General

We are in the process of moving from the image above to the image below.

At least in terms of what the infrastructure looks like.

Today I decommissioned an EdgeRouter 4 which features a “fanless router with a four-core, 1 GHz MIPS64 processor, 3 1Gbit RJ45 ports, and 1G SFP port.”

When they say “MIPS64” you can think of it as being in the same class as an ARM processor. Not a problem for what it is.

The issue was that there are only 1Gb interfaces. That and I’ve come to hate the configuration language.

This has been replaced with a pfSense router running on a TopTon “thing.” I call it a thing because it is from China and intended to be rebranded. It doesn’t have a real SKU.

It is based on an N100 with 4 cores and 8 threads. 2 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, 2 10Gb SFP+ ports. It can be upgraded and has multiple extras.

Besides the hardware, this is an entirely different animal in terms of what it can do. It is first, and foremost, a firewall. Everything else it does is above and beyond.

It is running NTP with a USB GPS unit attached. It runs DHCP, DNS, HAProxy, OSPF and a few other packages. The IDS/IPS system is running in notify mode at this time. That will be changed to full functionality very shortly.

So what’s the issue? The issue is that everything changed.

On the side, as I was replacing the router, I jiggled one of the Ceph servers. Jiggling it caused it to use just a few watts more, and the power supply gave out. It is a non-standard power supply, so it will be a day or two before the replacement arrives.

When I went to plug the fiber in, the fiber was too short. This required moving slack from the other end of the fiber back towards the router to have enough length where it was needed.

Having done this, plugging in the fiber gave me a dark result. I did a bit of diagnostic testing, isolated the issue to that one piece of fiber. I ran spare fiber to a different switch that was on the correct subnet, flashy lights.

Turns out that I had to degrade the fiber from the other router to work with the EdgeRouter 4. Once I took that off, the port did light off. But that was a few steps down the road.

Now the issue is that all the Wi-Fi access points have gone dark. Seems that they are not happy. This required reinstalling the control software and moving them from the old control software instance to the new one. Once that was done, I could see the error message from the access point complaining about a bad DHCP server.

After fighting this for far too long, I finally figured out that the pseudo Cisco like router was not forwarding DHCP packets within the same VLAN. I could not make it work. So I disabled the DHCP server on the new router/firewall and moved it back to the Cisco like router. Finally, Wi-Fi for the phones and everything seems to be working.

At which point I can’t log into the Vine of Liberty.

I can see the pages, I can’t log into the admin side. It is timing out.

3 hours later, I figured out that there was a bad DNS setting on the servers. The software reaches out to an external site for multiple reasons. The DNS lookup was taking so long that the connection was dropping.

I think this is an issue that I have just resolved.

But there’s more.

Even after I got the DNS cleaned up, many servers couldn’t touch base with the external monitoring servers. Why?

Routing all looked good, until things hit the firewall. Then it stopped.

Checking the rules, everything looks good. Checking from my box, everything works. It is only these servers.

Was it routing? Nope, that was working fine.

That was one thing that just worked. When I turned down the old router, the new router distributed routing information correctly and took over instantly.

So the issue is that pfSense “just works.” That is, there are default configurations that do the right thing out of the box.

One of those things is outbound firewall rules.

Anything on the LAN network is properly filtered and works.

But what is the definition of the LAN network? It is the subnet directly connected to the LAN interface(s).

Because I knew that I would need to be able to access the routers if routing goes wrong, my computer has a direct connection to the LAN Network attached to the routers. The Wi-Fi access points live in on the same subnet. So everything for my machine and the wireless devices “just worked”

The rest of the servers are on isolating subnets. That are part of the building LAN but they are not part of the “LAN Network”.

I know this, I defined an alias that contains all the building networks.

Once I added that to the firewall rules, it just worked.

Tomorrow’s tasks include more DHCP fights and moving away from Traefik. Which means making better use of the Ingress network.

Allyson is a published author. I am a published author. She works at writing. I was told to write, I did, they published it.

When I decided to keep GunFreeZone.net alive, I tried to post multiple times per day. I quickly burned out. Today I have a schedule of once per day, with extras when it is important and not an echo.

In the course of a normal day, I will read around 400 pages of text. Some of it I skim, some of it I have to read carefully, and some of it is for fun. I will also write 3000 to 5000 words, some of that is code, most of it is in English.

To be blunt, I spend more time reading and writing than just about anything else in my life.

Writer’s block is an excuse for an amateur. If you are expected to write, you write, you don’t get to say, “I don’t feel it today.”

If you are getting “writer’s block”, you are writing as a hobby. Allyson talks about this in her writing blogs and groups.

The next part of writing is making sure you are writing for more than yourself. If you are writing for yourself, you should be writing for yourself six months from now.

Every evening, I sit down, and I write for the blog. Occasionally, it is easy. Usually, it is work. Then there are days when it is just plain difficult.

I want to babble about the cheap soldering station I just picked up. Claims to be good. Has a 4.5-star rating. I had to crank it to 800F before it would melt solder, and I’m not sure if I got good connections.

Boring.

I’m in the process of getting rid of Traefik, a “load balancer”. I would rather not have left Apache, I did. I went to nginx, I still don’t understand it as well as I do Apache, but it is my preferred web server. Nginx can work as a load balancer, but it isn’t really.

So I have: Traefik, Nginx, Apache, HaProxy, and whatever it is that pfSense used for “load balancing”.

It isn’t uncommon to have a path that hits firewall, HaProxy, Traefik, nginx or Apache. Boring.

There are dozens of court cases that are interesting to me.

If they are heard in a district court where they obey the rule of law and follow the instructions set for them, they will get yanked into the Circuit Court so fast your head won’t stop spinning. If the case is in the circuit court, then the argument will be a repeat of what has already been said.

Boring.

At this point, the only interesting cases are those that will be heard by the Supreme Court this year.

Current events? By the time my article is published I’m already 12 hours behind of the news cycle.

Still, I write about things. There is more than a little filler these days. There are articles where I go far too deep in technical babble.

So to all of you that read our blog, thank you for hanging with us.

If you have something you want to say, PLEASE submit it. It would give me a day off.

For the most part, I’ve stopped writing or reporting on “mass shootings”. They happen. My initial takes are normally wrong. The information that we are fed is designed to tell a story. I hate being a conspiracy guy.

My biggest error, so far, has been my initial analysis of the Trump shooting.

Having said that, it is difficult not to have questions when something stinks.

Part of critical thinking is to ask questions. To verify answers. To put answers to the test.

Example: We had a breaker pop on Friday. I knew what the cause was instantly, the wife was running her space heater.

When I got to the living room, she’s sitting on the sofa. Within seconds, I determined that she had left the heater on, even after she left the room.

Wife and Ally are telling me that it couldn’t be the fault of the heater because it had been running for a while and hadn’t blown the circuit.

Yeah, that was before we had that extra bit of draw on the circuit from the wife turning on the TV and side table light and other loads.

They used critical thinking to eliminate the heater. I used more knowledge to rule the heater in.

That circuit is rated at 1650 watts. The heater, in low mode, draws 750 watts. The lights left on, the misc. stuff plugged into the walls, the bathroom light and fan easily reaches 300 watts. My computer has a 750 watt power supply in it. The switch and other “stuff” plugged into the same circuit. All of that is a significant load. Thus, popped breaker.

While rated at 1650 watts, those circuits will actually run for a bit over that limit until they pop.

When you look at a fact set, you have to evaluate all the parts to be able to reach a logical conclusion. Upon reaching that conclusion, you still need to have an open mind for more data that might change your analysis.

Security Analysis

Doing a security analysis of a location or situation has risk. I’m reminded of a sales analysis I did and provided to our sales manager for Cray.

The short of the analysis was that they were asking for millions of dollars from the client for a drive system which they could buy from other sources for under $100 thousand. I gave him this analysis so that he would have the ability to answer these types of questions before they were asked of him.

The sales manager reported me for “attempting to sabotage the sale”. I listened and reported back to my chain of command. The customer didn’t need me to tell them what their options were, they already knew.

Security analyses are like that. Telling a potential target of an observed weakness is more likely to get you in trouble and harassed than it is to get the institution to budge.

I’ve gamed out some options against institutional targets. I don’t ever talk about those analyses because I do not want something to happen to those targets and me becoming a person of interest.

Even the language I use would get me in trouble. I learned it from working for the military. Everything we analyzed was a “target”. It didn’t matter whether it was a T-90 from Russia or a Leopard II from Germany or an XM-1 from the US. They are all targets.

Most people don’t get it. So I don’t use those terms.

Questions

A veteran from the US Special Forces has decided to do “bad things.” He is going to detonate a bomb to cause damage to a Trump Hotel.

For some reason, he decides to take his passport with him on this mission.

The heat from the detonation is so intense, his weapons melt. Likely just the plastic furniture, but his passport and IDs survive.

What protected those IDs from the heat?

He rented a Tesla truck to do this in. What advantages does a Tesla truck have over an Econvan?

With extensive training on IEDs and making explosives, his device was pretty much a dud. What was the explosive used? Why didn’t he use a real explosive?

See TM 31–210 (HQ Department of the Army, 1969) pages 7 through 72 contains extensive information on primary and secondary explosives from field expedient sources.

Pages 194 through 223 cover making Fuses, detonators, and delay mechanisms.

A revised version was released in 2007.

So SF dude, who has been trained in all of this, messes up a simple bomb?

This man was likely highly trained in how to perform one man operations that were extremely successful. Why did he forget so much of his training?

Finally, why did he choose to use a Desert Eagle in 50 cal to off himself?

Christmas is past for another year. It was better than expected.

Watching movies with the family was good. My wife insists on “A Christmas Story”, as it is her favorite. I picked “Red One” on a recommendation from Scott Adams on X. The final movie was “A Christmas Story Christmas”.

This last hit a bit hard.

Regardless, friends came through, and we were able to give back to our friends.

My wife’s best friend’s husband passed earlier this month. We had her over for Christmas Eve dinner (tacos) and Christmas Dinner (Turkey with fixings).

Our tradition is to go around the table and each person gives thanks for something that happened that day. Sometimes it leads to discussions, sometimes it is just a little thing, “Thank you for a dinner, I really like.”

The goal is to stop perseverating on the bad that is happening around you, the things that are getting you down, and to acknowledge, to search for, the good that you have.

My friend from the NVL called on Christmas Eve. That was a good talk. The only bobble was when he let his distrust of Elon slip out. We have agreed not to talk politics. We are still friends.

My best friend died in November 2000. I don’t think I ever recovered from that day. He was not only my friend, he was my mentor.

He was the first person I met that could program better than I could. He was a better man than I, by far.

I found myself competing with him in programming to be better. He never competed with me. He just won. After a while, it stopped being a competition and became a lifelong friendship.

Through Mike, I met Max. Max called me on Christmas Eve. Talking to him made me feel better. Friends can do that.

So on this day, after you have finished with what’s under the tree, had the first of a week’s worth of leftovers, take a moment to reach out to a friend and let them know what they mean to you.

Here is hoping that the happy man in the red suit brought you all you wish.

More importantly, I wish you health and happiness in the coming years.

-Chris

Yesterday was a good day. But you don’t want to hear about nerd rants.

I took my wife to the hospital for minor surgery. It was successful, and the patent lived.

There are hardly any places in this state that are “gun free zones”. Post offices, courts, and jails are the limit, as far as I know.

While schools are “gun free zones”, the law says that if you have a permit to carry, you can carry in school zones.

Certain parts of court buildings are gun free zones. When I went to support a friend, I was in the court building, carrying. There was a metal detector between me and the courtroom, which was a true gun free zone.

Post offices were made “gun free zones” when a postal worker went bonkers and killed some of his coworkers. Under leftist logic, that means that The People need to be disarmed when entering postal property.

Postal property including the parking lot.

This is being challenged in court.

If you look at the image, you will notice that there are no references to any legal documents.

For example, the signage in Massachusetts has “G.L.C. 266 § 120” on it. New York’s signage says it is a felony and “Penal Law § 265.01-D, Penal Law § 265.01-E”. Texas signage says, “Pursuant to section 30.05, penal code (criminal trespass), a person may not enter this property with a firearm”.

The sign on the hospital? No such verbiage. That is because it does not have the force of law behind it.

In my state, a NO GUNS sign doesn’t mean anything.

If the owner of the property discovers I’m carrying, they can have me trespassed. That’s it. It isn’t the sign, it is just their right as a private property owner.

They can trespass anybody they want for any reason.

It is nice to live in a free state.

Defamation: A statement that injures a third party’s reputation. It is a type of tort.

Slander: A false statement, usually made orally, which defames another person. The damages from slander must be proved by the party suing.

Libel: A method of defamation expressed by print, writing, pictures, signs, effigies, or any communication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person’s reputation.

In other words, it is all linked together. In general, we speak of libel as written defamation and slander as spoken defamation.

E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her. Trump denied the allegation he raped her. Carroll then sued Trump for defamation.

Trump lost the defamation case. I believe that the case is on appeal.

This is the case that leftists have been using to say “Trump was found guilty of rape.”

No, he was not. Rape is a criminal offense, tried in a court of law, prosecuted by the state. E. Carroll was unable to find a single prosecutor willing to charge Trump with rape.

She brought a civil case. In a criminal case, the accused must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil case, it is a preponderance of the evidence. Very different.

Nobody on the left is willing to say that a court that finds in the way they want might be biased, while at the same time screaming that any court that finds against their wishes must be right-wing extremists/right leaning bias. In terms of this case, the suit was brought in a notoriously anti-Trump court.

The court allowed statements that did not directly relate to the charge.

In the end, the jury found that no rape occurred but felt that there was a sexual assault. See past articles regarding multiple charges to allow a jury to do the right thing and then give a lesser charge to make the plaintiff (in a civil suit) or the prosecutor a “smaller” win.

The jury awarded E. Carroll 5 million dollars.

Trump makes it all back, and then some

Yesterday, December 15th, Trump reached a settlement with ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle Trump’s defamation suit against ABC News for statements made by George Stephanopoulos.

George claimed that Trump had been found guilt of Rape. This is a false statement that damages Trump’s reputation, i.e., defamation.

Rather than a length and expensive civil trial, which they would have lost. ABC News agreed to pay $15 million for the building of the Trump presidential library. They will also pay $1 million dollars towards Trump’s legal fees.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/george-stephanopoulos-abc-apologize-trump-forced-pay-15-million-settle-defamation-suit

One of the ways the left “wins” arguments is by changing the meaning of the words they use.

So, what is healthcare?

Healthcare is anything that is caring for your health. That is the skills of a doctor or health professional. The medications you might take for high blood pressure or pain. It is setting a bone or removing a tumor.

Healthcare is about your mental and physical health. Everything from a band-aid to a heart transplant, and everything in between, is health care.

What is access to healthcare?

This is about your ability to get healthcare.

If you are in a vehicle accident, they pick you up, carry you to the hospital, and take care of your injuries. That is access to healthcare.

You are having trouble breathing, walk into the emergency room, they put you on a nebulizer, admit you, and take care of you until you can walk out the door. That is access to healthcare.

You cut your toenail too short, and it becomes an ingrown toenail, badly infected. You walk into the urgent care, and they take half your toenail off and write you a prescription for an anti-biotic. That is access to healthcare.

You think you have a sinus infection, you call your doctor’s office. They schedule you to see your doctor or another later that day. That is access to health care.

Your doctor thinks a skin growth might be cancerous. He refers you to the dermatologist, two weeks later, you are seen, and a biopsy is taken, tested, the results are back to you and your doctor 15 days after first being seen by your doctor.

Being able to get a doctor is part of access to healthcare. So is the ability to get medical tests done in a timely fashion.

In Montreal, CA in 2021, it took 862 days, on average, before you were assigned a family doctor.

As of 2042, on Friday, most of the hospitals emergency rooms in Montreal are over capacity. Most of the over capacity hospitals have had patients on stretchers for over 24 hours, some for over 48 hours. They don’t even bother to give wait times.

A different website gives wait times ranging from just over an hour to more than 6 hours.

The website I found with wait times for US hospitals shows about the same for Boston hospitals. But, a data point that I have is that my local hospital has a listed wait time of 2.2 hours. My personal experience at that hospital is that wait times are generally much less than that. You are normally seen by a triage nurse within a few minutes of arriving.

You can have good healthcare, good access to healthcare, or some mixture of the two.

In the United States, no person can be turned away from an ER because of their ability to pay.

Paying for Healthcare

Paying for healthcare is where things start to get very complex. When a friend came down to visit from Canada, she was horrified with how medical payments were done, here in the states. On the other hand, when she got sick, she was seen by a doctor within 15 minutes of arriving at an urgent care facility. She left with antibiotics, in hand. She had paid in full for her medical service, around $100.

She agreed that her access to healthcare, in the states, was better than it was in Canada. She felt that the quality of her healthcare was better in the states, and she was surprised at how little it cost.

The first issue with healthcare, is that you have no ability to shop for services. Until recently, with the creation of boutique medial services, you didn’t know how much accessing your doctor was going to cost.

I had a slow leak in the rim/wheel of the truck. Not an issue, every other week I gave it another shot of air.

It finally decided to become a fast leak. I called my guy, asked how much to move the current tire to a new rim. He told me. I ordered a new wheel, took it and the truck to him.

At the end of the morning, my truck had a new rim and the cost was within $5 of what he quoted me. The difference being a choice to replace the valve stem.

I came out of my doctor’s office, asked what the cost was. Paid in full. Then three weeks later, gotten a bill for more because they hadn’t coded the office visit correctly. They ate that extra after I made complaints to the administration.

If we agree I have paid, in full, then they don’t get to change the bill later.

Regardless, there is no real way to find out the prices of different procedures, ahead of time.

The next issue with healthcare costs is that the person paying for the procedures/visits is not the person who is getting the procedure. There is no reason for you to shop around when somebody else is going to pay. You will always choose the best quality you can find.

So what about payments?

You can pay at the point of service, or you can pre-pay.

“Point of service” is paying when the service is performed. If you go in to have your car serviced, you are expected to pay for that service before you leave. That is payment at the point of service.

The few times when some vendor or service person has said, “I know you, you’re good for it, come back tomorrow and pay.” has been so few and far between, it sticks in my mind.

My barber only takes cash, no cards. I didn’t know that when I sat down. It got done, found out that I didn’t have enough cash, left my lady as collateral, went and got more cash. I got my lady out of hock and called it a day.

Most healthcare is billed out after service, but is still considered payment at the point of service.

Pre-payment for medical services is when you pay something now for services you might need later.

In America, that is done with insurance. You purchase insurance to cover your healthcare costs.

Originally, health insurance was designed to cover unusual health events. You broke your leg, insurance covered it. You required your appendix removed, insurance covered it. You require a hip replacement, insurance covered it.

If you require an annual physical, insurance doesn’t cover it. Most of the maintenance costs of healthcare were paid out of pocket, not with insurance.

The government broke this model.

The benefits your employer gives you are part of your total compensation package. Only some of those benefits are taxable. One of the things that is not taxed, is your healthcare costs. Nor the amount your employer pays towards your healthcare insurance.

Consider the following, you are offered $50,000/year. You pay $13,000 in health insurance per year. That leaves $37,000. The government takes 30% of that, leaving you $25,900.

A different firm offers you $45,000 per year with matching insurance payments. This means that you will be paying $6,500 in insurance and the company will pay $6,500 for a total of $13,000. Your taxable income is $38,500. The government still takes 30%, leaving you with $26,950.

By taking a lower salary $5000 less, you get to take home just over a $1000 more. Not bad.

These tax games actually changed the face of medical insurance. For healthy, young people, this equation wasn’t as persuasive. So “insurance” started to cover healthcare maintenance. This drastically increased the cost of insurance.

Whereas, before, the insurance company could play the odds, taking money from everybody, knowing they would only have to pay a few, the new model required them to collect money and pay money for everybody.

A healthy 25-year-old didn’t cost the insurance company anything, on average. But now that maintenance is included, even the 25-year-old costs money. All of that had to be paid for.

The other place where the government interferes with insurance pricing, is in boundary limits.

There are places in this country where the side of the street you live on changes the cost of your medical insurance.

While you might think you have “Blue Cross/Blue Shield” insurance, I can promise you that you do not.

If you look at your insurance card, you will find that you have “Blue Cross/Blue Shield of STATE”. This is because medical insurance companies can only offer medical insurance in their state.

This means that there are 50 different Blue Cross/Blue shield insurance companies. Are they inter related? Yes. It is a legal fiction that keeps them separate.

In addition to the visible insurance costs, there are other hidden insurance costs. The federal government of the US takes a part of your income and uses it to fund Medicare and Medicaid.

When people talk about “free healthcare” in the UK or Canada, they are lying. There is no free healthcare in any country.

It is free at the point of service. The citizens of those countries pay for their healthcare via taxes.

The NHS of the UK spent $231.6 Billion on health services in the 2022/2023 budget year. This is out of a budget of $1,551 Billion. The NHS budget was 15% of the total budget.

This puts the price, per person, at about $3,400, or $13,600 per family of 4. Just about the same as the pre-Obamacare cost for family insurance in the United States.

The point is that healthcare in the UK is NOT free.

What they mean by “healthcare”

The left conflates healthcare with paying for healthcare. In the process, we have created a situation where healthcare costs more for most people. Access to healthcare has gone down. And the quality of healthcare seems to be slipping.

But, the left yells that more people have access to healthcare than ever before.

They didn’t really get more access, they just changed how much they pay for healthcare and who pays for healthcare.

I’m reminded of a show I watched a few years ago.

In the show, the couple set out to find out if they could live as a couple at menial labor.

He got a job, but I do not believe she did. His job did not have healthcare benefits. He was working at nearly minimum wage.

She was prone to getting UTIs. About 6 months into this experiment, she came down with what she knew was a UTI.

So they went to the ER to get treated. They ended up with a bill in the thousands.

They held this up as a reason people can’t live on such low wages.

They cheated for their story. First, she could have gotten a job. If they were as good as he said they were, they should have been able to work their way out of that starting wage/position. They didn’t.

Second, the cost of an ER visit is pretty high. The cost of an urgent care visit is much lower. My last urgent care visit included minor surgery. My total cost, before insurance, was less than $200.

The cost of diagnosing a UTI and prescribing an antibiotic is around $100. There are telehealth options available today that are even cheaper.

By making a shitty decision, they cost themselves over $1500 in medical bills, which could have been less than $125.

Conclusion

Make sure you hold them to using the right terms. Don’t let them redefine words to confuse and conflate the different issues at play.

This is a special day for me. It has been years since we gathered as a family at my parents’ home for a Thanksgiving feast, but that is a memory I hold dear.

No, this comes from something my mentor gave me.

When he was in collage, he had many good friends. Friends he kept until his death. When that first Thanksgiving came around, his friends went off to their families, and he went home to his. There was no feast for them. There was no celebration of thanks among those friends.

They took a look at the calendar and discovered that the second weekend in December would fall on the 10th. They decided to initiate the DEC-10 day.

This is, of course, a pun. The Digital Equipment Company manufactured the DEC-10 computer. The DEC-10 is the computer they were using. It is the computer which my mentor used to write BASIC for the local schools to use.

So today, the house is mostly empty, just the wife and I. The children arrive tomorrow. So there is no feast today.

That happens on Saturday.

We have Friendsgiving. This happens on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It is when we have all our friends over to enjoy each other’s company. It is a created family of sorts.

We will also invite acquaintances that might have had a lonely holiday. Making sure they are welcome too.

No matter where you are, which side of the political aisle you are on, please slow down, stop, and before you feast, give thanks for all you have.

One of the most difficult tasks economists have is to judge the cost of things. If I’m paying $3/dozen for eggs and you are paying $1/dozen, do your eggs or mine cost more?

This gets even more complex when you start to consider currency differences.

When I’m discussing past prices, I like to convert the cost at that time to hours of labor. How many hours of labor does it take to purchase this item.

In 1976-77 A brand new Apple II would run you around $900. Today, I can put together a similar class of computer for around $1000. CPU, Memory, Disk, Motherboard, and case. In 1976, that $900 was somewhere around 150 hours of my labor, call it 4 weeks of full-time labor.

Except that I was only working part-time. This means that my actual cost, saving everything, was going to be around 10 weeks.

Today, that $1000 computer is going to cost me less than a week of labor, ignoring taxes.

The problem with using hours of labor to compare costs is that the value of your labor varies greatly. At the time, I was working in a computer store, the first in the state. My friends were flipping burgers. I was making twice as much per hour as they were, sitting in front of a monitor typing.

Whose labor value do we use? When comparing my grandfathers’ salary, I used historical records for machinists, which he was. As a skilled laborer, he was paid much more than the average.

In 1986, to try to give people a more innate sense of how much the cost of living varied from location to location, and from time to time, The Economist published the “Big Mac Index.”

Why would an index based on a fast food restaurants’ menu item be of any use?

The answer is one of consistency and inclusion. If you were to compare a generic “hamburger” from location to location, you would get wildly changing values. That could be because of the cost of the burger to the restaurant, or the hamburgers could be different. Does one have a slice of American cheese on it and the other premium Swiss? Is one made from grass fed organic ground beef and the other from Sysco’s finest? Is one burger 4oz pre cook weight and the other 2oz?

It makes a difference.

A Big Mac is standardized everywhere. That stupid jingle is correct for every Big Mac ever made. McDonalds even standardizes the amount of sauce that goes on each sandwich.

This means we are comparing apples to apples. Or, in this case, burger to burger.

The second part is inclusion. We know what goes into each sandwich. Those base ingredients are source relatively locally.

While the restaurant might be buying their meat from McDonalds, they are buying it from a location nearby. This means that the transportation expenses are in the price of the burger. This means that the cost of meat is in the price of the burger.

The cost of each item that goes into the burger is included in the price it sells for.

There is a cost of doing business, insurance, property tax, rental costs, undocumented payments to government organizations and NGOs (bribes), heating, cooling, building maintenance. These costs are all rolled into the final price of the sandwich.

The final cost is that of labor. If the labor market is strong, workers will be making more, if it is weak, labor will be paid less.

This also accounts for the cost of living in a particular area. In a location where it costs more to live, the workers will want more money per hour. While people in lower cost of living areas might want the extra pay, they are not going to get it.

I interviewed for a job in California once. As part of the interview process, they flew me to San Diego for a week. I spent the week house shopping and interviewing. I finally found a home that I was willing to live in.

Even though they were going to almost double my current salary, I would not have been able to afford a house in San Diego. I turned the job down.

Using a Big Mac equivalent, we can get a better idea of what the true cost is for different locations.

In Hawaii, the price of a Big Mac is $5.31 while in Mississippi, it is $3.91. This implies that it costs more to live in Hawaii than it does in Mississippi.

As a final thought on the Big Mac index, I remember McDonalds advertising that you could buy dinner for a family of four for $5.00 and have change.

That isn’t the case, anymore.