Appears to be a victory for amazon
http://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-to-close-269-stores-globally-1452868122
Posts Tagged ‘therm0mg’
Wal-Mart Makes Rare Retreat on Home Turf – WSJ
January 29, 2016The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp
January 18, 2016The 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?
QT:{{”
“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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Live Long and Prosper
August 1, 2015QT:{{”
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
Survival of the fittest
July 11, 2015QT:{{‘
“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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Solar Power for Everyone – The New Yorker
July 6, 2015Power to the people
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/power-to-the-people Will utilities go for refitting homes w/ solar & more insulation? Or will they resist?
This Cold House
January 24, 2015This Cold House
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/24/opinion/this-cold-house.html Low ‘excess’ winter #mortality for Scandinavians; their motto: “No bad weather, only bad clothing.”
“Excess winter mortality” seems to be a useful number to remember in keeping warm in the winter
QT:{{”
Life at 45 degrees isn’t for everyone — I wouldn’t recommend it for the sick, the elderly or children. And there are, of course, legitimate hazards to the cold. The National Weather Service reports that there were 66 cold- and winter-related deaths in 2013 in the United States. A more useful measurement, popular in Europe, is “excess winter mortality,” which simply compares deaths during winter to those during the rest of the year. The resulting figures tend to be much higher than the weather service’s: In England and Wales there were an estimated 31,100 such deaths in the 2012-13 winter.
Using this measure, paradoxically, warmer countries like Spain and Portugal suffer more cold-related deaths than colder countries, because they aren’t as well versed in the art of keeping
warm….Scandinavians, who also have a low excess winter mortality rate, have a common saying: “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.”
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How 3-D Printing Is Changing Medicine
December 8, 2014How 3D Printing Is Changing Medicine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/print-thyself Common in orthodontics (@Invisalign) & some surgeries. Printable organs next?
Also, 3D printing is now available from Amazon & Staples, viz:http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8323871011
Sliding Oil and Gas Prices Give Americans More Money to Spend
November 24, 2014Sliding #Oil & Gas Prices
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/business/economy/lower-oil-prices-give-a-lift-to-the-american-economy.html US spends $1B/day on gas, 1.4K gal/yr/person; $3.23/gal 11/13 price, falling to $2.89 now
QT:{{”
With Americans spending roughly $1 billion a day on gasoline, Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, estimates that consumers will save roughly $8.4 billion in November and December, compared with the last two months of 2013, based on an average price for regular gasoline of about $2.89 a gallon as opposed to $3.23 last November and $3.26 last December.
The typical American household buys 1,200 gallons annually, so if prices fall to the level Mr. Kloza predicts and stay there, that adds up to a yearly savings per household of at least $400. A 15 percent drop in the cost of home heating oil since last winter should also be helpful, especially as cold weather arrives in the Northeast.
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Breaking The Plastic Bag Habit | September 15, 2014 Issue – Vol. 92 Issue 37 | Chemical & Engineering News
November 10, 2014Breaking the Plastic Bag Habit http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i37/Breaking-Plastic-Bag-Habit.html It’s not #plastic v paper but v reusables, which may, however, have a "bacteria issue"
linkstream2 microblog 