Showing posts with label Specialization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Specialization. Show all posts
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Bernie Sanders' War on Chinese Bobbleheads! - YouTube
Bernie Sanders' War on Chinese Bobbleheads! - YouTube
"If a museum owned by the people of America cannot even have products manufactured in the United States by American workers, we've got some very, very serious problems." - Congressman Bernie Sanders
Do you agree with Sanders? Watch the video and then see what you think.
"If a museum owned by the people of America cannot even have products manufactured in the United States by American workers, we've got some very, very serious problems." - Congressman Bernie Sanders
Do you agree with Sanders? Watch the video and then see what you think.
Monday, May 16, 2011
McDonald’s to shake up food ordering system
EXCERPTS:
"McDonald’s is to change the way customers order its meals in Europe, partly replacing cashiers and the use of banknotes at its 7,000 fast-food restaurants in the region with touchscreen terminals and swipe cards.
“Ordering food has not changed for 30 or 40 years,” said Steve Easterbrook, president of McDonald’s Europe, in an interview with the Financial Times.
The move is part of the fast-food chain’s efforts to woo cash-strapped customers by making its restaurants more convenient and convivial. It is refurbishing stores, and introducing longer opening hours and new menus.
/
Mr Easterbrook said that the changes would make life easier for consumers as well as improve efficiency, with average transactions three to four seconds shorter for each customer. McDonald’s European stores serve 2m customers a day.
/
But Joe Surkitz, 21, was less convinced. “I’m looking for work and if there’s more machines doing jobs I’ll find it harder. Plus you won’t get service with a smile.”
Mr Easterbrook said that the new technology would allow McDonald’s to harness more information about customers’ ordering habits. Supermarkets and other retailers have huge databases of information on customers’ shopping habits, which they gather from loyalty cards.
"McDonald’s is to change the way customers order its meals in Europe, partly replacing cashiers and the use of banknotes at its 7,000 fast-food restaurants in the region with touchscreen terminals and swipe cards.
“Ordering food has not changed for 30 or 40 years,” said Steve Easterbrook, president of McDonald’s Europe, in an interview with the Financial Times.
The move is part of the fast-food chain’s efforts to woo cash-strapped customers by making its restaurants more convenient and convivial. It is refurbishing stores, and introducing longer opening hours and new menus.
/
Mr Easterbrook said that the changes would make life easier for consumers as well as improve efficiency, with average transactions three to four seconds shorter for each customer. McDonald’s European stores serve 2m customers a day.
/
But Joe Surkitz, 21, was less convinced. “I’m looking for work and if there’s more machines doing jobs I’ll find it harder. Plus you won’t get service with a smile.”
Mr Easterbrook said that the new technology would allow McDonald’s to harness more information about customers’ ordering habits. Supermarkets and other retailers have huge databases of information on customers’ shopping habits, which they gather from loyalty cards.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
China Fuels Waste-Paper Boom - WSJ.com
EXCERPTS:
"CARSON, Calif.—Unemployed and short on cash, Jerry Leonhardt ... regularly sells worn cardboard to the recycling center, which bales it, packs it into containers, and trucks it 10 minutes to the Port of Long Beach, where it is loaded on ships bound for China. "I make out pretty decent," said Mr. Leonhardt, who fetches about $85 per truckload.
Exports of waste paper, the term given to the market for second-hand boxes and other scrap paper, are taking off. The U.S. has long shipped its discarded paper—cardboard, newspapers, catalogues, phone books and other scraps—to emerging markets like China, which doesn't yet have enough imports, hearty trees, or a strong enough recycling habit to generate ample raw materials to make boxes for its own booming export market.
... China needs the U.S.'s old boxes in order to make new boxes to ship stuff back to the U.S. China is also scrambling for American waste paper to box consumer goods sold to its own growing middle class, according to analysts, who say it is far cheaper for China to make boxes locally from waste paper rather than import new boxes directly.
"They simply don't have enough boxes," said Bill Moore, a paper industry consultant in Atlanta.
The U.S., meanwhile, has plenty. With more people shopping online, U.S. houses are inundated with boxes, which now represent 15% of the residential waste stream, up from 5% in 1995, according to Mr. Moore.
After falling sharply in 2009, U.S. export prices for old cardboard boxes—the bellwether for the scrap paper market—have been steadily climbing and are passing pre-recession prices. Chinese paper mills are paying $228 for a baled ton of old corrugated containers—industry jargon for used cardboard boxes—leaving ports around Los Angeles, up 5% from March 2010, and well past the going rate of $160 per ton in March 2007, according to Official Board Markets, a weekly report for the packaging and paper recycling industry.
***
In Carson, Calif., individual and commercial scrap collectors looking to sell their hauls start arriving at the three-acre Corridor Recycling yard at 6 a.m. and pull in all day, backing up trucks to huge mounds of loose cardboard and unloading them.
One regular, José Jimenez Leyva, 58, who had just dropped off a load, said local stores know him and save their boxes for him. He saves the stores the trouble of having to go to the landfill, and he earns about $90 dollars a day. "This is where I get my money for rent and bills," he said.
Mr. Leonhardt, who arrived in his white pickup loaded with boxes, said he was laid off from a shoe manufacturing company in 2009, and that his unemployment checks ran out in December. He heard about box collecting from a neighbor, who mentioned that prices were going up. "I'd like to earn halfway decent wages again, but for now, this is a help," he said.
"CARSON, Calif.—Unemployed and short on cash, Jerry Leonhardt ... regularly sells worn cardboard to the recycling center, which bales it, packs it into containers, and trucks it 10 minutes to the Port of Long Beach, where it is loaded on ships bound for China. "I make out pretty decent," said Mr. Leonhardt, who fetches about $85 per truckload.
Exports of waste paper, the term given to the market for second-hand boxes and other scrap paper, are taking off. The U.S. has long shipped its discarded paper—cardboard, newspapers, catalogues, phone books and other scraps—to emerging markets like China, which doesn't yet have enough imports, hearty trees, or a strong enough recycling habit to generate ample raw materials to make boxes for its own booming export market.
... China needs the U.S.'s old boxes in order to make new boxes to ship stuff back to the U.S. China is also scrambling for American waste paper to box consumer goods sold to its own growing middle class, according to analysts, who say it is far cheaper for China to make boxes locally from waste paper rather than import new boxes directly.
"They simply don't have enough boxes," said Bill Moore, a paper industry consultant in Atlanta.
The U.S., meanwhile, has plenty. With more people shopping online, U.S. houses are inundated with boxes, which now represent 15% of the residential waste stream, up from 5% in 1995, according to Mr. Moore.
After falling sharply in 2009, U.S. export prices for old cardboard boxes—the bellwether for the scrap paper market—have been steadily climbing and are passing pre-recession prices. Chinese paper mills are paying $228 for a baled ton of old corrugated containers—industry jargon for used cardboard boxes—leaving ports around Los Angeles, up 5% from March 2010, and well past the going rate of $160 per ton in March 2007, according to Official Board Markets, a weekly report for the packaging and paper recycling industry.
***
In Carson, Calif., individual and commercial scrap collectors looking to sell their hauls start arriving at the three-acre Corridor Recycling yard at 6 a.m. and pull in all day, backing up trucks to huge mounds of loose cardboard and unloading them.
One regular, José Jimenez Leyva, 58, who had just dropped off a load, said local stores know him and save their boxes for him. He saves the stores the trouble of having to go to the landfill, and he earns about $90 dollars a day. "This is where I get my money for rent and bills," he said.
Mr. Leonhardt, who arrived in his white pickup loaded with boxes, said he was laid off from a shoe manufacturing company in 2009, and that his unemployment checks ran out in December. He heard about box collecting from a neighbor, who mentioned that prices were going up. "I'd like to earn halfway decent wages again, but for now, this is a help," he said.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Winners and losers from trade - Russ Roberts
EXCERPTS:
"Don [Boudreaux] argues in the book and in the podcast that to point to an American steel worker put out of work by imports of Brazilian steel and say that he is "harmed by trade" is to misunderstand the nature of trade and its winners and losers. He says it’s like saying that a man whose wife leaves him for another man is harmed by love. After all, the man married because of love. The man is the product of his parents who were touched by love. So it is with the steel worker. His steel job exists because of trade. His whole life is supported by trade of various kinds. So in what sense is he "harmed by trade?"
It’s a profound point. It forces you to see just how trade and specialization and the division of labor create the incredible lives we lead, lives of wealth and health unimagined by previous generations.
*****
"Ironically, the richer we become, the more specialization we have. The more specialized you are, the greater the risks (and rewards) from economic change.
The lesson, I think, is that education should give you a range of places to apply your specialized skills. It’s better to learn how to program than to learn how to program in HTML. It’s better to know how to write than to know how to write an article for a traditional newspaper. It’s better to know how to communicate generally than to know how to write.
It is better to learn how to learn than just to learn something specific."
"Don [Boudreaux] argues in the book and in the podcast that to point to an American steel worker put out of work by imports of Brazilian steel and say that he is "harmed by trade" is to misunderstand the nature of trade and its winners and losers. He says it’s like saying that a man whose wife leaves him for another man is harmed by love. After all, the man married because of love. The man is the product of his parents who were touched by love. So it is with the steel worker. His steel job exists because of trade. His whole life is supported by trade of various kinds. So in what sense is he "harmed by trade?"
It’s a profound point. It forces you to see just how trade and specialization and the division of labor create the incredible lives we lead, lives of wealth and health unimagined by previous generations.
*****
"Ironically, the richer we become, the more specialization we have. The more specialized you are, the greater the risks (and rewards) from economic change.
The lesson, I think, is that education should give you a range of places to apply your specialized skills. It’s better to learn how to program than to learn how to program in HTML. It’s better to know how to write than to know how to write an article for a traditional newspaper. It’s better to know how to communicate generally than to know how to write.
It is better to learn how to learn than just to learn something specific."
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Should you "buy local?" - Russ Roberts
EXCERPTS:
"The way to prosperity is to find ways to serve others by producing something you value enough to pay the price I charge. If I serve you poorly either by making a lousy product or one that is more expensive than the alternatives, but ask you to buy from me anyway, that is charity. That may be a nice thing to do. I may choose to do it because I care about you. But don’t pretend that it creates wealth when I am getting less value for my money than I could get elsewhere. It doesn’t. What it does is put my purchasing power in your pocket.
But shouldn’t we support and help each other by buying local? Maybe. But don’t pretend it creates material prosperity. It reduces material prosperity unless I get equal or greater value from purchasing local compared to the alternatives. But in that case, buying local comes naturally and you don’t need to exhort anyone to do it.
When my neighbor asks me to buy his product because he is local, he is asking me to forego benefits. If we all choose to do so and if everyone outside of our community does the same–they only buy locally in their communities–we restrict the range of people we can buy from and sell to. We reduce the range of people we can cooperate with implicitly via specialization. That makes us poorer."
"The way to prosperity is to find ways to serve others by producing something you value enough to pay the price I charge. If I serve you poorly either by making a lousy product or one that is more expensive than the alternatives, but ask you to buy from me anyway, that is charity. That may be a nice thing to do. I may choose to do it because I care about you. But don’t pretend that it creates wealth when I am getting less value for my money than I could get elsewhere. It doesn’t. What it does is put my purchasing power in your pocket.
But shouldn’t we support and help each other by buying local? Maybe. But don’t pretend it creates material prosperity. It reduces material prosperity unless I get equal or greater value from purchasing local compared to the alternatives. But in that case, buying local comes naturally and you don’t need to exhort anyone to do it.
When my neighbor asks me to buy his product because he is local, he is asking me to forego benefits. If we all choose to do so and if everyone outside of our community does the same–they only buy locally in their communities–we restrict the range of people we can buy from and sell to. We reduce the range of people we can cooperate with implicitly via specialization. That makes us poorer."
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
New Heroes vs. Old - Thomas Sowell
EXCERPTS:
"When I mention that my family used kerosene lamps when I was a small child in the South during the 1930s, that is usually taken as a sign of our poverty, though I never thought of us as poor at the time.
What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were a luxury of the rich in the 19th century, before John D. Rockefeller came along. At the high price of kerosene at that time, an ordinary working man could not afford to stay up at night, burning this expensive fuel for hours at a time.
Rockefeller did not begin his life as rich, by any means. He made a fortune by revolutionizing the petroleum industry. Although we still measure petroleum in barrels, it is actually shipped in railroad tank cars, in ocean-going tankers and in tanker trucks.
That is a legacy of John D. Rockefeller, who saw that shipping oil in barrels was not as economical as shipping whole railroad tank cars full of oil, eliminating all the labor that had to go into shipping the same amount of oil in numerous individual barrels.
That was just one of his cost-cutting innovations. If there was a better way to extract, process and ship petroleum products-- or more products that could be made from petroleum-- Rockefeller was on top of it.
Before he came along, gasoline was considered a useless by-product that petroleum refineries often simply dumped into the nearest river. But Rockefeller decided to use it as a fuel in the refining process, which made it valuable, even before automobiles came along.
"When I mention that my family used kerosene lamps when I was a small child in the South during the 1930s, that is usually taken as a sign of our poverty, though I never thought of us as poor at the time.
What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were a luxury of the rich in the 19th century, before John D. Rockefeller came along. At the high price of kerosene at that time, an ordinary working man could not afford to stay up at night, burning this expensive fuel for hours at a time.
That is a legacy of John D. Rockefeller, who saw that shipping oil in barrels was not as economical as shipping whole railroad tank cars full of oil, eliminating all the labor that had to go into shipping the same amount of oil in numerous individual barrels.
That was just one of his cost-cutting innovations. If there was a better way to extract, process and ship petroleum products-- or more products that could be made from petroleum-- Rockefeller was on top of it.
Before he came along, gasoline was considered a useless by-product that petroleum refineries often simply dumped into the nearest river. But Rockefeller decided to use it as a fuel in the refining process, which made it valuable, even before automobiles came along.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
How I built a toaster -- from scratch | Video on TED.com
This video is by a guy who decided to build a toaster by himself. It illustrates how the ability to specialize and trade enables us to produce things easily which, if any one of us had to produce by himself, would be incredibly difficult or impossible to do.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley: A book excerpt - Your Olive Branch News
The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley: A book excerpt - Your Olive Branch News
Comment:
Given the economic problems that the country faces at the moment, it's easy to lose perspective on where we stand today relative to the past. If reading the news gets you down and you could use some encouragement, you really should read this entire excerpt from The Rational Optimist. It demonstrates that we really do have a tremendous number of things for which to be thankful. It also shows that we should think long and hard about how our economic system works, and about the ways in which it has enriched our lives, before we make major changes which may lead to consequences very different from what were intended.
Comment:
Given the economic problems that the country faces at the moment, it's easy to lose perspective on where we stand today relative to the past. If reading the news gets you down and you could use some encouragement, you really should read this entire excerpt from The Rational Optimist. It demonstrates that we really do have a tremendous number of things for which to be thankful. It also shows that we should think long and hard about how our economic system works, and about the ways in which it has enriched our lives, before we make major changes which may lead to consequences very different from what were intended.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Who Is We? The benefits of specialization and exchange
EXCERPTS from Donald Boudreaux's letter to Tony Kornheiser, host of the Tony Kornheiser Show on ESPN:
"Your show is great. And while I realize that your chief goal is to be humorous, your monologue yesterday – lamenting that “we Americans don’t make things any more” and filled with genuine worry about America being largely a service economy – demands a response.
***
You make your living by writing and talking about sports. The Kornheiser family truly doesn’t “make things.” You earn an income by specializing in what you do best, and you use that income to purchase from persons outside of your household all the many “things” that you consume. As a result, you’re quite prosperous.
What’s true for the plural pronoun “we” used to describe the Kornheiser household is no less true for the plural pronoun “we” used to describe America. We Americans do indeed buy lots of things from non-Americans – a fact that is no more worrying than is the fact that, as you might say, “we Kornheisers don’t make things any more and, instead, buy all of our things from non-Kornheisers.”
"Your show is great. And while I realize that your chief goal is to be humorous, your monologue yesterday – lamenting that “we Americans don’t make things any more” and filled with genuine worry about America being largely a service economy – demands a response.
***
You make your living by writing and talking about sports. The Kornheiser family truly doesn’t “make things.” You earn an income by specializing in what you do best, and you use that income to purchase from persons outside of your household all the many “things” that you consume. As a result, you’re quite prosperous.
What’s true for the plural pronoun “we” used to describe the Kornheiser household is no less true for the plural pronoun “we” used to describe America. We Americans do indeed buy lots of things from non-Americans – a fact that is no more worrying than is the fact that, as you might say, “we Kornheisers don’t make things any more and, instead, buy all of our things from non-Kornheisers.”
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
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