US…immersed in its warmest period in recorded history
https://www.WashingtonPost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/04/18/the-nation-is-immersed-in-its-warmest-period-in-recorded-history/ “Latest 1,2,3,4 & 5 yr periods rank as…warmest in 122 yrs”
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“The latest one-, two-, three-, four- and five year periods — ending in March — rank as the warmest in 122 years of record-keeping for the Lower 48 states, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”
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Monitor & Find Everything: Wireless #Sensor Tags
http://wirelesstag.net Useful for temp & motion. Can be combined w/ other stuff via @IFTTT
.@Solar_Puff http://www.Solight-Design.com/product/ Neat cubes that store the day’s sunlight for light during the night. Designed w/ a social angle.
an update on kerosene storm lamps
Betw Bentonville & Bezos
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21699913-lessons-two-giants-american-retailing-between-bentonville-and-bezos $AMZN winning over $WMT (up 30% in ’15 v flat) by focussing on saving shopper time v money
http://www.ambientdevices.com/
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Ambient Devices is the leading provider of displays and systems that deliver instant, effortless access to information at a glance. Ambient’s energy products, including the Energy Orb and new Energy Joule
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How Much Warmer Was Your City in ’15
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/19/us/2015-year-in-weather-temperature-precipitation.html#new-haven_ct Great #viz of NHV’s freezing Feb. & hot Dec. HT@chaubtu
Appears to be a victory for amazon
http://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-to-close-269-stores-globally-1452868122
The Life & Death of an $AMZN Warehouse Temp
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/life-and-death-amazon-temp/ Monitoring every move for max efficiency. Assembly Line of the future?
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“In the years since Amazon became the symbol of the online retail economy, horror stories have periodically emerged about the conditions at its warehouses—workers faced with near-impossible targets, people dropping on the job from heat or extreme fatigue. This isn’t one of those stories. Jobs at Amazon are physically demanding and the expectations can be high, but the company’s fulfillment centers are not sweatshops. In late September, I visited the Chester warehouse for an hour-long guided tour. Employees were working at a speed that seemed brisk yet reasonable. There were no idle moments, but no signs of exhaustion, either.
At the same time, we are living in an era of maximum productivity. It has never been easier for employers to track the performance of workers and discard those who don’t meet their needs. This applies to employees at every level, from warehouse grunts to white-collar workers like those at Amazon headquarters who were recently the subject of a much-discussed New York Times piece about the company’s brutally competitive corporate culture. The difference is that people like Jeff don’t have the option of moving to Google, Microsoft or a tech startup eager to poach managers and engineers with Amazon on their resume.
When it comes to low-wage positions, companies like Amazon are now able to precisely calibrate the size of its workforce to meet consumer demand, week by week or even day by day. Amazon, for instance, says it has 90,000 full-time U.S. employees at its fulfillment and sorting centers—but it plans to bring on an estimated 100,000 seasonal workers to help handle this year’s peak. Many of these seasonal hires come through Integrity Staffing Solutions, a Delaware-based temp firm. The company’s website recently listed 22 corporate offices throughout the country, 15 of which were recruiting offices for Amazon fulfillment centers, including the one in Chester.”
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Begin thinking of your investments in terms of three buckets: one for liquidity, one for longevity and one for legacy
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http://www.worth.com/index.php/component/content/article/3-grow/7469-live-long-and-prosper
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“In November 2012 the Harvard Business Review, the management profession’s bible, published an article entitled “What You Can Learn from Family Business”. For decades the profession had looked down on family businesses as amateur and slapdash. Now three leading BCG consultants, Nicolas Kachaner, George Stalk and Alain Bloch, were changing tack.
The BCG trio argued that public companies have a lot of important lessons to learn from family companies, from the value of long-term thinking to the virtues of frugality. They commended family companies on their ability to develop a cadre of loyal staff; they may not be able to compete with investment banks or consultancies in hiring top talent, but they make up for it by developing high-performance teams that stick together for years. They pointed to a list of public companies that act rather like family companies. Nestlé, a Swiss food company, slightly underperforms its big competitors in good times but outperforms them in bad. Essilor, a global leader in optical lenses, is obsessed with cost, keeps its debt low and has little staff turnover.”
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