks. And the women will be dressed even more inappropriately. Both men and women will see it as a way to meet potential partners.

They will be on disability in a heartbeat and will be sheltered from having to work if they are dropped into 20 hours if strenuous, physical labor like cutting-and-dragging brush.

The only way I can see to avoid having 95% of the "workers" crash out of the program in the first week is to mimic the football coach and not the drill instructor. 

The first day will be most covering what they CANNOT wear on the job. That includes rings because they are a snagging hazard and because you cannot wear work-gloves that fit when you have chunky rings or rings with stones mounted in them. Footwear is a big deal. And on and on and on. 

Bottleneck

Getting crews like this going is very labor intensive. Realistically, it is going to take one supervisor for every four-or-five workers. I don't know where all of those supervisors are going to come from.

It sure won't be people with Masters degrees in Social Work.

Select all of the pictures that depict Toxic Masculinity

Select all of the pictures that depict Toxic Masculinity and cis-Normative Privilege