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Commercial airlines often prioritize boarding for passengers traveling with small children, or for those who need extra assistance, before starting to board the faster passengers. It’s counter-intuitive, but it turns out that letting slower passengers board first actually results in a more efficient process.
There was nothing charming about what the British built. It wasn’t meant to protect anything except imperial revenue. It grew along the Inland Customs Line, a bureaucratic barrier that the British created to impose a high salt tax on the people living on one side of the line—the relatively saltless one.
Kentucky’s plan to bring broadband to remote parts of the state has sputtered and its future looks increasingly bleak. State leaders told rural residents it would create better business opportunities. But instead, they keep getting left behind.
The 2008 crisis and the government’s response made obvious the extent of economic and political inequality in the United States, and the absolute decline in wealth and well-being for a growing fraction of Americans. Evidence of decline is manifest to those of us living in America in the first decades of the 21st century.
Former Secret Service Agent Jonathan Wackrow explains how the Service keeps counterfeit currency out of circulation. The Secret Service was installed to combat counterfeit money during the Civil War, and the Service still to this day works tirelessly to suppress counterfeits.
Between 1990 and 2015, raising the minimum wage by $1 in each state might have saved more than 27,000 lives, according to a report published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. An increase of $2 in each state’s minimum wage could have prevented more than 57,000 suicides.
Because my father believed that debt was sinful, and believed God wanted him and my mom to have as many kids as possible, they were too broke to help me pay for college. Because of this anti-debt theology, I wasn’t allowed to take out student loans, and had to attend a really conservative Christian college because it was so cheap.
Humans gobble so many chickens that the birds now count for 23bn of the 30bn land animals living on farms. Chicken is cheap and delicious. Fans of cheap chicken have selective breeding to thank. Farmers have also benefited from the healthy reputation of chicken.
Jeff Bezos’s big bet is that he can make buying from Amazon so effortless that we won’t notice the company’s creeping grip on commerce and its underlying infrastructure, and that we won’t notice what that dominance costs us. Amazon has unprecedented power to steer our choices.
Why luxury goods don’t impress, but repel. One story that’s true: Acquiring something luxurious can temporarily increase one’s self-esteem. One story that’s not: Acquiring something luxurious can impress potential friends.
In terms of countries that had it easy Venezuela by all counts should be at the top of the list, it is home to the largest oil deposits in the world, easily beating out the typical oil giants like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab eremites. But they squandered it.
The High Line and its imitators are examples of “landscape urbanism,” a growing design movement that places green space in collision with old infrastructure. Rehabilitation projects follow a familiar playbook, aestheticizing the labor of the past even as they support a gentrified future.
The rise of hustle culture is often attributed to millennials, but when it comes to grinding in the gig economy these days, Boomers are leading the way. According to Uber, 25 percent of its millions of workers are over 50, with more drivers over 50 than under 30. Meanwhile, Boomer homeowners are the fastest growing demographic for Airbnb.
IKEA’s “aesthetic per dollar” ratio is very high, says neuromarketer and author of “The Buying Brain” Dr. A. K. Pradeep. Ikea’s affordable style is its “category-busting-metric,” or what makes it stand out from all the other brands in that space, he says.
Increase your output, get paid more. Wages go up with productivity. Until, it turns out, they don’t anymore. The unwinding of this agreement in recent decades, such that workers must continue to produce more without expecting it to show up in their pay stubs, has now been the subject of a good deal of discussion and debate.
In a process called “stretching,” the Star Breeze is getting pulled apart to make room for a new, 84-foot, 1,250-ton prefab midsection addition. Think of it like unsnapping (or unwelding) two Legos and putting another block in between. But with a boat.
Big data is poised to transform society. Yet big data also exacerbates a very old problem: relying on the numbers when they are far more fallible than we think. Nothing underscores the consequences of data analysis gone awry more than the story of Robert McNamara.
To have sitzfleisch means the ability to sit still for the long periods of time required to be truly productive; it means the stamina to work through a difficult situation and see a project through to the end. Angela Merkel has it in abundance – how do you cultivate this crucial skill?
Higher productivity means the expectation of rising wages and abundant job opportunities. In a time of Facebook, smartphones, self-driving cars, and computers that can beat a person at just about any board game, how can the key economic measure of technological progress be so pathetic?
Ruja Ignatova called herself the Cryptoqueen. She told people she had invented a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin, and persuaded them to invest billions. Then, two years ago, she disappeared. Jamie Bartlett spent months investigating how she did it and trying to figure out where she’s hiding.
When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo got to China, he saw many wonders. One of the things that astonished him most, however, was a new invention, implemented by Kublai Khan, a grandson of the great conqueror Genghis. It was paper money, introduced by Kublai in 1260.
What has happened in those sweatshops since they became a cultural fixation three decades ago? All sources led to the same conclusion: Boycotts have failed. Our clothes are being made in ways that advocacy campaigns can’t affect and in places they can’t reach. So how are we going to stop sweatshops now?
Farmers across the country are in a state of emergency with dairy and grain producers, new farmers, and farmers of color being hit the hardest. The term farm crisis is synonymous with the 1980s, when the bottom dropped out of the agricultural economy, sending thousands of farms into foreclosure and shuttering businesses.
I can’t explain airline pricing but I do know some plane tickets can be cheaper depending on where you buy them or, even better, where you appear to buy them from. This is all about leveraging foreign currencies and points-of-sale to your advantage.
One of the most important economic stories of the past couple of decades is the rise of economic inequality in the United States and around the world. Since 1980, economists say, wage growth for the highest-paid workers has been roughly triple that for the lowest paid. In some cities, the disparity is wider.
Some major textbooks feature illustrations of Texas Instruments–series calculators alongside the text, so students can use their Texas Instruments calculator with the lesson plan, emphasizing how deeply interwoven Texas Instruments remains with the educational hegemony.
A limit would help to slow the growth of economic inequality and prevent reckless risk-taking by CEOs who otherwise might feel motivated to try to drive up the stock price of their company and therefore their bonus.
Airlines were focused on finding the fastest possible boarding method, so planes can spend less time at gates and more time in the air, making money. They might have stuck with that aim if it weren’t for the other change, which has to do with the fight for overhead bin space.
The number of international tourist arrivals has been increasing more or less exponentially since the mid-20th century, and totaled about 1.4 billion in 2018. Europe has seen the biggest share, but the Asia-Pacific region is growing fast.
After years of timidity Big Tech, with its billions of users and gigantic war chest, at last appears serious about crashing the fintech party. Amazon and Apple introduced a credit card. Facebook announced a new payments system and Google said it would start offering current (checking) accounts in America.
The numbers tell one story. Unemployment in the US is the lowest it’s been in 50 years. More Americans have jobs than ever before. Wage growth keeps climbing. People tell a different story. Long job hunts. Trouble finding work with decent pay. A lack of predictable hours.
The shopping mall would have been inconceivable without air conditioning, as would the deep-plan and glass-walled office block, as would computer servers. The expansion of tract housing in postwar suburban America relied on affordable domestic air conditioning units.
There are two different tales we tell ourselves about houses. The primary story is about bright futures, long lives, children, grandchildren, and hard-earned success. The second story, the darker story, is about the horror of being trapped.
Founding father and first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew kicked off the Keep Singapore Clean campaign 50 years ago. The aim wasn’t just to make the city more pleasant. A cleaner city, Lee Kuan Yew reasoned, would create a stronger economy.
Last year billionaire Sun Hongbin quietly transferred $4.5bn worth of shares in his Chinese real estate firm to a company on a street corner in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Thanks to its relish for deregulation, the state is fast becoming the most profitable place for the mega-wealthy to park their billions.
On any given day, thousands of packages from Walmarts, Targets, and stores around the country travel north along a two-lane road out of Billings, Montana — past the Tumbleweed Saloon, past cows grazing on empty rangeland, past the Busy Bee Cafe and stands of short pines — to the town of Roundup, where they will be unboxed, re-boxed, and sent off to Amazon.
How to buy college football players, in the words of men who deliver the money. These men are fans who believe they’re leveraging football success $500 or $50,000 at a time.
When you fly a lot for work, as I do, you check your frequent-flier mile balance often, to provide data for competitive commiseration. Frequent fliers sometimes go to great lengths to keep their airline élite status, and those efforts are often completely out of proportion to the perks.
In the wake of the 737 MAX disasters, caused by a software feature, Boeing and regulators initially placed blame on the planes’ pilots. Since Samya Stumo’s death in a 737 MAX crash, her parents and her great-uncle, Ralph Nader, have devoted themselves to proving that the company put profit over safety.
You turn the pages of yellowing student newspapers from 30 years ago, and there they are, recognisably the same faces that dominate today’s British news. Boris Johnson running for Union president, Michael Gove winning debating contests, Jeremy Hunt holding together the faction-ridden Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA).
