Where Tech Stocks make money and Horsepower in the Titantic versus the Engine on a Boeing 777
May 2, 2022 Volume 2 # 48
What goes up…
Many young stock market players must be in shock. They are used to stocks going straight up and bouncing back after a quick downturn. Warren Buffett called markets `a casino’ this week. The Nasdaq had its worst week since 2008.
Where in the world and tech giants sell and what are their biggest products.
Supply Chain Mess could get Worse
Apple said this week the supply chain mess could cost it as much as $8-billion the rest of this year The COVID shutdown of Shanghai by the Chinese government means a huge delay in getting material from Chinese factories. I made an inquiry about an electric car and was told I could expect it in 18 months. Chip shortage.
Below is a screen shot of an App called Boat Watch from Friday morning. It shows the ships at anchor or waiting at docks; the green one are almost all container ships. The red ships are tankers.
Russia Cuts Gas to Poland and Bulgaria
Will Germany be next?
What is behind the puffy-faced Vladimir Putin?
A doctor friend looking at his face and his rigid posture and holding on to the desk has this diagnosis: “Putin has Edema (a build-up of fluids) and probably Parkinson’s Disease. He is obviously mentally unbalanced.” The Daily Telegraph says Schizophrenia. Is a man who knows he is sick rolling the dice in Ukraine?
Now the Daily Mail says Putin is going in for a cancer operation. Maybe that’s one way to get rid of him.
One Boeing 777 Engine Twice the Horsepower of the Titanic Engine Room
The clip below shows the engine room of the Titanic from the 1997 film.
This info comes from an article in the December 30 2011 edition of The Atlantic. Here is how they describe the difference between a jet engine and a giant steam engine:
“The RMS Titanic weighed almost 50,000 tons and could carry 3,500 people. Before it sunk, it was world-famous as the massive titan of the sea. Its multiple engines, powered by 159 coal furnaces, were designed to deliver 46,000 horsepower.
Compare that to today's beastly mode of transport: the Boeing 777. Bangalore Aviation points out that a single GE90-115B engine puts out over 110,000 horsepower, or more than twice the design output of all the Titanic's steam engines.
And that power is obviously hooked up to a much smaller vehicle. The Titanic had to carry 14,000,000 pounds of coal alone; the 777 has a total weight of only 775,000 pounds.
When it comes to exerting power, horsepower isn't all there is to it.
If you could put the Titanic in Boston Harbor about a 1/2 mile south of Logan airport and you placed a 777 on the runway and then connected the two by a superstrong/super light cable. Then you told the 777 to put both engines at full throttle the cable would flatten but the titanic wouldn't perceptibly begin to move. Then after 10 seconds or so you tell the titanic to go forward slow or 1/8th forward. The Titanic would then slowly pull the 777 off the end of the runway in about three minutes. The comparison of power would not even be close.
Why? Steam engines have very high force multipliers (think Newton) and jets have very low force multipliers. Another better way to look at this is to compare torque. Steam is around x300 and jets are around x0.33. Internal gas engines are around x1. This is why at county/farm tractor pulls old 1910s steam engine tractors with 15 hp always beat 1970s gas engine tractors with 500 hp.
The headline of this story has been updated to reflect we're talking horsepower in the comparison, not power in total.”
The Most Expensive Painting Sold in 2021: A Picasso.
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Essay of the Week
These are the next two chapters of the book I wrote on Sam Ciccolini and his wife Donna. Today Sam and his family own and operate Masters Insurance, which among other things dominates insurance in the Toronto area construction business.
Again, the aftermath of the Second World War made many people desperate to leave Europe and come to Canada. This installment details how the Ciccolini family managed the move over several years. The father went first to establish a base; the strong mother stayed behind to keep the family together and organize the final trip.
Chapter 3
Preparing the Way
Pasquale Ciccolini sold his taxi to his brother and came to Canada in 1948. Post-war Italy was a shambles. The country was in a perpetual recession as it had to repay $360 million in war reparations; infrastructure was being rebuilt after being destroyed in the long war fought on Italian soil, and there was political turmoil as the Communists tried to take over.
The Marshall Plan, the American program to rebuild Europe and save many from starvation, was only starting, but from 1948 to 1949 Italy received $594 million of the $5 billion the U.S. spent that year, more than any other country in continental Europe, except France.
None of that money seemed to trickle down to Pescosolido. The southern and central part of Italy where the Ciccolinis lived was hit particularly hard; most of the fighting had taken place there and there was little industry, poor agriculture, and no jobs. If there was any work it was in the industrial north.
Canada beckoned, even if Italians were classified as enemy aliens after the war. Toronto was already a magnet for Italian immigrants and Pasquale found work in the construction industry through connections he had from his home village. He made 50 cents an hour, with part of his paycheque going to re-pay the $250 to finance his move to Canada, money put up by his Canadian sponsor, Giuseppe (Joe) Macciocchi, who also provided him with work.
Every two years Pasquale would return to Italy for a month to live with his family. In 1951 he took his eldest son Frank back to Toronto and two years later his second eldest son Mario returned with him to Canada as well. All three men lived together in a crowded boarding house at 595 Euclid Avenue in the heart of what was then Toronto’s Little Italy. All along he planned to reunite his family and bring them to Canada. It was a complex process that demanded time, hard work and, above all, patience.
In Toronto Pasquale was a truck driver in the construction business. He was a steady, reliable employee and only drove for two companies for his entire working life in Canada: Macciocchi Construction and Valentine Enterprises, the company he stayed with until he retired.
“The usual thing was that whoever was in Canada would work and just pile up the money and come back to Italy,” says Sam’s brother Max. “My dad came back in 1955. We were still in our small hometown of about one thousand people and he wanted to see if we could move to a place like Rome and get an apartment there. But it didn’t work out so after he came back, he decided that in the next year he was going to bring everybody to Canada, my mother and my brothers. So during 1956 we went to Rome three times for our visas and every time we went, they asked my mother questions and we all had to pass the physicals twice.”
Filomena Ciccolini chose the precise moment to book passage on the ship to New York. It was a tumultuous period; 1956 was perhaps the most dramatic year since the end of the war in 1945. There was the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the sinking of the liner Andrea Doria, and a tuberculosis epidemic raging in Europe, perhaps the reason the Ciccolinis were given such rigorous physical examinations before leaving Italy.
They made their trip to the ship in the old Balilla that Pasquale had sold to his brother. “Our uncle drove the four of us to Naples where we boarded the ship and set sail for L’America,” says Max, the youngest of the three boys making the trip.
The patriarch of the Ciccolini family was a quiet man, devoted to making sure his family had a better life in Canada than he had in Italy. In that he was more than successful, but in his working life he never made much more than the minimum wage paid in the construction business.
“If you could have a million people in a room my father would be the last one you would notice,” says Sam. “His demeanour was very low-key and very seldom did he say anything.”
This modest, hard-working man’s goals were more than met in his lifetime. By the time Pasquale Ciccolini died in 1991 he had lived to see his family established in Canada and his sons vaulted from the poverty of rural Italy to positions of comfort and respect in their adopted country. He had truly prepared the way.
Chapter 4
Trip to the New World
Filomena Ciccolini and her three sons boarded the SS Independence in Naples on November 7, 1956. That ship carried many famous people in its day on the regular run from New York City to the ports of the Mediterranean, and those passengers included former U.S. President Harry Truman, Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, and even King Saud of Saudi Arabia. But the rich and famous were all travelling in the 484 first-class cabins. Below them were 350 cabin-class passengers, and then came the 254 tourist-class, a euphemism for third-class, well below the upper decks.
That is where the Ciccolini family was jammed, all four squeezed into a small tourist-class cabin with a porthole at sea level. Once the ship passed Gibraltar, the rough November seas of the Atlantic Ocean tossed the giant ship around as if it were a cork. Every member of the Ciccolini family became seriously seasick, everyone except Sam.
Max Ciccolini remembered a kind waiter who felt sorry for the poor Italian family. The waiter had a home recipe for seasickness: anchovies. He said it settled their stomachs, and the severity of the seasickness abated somewhat.
Sam, a young man just out of the Spartan life of the seminary, spent a lot of time away from the cabin, serving Mass in the ship’s chapel and making constant trips to the upper deck, exposing him to a world he had never seen, or even dreamed of.
“I used to go up and serve Mass in the chapel every day. Most of the time they couldn’t find me because I was here, there, and everywhere. So I’d go up to the top where all the wealthy people were and there was a swimming pool and I used to think wow, this is the way people live? That’s pretty good. The one thing that gave us a bit of solace was getting some food from the top and bringing it down to my brothers and my mother,” says Sam.
His brother Max’s recollections of the voyage are somewhat different. He remembers that his mother was worried that Sam was lost, as he had been gone for hours. But Sam was not lost; he had indeed wandered into first class and returned with food.
“While we were on the ship coming over from Italy, Sam was never around. He was either ringing the bell for everyone to go to the dining room to eat every morning,” his mother Filomena recalled almost 50 years later. She was proud of her gregarious son. “Sam always served Mass with the chaplain of the ship.”
Max was eight years old and not as adventurous as his older brother. Sam would wander off and return after several hours with tales of wealth on the upper decks.
When he finally showed up, said his brother Max, he told us that he had gone up to the first class “where everything is free; you have to see it, it’s really nice.” My mother asked how he got there and Sam said, “I don’t know; I just went up there.” So on the second day my brother Livio and I would be hanging around with my mother and Sam took off again. Now when it was lunchtime they would ring a bell that told you that you had to go to the dining room for lunch and we couldn’t find Sam. Next thing you know there he was—Sam was the bell ringer. He had gotten to know the bell ringer and he helped him out ringing the bell.”
While many people have fond memories of trans-Atlantic voyages, Sam remembers that at one point the sea became so violent all passengers were ordered to their cabins. The anchovies helped with seasickness.
Relief finally came when the ship reached its destination, New York City, on Saturday, November 17, 1956, and the passengers from tourist class were allowed on deck to behold what millions of immigrants had seen before them: the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline.
“There you were looking at all those tall buildings and going right by the Statue of Liberty. Can you imagine? A twelve year old going by that statue? I thought I had gone to heaven and came back,” remembers Sam.
A huge number of the postwar Italian immigrants to Canada came through New York. Their first experience was an American one, doctors checking them out, and U.S. officials looking over their papers. A crisis occurred when one of the Ciccolinis’ steamer trunks began to leak. It was filled with food, oil, cheese, and salami, and one of the olive oil containers was leaking. Luckily, the family’s clothes were in their other trunk.
Sam remembers being baffled when they were handed a box lunch. He couldn’t understand why his teeth were sticking together. “It was the first time I ever had a peanut butter and jam sandwich and a Coke. It was so sweet, what was there not to like?” says Sam. It was also his first taste of soft Wonder Bread, unknown in Italy. What he didn’t like was the thorough medical examination, which this modest boy, just two weeks out of the cloistered life of the seminary, found intrusive.
It was 46 Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) that day in New York. The city was a lot colder than it had been in Italy and Sam and Max were wearing shorts. Their mother opened the second trunk and pulled out long trousers and a sweater for the rest of their trip. From the port of New York they were taken to the railway station to board the train to Toronto. It was a milk run, stopping at almost every town between New York City and the border at Niagara Falls.
Sam remembers the hard wooden seats on the train, an uncomfortable 36-hour trip in all. They finally arrived in Toronto on November 19, 1956 and were met at Union Station by their father and Francesco Biancucci, a loyal family friend from Pescosolido, who drove them through the snow-covered streets to their new home.
“I don’t know if it was a shock because we probably didn’t know enough to be shocked. But [our first impression of Toronto was] a foot and a half of snow when you got off the train?” says Sam.