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kjack89 · 4 years

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Love in the Time of Quarantine (pt. 7/?)

More trouble in paradise quarantine...

Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, or catch up on previous parts on AO3.

Enjolras was woken by his cellphone vibrating irritatingly against the side of his face, and he groaned, blinking blearily at the screen before answering it. “Hey Ferre,” he mumbled, running a hand across his face.

“Well, good morning to you too,” Courfeyrac said, sounding amused, and Enjolras squinted at his phone again.

“Courf?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you stole Combeferre’s phone again.”

“No, there’s this magic thing called speakerphone,” Combeferre said, sounding just as amused as Courfeyrac had.

Enjolras glowered at his phone, even though he knew neither of them could see him. “Now you figure that out,” he muttered. “Dare I ask why you are calling so early?”

“Early?” Courfeyrac repeated, with mock concern. “My dear man, it’s after 8 o’clock! On any other day, we’d already be meeting by now.” He paused, and when he spoke again, Enjolras could hear the smirk in his voice. “Of course, that was before you decided to take up some late night extracurriculars, if you know what I mean.”

Combeferre made a disparaging noise. “Everyone knows what you mean,” he said sourly. “You have the subtlety of a foghorn.”

Enjolras tactfully chose to ignore both of them. “I forgot to set my alarm,” he told them.

“Because you were up so late doing...well, Grantaire?”

Courfeyrac let out a yelp that indicated Combeferre had undoubtedly elbowed him in the stomach. “Speaking of Grantaire,” Combeferre said sternly, “how are things going?”

Enjolras shrugged as he finally sat up, running a hand through his hair. “They’re going,” he hedged. “We’re working on it, at the very least.”

“And I assume Grantaire is still asleep?” Combeferre asked.

“That I do not know,” Enjolras said, stifling a yawn. “He slept on the couch last night.”

There was a moment of silence before Courfeyrac asked, sounding confused, “But...how?”

“Well, see, he lay down on the couch and closed his eyes and—”

“Hardy-har,” Courfeyrac said dryly. “I mean, how exactly did you two manage to stay up all night bumping uglies like rabbits with him sleeping on the couch?”

“Bumping uglies?” Combeferre repeated incredulously, while Enjolras rolled his eyes and answered shortly, “We didn’t.”

There was another moment of silence at that. “You didn’t?” Combeferre repeated.

“No,” Enjolras said. “We’re taking a step back, trying to figure this whole thing out without relying on sex.”

“Oh.” There was a world of disappointment in the way Courfeyrac said that simple word, and Enjolras sighed, already bracing himself for the lecture. Luckily or not, Courfeyrac changed tacks, sounding smug instead as he added, “Well, sorry your quarantine’s not going as well as my social distancing is.”

Enjolras’s brow furrowed. “What makes you say that?” he asked warily.

“Well, unlike you, I’m actually getting some, so…”

Enjolras raised both eyebrows at that – not because Courfeyrac getting laid was even remotely surprising, but more because Courfeyrac sounded like there was something more going on there. “Do I even want to know from who?”

“It’s from whom,” Courfeyrac corrected, still sounding unbearably smug, “and actually—”

“We’ll call you later,” Combeferre interrupted, hanging up the phone before either Enjolras or Courfeyrac could say anything else.

For a moment, Enjolras just stared at his phone, wondering if he should call them back and deciding against it. Instead, he stood and stretched, running a hand through his curls once again before making his way into the living room. To no one’s surprise, Grantaire was still asleep, snoring like a freight train, his mouth hanging half-open.

Enjolras half-smiled at the sight, his smile turning appreciative as he noticed that Grantaire’s shirt was partially rucked up from sleep, and he tore his eyes away from the muscles he could see moving under Grantaire’s skin as he breathed, heading instead into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee.

But by the time the pot of coffee had finished brewing, Grantaire hadn’t so much as stirred, and even though Enjolras was normally in a better mood with some caffeine in him, he instead felt his amusement souring into something like irritation as he sipped his coffee, watching Grantaire sleep.

He decided to take matters into his own hands, nudging the couch with his foot. “Grantaire,” he said, and when Grantaire didn’t move, he kicked the couch a little harder. “Grantaire!” Grantaire groaned and shifted, throwing an arm over his eyes. “Good morning,” Enjolras said pointedly. “Are you going to get up at some point?”

Grantaire cracked one eye open. “Trial run,” he muttered, and Enjolras raised an eyebrow.

“Pardon?”

Grantaire opened both eyes and yawned so wide his jaw cracked. “This is supposed to be a trial run for what a relationship would really be like,” he reminded Enjolras.

“Yes,” Enjolras said, slightly impatiently. “Hence why I’m awake and ready to get to work, on my couch, where I usually get things done.”

Grantaire yawned again. “And hence why I’m going back to bed,” he mumbled, closing his eyes and burrowing back against the couch cushions. “There’s another five hours before I’m normally awake.”

Enjolras glared at him, exasperation flaring in his chest. But he took a moment – and a deep breath – to tamp it down. “Then how about you at least go sleep in my bed so that I can get some work done?” he suggested instead, only a hint of irritation in his voice.

Grantaire opened his eyes again. “Deal,” he said sleepily, getting to his feet and kissing Enjolras’s cheek before slumping into Enjolras’s bedroom.

Enjolras’s irritation all but disappeared at that, and as he sat down to settle into his work, it was with a small smile on his face. A smile that was long gone by the time his stomach growled to remind him it was time for lunch, while Grantaire had yet to emerge from the bedroom. He glanced at the time on his phone and scowled, glaring in the direction of his bedroom and tempted to go wake Grantaire just to ask him if this was really how he intended to spend his entire day.

He was saved from doing that or something equally stupid by a knock on his door, and he stood instead to go answer it. He was surprised to see Joly standing there, a canvas tote bag filled with art supplies in hand, though it was less of a surprise to see that Joly was fully decked out in a respiratory mask and wearing a face shield, both of which he had undoubtedly swiped from work.

“I thought there was a PPE shortage,” Enjolras said mildly.

It was hard to tell what face Joly made at that, but his reply was good-natured. “Luckily, the hospital I work at got an infusion of supplies from a local manufacturer, so we’re actually pretty well stocked for the moment.” He held out the tote bag for Enjolras, revealing for the first time that he was also wearing latex gloves. “Delivery for Grantaire. He texted me last night to see if I could bring him some supplies.”

“And you agreed?” Enjolras asked, mostly joking.

Joly laughed, though the sound was muffled through his mask. “Actually, he texted Bossuet, but Bossuet and I both agreed that he shouldn’t risk it, given, y’know—”

“How bad his luck is?” Enjolras finished for him. “I sure do.” He reached out and took the tote bag. “Thanks, I’ll be sure Grantaire gets this.”

“Speaking of Grantaire, where is he?” Joly asked.

Enjolras sighed. “Still asleep,” he reported, trying not to sound as irritated by that fact as he felt.

He could only tell that Joly had smiled at that by the tone of his voice as he said, “And let me guess, it’s driving you crazy.”

Enjolras jerked a shrug. “It’s not my day that he’s wasting,” he said, entirely unconvincingly.

And sure enough, Joly didn’t even remotely sound like he believed him. “Well, at least it’s not forever,” he told Enjolras bracingly.

Enjolras hesitated. “Well, that’s kind of the thing – we’re trying to see if it could be,” he muttered.

Joly stared at him, and Enjolras shifted uncomfortably, realizing for the first time that if Grantaire hadn’t told Joly about their trial run, it was probably for a reason. “What do you mean?” Joly asked.

“I mean…” Enjolras sighed, wondering what he could tell Joly that wouldn’t make Grantaire murder him. “We, uh, we slept together. And realized we have feelings for each other. So we’re...I don’t know, we’re using this quarantine as a trial run of sorts.”

“And you’re sure that’s a good idea?” Joly asked, all traces of amusement gone from his tone.

Enjolras shrugged again. “As good an idea as any, I guess,” he said with a weak chuckle, on that Joly didn’t return. Enjolras’s smile faded. “What?” he asked Joly, trying not to sound as defensive as he felt.

“Just—” Joly broke off, looking unusually grim, even in just the small bit of his expression that Enjolras could see. “Look, this may be a trial run for you, but it’s not for Grantaire.”

Enjolras blinked. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is, at the end of a trial run, you can normally return something if it didn’t work out. And there’s not a return policy on someone’s heart.”

The metaphor would have been more expected from Jehan, and Enjolras stared at Joly, waiting for him to say something that made sense. “What are you saying?” he asked, when it became clear that Joly wasn’t going to.

Joly sighed. “I’m saying…” He trailed off, clearly looking for the right words. “I’m saying, you break it, you buy it.”

“Is there a reason you’re talking in retail terms?” Enjolras asked sourly, not waiting for a reply before adding, “Besides, what makes you think I’m going to break it?”

Joly met his glare evenly. “What makes you think you won’t?” Enjolras had no answer for that, and Joly sighed again, glancing down at his watch. “I have to get back to the hospital. Tell Grantaire to call me, ok?”

Enjolras nodded, watching as Joly retreated from his door, and when he had disappeared down the stairs, Enjolras closed the door, looking down at the bag of supplies Joly had brought, his expression troubled.

He had no intention of breaking anyone’s heart, much less Grantaire’s.

But he had a bad feeling, as he crossed back to the couch and realized that there was still no indication of Grantaire waking up anytime soon, that at the end of this whole quarantine, his intentions might not make that much of a difference.

#enjolras #grantaire #enjolras x grantaire #exr #enjoltaire #fanfiction #Les Miserables #modern au #covid-19 quarantine fic #developing relationship #with guest appearances by #combeferre #courfeyrac #Joly

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing North American sales of its talc-based baby powder, a product that once defined the company’s wholesome image and that it has defended for decades even as it faced thousands of lawsuits filed by patients who say it caused cancer. The decision to wind down sales of the product is a huge concession for Johnson & Johnson, which has for more than a century promoted the powder as pure and gentle enough for babies. The company said on Tuesday that it would allow existing bottles to be sold by retailers until they ran out. Baby powder made with cornstarch will remain available, and the company will continue to sell talc-based baby powder in other parts of the world. Johnson & Johnson has often said that faulty testing, shoddy science and ill-equipped researchers are to blame for findings that its powder was contaminated with asbestos. But in recent years, thousands of people — mostly women with ovarian cancer — have said that the company did not warn them of potential risks that the company was discussing internally. Even as it announced the withdrawal of its baby powder, the company said that it “will continue to vigorously defend the product” in court. But Johnson & Johnson acknowledged that demand for the talc-based version had slumped as consumer habits changed and concerns about the product spread. The company said that the decision to discontinue the product stemmed from a pandemic-related evaluation of its product portfolio. For decades, baby powder’s main ingredient was talc, a mineral known for its softness. Sold in an iconic white bottle, its fragrance is said to be one of the most recognizable in the world. It was only in 1980, after consumer advocates raised concerns that talc contained traces of asbestos, a known carcinogen, that the company developed a cornstarch alternative. Krystal Kim, a Philadelphia woman who has survived two bouts of ovarian cancer that she blames on her lifelong use of the powder, said the decision to remove the product was a victory. Ms. Kim was one of a group of women who won a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson in 2018. “It means no more little girls are going to go through what we went through,” said Ms. Kim, who started using baby powder when she was 10 years old. “This stops now. That monster is off the shelves.” Early lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson claimed the talc itself caused ovarian cancer, though the scientific evidence on that was never conclusive. Plaintiffs’ lawyers later shifted their focus, arguing that traces of asbestos — an indisputable and much-feared carcinogen — were present in talc and capable of causing cancer even in microscopic amounts. Asbestos contamination can occur when talc is mined, because both minerals can be intermingled underground, and internal memos and reports unearthed during litigation revealed that the company had been concerned for at least 50 years about the possibility of traces of asbestos in its talc. Asbestos was first linked to ovarian cancer in 1958. The revelation of these company documents also prompted inquiries by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as congressional committees and authorities in Mississippi and New Mexico. As of late March, Johnson & Johnson faced 19,400 lawsuits related to talc body powders, many of them involving complicated science. A federal judge ruled in April that plaintiffs’ scientific experts could testify with some exceptions, a blow to Johnson & Johnson, which had been pushing to exclude the testimony in hopes of shutting down thousands of cases. The legal record has been mixed so far. Several juries have decided against Johnson & Johnson, in one case awarding $4.7 billion to 22 women including Ms. Kim in 2018. But the company has prevailed in other cases and is appealing nearly all of the cases it has lost. Johnson & Johnson’s talc supplier, Imerys Talc America, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year. In October, Johnson & Johnson recalled 33,000 bottles of baby powder after the Food and Drug Administration said it discovered evidence of chrysotile asbestos in a bottle purchased from an online retailer. Soon after, the company said that multiple tests of the same bottle came up clean. Nathan A. Schachtman, a lawyer who defends product liability cases and spent decades handling asbestos-related claims, said that companies often agreed to settle lawsuits or discontinue products that they believed were safe in an attempt to soothe shareholders and win back public confidence — to “buy peace,” he said. “At some point, the shareholders don’t care whether the science is on your side,” said Mr. Schachtman, who said he was not involved in the Johnson & Johnson talc cases. “Companies have to make very practical and hard decisions about withdrawing products that they don’t think are bad products, or dropping cases because they know they can’t win them all and it’s expensive to defend them.” On Tuesday, the company said that baby powder made up half a percent of its total consumer health business in the United States and that demand for the talc-based version had slumped. Mark Lanier, a lawyer who represents thousands of cancer survivors and their families who are suing Johnson & Johnson, said the company had made “the right move.” “They can give all the reasons they want — I’m just thankful the stuff is off the market. I do believe this will save untold misery and lives,” Mr. Lanier said. Though Johnson’s Baby Powder has long been advertised for infants and is stocked on the baby aisle along with diapers and baby shampoo, adult women have been the main purchasers in recent decades, using it on their perineum and to prevent chafing between the legs. Thousands of women who developed ovarian cancer after long-term use of the product blamed the powder and sued the company, while a smaller number sued after developing mesothelioma, a rare and particularly vicious cancer that develops in the linings of the lungs and abdomen and is considered a signature disease of asbestos. And groups that have advocated the removal of other talc-based cosmetics from the market seized on Johnson & Johnson’s decision to call for more companies to do the same. In a statement, the Environmental Working Group advocacy organization urged other cosmetic companies to stop using talc in loose powders. The group said that it commissioned tests that last week found asbestos in two eye shadow palettes made with talc, marketed to children and sold on Amazon. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The F.D.A. issued several alerts last year warning that asbestos had been discovered in several talc cosmetics products, including eye shadow sold at Claire’s, a retailer focused on teenagers. Linda Reinstein, whose husband died of asbestos-induced mesothelioma and now heads the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, called the company’s move a public health victory but said several chemical companies continued to use asbestos in manufacturing and had blocked an outright ban on it. “We can’t wait for them to follow Johnson & Johnson,” she said. The post Johnson & Johnson to End Talc-Based Baby Powder Sales in North America appeared first on Sansaar Times.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/05/johnson-johnson-to-end-talc-based-baby.html

#SEO #Local SEO training #daily news paper #daily news india #daily news newspaper #technology news a

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retail-truestory · 5 years

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Who wants to hear Another Retail Story?

There I was, on register during another busy weekend. It wasn't a particularly long shift, but with how many customers there were it felt like I'd been stuck on that register forever. And I knew it was going to get even crazier because at 4:00 I'd be heading to self scan. I had 20 more minutes on register, but I would've gladly taken the rest of my shift there instead. I was finishing with one customer and their order as another got on my line. Then my supervisor told me to shut down for my break; I'd go straight to self scan when I came back. The customer who just came didn't start unloadng yet so I could have told her I was closed. But that would've made me a glutton for punishment because she was technically there when my light was still on. She had a decent sized order. I figured if I scanned fast enough and helped her pack, I could be on my break within 10 minutes. If only I knew how wrong I'd be! It started off alright. The only downside was as I was scanning, instead of her going to the other end of the belt to help pack, she was ripping coupon after coupon after coupon from multiple flyers. She gave them to me as I was about 3/4 of the way done scanning. There were between 10 and 20 manufacture coupons in the pile. And when I was done scanning the items, I went for the coupons. The first coupon was denied. Which basically meant I'd have to call a supervisor to override it. That is, assuming the customer had the item/the correct number of items for the coupon. But before I did that, I read the coupon to see why it was being denied. It was for frozen vegetables. "Did you get the [Brand] Vegetables?" I asked her. "Yes," she said. I looked at the frozen food that was still on the belt and unpacked. There was a lot of frozen food in her order. But I only remembered scanning TV Dinners. Not frozen vegetables. I double checked the screen. No [Brand] Vegetables. I told her it didn't look like she got them and gave her back the coupon. I scanned the next coupon. It was also denied. I read it. It was the exact same coupon. As was the next 2 coupons. I gave them back to her. She looked at me like I was a nut. Then came the third...or was it fifth?...coupon. It was also denied. It was a cleaning product. But I knew all she had bought was food. So I gave the coupon back to her. After the next coupon was denied, once again for an item she didn't get, I looked at each individual coupon. I put 3 to the side, unsure if she got the right amount of those specific items. I gave her back the rest, all of which she had none of the items for. She still looked at me like I was a nut. I scanned another coupon. It was denied. "Did you get These Crackers?" I asked her. "Yes," she answered. I checked the list on my screen, but didn't see them. It was possible I scrolled too fast and missed it, so I printed the on demand receipt. I scrolled down past the Frozen Food section, past the Bakery section, and past the Dairy section to read the Grocery section. It looked like she had the item. But did it match the size the coupon was asking for? "May I see These Crackers?" I asked. "I don't know where they are," she brushed me off and continued packing. She left me no choice but to start going through the bags she packed and placed in her wagon. Fortunately These Crackers were easy to spot. But there was only one box. She was supposed to get 2 boxes. I told her this and handed her back the coupon. Then I read the last 2 coupons. They were exactly the same - $3 off of 8 [Brand] greek yogurts. I asked her how many she got. "I got plenty," she said. I dug through her bags, eventually finding them at the bottom of the cart. There were only 4. I told her this. "Check again, I definitely got more." I double checked. There was all of one yogurt hiding under the cheese. "There's 5 yogurts here. These coupons are for 8. So you'd need to buy 8 to use one coupon or 16 to use both." "So I only need to run back and get 2 more?" she asked. I shook my head. "3 more," I corrected. I walked back behind my register after handing her the coupons back. From the corner of my eye I glanced at the time on my screen as I helped her pack the rest while she stood there. It was 3:50. It was sure cutting it close to getting to self scan after my break if my coworker had to leave at 4. But I didn't say anything. "How much were the grapes?" the customer asked. Silly me, I'd already thrown out the on demand receipt. I scrolled through the list on the screen searching for the grapes. Fortunately they were one of the last items I scanned so it didn't take long to find. "About $9.24." The lady made a face. "That's a lot to pay for grapes. Take them off." I voided off the grapes and she dug through her bags to give them back to me. She then asked the price of a few other items, some of which I had to reprint the on demand receipt for to double check. I answered her questions and she stood there thinking. After another couple of minutes, she took out her credit card to pay. Her total was $136.72. The payment processed $21.89 on her card. "Your new total is $114.83," I told her. Once again, she looked at me as though I were crazy. "What?" "Your card took off about $21," I explained. "Where does it say that? It should've gone through," the lady said. I turned the other moniter so she could see it better. My finger brushed over the screen, signaling toward the last line. Visa - $21.89. "Oh..." she blinked. She paused. "Can you cancel the transaction?" "Yes...I just need to a supervisor." I called for a key - a shorter way of yelling for a supervisor. Since one was on register and the other was preparing to clock out, my coworker at Customer Service came over to help. She asked what was wrong and the lady said she wanted the transaction canceled. Coworker blinked. "The whole thing? Or just the payment?" "The payment," the lady specified. Coworker put her key into the slot and typed in her code. The payment became undone and the total went back to $136.72. Coworker said she could try paying again. I asked Coworker not to go too far, as I might need her help again and I was already late taking my break. Fortunately Coworker did not have a line waiting for her at customer service, so it was nice she even wanted to stick around and help me. This was one of the Good Ones. The lady attempted to pay again. But this time her card was denied. "Why isn't it going through?" she gasped. Coworker proceeded to give her a list of reasons why the card might've been denied. She could've gone over her limit. Maybe she got locked out of her account. Maybe there was just a problem with the card. This time, it was Coworker who got the crazy look. Coworker paused and blinked before asking, "Do you have another card you can use?" "No," the lady answered simply. "So...do you want me to suspend the order? We can hold it at customer service for you and you can come back later with another payment method," Coworker explained. "Oh I'm not coming back later," she shook her head. Coworker and I exchanged glances. She then slowly brought her gaze back to the lady. "Sooooo should I just cancel the whole thing?" Lady shrugged her shoulders. "I guess so," she said before turning and leaving the store. Coworker sighed and proceeded to void the transaction, once again using her key and her code. By now it was 3:57. Realizing this, I sighed. "Guess I'm not going to self scan at 4." "Oh really? How come?" Coworker asked in a genuinely happy tone, as she knew how I loathe self scan. "[Other] Coworker goes home at 4. I was supposed to be on my break 15 minutes ago," I said. I then glanced over to the wagon the lady left behind, full primarily of perishables. I bit my lower lip before glancing at my Coworker again. "What do we do about all that stuff in the meantime....?" Coworker sighed. "Just...I guess bring it over to the throwbacks and let self scan know you're gonna be late. There's no one to run anything back and there's nowhere to put any of it right now. You just take your break." "Soooo all that's stuff's just gonna go bad now?" I asked. Coworker wasn't thrilled about it either, but there was no other choice. "It's gonna have to." Luckily [Other] Coworker at self scan was understanding why I was late to cover for her and didn't mind staying the extra 15 minutes. Admittedly I only took a 10 minute break instead, as I already felt bad she was stuck there longer than needed. And I didn't get asked about why there was a wagon of perishables sitting there fully bagged at all. But looking back on this story I'm not sure what annoyed me more.... The fact that this lady gave me so many coupons for things she didn't even get just expecting to get at least $10 off her order without me even batting an eye (did she even read the coupons to be sure she got the items?) or the fact that because someone didn't schedule enough people on a busy weekend to work that there was all that frozen (and some dairy) food that ended up needlessly going to waste. Maybe it was both. Maybe I'm just cynical from all this time working in retail. Or maybe it's just that I reached the Are You a Nut? look limit. All I know for sure is this - you can't make this stuff up. And that, my friends, is a True Retail Story.

#retail #retail life #retail problems #cashier #cashier problems #customer service #customer service problems #customer #customer problems #annoying customer #coupons #perishables #retail stories #retail story #true story #i hate people

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agritecture · 6 years

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Water Of Plenty: Meet The Trio Practising Soilless Farming In Delhi

CONTENT SOURCED FROM FORBESINDIA

When Ullas Samrat and Dhruv Khanna spoke after a long hiatus in the summer of 2014, they had a lot to share. The childhood friends had drifted apart when Khanna relocated to Singapore for a master’s degree in 2013, while Samrat stayed back in Delhi to work in his family’s lighting business.

On that call, they mostly spoke about where their lives were headed. Samrat was figuring out a way to keep his mother, who suffered from a lung disorder, away from Delhi’s air pollution. His plan to shift his mother to a farmhouse on the outskirts was struck down by doctors—pesticides, soil and dust at the farms would do her no good. This got him thinking about farming without soil. Khanna, stationed in Singapore, was building his own startup, one that aspired to make TVs smart.

A few minutes into the conversation, both figured they wanted to do something more “meaningful and impactful in life”. Working on a sustainable farming module could be a good starting point, the friends agreed.

“When I told Dhruv about soilless farming, he called me back in three days and said there are a few startups in Singapore [like Comcrop] doing the same. Dhruv said he would be visiting India in a couple of months and if we could figure out a pilot by then, he could work on his startup from Delhi and relocate,” says Samrat, 28, in a phone interview. Khanna, also 28, did return in September. By then, the duo had sold their dream to three others—Devanshu Shivnani, Deepak Kukreja and Vaibhav Batra. In October they set up Triton Foodworks and started out by growing strawberries hydroponically—without the use of soil, in a nutrient-rich medium using water as solvent—on a plot in Delhi’s Sainik Farms, where Samrat’s family owned some land. The yield was heartening—eight tonnes, which fetched them a profit of about ₹3.5 lakh.

The five founders, all in their twenties, were elated as the dream to create something impactful had started to take wing. Hydroponics was the way forward for sustainable agriculture, they concluded. First, hydroponics requires 60-80 percent less water than conventional farming. Second, one can practise high-density cultivation with hydroponics. Third, since there is no soil involved, there is no scope of lacerating the soil with pesticides and other chemicals. Explains Kukreja, 39, “In soil cultivation, plant spacing has to be maintained because the plants compete for minerals, but here, since we feed the plants with precision, it gives us the scope to increase plant density. We can also grow vertically for small and compact plants like strawberries, lettuces and herbs.” He adds, “In conventional farming we have to do crop rotation to avoid soil erosion and avoid problems like nematodes and pests, but hydroponics gives us the advantage to cultivate a certain crop throughout the year.”

However, the company’s wings were soon clipped by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, which razed a greenhouse structure they were starting to put up. “In Sainik Farms, construction of new houses and digging borewells for residential use is not permitted due to an ongoing case, but there is no restriction for agricultural activities,” says Khanna, adding that they were asked for bribes. “When we refused, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi demolished the greenhouse without giving any notice. When we complained to the local MLA, a few days later a junior engineer from MCD came to apologise and told us he thought we were building a house.” The team was shaken to the core, the immediate fallout of the corporation’s action being Batra’s exit. Next, Shivnani chose to take a break and pursue an MBA. Meanwhile, an institutional investor who had evinced interest in the firm also withheld investment. The flight, in effect, was grounded even before it could take off. “More money had to be pumped in and we were all very tense. Everyone had this awkward conversation at home where we asked for more money and our parents were not convinced this time. They had already given us money to kick-start the operations,” recalls Samrat of the tumultuous days. However, Samrat, Kukreja and Khanna decided to stay put. The plan was to take up hydroponics consultancy work for about a year or two, make enough revenue and plough it back into their firm to continue with R&D—the firm had set up two research and production facilities in Rohini in Delhi and Wada near Mumbai. Between January 2016 and mid-2017, the company executed about five projects in Delhi, Karnataka and Maharashtra —which fetched them about ₹1 crore in revenue—simultaneously working on the research facilities.

The idea was to develop indigenous hydroponics techniques as well as reduce the cost of operations, which could skyrocket to about ₹2 crore for an acre of land. By the end of 2017, Triton Foodworks had devised a way to reduce the cost of setting up a greenhouse hydroponics unit to about ₹1.25 crore. “The idea was to source as much raw material as possible from local vendors, design the systems ourselves and get them made by local manufacturers,” says Khanna. Adds Kukreja of some of their innovations, “Instead of plastic moulds to hold the crops, which cost about ₹25 lakh for an acre, we use styrofoam, which is not only cheaper but also keeps the temperature low. The cost comes down to ₹15 lakh.” The team has also developed a high pressure fogger, which sprays smaller water droplets compared to conventional fogging systems. Late last year, the company stopped consultancy work and turned its attention to developing their own farms. To consolidate operations, it shut down their research facilities and took up a five-acre plot in Manesar, where it grows different varieties of tomato, strawberries, lettuce, eggplants and pepper among other plants. The plan is to stock the produce in retail outlets in Delhi under the ChopChop brand as well as sell directly to hotels and restaurants. The current fiscal is expected to fetch the firm ₹1 crore in revenue. “There has been a lot of exposure around food and food experimentation has become big in urban markets. Also, the eating out market has grown and exposed a lot of urban centres to new tastes and ingredients, which have found their way into people’s kitchens. Hence, this category is finding significant retail shelf in outlets, which makes startups in this space interesting,” says Ankur Bisen, senior vice-president at retail consultancy firm Technopak Advisors. The greenfield opportunity in hydroponics has also attracted businesses such as Letcetra Agritech, BitMantis Innovations, Junga FreshnGreen and Future Farms. The trio of Triton is in no mood to let go of the opportunity.

#urban agriculture #sustainable farming #vertical farm #hydroponic #india #double-size

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sparklytastemakerwitch · 3 years

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What is a Paper Making Machine?

I know you’re looking for a paper bag machine that’s why you are here.

Maybe, you want to be a paper bag wholesaler or make branded designs for your retail business.

The truth is, paper bags are dear packages for food vendors, retailers, and even manufacturers.

But, how can you venture in this business?

Or, what is the most cost effective way of making paper bags?

Today’s guide debunks the facts behind paper bag making process and machine such basic definition, working principle, classification, design, technical specification, etc.

So stay with me to be an expert in paper bag making industry.

Let’s begin with some facts.

Apart from the other devastating problems associated with plastic bags, did you know that synthetic bag manufacturers produce about one trillion of those bags in a year globally?

Did you also know that it takes one thousand years for a single bag of this kind to biodegrade?

Yes, that’s the scariest part of it.

Due to that, most governments are imposing bans on these carriers.

The alternative?

A mega-shift to more environmentally friendly paper bags.

So basically a paper bag making machine is a state of the art machine that gathers, folds, stamps, and processes papers to produce clean paper bags.

These paper bags are for use in the packaging of goods in various industries such as food, pharmaceutical products, grocery, and baking industries.

The bag making machines come in various configurations depending on the type of bags for final production.

Therefore, the paper bag making system should be versatile enough to cater to the dynamics in the paper bag manufacturing.

Today different paper bag making stakeholders such as the machine manufacturers, raw material suppliers face a lot of shifting customer demands, government regulations, changing prices, etc.

It’s thus good only if the machine can afford the manufacturer some relief.

For that matter, it means that you need to know all the factors related to the paper bag making the machine.

Besides, all the accompanying dynamics before making a purchase.

Luckily, I have compiled all that you need to know in this article.

The history of development and use of paper bag making machine dates back to the 19th century.

During these early stages, the systems were simple and mechanically operated.

With that, we move to the next step.

Where to Use Paper Bag Making Machine

Take a moment to reflect on the occasions you use a paper bag.

Indeed paper bag forms a vital integral in our lives today.

From simple uses such as carrying random goods to more complex ones such as in pharmaceuticals to wrap up drugs.

One thing is for sure.

Without paper bag making machine, we would be missing a significant aspect of our lives.

Surely, there are numerous uses of paper bag making the machine.

Subsequently, the produced paper bags can be classified under different distinct categories depending on their purposes.

We carry stuff in them -– groceries, clothes, gifts, trash and booze. I carried my lunch to school in one until the fourth grade because my mother would decorate them with stickers and drawings. People add sand and candles to them to illuminate their neighbourhoods at Christmas. Disgruntled sports fans cover their heads with them. But how many people know where the flat-bottomed paper bag came from? Or that its invention was a triumph of feminism over patriarchy, and of brains over bullying?

For most of recorded history, containers were made of leather, wood, cotton and reeds. Paper, made by hand one sheet at a time, was a luxury, used only for books, records and letters by the literate few. In 1799, a French inventor named Louis-Nicolas Robert was granted a patent for a machine that produced rolls of paper. This invention brought paper to the masses. Soon, merchants were using rolled paper, or ‘cornucopias’, to package small quantities of goods, with predictably messy results. They also constructed rudimentary paper bags by hand, which was a time-consuming and not always successful process.

The race was on to produce a paper bag that was both sturdy and easy to make. In 1852, the American Francis Wolle received the first patent for a square bottom paper bag machine. It used steam and paste to create bags in the shape of envelopes. Though the machine became popular, the bags it produced were cumbersome and of limited use – picture a load of groceries in a large envelope-shaped sack. Still, they were better than nothing at all, and factories producing the bags multiplied. In the late 1860s, Margaret Knight, a tall, endlessly inquisitive and hard-working New Englander, went to work for the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. Within a few years, her ingenious designs would revolutionise the industry.

Born in 1838, Knight’s childhood was shaped by the industrial revolution. At first glance, hers is the classic victim’s story – raised by a widowed mother, and put to work by the age of 10 in the brutally inhospitable cotton mills of New Hampshire. But from her earliest days this uneducated labourer had an agile, inventive mind. While still a child, Knight saw a fellow worker injured when a steel-tipped shuttle shot off a loom. She soon created a shuttle cover to prevent any more accidents, and her invention was adopted by her factory. In an interview with the progressive Woman’s Journal in 1872, she recalled her unconventional youth: As a child, I never cared for things that girls usually do; dolls never possessed any charms for me. I couldn’t see the sense of coddling bits of porcelain with senseless faces: the only things I wanted were a jack-knife, a gimlet, and pieces of wood. My friends were horrified. I was called a tomboy; but that made very little impression on me. I sighed sometimes, because I was not like the other girls; but wisely concluded that I couldn’t help it, and sought further consolation from my tools. I was always making things for my brothers; did they want anything in the line of playthings, they always said: ‘Mattie will make them for us.’ I was famous for my kites; and my sleds were the envy and admiration of all the boys in town.

By the time she joined the Columbia Paper Bag Company as a lowly factory worker, the 30-something, unmarried Knight had spent years as a ‘Jill-of-all-trades’, becoming proficient in daguerreotype, photography, engraving, house repair and upholstering. Spending long hours at the factory, she soon heard of current efforts to create a flat bottom paper bag machine that could efficiently manufacture flat bottom paper bag. ‘I am told that there is no such machine known as a square-bottomed machine,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I mean to try away at it until I get my ideas worked out.’ Independent of the factory and without her bosses’ knowledge, Knight began to study the issue intently.

By 1867, she was hard at work on creating a machine that could ‘cut, fold and paste bag bottoms itself’. Her work kept her up at night, leading the manager of her boarding house to declare: ‘I saw her making drawings continually… always of the machine. She has known nothing else, I think.’ Her work on the machine also bled into her shifts at the factory. This initially annoyed her superiors – until she showed them her plans – which led them to believe that she had a ‘keener eye than any man in the works’. After a ‘rickety’ wooden model of her machine proved successful, producing thousands of ‘good, handsome bags’, she had an iron version produced in 1868. While the machine was at a Boston shop to be refined, it was viewed by Charles F Annan, a would-be-inventor of dubious morality.

Knight prepared to apply for a patent for her new machine. In 1871, she was shocked to find that Annan had already been granted a patent to the machine, which he claimed as his own. The dispute ended up in court, where the cash-strapped Knight spent $100 a day to hire a patent attorney to prove that she was the machine’s true inventor. Annan’s lawyer argued that an uneducated, self-taught woman could never have built such a sophisticated machine. He was countered at every turn by the mountains of physical evidence and eye-witness testimony Knight produced. ‘I have from my earliest recollection been connected in some way with machinery,’ Knight protested. In the end, the commissioner of patents found in favour of Knight, though officials could not resist chastising her for waiting so long to apply for her patent. However, since Knight was not a ‘man of business’, this oversight was forgiven.

On 11 July 1871, Knight was granted patent number 116,842 for her ‘new and improved shopping paper bag machine for making paper bags’. She soon formed the Eastern Paper Bag Company with a partner, and became a media darling for her revolutionary machine, which did the work of 30 labourers. The new stand-alone, flat-bottomed bags were quickly adopted by large department stores and grocers, and Knight was awarded a royal honour from Queen Victoria. In 1883, Charles Stilwell of the Union Paper Bag Machine Company, working from Knight’s patent, further advanced the paper bag with his invention of a machine that produced the Self-Opening-Sack (SOS), the pleated flat-bottomed bags that are used today.

The vivacious Knight, dubbed by one paper the ‘lady Edison’, would spend the rest of her long life – she died aged 76 in 1914 – inventing. By 2006, when she was inducted into the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame, it was estimated that around 25 billion paper sacks were used annually throughout the world.

In the past decade, Knight’s dramatic story has been told in two popular children’s books – Marvelous Mattie (2006) by Emily Arnold McCully, and In the Bag! (2011) by Monica Kulling. She is emblematic of a whole multitude of female inventors, such as Mary Anderson (the windshield wiper), Katharine Blodgett (non-reflective glass), and Stephanie Kwolek (Kevlar), who created life-changing inventions within industries – and a world – dominated by men. Their stories are important and should be better known. They can inspire future generations of girls and young women to tinker, experiment and invent.

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techcrunchappcom · 3 years

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/roaring-kitty-will-tell-congress-he-was-a-true-believer-in-gamestop-live-updates/

Roaring Kitty Will Tell Congress He Was a True Believer in GameStop: Live Updates

Here’s what you need to know:

“The idea that I used social media to promote GameStop stock to unwitting investors is preposterous,” Keith Gill said in a statement to a House committee that will hear testimony on Thursday.Credit…via Youtube

Keith Gill, the former MassMutual wellness education director who advocated for shares of GameStop in his free time, is prepared to tell a House committee on Thursday that he never provided investment advice for a fee and did not “solicit anyone to buy or sell the stock for my own profit.”

The statement made no mention of the fact that Mr. Gill was a registered securities broker and a chartered financial analyst while he was posting online about GameStop under the alias Roaring Kitty and another pseudonym that included a vulgarity.

In the five-page statement, Mr. Gill described himself as a true believer in the fortunes of GameStop, a video game retailer, and said his postings online about the company had nothing to do with his job at MassMutual. He portrayed himself as a one-person operation doing battle with wealthy hedge funds, some of which were shorting shares of GameStop and betting on its collapse.

“The idea that I used social media to promote GameStop stock to unwitting investors is preposterous,” Mr. Gill said in the statement, which his lawyer provided to the House Committee on Financial Services in advance of Thursday’s hearing into the speculative and aggressive trading last month in shares of GameStop. “I was abundantly clear that my channel was for educational purposes only, and that my aggressive style of investing was unlikely to be suitable for most folks checking out the channel.”

He said he had shared his investment ideas online because he “had reached a level where I felt sharing them publicly could help others.”

Mr. Gill described himself as an average guy who earned a modest income and was effectively out of work for two years before landing at MassMutual in April 2019. The statement skirted over how much money he had made trading shares of GameStop — though he said he had told his family at one point that “we were millionaires.” He also did not mention that Massachusetts securities regulators are investigating whether he violated any securities industry rules and regulations with his social media postings.

On Tuesday, Mr. Gill and his former employer were named as defendants in a proposed class-action lawsuit that claimed he misled retail investors who bought shares of GameStop during its 1,700 percent rally only to suffer losses when the stock quickly gave back most of those gains. The lawsuit contends that MassMutual and its brokerage arm did not properly supervise Mr. Gill, who was an employee until a few weeks ago.

Mr. Gill’s lawyer, William Taylor, declined to comment on the lawsuit. A spokeswoman for MassMutual said the company was reviewing the matter with Mr. Gill.

Mr. Gill is one of a half-dozen witnesses scheduled to testify at the hearing, which will focus on the impact of short selling, social media and hedge funds on retail investors and market speculation.

A stuck car in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday. A storm that brought snow, ice and plunging temperatures has slowed or halted auto production across the South and Midwest.Credit…Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press

The winter storm that battered much of the United States over the holiday weekend continued to slow auto production across the Midwest on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, several automakers suspended or shut down production at plants from Texas to Indiana as rolling blackouts, natural gas shortages and extreme weather made operating difficult.

General Motors canceled day shifts on Wednesday at factories in Arlington, Texas, and Fort Wayne, Ind., but was back to normal schedules at its plants in Spring Hill, Tenn.; Wentzville, Mo.; and Bowling Green, Ky., a spokesman said.

Toyota canceled early shifts at plants in Tupelo, Miss., and San Antonio, the company said. Both plants were closed on Tuesday. The company’s factory in Georgetown, Ky., went back into operation Wednesday, although two hours later than usual. A plant in Princeton, Ind., that had been idle on Tuesday returned to its normal schedule on Wednesday.

Honda Motor said all of its plants were back to normal hours on Wednesday, a day after cold weather forced the cancellation of shifts at some factories.

The extreme weather has left millions without power and disrupted retail chains, delivery services and manufacturers across much of the South and Midwest. On Wednesday, Texas faced a new onslaught of sleet and freezing rain that the National Weather Service said could be “the worst of all the winter events over the past week.”

Businesses in Dallas cleaning up after this week’s storm. With demand high and production limited, natural gas prices continued to surge.Credit…Nitashia Johnson for The New York Times

Energy prices rose again on Wednesday, a reflection of surging energy demand and expectations of disruptions of Texas-based supply after winter storms hit Southern and central states.

Benchmark prices for American crude oil rose 1.8 percent, with a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil settling at $61.14. The price topped $60 a barrel this week for the first time in 13 months.

Natural gas prices rose 2.9 percent, settling at $3.219 per million British thermal units. The rise followed a 7.5 percent surge in natural gas prices on Tuesday.

“A production rebound could potentially take more than a week or two for the majority of oil and gas wells, but it might take longer for production from nearly all wells to recover,” wrote commodities analysts from Citi Research in a note to clients published on Tuesday.

As of

Data delayed at least 15 minutes

Source: Factset

Stocks

On Wall Street, markets ended lower but recovered their steepest losses. The S&P 500 lost less than 0.1 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index lost 0.6 percent, led by a 1.8 percent drop in Apple shares.

The Stoxx 600 Europe fell 0.7 percent, led by consumer and financial stocks.

Bonds

The 10-year Treasury yield was down slightly to about 1.29 percent. (It was not, as was previously stated here due to an editing error, down 15 basis points.) On Tuesday, the yield jumped 10 basis points, or 0.1 percentage point, the biggest one-day increase since March. Inflation expectations in U.S. financial markets are at multiyear highs, as investors anticipate that a large government spending package could stoke higher prices. In recent days, this had spurred a sharp sell-off in U.S. government bonds.

Federal Reserve officials were concerned about continuing threats to the economic recovery during their late January meeting and did not see a big risk that inflation would shoot higher in a lasting way, based on minutes from the gathering.

The 10-year break-even rate, one measure of inflation in markets, was at 2.24 percent, the highest since 2014.

Bond yields rose across Europe, reversing an earlier decline. The 10-year yield on British bonds rose slightly to 0.62 percent. Earlier data showed the annual inflation rate increased in January.

Facebook’s decision comes in response to a proposed law that requires tech companies to pay publishers for linking to articles.Credit…Richard Drew/Associated Press

Facebook said on Wednesday that it would restrict people and publishers from sharing links to news articles in Australia, in response to a proposed law in the country that requires tech companies to pay publishers for linking to articles across their platforms.

The decision came hours after Google announced it had reached an agreement to pay Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to publish its news content in a three-year global deal, part of a string of deals it had struck with media companies in recent days to ensure that news would remain on its services.

“The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” William Easton, managing director of Facebook Australia & New Zealand, said in a statement about Australia’s legislation. “It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.”

Facebook’s decision is an escalation of a long-term standoff between tech companies and news publishers, which have argued for years that they are not fairly compensated for articles and other content that generate ad revenue for the technology companies. The tech giants have pushed back, saying that they are merely conduits for the content, and that the proposed law in Australia is untenable.

Still, Facebook has continued to make investments in other areas of news, including expanding its Facebook News tab — a paid partnership program dedicated to showing curated news articles inside the mobile app — to more countries and paid partners. Last month, Facebook started its News Tab service in Britain, unveiling a slate of new partnerships with major British publishers.

Although Google reached an agreement with news publishers, Facebook has positioned itself as having a fundamentally different relationship with them. The social network has maintained that it has largely helped the media industry, and that publishers would not be able to increase their revenue in the same way without Facebook’s aid.

News Corp, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and The Australian, has been a longtime critic of Google.Credit…Lucas Jackson/Reuters

News Corp said on Wednesday that Google had agreed to make “a significant payment” to publish the newspaper publisher’s news content, signaling a breakthrough in a dispute that has dated back to the earliest days of the search engine.

The three-year global deal comes as Australia prepared to pass groundbreaking legislation to force internet platforms to pay for news. In recent days, Google had struck deals with other media companies to ensure that news would remain on its services, but News Corp, a longtime critic of the search giant and publisher of The Wall Street Journal and The Australian, had held out.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has been a vocal and determined critic about how news organizations are not fairly compensated for content that helps to bring in advertising revenue for Google.

Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, said the deal would have “a positive impact on journalism around the globe.” The exact financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

News Corp said the agreement also included the development of a subscription platform, the sharing of advertising revenue from Google’s technology services and investments into video journalism by YouTube, a Google subsidiary.

Don Harrison, president of global partnerships at Google, said the company had invested to help news organizations over the years. “We hope to announce even more partnerships soon,” he said.

Rush Limbaugh received the Presidential Medal of Freedom last February. Credit…Fox News

Fox News dedicated hours of coverage on Wednesday to praise for Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk radio star whose aggressive and often divisive rhetoric helped pave the way for the network’s prime time hosts.

With Harris Faulkner and Bill Hemmer at the anchor desk, conservative media and political figures called in to offer tributes to Mr. Limbaugh, who died on Wednesday at 70.

Sean Hannity said “there is no talk radio as we know it” without Mr. Limbaugh.

“It just doesn’t exist,” he said on Fox News. “And I’d even make the argument in many ways, there’s no Fox News or even some of these other opinionated cable networks.”

Tucker Carlson said Mr. Limbaugh came “out of nowhere” and became the voice of conservatism and the savior of AM radio. “Here was a guy who took the oldest of mass communication media and turned it into the most powerful force in American politics, and he did it purely out of talent,” he said.

Former President Donald J. Trump said in a call to Fox News that he had last spoken with Mr. Limbaugh three or four days ago. “People, whether they loved him or not, they respected him, they really did,” he said. Mr. Trump also repeated the baseless claim that he had won the election. “Rush thought we won, and so do I, by the way,” he said. “I think we won substantially.”

The broadcast included footage of Mr. Trump’s presenting Mr. Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, during the State of the Union address last February. Former Vice President Mike Pence, himself a former talk radio host, also called in to say that Mr. Limbaugh “made conservatism fun.”

In his long career, Mr. Limbaugh often referred to feminists as “feminazis”; lost his commentary role on ESPN in 2003 after he said that Donovan McNabb, a Black quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, had received too much credit for his team’s success because of his race; and hung up on callers to his radio show with something he called “caller abortions,” an audio montage of a vacuum cleaner sound and human screams. In 2012, he repeatedly attacked Sandra Fluke, a law student who testified at a congressional hearing on birth control, calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” on his radio show.

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, Mr. Limbaugh promoted the falsehood that Mr. Obama had been born outside the United States and lent support to Mr. Trump’s recent claims of election fraud. On his Dec. 23 program, he acknowledged his influence on Fox News.

“And then I got some help starting in 1996,” he said, referring to the year the cable news channel started. “Here comes Fox! Proud of that.”

The White House on Wednesday nominated Jennifer Abruzzo, a prominent union lawyer, to be general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, the country’s top enforcer of labor rights for private-sector employees.

Ms. Abruzzo’s nomination comes roughly a month after President Biden fired the Trump administration’s appointee to the job, Peter B. Robb, who was unpopular with organized labor. Mr. Robb’s term was not due to expire until November, but unions close to the new president urged his ouster.

The labor board’s general counsel, a Senate-confirmed position, has considerable authority over which cases the agency pursues — such as those in which employees are fired while trying to organize. Unions were frustrated that Mr. Robb had sought to settle a prominent case against McDonald’s that the agency had initiated during the Obama administration, among other decisions.

Before leaving the labor board in 2017, when Mr. Robb was confirmed, Ms. Abruzzo had spent more than two decades there, including a tour as deputy general counsel beginning in 2013.

Her nomination as general counsel drew praise from labor officials. Lynn Rhinehart, a former general counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., called the appointment a “superb choice.”

Ms. Rhinehart, now a senior fellow at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said Ms. Abruzzo “will hit the ground running and help restore the N.L.R.B.’s credibility as an agency that protects and promotes the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively for improvements at their workplace.”

“Many participants stressed the importance of distinguishing” between an anticipated temporary pop in prices later this year and a shift in inflation’s longer-term trend, minutes from the Fed’s January meeting showed.Credit…Ting Shen for The New York Times

Federal Reserve officials fretted about continuing threats to the economic recovery and noted financial stability concerns during their late January meeting, minutes from the gathering showed, but they did not see a big risk that inflation would shoot higher in a lasting way.

Fed officials left interest rates near zero at their Jan. 27 meeting and pledged to continue making huge bond purchases as they try to help the economy weather the pandemic. During a news conference following the meeting — and in remarks since — Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has suggested that doing too little to stem the fallout of the crisis is a bigger risk than doing too much. Minutes released Wednesday echoed that watchful stance.

“Participants observed that the economy was far from achieving the committee’s broad-based and inclusive goal of maximum employment and that even with a brisk pace of improvement in the labor market, achieving this goal would take some time,” the minutes said.

The pandemic “continued to pose considerable risks to the economic outlook, including risks associated with new virus strains, potential public resistance to vaccination, and potential difficulties in the production and distribution of vaccines,” officials noted.

While several prominent economists have warned that the government might overdo its coronavirus crisis spending response and set off higher inflation, Fed policymakers have been less concerned. In fact, “many participants stressed the importance of distinguishing” between an anticipated temporary pop in prices later this year and a shift in inflation’s longer-term trend, the minutes showed.

Central bankers were alert to financial stability risks. The Fed’s late-January meeting came as GameStop’s stock rose rapidly, fueled in part by retail traders who had organized on social media. Fed officials discussed that and other concerns.

“Some participants commented that equity valuations had risen further, that initial public offering activity was elevated, or that valuations might have been affected by retail investors trading through electronic platforms,” the minutes showed.

Fed staff members — influential advisers to the policy-setting officials — characterized financial market vulnerabilities as “notable” and called asset valuations “elevated,” the minutes showed. Valuations were deemed “moderate” as recently as November.

The volume of new mortgages hit a record in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.Credit…Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

A mortgage boom is underway as American families take advantage of historically low interest rates by refinancing or buying homes, based on a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The volume of new mortgages hit a record in the fourth quarter of 2020, surpassing a 2003 high before adjusting for inflation, the New York Fed said in its latest household debt report and an accompanying blog post. That boom in the mid-2000s has since been blamed for leaving households heavily indebted and contributing to the pain of the 2007 housing bust. But the Fed’s researchers noted that today’s run-up looks different.

This time, both lenders and borrowers appear to be treading more carefully, and mainly households with pristine financial histories are borrowing or refinancing. More than 70 percent of originations in the fourth quarter of 2020 went to borrowers with credit scores over 760, the researchers said.

“Although these two bumps in mortgage originations are similar in magnitude, the composition is quite different,” they wrote. Plus, it’s hard to properly compare origination volumes exactly over time, because rising home prices mean that the increase isn’t apples to apples.

Still, “the trend was unmistakably increasing this year, and to a high level,” according to the post.

Mortgage originations for home purchases spiked in the fourth quarter of 2020, with first-time and repeat buyers borrowing to buy homes at a similar pace. The researchers note that even first-time borrowers look more financially stable now than during the mid-2000s housing boom.

Refinancing has also accelerated. That extends to “cash out” refinances, in which borrowers re-up their home loans and pocket some money against their home equity.

The practice jumped in 2020, with borrowers withdrawing $188 billion in home equity over the course of the year compared with just $119 billion the year before, though “cash-out refinance volume is still notably smaller than what was seen between 2003-06” and came mostly in tiny increments.

“At least half of the refinancers borrowed only enough additional funds to cover the closing costs on the new mortgage,” the researchers noted.

The data as a whole paints a picture in which the mortgage market is booming, the Fed researchers said, but with different — and seemingly more stable — underlying characteristics than the ones that led to the 2007 bust.

A container port in Shandong Province, China. American economic output would drop $190 billion annually if the United States imposed a 25 percent tariff on all trade with China, a new report says. Credit…Chinatopix, via Associated Press

Fracturing trade, investment and other economic ties between the United States and China would have significant costs for the American economy and for industry, and could ultimately lead to the United States being less competitive, according to a report published Wednesday by a consultancy, the Rhodium Group, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce China Center.

The report attempts to quantify the economic costs of “decoupling” the American and Chinese economies through the fuller pursuit of policies like those adopted by the Trump administration, including tariffs and higher barriers to investment and immigration.

The report’s authors estimate that American economic output would fall by $190 billion annually if all U.S.-China trade was subject to the kind of 25 percent tariff that Mr. Trump put on more than half of Chinese exports.

On the investment front, the U.S. economy could face a one-time loss of up to $500 billion if policies led to the sale of half of U.S. foreign direct investments in China. And the United States could lose between $15 billion and $30 billion in service sector exports if Chinese tourism and education spending fell by half from its pre-pandemic levels, according to the report.

Daniel Rosen, a founding partner at Rhodium Group, said in a news conference on Wednesday that China had initiated the conflict by adopting practices that have raised national security concerns and violated economic norms. But as the United States responds to those challenges, he said policymakers needed to carefully analyze the cost of their own actions, which could be substantial.

Cutting off the “preponderance of our engagement with China would be so expensive that it would make everyone, even the most hawkish Americans and national security professionals, very uncomfortable. We’re going to have to pay for this stuff. Our choices are not going to be cheap,” Mr. Rosen said.

“It doesn’t mean we don’t act, but it does mean we need to do the accounting carefully so we understand the implications,” he said.

The report found significant costs from decoupling for several U.S. sectors, including aviation, chemicals, semiconductors and medical devices. Restrictions on American sales to the Chinese market would lead to lower revenue for American firms, less investment in factories, jobs and research in the United States, boosting foreign competitors and diminishing U.S. industry, the report said. In the case of semiconductors, it could also push foreign firms to cut American companies out of their supply chains.

In the aviation sector, where the United States records huge sales to China and faces no close Chinese competitor, decoupling would be “insane,” Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said during the news conference.

“The Trump administration did essentially no math on this,” he said. “It’s critical that we do the math and not make choices based on faith or ideology.”

The Trump administration embraced the perspective of the business community on some issues, like regulation and taxes, but it was often at odds over trade policy. In particular, trade officials in the Trump administration often derided officials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as corporate lobbyists, saying that the chamber’s pro-China policies had led to outsourcing and the loss of American manufacturing jobs.

The Biden administration has promised to take a more strategic approach to advancing American competitiveness, but it may also be under pressure from unions and progressive Democrats not to be seen as putting the concerns of corporations over economic or national security.

Ford Motor became the latest automaker to accelerate its transition to electric cars, saying Wednesday that its European division will soon begin to phase out vehicles powered by fossil fuels. By 2026, the company will offer only electric and plug-in hybrid models in Europe, and by 2030 all of its new passenger cars there will run solely on batteries.

The coronavirus crisis may have accomplished something that a decade of economic growth could not: It spurred a boom in U.S. entrepreneurship. According to a study released on Wednesday, researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that Americans started 4.4 million businesses last year, a 24 percent increase from the year before. It is by far the biggest increase on record.

The private equity firm Carlyle Group plans to create a $4.1 billion credit line for its portfolio companies that will tie the price of debt to the diversity of a company’s board, the DealBook newsletter reports. Carlyle did not disclose the rates associated with the loans. The three-year facility, which the firm says is the largest of its kind in the United States, is part of an “integrated approach to building better businesses,” said Carlyle’s chief executive, Kewsong Lee.

#believer #congress #gamestop #kitty #roaring #updates #Technology

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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The Famous Router Hackers Actually Loved

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

In a world where our routers look more and more like upside-down spiders than things you would like to have in your living room, there are only a handful of routers that may be considered “famous.”

Steve Jobs’ efforts to sell AirPort—most famously by using a hula hoop during a product demo—definitely deserve notice in this category, and the mesh routers made by the Amazon-owned Eero probably fit in this category as well.

But a certain Linksys router, despite being nearly 20 years old at this point, takes the cake—and it’s all because of a feature that initially went undocumented that proved extremely popular with a specific user base.

Let’s spend a moment reflecting on the blue-and-black icon of wireless access, the Linksys WRT54G. This is the wireless router that showed the world what a wireless router could do.

1988

The year that Linksys was formed by Janie and Victor Tsao, two Taiwanese immigrants to the United States who launched their company, initially a consultancy called DEW International, while working information technology jobs. (Victor, fun fact, was an IT manager with Taco Bell.) According to a 2004 profile in Inc., the company started as a way to connect inventors with manufacturers in the Taiwanese market, but the company moved into the hardware business itself in the early 1990s, eventually landing on home networking—a field that, in the early 2000s, Linksys came to dominate.

How black and blue became the unofficial colors of home networking during the early 2000s

Today, buying a router for your home is something that a lot of people don’t think much about. Nowadays, you can buy one for a few dollars used and less than $20 new.

But in the late 1990s, it was a complete nonentity, a market that had not been on the radar of many networking hardware companies, because the need for networking had been limited to the office. Which meant that installing a router was both extremely expensive and beyond the reach of mere mortals.

It’s the kind of situation that helps companies on the periphery, not quite big enough to play with the big fish, but small enough to sense an opportunity. During its first decade of existence, Janie and Victor Tsao took advantage of such opportunities, using market shifts to help better position their networking hardware.

In the early 90s, Linksys hardware had to come with its own drivers. But when Windows 95 came along, networking was built in—and that meant a major barrier for Linksys’ market share suddenly disappeared overnight, which meant there was suddenly a growing demand for its network adapters, which fit inside desktops and laptops alike.

While Victor was helping to lead and handle the technical end, Janie was working out distribution deals with major retailers such as Best Buy, which helped to take the networking cards mainstream in the technology world.

But the real opportunity, the one that made Linksys hard to shake for years afterwards, came when Victor built a router with a home audience in mind. With dial-up modems on their way out, there was a sudden need.

“As home broadband Internet use began to bloom in the late ’90s, at costs significantly higher than those for dial-up connections, Victor realized that people were going to want to hook all their small-office or home computers to one line,” the Inc. profile on Janie and Victor stated. “To do so they would need a router, a high-tech cord splitter allowing multiple computers to hook into one modem.”

The companies Linksys was competing with were, again, focused on a market where routers cost nearly as much as a computer itself. But Victor found the sweet spot: A $199 router that came with software that was easy to set up and reasonably understandable for mere mortals. And it had the distinctive design that Linksys became known for—a mixture of blue and biack plastics, with an array of tiny LED lights on the front.

In a review of the EtherFast Cable/DSL router, PC Magazine noted that Linksys did far more than was asked of it.

“A price of $200 would be a breakthrough for a dual Ethernet port router, but Linksys has packed even more value into the 1.8- by 9.3- by 5.6-inch (HWD) package,” reviewer Craig Ellison wrote. The router, which could handle speeds of up to 100 megabits, sported four ports—and could theoretically handle hundreds of IP addresses.

Perhaps it wasn’t as overwhelmingly reliable as some of its more expensive competitors, but it was reasonably priced for homes, and that made it an attractive proposition.

This router was a smash success, helping to put Linksys on top of a fledgling market with market share that put its competitors to shame. In fact, the only thing that was really wrong about the router was that it did not support wireless. But Linksys’ name recognition meant that when it did, there would be an existing audience that would find its low cost and basic use cases fascinating.

One router in particular proved specifically popular—though not for the reasons Linksys anticipated.

$500M

The amount that Cisco, the networking hardware giant, acquired Linksys for in 2003. The acquisition came at a time when Linksys was making half a billion dollars a year, and was growing fast in large part because of the success of its routers, among other networking equipment. In comments to NetworkWorld, Victor Tsao claimed that there was no overlap between the unmanaged networking of Linksys routers and the managed networking of Cisco’s existing infrastructure. They did things differently—something Cisco would soon find out the hard way.

Not only was the WRT54G cheap, it was hackable. (Jay Gooby/Flickr)

How an accidental feature in Linksys’ wireless router turned a ho-hum router into an enthusiast device

In many ways, the WRT54G router series has become something of the Nintendo Entertainment System of wireless routers. Coming around relatively early in the mainstream history of the wireless router, it showed a flexibility far beyond what its creator intended for the device. While not the only game in town, it was overwhelmingly prevalent in homes around the world.

Although much less heralded, its success was comparable to the then-contemporary Motorola RAZR for a time, in that it was basically everywhere, on shelves in homes and small businesses around the world. The WRT54G, despite the scary name, was the wireless router people who needed a wireless router would buy.

And odds are, it may still be in use in a lot of places, even though its security standards are well past its prime and it looks extremely dated on a mantle. (The story of the Amiga that controlled a school district’s HVAC systems comes to mind.)

But the reason the WRT54G series has held on for so long, despite using a wireless protocol that was effectively made obsolete 12 years ago, might come down to a feature that was initially undocumented—a feature that got through amid all the complications of a big merger. Intentionally or not, the WRT54G was hiding something fundamental on the router’s firmware: Software based on Linux.

This was a problem, because it meant that Linksys would be compelled to release the source code of its wireless firmware under the GNU General Public License, which requires the distribution of the derivative software under the same terms as the software that inspired it.

Andrew Miklas, a contributor on the Linux kernel email list, explained that he had personally reached out to a member of the company’s staff and confirmed that the software was based on Linux … but eventually found his contact had stopped getting back to him.

Miklas noted that his interest in the flashed file was driven in part by a desire to see better Linux support for the still-relatively-new 802.11g standard that the device supported.

“I know that some wireless companies have been hesitant of releasing open source drivers because they are worried their radios might be pushed out of spec,” he wrote. “However, if the drivers are already written, would there be any technical reason why they could not simply be recompiled for Intel hardware, and released as binary-only modules?”

Mikas caught something interesting, but something that shouldn’t have been there. This was an oversight on the part of Cisco, which got an unhappy surprise about a popular product sold by its recent acquisition just months after its release. Essentially, what happened was that one of their suppliers apparently got a hold of Linux-based firmware, used it in the chips supplied to the company by Broadcom, and failed to inform Linksys, which then sold the software off to Cisco.

In a 2005 column for Linux Insider, Heather J. Meeker, a lawyer focused on issues of intellectual property and open-source software, wrote that this would have been a tall order for Cisco to figure out on its own:

The first takeaway from this case is the difficulty of doing enough diligence on software development in an age of vertical disintegration. Cisco knew nothing about the problem, despite presumably having done intellectual property diligence on Linksys before it bought the company. But to confound matters, Linksys probably knew nothing of the problem either, because Linksys has been buying the culprit chipsets from Broadcom, and Broadcom also presumably did not know, because it in turn outsourced the development of the firmware for the chipset to an overseas developer.

To discover the problem, Cisco would have had to do diligence through three levels of product integration, which anyone in the mergers and acquisitions trade can tell you is just about impossible. This was not sloppiness or carelessness—it was opaqueness.

Bruce Perens, a venture capitalist, open-source advocate, and former project leader for the Debian Linux distribution, told LinuxDevices that Cisco wasn’t to blame for what happened, but still faced compliance issues with the open-source license.

“Subcontractors in general are not doing enough to inform clients about their obligations under the GPL,” Perens said. (He added that, despite offering to help Cisco, they were not getting back to him.)

Nonetheless, the info about the router with the open-source firmware was out there, and Mikas’ post quickly gained attention in the enthusiast community. A Slashdot post could already see the possibilities: “This could be interesting: it might provide the possibility of building an uber-cool accesspoint firmware with IPsec and native ipv6 support etc etc, using this information!”

And as Slashdot commentators are known to do, they spoke up.

It clearly wasn’t done with a sense of excitement, but within about a month of the post hitting Slashdot, the company released its open-source firmware.

A WRT54G removed from its case. The device, thanks to its Linux firmware, became the target of both software and hardware hacks. (Felipe Fonesca/Flickr)

To hackers, this opened up a world of opportunity, and third-party developers quickly added capabilities to the original hardware that was never intended. This was essentially a commodity router that could be “hacked” to spit out a more powerful wireless signal at direct odds with the Federal Communications Commission, developed into an SSH server or VPN for your home network, or more colorfully, turned into the brains of a robot.

It also proved the root for some useful open-source firmware in the form of OpenWrt and Tomato, among others, which meant that there was a whole infrastructure to help extend your router beyond what the manufacturer wanted you to do.

Cisco was essentially compelled by the threat of legal action to release the Linux-based firmware under the GPL, but it was not thrilled to see that the device whose success finally gave it the foothold in the home that had long evaded the company being used in ways beyond what the box said.

As Lifehacker put it way back in 2006, it was the perfect way to turn your $60 router into a $600 router, which likely meant it was potentially costing Cisco money to have a device this good on the market.

So as a result, the company “upgraded” the router in a way that was effectively a downgrade, removing the Linux-based firmware, replacing it with a proprietary equivalent, and cutting down the amount of RAM and storage the device used, which made it difficult to replace the firmware with something created by a third party. This angered end users, and Cisco (apparently realizing it had screwed up) eventually released a Linux version of the router, the WRT54GL, which restored the specifications removed.

That’s the model you can still find on Amazon today, and still maintains a support page on Linksys’ website—and despite topping out at just 54 megabits per second through wireless means, a paltry number given what modern routers at the same price point can do, it’s still on sale.

The whole mess about the GPL came to bite in the years after the firmware oversight was first discovered—Cisco eventually paid a settlement to the Free Software Foundation—but it actually informed Linksys’ brand. Today, the company sells an entire line of black-and-blue routers that maintain support for open-source firmware. (They cost way more than the WRT54G ever did, though.)

“We want this book to expand the audience of the WRT54G platform, and embedded device usage as a whole, unlocking the potential that this platform has to offer.”

— A passage from the introduction of the 2007 book Linksys WRT54G Ultimate Hacking, a book that played into the fact that the WRT54G was a hackable embedded system that was fully mainstream and could be used in numerous ways—both for fun and practical use cases. Yes, hacking this device became so common that there is an entire 400-page book dedicated to the concept.

Now, to be clear, most people who bought a variant of the WRT54G at Best Buy likely did not care that the firmware was open source. But the decision created a cult of sorts around the device by making it hackable and able to do more things than the box on its own might have suggested. And that cult audience helped to drive longstanding interest in the device well beyond its hacker roots.

It was an unintentional word-of-mouth play, almost. When the average person asked their tech-savvy friend, “what router should I buy,” guess which one they brought up.

You know something has become a legendary hacking target when there’s a book about it. (via Bookshop)

A 2016 Ars Technica piece revealed the router, at the time, was still making millions of dollars a year for Linksys, which by that time had been sold to Belkin. Despite being nowhere near as powerful as more expensive options, the WRT54GL—yes, specifically the one with Linux—retained an audience well into its second decade because it was perceived as being extremely reliable and easy to use.

“We’ll keep building it because people keep buying it,” Linksys Global Product Manager Vince La Duca said at the time, stating that the factor that kept the router on sale was that the parts for it continued to be manufactured.

I said earlier that in many ways the WRT54G was the Nintendo Entertainment System of wireless routers. And I think that is especially true in the context of the fact that it had a fairly sizable afterlife, just as the NES did. Instead of blocky graphics and limited video output options, the WRT54G’s calling cards are a very spartan design and networking capabilities that fail to keep up with the times, but somehow maintain their modern charm.

In a world where routers increasingly look like set pieces from syndicated sci-fi shows from the ’90s, there is something nice about not having to think about the device that manages your network.

The result of all this is that, despite its extreme age and not-ready-for-the-living-room looks, it sold well for years past its sell-by date—in large part because of its reliance on open-source drivers.

If your user base is telling you to stick with something, stick with it.

The Famous Router Hackers Actually Loved syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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How Coronavirus Could Change the Way You Get Your Favorite Craft Beer

Mihai_Andritoiu/Shutterstock

Competition is fierce for cans, labels, and customers as breweries rush to package their beer for home drinking

It’s been a rough couple of months for craft beer. Like the coffee and wine industries, the entire beer ecosystem was upended as the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered breweries, closed bars, and scared people away from beer shops. “March was kind of a bloodbath, financially speaking,” says Josh Stylman, co-founder of Threes Brewing in Brooklyn. “If you had asked me two months ago, I would have said I don’t know if our company is going to make it.” And that’s coming from a well-known, award-winning brewery in a huge market.

The pandemic has forced some breweries to close, and while COVID-19 has certainly pummeled the beer business, recent data from the Brewers Association shows many brewers are optimistic about their chances of survival. Operations that remained open the last few months found new ways to serve customers; others are now reopening alongside bars in some states.

Still, the crisis has forced breweries to completely reimagine operations. While bars and taprooms were forced to close, demand for beer remained through the darkest hours of lockdowns (plenty of socially distanced people still want to drink at home). Instead, the major disruptions were in distribution. According to Bart Watson of the Brewers Association, before the pandemic, 10 percent of an average American brewery’s output went into kegs, and that beer would go on to be sold on draft at bars, restaurants, and breweries’ own taprooms. For craft brewers, that number was much higher, nearly 40 percent, and they especially relied on in-house taprooms and brewpubs.

The rest went into off-premise sales like cans and bottles. But as on-premise sales dried up completely, brewers had to repackage their beer any way they could. “As soon as we closed, we decided any drop of liquid that can go in a can needs to go in a can,” Stylman says. While Threes had already been canning its beer for a few years, the shift required recalculating the brewery’s entire operation, costing time and money. “We just ordered a million different kinds of boxes to find the best one. We never did this before. We’re inventing a supply chain from nothing.”

“We never did this before. We’re inventing a supply chain from nothing.”

Some breweries that were forced to pivot to repacking use growlers or crowlers, relatively affordable entries into packaging for many small breweries. Crowler machines or other manual can seamers only cost a few thousand dollars, but they’re labor intensive, they’re usually filled and sold directly from taprooms (not at retail), and their DIY packaging doesn’t provide the best shelf life. Other brewers that never canned before have partnered with mobile canning companies like Codi Manufacturing or Mobile Canning, some of which have provided discounts or donated labor to help the struggling industry keep afloat. A few brewers, unable to redirect their entire stock into packages, had to dump beer that couldn’t be moved.

Pivoting may be more difficult depending on how a brewery’s business was spread across sales channels before the pandemic. Brewmaster Ben Edmunds of Breakside Brewery in Portland, Oregon, for instance, says pre-COVID-19, the brewery put 70 percent of its beer in kegs. Shifting to packaging has “softened the blow, but hasn’t allowed us to grow back to where we were,” he says. “We’re operating at about 50 percent.”

Even as alarmist headlines declare Americans are drinking shocking amounts of alcohol at home, for many breweries, off-premise sales can’t make up for the loss of on-premise sales. Part of the trouble is that once the beer is in cans, breweries still have to find ways to get their products into drinkers’ hands.

Greater placement in mainstream grocery chains may seem like an attractive way to reach customers, but it’s an uphill battle. Chains typically refresh their lineups twice a year, in spring and fall. “Even though the total volume of packaged beer is up, the market for packaged beer has actually tightened. When there are such good sales going through grocery stores, they’re loath to add new items. They don’t need to,” Edmunds explains. “If you’re in there and you have those chain placements, things are going gangbuster right now. But if you don’t, it’s hard to crack into it.”

Luckily for small operations like Denver’s Lady Justice Brewing, a wave of localism has risen to support community brewers that may not have the ability (or interest) to access widespread distribution. Kate Power, Betsy Lay, and Jen Cuesta used a fundraiser to launch the one-barrel brewery as a philanthropic project in 2016. It was one of, if not the first to introduce membership beer sales to Colorado through its Community-Supported Beer (CSB) program. Customers paid ahead of time to provide funds to brew the beer, and all profits went to local organizations benefiting women and girls.

The trio grew into a new taproom in March, but when Denver locked down, they revived the CSB concept and immediately saw record demand. “People feel good when they buy our beer because they know it’s going to help their own communities. It’s a way to help people stay connected,” Lay says. “The neighborhood has really been investing in us.”

Beer delivery has also seen a huge jump, with 30.5 percent more breweries saying they are delivering beer locally, 3.8 percent newly partnering with third-party delivery platforms, and 4.8 percent adding direct-to-consumer shipping, according to the Brewers Association. Loosened alcohol delivery laws have allowed brewers to list products on services like Doordash and UberEats. Stylman, who has seen how restaurants have struggled with those platforms, says Threes launched direct-to-consumer delivery in-house in order to avoid fees, rehire furloughed taproom workers, and offer subscriptions for cases of its flagship beers.

Online beer retailer Tavour has also seen a bump in business. Once mostly a platform for craft geeks to drop big money on rare brews, lately Tavour has welcomed more casual customers who typically shop at brick-and-mortar retail. The online market usually adds seven new breweries a month, but 47 have joined since March. Megan Birch, director of marketing for Tavour, says about half of those entirely self-distributed before partnering with the service, and a handful only sold through their own taprooms. Big names like Mikkeller and cult brands like Parish Brewing have listed beers that may have never appeared on such a site under ordinary circumstances. “You’re definitely seeing breweries that never wanted to work with us because they never really needed to,” Birch says.

Even as brewers adapt to the new normal, new challenges appear all the time. In April, brewers worried about a shortage of CO2, a byproduct of ethanol production used to carbonate beer. Demand for ethanol, which is mixed with gasoline, dropped during the pandemic, and plants halted production. While plummeting ethanol sales didn’t end up harming breweries as much as expected, the episode illustrated how supply remains extremely vulnerable to global developments. More recently, with nearly every brewery transitioning to packaged beer, more pressure has fallen on supply chains for raw materials. “All of the glass suppliers, all of the label suppliers, all of the can suppliers in particular have seen increased lead time,” Edmunds says.

Looking ahead, as the nation officially experiences a recession, Edmunds expects financially cautious drinkers may dampen the explosive growth the craft industry has seen over the last decade, both in beer prices and product availability. “Five years ago the $16 six-pack was the outlier. Now it’s routine to see beers go for $20 or even $25 for a four-pack,” he says. “I don’t think we’ll see beer prices fall like crazy for your average six-pack, but more for that super-premium tier.” He also expects the market to curb “SKUmaggedon,” the proliferation of brands and niche releases. Both at retail and bars, Edmunds says, owners may eschew the constant churn of new products for surefire sellers. “Wholesalers but also retailers have wanted to have a reset on that, to go back to a more controlled method for getting beer out,” he adds.

The pandemic has also united breweries across regions to call for a reset on another aspect of distribution: local regulations that have limited or complicated alcohol delivery. The pandemic has inspired legislators in some areas to relax those rules temporarily, but changes could become permanent if brewers get their way.

“The temporary orders and the demonstrated ability of state regulators to enforce them have … shown that beer to go can be done responsibly,” Brewers Association president and CEO Bob Pease says. Consumer caution could choke on-premise sales for years to come; Pease emphasizes that responsible, flexible distribution will help save countless businesses and jobs. Long-term policy changes could provide a silver lining to the economic crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic may last months or years, but it has also permanently changed how some brewers do business. “I was talking to another brewer who said, this is great, we’re selling stuff on our website, but we can’t wait until it goes back to the way things were. That is decidedly not our approach,” Stylman says. Digital sales and delivery will remain “connective tissue” for the brewery long into recovery.

That may be wise, as the pandemic could affect consumer demand for a long time to come. “There are a lot of people who have really gotten used to staying at home,” Birch says, “and when everything does open up, they’re not really going to want to go out. It’s so much easier to just get beer delivered to their house.”

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Competition is fierce for cans, labels, and customers as breweries rush to package their beer for home drinking

“We never did this before. We’re inventing a supply chain from nothing.”

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exploringsocialinformatics · 4 years

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Blog #2: Do Androids Dream Of Tenured Positions?

I wrote this in response to the article “Imagine How Great Universities Could Be Without All Those Human Teachers” by Allison Schrager and Amy Wang. I chose to write about it because of my background in education, because I feel like I really benefited a lot from the personal connections I made with my human professors in undergrad and also because I’m scared of robots.

I admit that the concept of AI does terrify me a little so I really had to reevaluate my anti-robot bias as I tried to figure out exactly where I stood in the fairly confusing lane between AI technology as a helpful assistant and AI technology as a terrifying force coming to steal jobs from professors. After careful consideration, though, I’ve come to a firm conclusion: not only should AI/automation in general not be wholesale replacing human labor, we don’t actually have to let it wholesale replace human labor. Inevitability sometimes only exists because we make something inevitable. The robots aren’t making themselves.

Or. . .I guess they kind of are, but--you know what I mean.

The choice to replace any job with AI technology instead of utilizing AI and adapting that job to both benefit the worker and to add more diverse tasks that couldn’t be accomplished by a machine is fundamentally a choice in favor of profit over people. I realize that it’s naive to think that major corporations or even universities might choose people over profit but, with the smallest percentage of hope I have left for the world, I know that it’s at least an option.

For example, the McKinsey Institute (not a group of folks who I would assume would be pushing for human decency) has laid out plans for the future of retail workers when automation is more of an established presence in their establishments. They reference already existing examples, writing, “Several grocers, for example, are creating new roles for in-store pickers and e-commerce distribution centers. [. . .] Meanwhile, McDonald’s has not only introduced table service in restaurants but also rolled out self-service ordering kiosks. Best Buy has pushed further into adjacent services, creating new customer-service roles in its In-Home Advisor and Total Tech Support programs and retraining employees for them” (Begley, Hancock). The ideal here is shifting labor, not replacing it.

With all of that in mind, I feel compelled to take a moral stance here: this is less an issue of technology and more an issue of properly compensating employees. The human ones with skin and hearts and stuff, whose humanness is often a key factor of their job. And this is especially true of educators, whether K - 12 or higher education.

The notion that AI can replace professors just goes to show the fundamental disrespect that we as a society have for educators. This is something that we can see in how little they’re paid (especially adjuncts, who don’t nearly make enough to survive [Douglas-Gabriel]). It’s also ignoring the possibility of shifting their labor. This argument requires that we’re all on the same page that higher education should be about expanding knowledge: replacing the day to day work of grading or answering easily answerable questions with the help of AI, in an ideal world, wouldn’t mean job losses for TAs or potentially un-tenured professors. If universities properly focused their money (for example, focusing more on professors than administration [Lewis]), academics and robots could peacefully co-exist. Imagine a world where professors won’t have to worry about minutiae and instead have time to focus on research and writing and other things that are the reason they got into academia and that will actively make them better teachers. Imagine a world where TAs get real world experience actively helping with that research. Professors who have more time to work with students one on one! To write grants! To live more fulfilled and meaningful lives!

It’s exciting!

Again, naive and probably idealistic, especially considering that this would require universities to radically change their budgets. It would be also likely require more funding and more specified funding from the federal government for public universities. These are both very large feats.

In his paper Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? David H. Autor backs up my idyllic academic vision when he states that, on top of replacing labor, “automation also complements labor, raises output in ways that lead to higher demand for labor, and interacts with adjustments in labor supply” (2015). Essentially, the purpose of automation should be to make life easier for people, not to displace them.

There are a few significant arguments in favor of focusing more funds on AI in academic institutions that I find compelling, many of them focused on the students. On a base social level, I would probably have been more comfortable addressing a robot as an anxious undergrad than I would my professors and having a resource that would be available more frequently than a human could possibly be would be a comfort. Schrager and Wang explain the software created by the company Hobsons and how it can figure out demographics that might be struggling and use it to identify specific students that are close to dropping out. This is described as “granular,” (3) which is important--after all, professors are notably human. They can’t catch and parse small things like that, especially with crowded classrooms.

Another argument is that investing in technology that can directly help students and takes over the bulk of teaching saves money because you can hire fewer professors; ultimately, this could be worth the loss (7 - 8). If AI can do the menial labor behind teaching, why pay a human to do it when that requires a consistent salary and when the money could be used in ways that would more directly benefit--as was already mentioned--far more students than a single professor could reach? Kristin Houser writes, on the online publication Futurism, in regard to K - 12 teachers being replaced that “after the initial development costs, administrators wouldn’t need to worry about paying digital teachers. This saved money could then be used to pay for the needed updates to education facilities or other costs” (“The Situation to Our Education Crisis”), which seemingly supports the same claim about colleges. She also adds--and I find the idea that this technology would function so efficiently and without bias far more idealistic than anything I believe, but it’s still good to think about--that “digital teachers wouldn’t need days off and would never be late for work. Administrators could upload any changes to curricula [. . .] and the systems would never make mistakes. If programmed correctly, they also wouldn’t show any biases toward students based on gender, race, socio-economic status, personality preference, or other consideration” (Houser). These are all certainly elements that could positively impact education if they functioned well enough.

Even with both sides of the coin, though, there’s some evidence that the coin itself is less relevant than we think. There have been several studies which point out that automation isn’t killing off manufacturing jobs at nearly the rate that people have been expecting. Jared Bernstein, former chief financial advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, wrote in the Washington Post that the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs after 2000 had more to do with trade than it did automation (“Contrary to Popular Wisdom”). This was also a contentious moment in a Democratic Primary debate last fall between Senator Elizabeth Warren and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, with the former supporting Bernstein’s claim and the latter supporting the issues with automation. According to Politifacts, both the candidates were effectively right (Greenberg). So, essentially, this isn’t to say that automation isn’t part of the problem, it’s just that the situation is likely not as dramatic as economists and others have made it out to be.

Also, there certainly aren’t clear indicators that automation will be taking over academia specifically anytime soon. To say otherwise seems unnecessarily fear-inducing. As I said, though, I might be naive. Maybe college professors and TAs should be stocking up on whatever weapons are most effective against a robot uprising (. . .water?) or at least updating their resumes. If this does become a trend, though, I sincerely hope that the inherent value of good, earnest, sentient human educators is considered. As someone who primarily took undergrad classes in the humanities, the lived experiences of a professor often go hand in hand with their own education to make them more effective at relating to students. Giving up a fully realized, authentic education just for a more efficient one isn’t worth it.

Resources

Autor, D. H. (2015). Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 3–30.

Begley, S, Hancock, B. (n.d.). Automation in retail: An executive overview for getting ready. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/automation-in-retail-an-executive-overview-for-getting-ready

Bernstein, J. (2018, July 12). Contrary to popular wisdom, automation is not a job killer in U.S. manufacturing. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/12/contrary-to-popular-wisdom-automation-is-not-a-job-killer-in-u-s-manufacturing/

Douglas-Gabriel, D. (2019, February 15). 'It Keeps You Nice and Disposable': The Plight of Adjunct Professors. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/it-keeps-you-nice-and-disposable-the-plight-of-adjunct-professors/2019/02/14/6cd5cbe4-024d-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html

Greenberg, J. (2019, October 16). What's the Manufacturing Job Killer, Automation or Trade? . Retrieved from https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/oct/16/both-trade-and-automation-hurt-and-helped-jobs-whi/

Houser, K. (2018, January 17). The solution to our education crisis might be AI. Retrieved from https://futurism.com/ai-teachers-education-crisis

Lewis, N. (2017, February 17). U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go? Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2017/02/17/u-s-colleges-where-does-the-money-go/

Schrager, A., & Wang, A. X. (2017, September 27). Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers. Retrieved from https://qz.com/1065818/ai-university/

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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How Coronavirus Could Change the Way You Get Your Favorite Craft Beer added to Google Docs

How Coronavirus Could Change the Way You Get Your Favorite Craft Beer

Mihai_Andritoiu/Shutterstock

Competition is fierce for cans, labels, and customers as breweries rush to package their beer for home drinking

“We never did this before. We’re inventing a supply chain from nothing.”

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/beer/2020/6/16/21289665/craft-beer-microbreweries-drinking-alcohol-coronavirus-delivery-covid-19

Created June 16, 2020 at 11:26PM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

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georgecmatthews · 4 years

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Tracking China’s recovery and a dire US earnings season

Last week was another momentous one for economies and markets, with particular attention being paid to the economic recovery in China, earnings season for US stocks, and the Federal Reserve’s views on interest rates. Below, my colleagues from the Global Market Strategy Office and I answer some of the most pressing questions we have received from clients in recent days:

Q. Should we be worried about a rebound in infections in China?

A. David Chao (Global Market Strategist, Asia ex-Japan): Over the Easter weekend, China saw over 100 new infections. However, the majority of these were “imported” after people returned from a trip to Russia.1 Although there is a distinct threat of a second wave of infections, we don’t think it will meaningfully disrupt the economic recovery. So far, there hasn’t been a significant increase in local community transmissions — which would be a lot more worrisome. The Chinese government has also maintained strict quarantine procedures at airports and other entry/exit ports. The areas in China that have experienced the most recent wave of infections are around the Russian border and have minimal economic significance.

In short, worries about a rebound in infections are keeping China from fully relaxing social distancing measures, and we don’t expect these concerns to fully abate until other countries significantly flatten the infections curve.

Q. How slow is the economic recovery in China right now?

A. David Chao: As expected, the initial January-February economic data was awful. However, the peak of the epidemic passed during the second week of March, and the government has vigorously focused on getting the country back to work. As of the end of March, around 99% of workers at large companies and around 77% at small- to mid-sized enterprises had returned to work.2 As discussed above, some social distancing measures remain in place due to concerns about a rebound in infections, so we don’t expect a dramatic economic snapback in the near term.

Following is a review of recent data:

China’s manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for March was a surprisingly strong 52, up from a low of 35.7 just a month earlier, implying that workers have been able to get back to work quickly.3 This has been a much more rapid recovery in manufacturing than we saw during the global financial crisis (GFC) — back then, it took the PMI four months to surpass 50 after it hit its nadir of 38.8 in November 2008.3

In terms of trade data, China’s year-over-year exports fell 6.6% in March (which was significantly above the consensus expectation of a 13% fall).4 This was a marked improvement from the year-over-year fall of 17.2% seen in January-February.4 Diving down into the data, exports to the US and European Union (EU) remained weak (as orders were cancelled due to COVID-19) while those to Asia picked up noticeably (particularly in southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan). Although one month does not a trend make, it’s encouraging to see the sequential improvement — and it seems to put to rest some of the concerns that there were going to be significant supply chain shifts out of China due to the trade wars from last year and to COVID-19. I still expect exports and trade to be rocky for the rest of the year as China’s largest trading partners, the US and EU, may continue to experience an escalation of COVID-19 cases, which would sap demand for Chinese goods and hamper global trade.

China’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell 6.8% in the first quarter, which was worse than expected.5 March retail sales plunged 15.8% from a year ago, following a 20.5% year-over-year decline for January and February.5 Fixed asset investment dropped 16.1% year-over-year last month, versus a fall of 24.5% in the previous two months.5 However, industrial production was better than expected, down just 1.1% year-over-year after dropping 13.5% in the January-February period.5 We attribute that to a rapid return to work for state-owned enterprises and large private manufacturers, which was facilitated by top-down state support and relatively strong demand, both domestic and external. State mandates to hit targets for work resumption rates kickstarted factories quickly. The work resumption rate of large industrial firms reached 90% in early March.5

Anecdotally, we also track daily indicators such as coal use, traffic congestion, and property sales. These statistics have shown marked improvement over the course of March and early April.6

We think the big question now is whether China is providing enough fiscal stimulus to buffer the economy from a collapse in global demand. We expect very substantial stimulus, particularly in infrastructure spending.

Q: What is the cost of the shutdown on first-quarter earnings for the S&P 500 Index?

A: Talley Leger (Senior Investment Strategist): Assuming an earnings per share (EPS) baseline of $154 for the companies in the index, I would estimate the potential cost of the shutdown to be $3 of EPS for each week of the shutdown, assuming all of the companies are idle (based on a simple calculation of $154 divided by 52 weeks).7 Therefore, if half of S&P 500 companies were idle, an 8-week shutdown may have cost $12 of EPS. Based on these calculations, we believe a broad market earnings recession began in the first quarter with a 7% decline from year-ago levels, and will likely be followed by much deeper declines in later quarters.

Q. Looking forward, what kind of earnings decrease have stocks priced in?

A. Talley Leger: We judge that the stock market has priced in a 15% year-over-year drop in earnings to roughly $134. That’s bad, but it could get much worse if the 2008-2009 and 2001 economic recessions are any guides.

Q. What does history tell us about the peak-to-trough journey for earnings leading up to and exiting economic recessions? What about price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios in the same timeframe?

A. Talley Leger: Heading into the recession of the early-mid 1990s, earnings suffered a peak-to-trough decline of 24% over a period of 2.5 years.8 Leading up to the “garden variety” early-2000s downturn, earnings dropped 32% from their peak in the ensuing one year and three months.8 Earnings fell 57% from their peak before the deep late-2000s contraction, a trip that took two years and three months.8 Surprisingly, P/E ratios were relatively stable in the first 1.5 years after peak earnings, but valuations diverged significantly thereafter.

Q. From the start to the end of the last three recessions, what would past behavior of earnings and multiples suggest as potential outcomes for the S&P 500?

A. Talley Leger: On average, the last three recessions lasted about 12 months each9 and resulted in a wide range of outcomes for earnings and multiples. Trailing 12-month earnings in those recessions contracted 6% to 52%, and multiples expanded 12% to 30%.10 If you apply those historical ranges to the S&P 500 today, that implies potential outcomes from 1,600 (worst case) to 4,200 (best case) over the next year. The median of 3,200 would be a typical experience, implying stocks may bottom during the recession and recover the bulk of their losses.

Q. What are earnings trends looking like across countries?

A. Talley Leger: European and Canadian stocks have priced in substantial declines in earnings from year-ago levels. This is not the case for China and Japan.

Q. The price of oil has sunk to a historically low level overnight. What is happening?

A. Paul Jackson (Global Head of Asset Allocation Research): The recent drop in supply by OPEC+ does not match the bigger drop in demand that we have seen as a result of lockdowns in so many countries. And it would appear there is now a particular problem of storage in the US, which has depressed spot West Texas Intermediate (WTI). There may also be the same problem elsewhere, but the US is more siloed. Longer-dated contracts are about where I think they should be (in line with the $35-$40 long-term spot average, in today’s prices).11

Clearly, the longer the shutdowns persist, the bigger the surplus becomes. In the short term, some countries can boost demand by filling strategic reserves at low cost. The fact that WTI has had such a dramatic day is catching all the attention, but Brent is more important from a global oil market perspective, and its price has held up better.

Q. What is the probability that we see negative short rates in the US?

A. Kristina Hooper (Chief Global Market Strategist): I believe there is an extremely low chance that rates go negative. The Fed has seen the unintended consequences of negative rates in the eurozone, and Fed Chair Jay Powell has repeatedly made it clear that he prefers other monetary policy tools such as forward guidance policy and large-scale asset purchases. I believe the Fed will try to exhaust all other monetary policy tools before it resorts to something as problematic as negative rates.

Q. How long do you think the Fed will keep rates at zero? How does it begin to unwind its balance sheet?

A: Kristina Hooper: The Fed has made it clear that it plans to keep rates at current levels throughout this crisis. I believe the Fed will err on the side of remaining accommodative until it is confident that the US economy has rebounded and is once again on solid footing. When it comes to unwinding the balance sheet, I believe the Fed won’t wait as long as it did post-GFC. However, I expect it to follow a similar plan to the one it followed when it began unwinding the balance sheet in 2017.

Q. Is the European Union in danger of collapsing because of the current COVID-19 crisis?

A. Kristina Hooper: In a recent Financial Times interview, French President Emmanuel Macron warned of the collapse of the EU as a “political project” unless it supports peripheral economies that have been hit hard by the pandemic, such as Italy. While I am not convinced this will cause the end of the EU, I do believe Macron is correct in suggesting it will lead to more financial stress and the rise of more populism in the EU. In my view, there clearly needs to be a mutualization of debt or peripheral countries may suffer dire consequences. Spreads have already been widening for Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain,12 and the situation could get worse from here with inaction.

Q. We learned last week that the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has already run out of money. Will we get another phase of fiscal stimulus in the US and will it include money for the PPP?

A. Kristina Hooper: Yes, I expect the US to get a Phase 3.5 stimulus package soon. After some political discord, it appears that negotiations in Congress have become more constructive. This phase should be focused on the PPP — with Senate Republicans asking for an allocation of approximately $250 billion for the program — as well as some allocation for hospital funding. I will reiterate that I believe this is not enough and should be quickly followed by a Phase 4 stimulus plan. However, it should be a positive catalyst for risk assets in the short term.

Looking ahead

There were several positive developments last week, including declining infection rates in some major US cities, a possible treatment that is showing signs of effectiveness, and plans to reopen the US economy. However, many questions still remain. We will get some sense of the impact of the lockdown on some major economies’ data to be released this week, including flash manufacturing PMI for the US, as well as PMI data for Germany and the UK. This will give us a sense of how significant an impact the lockdown is having on economic activity. I expect the results to be abysmal but, as we have seen in those economies hit earlier by the pandemic, a cessation in economic activity is usually a sign that health protocols are being followed, which means a recovery can begin more quickly. We will also want to follow what major economies are doing to support their respective economies during the lockdowns. In particular, I will be following negotiations in the US closely over stimulus Phase 3.5.

1 Source: South China Morning Post, “China tightens controls on Russia border as number of imported coronavirus cases continues to rise,” April 12, 2020

2 Sources: Bloomberg, L.P.; TS Lombard

3 Sources: National Bureau of Statistics (China), Bloomberg Economics

4 Source: General Administration of Customs, People’s Republic of China, as of April 14, 2020

5 Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China, “Preliminary Accounting Results of GDP for the First Quarter of 2020,” as of April 20, 2020[1]

6 Source: Bloomberg Economics

7 Sources: Standard & Poor’s, Invesco

8 Sources: Bloomberg L.P., Invesco

9 Source: National Bureau of Economic Research. Recession dates were Dec. 2007 to June 2009, March 2001 to Nov. 2001, and July 1990 to March 1991.

10 Source: Standard & Poor’s, Invesco

11 Source: Invesco calculations based on data from Global Financial Data and Refinitiv Datastream

12 Source: Bloomberg, L.P. Spreads measure the difference in yield between each country’s 10-year bonds versus Germany’s.

Important information

Blog header image: Miss Rein/ Stocksy

Purchasing Managers Indexes are based on monthly surveys of companies worldwide, and gauge business conditions within the manufacturing and services sectors. Flash figures are early estimates of the monthly data provided in advance of the final figures.

Gross domestic product is a broad indicator of a region’s economic activity, measuring the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced in that region over a specified period of time.

The S&P 500® Index is an unmanaged index considered representative of the US stock market.

Earnings per share (EPS) refers to a company’s total earnings divided by the number of outstanding shares.

The price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio (or multiple) measures a stock’s valuation by dividing its share price by its earnings per share.

OPEC+ includes the 13 members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as 10 additional non-member countries.

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent are light, sweet crude oils that both serve as benchmarks for oil pricing.

The Paycheck Protection Program is a US Small Business Administration loan program to help businesses keep their workforce employed during the COVID-19 crisis.

The opinions referenced above are those of the author as of April 20, 2020. These comments should not be construed as recommendations, but as an illustration of broader themes. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions; there can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from expectations.

from Expert Investment Views: Invesco Blog https://www.blog.invesco.us.com/tracking-chinas-recovery-and-a-dire-us-earnings-season/

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Harmonix’s Fuser bets on user creativity as the future of music gaming • Eurogamer.net

Where do you go after Guitar Hero and Rock Band? That’s a question the music genre has been trying to answer for about 10 years, with varying degrees of success. Some games have looked to VR to replace the physicality of performing on peripherals, yet the platform still remains out of reach for many thanks to cost and space requirements. Others have taken risks with unique spins on rhythm-action – often brilliant in their own right, but none have captured the mass market like the guitar games of the 2000s.

Does the answer lie in user-created content? That’s what Harmonix is betting on with its latest title, Fuser, a music-mixing game officially unveiled today. Part performance game, part creative tool, it’s a far cry from the days of rocking out with a peripheral in your living room – instead favouring a Coachella-influencer vibe as players mix current tracks together to satisfy crowd demands.

“A lot of our traditional games – whether it’s Rock Band or Dance Central, even some of the stuff we’ve done in VR like Audica – are very different in that those games are either a recreation of, or performance to, an existing song,” Harmonix exec Dan Walsh told me during a preview session. “Fuser is a music-mixing game where you are creating things as opposed to recreating things.”

youtube

Launching with over 100 tracks, players will be able to pick and choose from set song lists to develop a mix. The gameplay centres around a deck where you can play four different discs at once, with each song broken down into four components: drums, bass, lead instruments (such as guitar, synths and horns) and vocals. Players can mix these into any combination they want – even four voice parts at the same time, although this doesn’t sound the best.

Oh, and there’s no peripherals: just a regular release on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch sometime this autumn. That’s pretty close to when next-gen consoles launch, but Fuser will also be playable on PS5 and Xbox Series X thanks to their backwards compatibility support, “so you won’t be shut out or have to wait”, Walsh confirmed.

All it takes is a tap or drag-and-drop to add music tracks from the cards above to the deck below.

It’s an impressive bit of tech, with tracks automatically adapting to the key and tempo as they’re introduced. Both can also be adjusted by the player as part of the overall mix, such as switching between major and minor. Harmonix used a similar system for its 2017 card game DropMix, in which songs were divided into parts and then mixed together on a peripheral. Fuser expands on this by giving players more creative control, allowing them to change the texture by muting tracks, or adding in custom sounds via what looked like an in-game MIDI pad with six instrument options (something Harmonix plans on detailing at a later point).

youtube

So, that’s the mixing interface: how does this work as a game? Fuser is divided into three core gameplay modes: campaign, freestyle, and multiplayer. The latter is listed as two to four players in the press release, with the opportunity to “collaborate or compete with players from around the world” – but Harmonix is waiting until later on to reveal more details of how this works, too.

Freestyle gives players the opportunity to mess around, save mixes and upload them directly onto social channels. The campaign, meanwhile, is about 10-15 hours long, and follows the career of a DJ from “some level of success” to headline act.

Points are scored by fulfilling crowd requests, keeping the mix moving, and hitting mission goals such as keeping the track within set bpm parameters. You can get combos on crowd requests by dropping a track that satisfies two at once: for instance, Billie Eilish’s bad guy would fulfill a request for pop, and a request for 2010s music. If you introduce new tracks on a downbeat you get bonus points, while yellow lines on the time bar indicate “musically interesting” parts of loops which are particularly suitable for changes.

Players are able to fully customise the character, and perform in six different venues. To keep things varied, the campaign gives different narrative reasons for each mission: such as playing the second day of a festival when everyone is…. fragile, and wants something calm.

In the context of the release of Media Molecule’s Dreams this month, it’s interesting timing for Harmonix to announce Fuser – and it feels like part of a larger trend giving players the tools to create content within a game. I asked if Harmonix felt this was the future for the music genre, too.

Pushed to the periphery

Almost inevitably, the topic of peripherals came up when discussing music gaming – and it’s unsurprising why the industry has moved away from them.

“I will never speak ill of the Rock Band instruments – [they] really sell that full experience,” Walsh said. “But it’s also a lot of complication… you’ve got to figure out manufacturing, shipping timelines and inventory logistics, and selling people on them. Also getting retail to dedicate the space, and asking people upfront to make a much larger investment than a traditional game because they have to buy all the extra stuff.

“It’s nice to be able to have people either purchase it physically or digitally. You don’t have to worry about whether or not you have something that’s compatible with the last generation, and it’s going to work with your current generation. [It’s] much more straightforward.”

Not to mention all that plastic probably isn’t great for the environment.

“At the moment, yes, just because if you look back at when rock band and Guitar Hero came out, rock star culture and the rock star fantasy were very much of that time,” Walsh explained. “Late 90s, early 2000s, mid 2000s. People wanted to be on stage at Lollapalooza, they wanted to be shredding on the lead guitar out in front of thousands of people.

“Music culture has sort of shifted over the last 10-15 years to where DJ culture is influential, mashup culture is really influential. Festival culture is bigger than it’s ever been right now. So this game is sort of our attempt to reflect modern music culture in a way that’s still a game, but it’s also creatively fulfilling in a different way than Rock Bands or Dance Central or Guitar Hero.

“From a creative standpoint, you look at influencer culture as well where people just want to create and share things all the time. And this is sort of a reflection of that, Dreams is a good reflection of that. Mario Maker is another example, Minecraft of course – it’s like turning people loose into a sort of gamified playground with a lot of access to a lot of like tools and interesting and interesting things.”

The music-mixing aspect of Fuser is something Harmonix has been thinking about for a while: Walsh told me the studio “started experimenting” with games Fantasia and DropMix. “[With Fuser], it feels like we figured out the rest of it, the game wrapper around it that makes it still accessible,” Walsh said. Getting the balance between creative freedom and game rules was a challenge, so Harmonix tried to focus on “purposeful decisions that are also musical in a way you [can] score them.

“Figuring out that balance took a little while and some of our other experiments… I don’t think quite found the way to make your creative decisions ‘gaming'”, Walsh added.

Fuser is already launching with a significant number of tracks, but Harmonix hasn’t ruled out adding more post-launch. ‘Harmonix has a long tradition of supporting its titles with ongoing content and features,’ project director Daniel Sussman told me over email. ‘You can expect Fuser to be similar.’

Given Fuser’s focus on influencer-style sharing, I started to wonder how the music world’s strict licensing rules would work with publishing mixes to social media. How do the music rights work with that? Well, Harmonix doesn’t quite have the answer yet.

“It’s definitely complicated. For normal people, you’ll be able to share to your personal timeline,” Walsh explained. “When it comes to like influencers or YouTubers, things of that nature… that’s something that we’re still working through, both with licence holders as well as platforms. We know them both very well over the years. Obviously, when the game comes out it will include guidelines on how to do it.”

Is it more of a problem when people are monetising on top of the mixes they’ve produced?

“Monetisation does add a layer of complication… yeah, that is harder to navigate,” Walsh added. “Not necessarily impossible, but still something that we’re working through.”

Much to sphinx about.

I did manage to get a little hands-on time with Fuser for 10 minutes (and watched some gameplay expertly demoed by community manager Zoe Schneider) – and I was pretty bowled over by the mixing technology on display. It’s easy to use, packed with a good assortment of current hits and classics, and complex enough that players will be able to produce some unexpected mixes. Dropping new tracks on-beat was surprisingly satisfying in a different way to timing a Rock Band note, as hearing a great transition is rewarding to the ears. And there’s a certain novelty to hearing Smash Mouth and Migos inexplicably work together.

That said, I’m not yet entirely convinced by the core gameplay shown in the campaign, particularly the request system. In later levels these requests come in “pretty frequently”, Schneider told me – and while you can ignore them, the game encourages you to hit as many as possible to get a high score. This means the track is constantly shifting, and it often felt a little frantic and unnatural to my ear, as the music wasn’t given time to settle. The alternative, I suppose, is to dial back the amount of crowd requests: but then this risks making the gameplay slow.

The idea of responding to crowd requests also seems a little weird to me, as it suggests successful music artists only follow the demands of fans – and I’m not sure how many people actually want to live out a wedding DJ fantasy. And, unfortunately, the gameplay often looks quite static. It doesn’t have the drama of Rock Band – either on-screen, where rows of glowing blobs would hurtle towards you, or in the entertainment value of watching a friend perform on a peripheral in your living room. I wonder if this will impact the game’s ability to spread on social media platforms, as Harmonix would clearly like.

There are still so many unknowns surrounding Fuser it’s impossible to know how it’s going to pan out: we still know very little about multiplayer, precisely how the custom instrument tracks work, or what players will eventually make in freestyle mode. I really admire the focus on creative elements, along with the strength of the mixing system which makes the process accessible. Personally, I can see myself spending quite a few hours in freestyle mode tinkering with tracks. But is there enough of a game amongst the mixing tools to keep me hooked? We’ll see.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/harmonixs-fuser-bets-on-user-creativity-as-the-future-of-music-gaming-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=harmonixs-fuser-bets-on-user-creativity-as-the-future-of-music-gaming-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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muachronicle · 5 years

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Happy Labor Day!

For some, this holiday signifies a much needed three day weekend. For others, it tells us that summer is unofficially over and we should start drinking pumpkin spice lattes. Few of us truly know the origin of Labor Day and I’m here to tell you it’s not all about the deals. On September 5, 1882 protestors marched down the streets of New York to advocate for labor rights and worker protections. At this point in history, the average American was working six days a week at 12 hours a day. This was the catalyst that began to change how we think about labor in America.

On September 3, 1916, the Adamson Act was passed, establishing that a full time employment schedule would be 8 hours a day for five days of the week. After this, the first Monday of September became Labor Day to remind use of the battle for work-life balance. It is a time to commemorate self-care and mental health in relation to the work we do. So on this long weekend, I hope you take up meditation, go shopping, or do something else that can ease your soul before heading back into your work life with gusto.

If you’re couch surfing today, shop some of the brands on this list, which were founded in and are still being manufactured in the United States. I’ve highlighted some of the greatest products from each brand for you to shop easily from this site. These were chosen carefully for their formulations, their feedback, and popularity (continuous spray sunscreen with antioxidants and light floral scent, yes please).

If you shop retail, just remember to be nice because retail associates have to work even longer hours on Labor Day due to the influx of sales. Oh, the irony!

Check out this list of American-made beauty companies and remember to support your local communities.

This list is by no means inflexible or exhaustive - companies are always changing leadership or new brands are being founded. If there’s a female-founded brand you love that hasn’t been mentioned, comment below!

* product photos courtesy of respective brands.

Bliss

Based In: New York, NY

Bliss launched in 1996 as a premier skincare brand used and sold exclusively in spas. Last year, they rebranded everything about themselves - new labels, entirely new formulations, and a new range of prices (nothing over $25). With the recent shift in consumer behavior we’re seeing educated customers and demand more transparency and less harmful fillers. Their website claims that all of their products are “PETA-certified, cruelty-free and blissfully-free from parabens, phthalates, SLS, SLES and other bad stuff you don’t want on your skin or body”. If you have any questions about their ingredients, you can check out the brand’s Ingredient Glossary.

Juice Beauty

Based In: San Rafael, CA

Juice Beauty has been featured on this site many times before and it’s with good reason. When Karen Behnke started the brand in 2005, she knew that she wanted to create natural and organic beauty products without compromising on luxury. This was the first kind of line to hold such high standards across the board and set the standards for every natural brand that would follow. The team at Juice Beauty has worked with PhD level chemists as well as physicians and microbiologists to guarantee the greatest caliber of formulation in every product. The goal was simple, to make products that would not only do what they promised but have, at their core, antioxidant and vitamin-rich organic juice (hence the name). The brand and its products have won many awards and caught the eye of Gwyneth Paltrow, who collaborated with the brand and made it the first one sold on Goop.

Pacifica

Based In: Portland, OR

Another brand to launch in 1996, Pacifica has looked at natural beauty in slightly different terms than its colleagues. It was all about making natural and organic beauty all encompassing (body, skincare, makeup, and fragrance) and always accessible. It’s currently sold in stores like Target and Ulta with no individual product being priced more than $30. In addition to formulating clean and sustainable formulas, Pacifica has partnered with Preserve to recycle all of its containers and protect our oceans. With this program, you can send your empty containers in a pre-paid envelope to Pacifica and they reward you with 100 loyalty points. You can also accrue loyalty points with every purchase you make.

Mario Badescu

Based In: New York, NY

We’ve all seen the face mists and bi-phase pimple creams that have made Mario Badescu social media famous. The brand, which was founded in 1967, saw a resurgence brought on by the influencer age. Mario was born in Romania, just like his fellow entrepreneur Anastasia Soire, when he came to New York to practice giving European style facials in his eponymous salon. It was in his small apartment that the dream of a product line was realized. The use of his products during facials for celebrities and the New York elite catapulted Mario to become a household name. While some products in the line have flared up in controversy lately for being irritating to some skin, the ones I’ve chosen to highlight had flocks of diehard customers when I worked at a beauty counter.

Dermalogica

Based In: Carson, CA

In 1983, Jane Wurwand brought her UK aesthetician techniques to the United States. She quickly set up the International Dermal Institute (IDI) to educate others on the technique, an education that is one of the most respected to this day. In 1986, the Dermatologica product range came alive. The UK has always been more strict with the ingredients it allows into beauty products and it comes as no surprise that this was the attitude that Jane brought to her line. Formulated without common irritants like lanolin, SD alcohol, mineral oil, artificial colors and fragrances). Not only is the brand certified cruelty-free from both PETA and Leaping Bunny but they are almost completely vegan. They have also pledged to have 90% of their packaging be recyclable or bio-degradeable by 2020.

OPI

Based in: Sanford, North Carolina

The popular nail polish brand did not have a linear path getting into salons. It started out as Odontorium Products Inc, making dental supplies when it was bought by George Schaeffer in 1981. He was then joined by an artistic director by the name of Suzi Weiss-Fischmann and together they worked with a biochemist to create an acrylic nail system that George sold door to door at salons. As the brand continued to grow, they began manufacturing their nail varnishes to be sold to salon professionals in California. What allowed OPI to flourish is their partnerships, working with a variety of entertainment and business accounts to create collaborative collections that have included Coca Cola, Ford Mustang, and a variety of films and TV shows. Over ten years ago, OPI reformulated their polishes to remove the chemicals DBP (dibutyl phthalate), formaldehyde and toluene, harmful additives that have been used in nail varnish formulations for decades. In 2016, it was announced that OPI’s new owners (Coty) would move manufacturing of the polishes to the North Carolina factories - making it still American-made and hinting at its massive upcoming expansion.

Stila Cosmetics

Based In: California

In 1994, makeup artist Jeanine Lobell created Stila to bring her innovative products to the masses. The brands’s lipsticks were first packaged in paper tubes - something that no other brand was doing and before the current sustainability movement in beauty. The brand was also the first to bring lip palettes and cream blushes to the market. Even though the brand was acquired by financial tycoon Lynn Tilton in 2009, the integrity that they bring to each product has remained. This was evident when the brand ceased selling their products in China in 2018 due to the fact that the Chinese government’s requirement of animal testing did not align with the company’s values.

RMS Beauty

Based In: Charleston, SC

Rose Marie Swift has also been featured in many a post. Her crusade to change the conversation and ideology around “clean” beauty has launched a thousand ships. It took her own personal health scare to educated herself about the ingredients in common cosmetics products. Exposure to certain ingredients regularly over time (Rose Marie has been an in-demand makeup artist for decades) led to them compounding in her system and making her ill. Once she began her education, she went on to educate those around her. Ten years ago, this knowledge was funneled into RMS, the cosmetics line that had high standards around the non-toxic state of their ingredients without compromising on any luxury. The brand continues to grow and expand while Rose Marie continues to change the conversation around ingredients and formulations.

Coola

Based in: Los Angeles, California

Chris Birchby moved across the country in search of waves. The longtime surfer moved from Long Island to Pasadena, California for graduate school where he achieved an MFA in design. It was when both of his parents were diagnosed with melanoma that Chris rethought his future. He began working with various labs in Los Angeles in order to formulate organic sun protection products that would be effective for athletes like surfers and the average person and anyone in between. Once his parents recovered, he also traveled the world to research people’s habits when it came to sun exposure and protection. In 2007, Coola was born and places integrity just as high as sunscreen. The organic (some with added antioxidants) products are made sustainably in a “Farm to Face®” philosophy that guarantees to be non-toxic to its users. Coola also sources ingredients locally whenever possible to bolster nearby communities.

Enjoy the long weekend responsibly (use sunscreen)!

Cover photo by Victor Lozano.

#makeup #makeup artist #products #devil wears prada #miranda #meryl streep #nordstrom #bloomingdales #retail #skincare #amazon #sale #sales #discount

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talabib · 5 years

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How To Become An Effective Strategist.

What separates winning strategies from losing ones? Ultimately, both set out to achieve the same goals, and yet their outcomes are vastly different. As it turns out, part of this difference lies in what we actually consider to be a strategy; in other words, losing strategies may not even be strategies at all!

We will offer you insights into strategic thinking by drawing from the experiences of successful – and sometimes disastrously unsuccessful – cases. By examining the wisdom gathered from these different examples, you’ll learn about the anatomy of a successful strategy, how to apply it to your life or business, and how to become an effective strategic thinker..

What is a strategy?

Consider this: the “2005 key strategy” of a major graphic arts company was a 20 percent revenue increase and a 20 percent profit margin. Does this sound like a good strategy to you? The short answer: No. In fact, these are simply goals – far removed from a working strategy.

A vision or a goal is simply a stand-alone idea. A strategy, however, is a set of different ideas that includes a plan to achieve these goals. Often a goal or a vision can be a perfectly fine starting point for a strategy. However, the strategy itself must include precise information on how these goals will actually be achieved.

For example, if your football coach advises your team to win the next game, he isn’t providing you with any useful information unless he tells you how to win. In other words, he must provide a plan of action – a strategy.

It’s not only our goals that are often mistaken for strategies; motivational slogans and buzzwords sometimes get passed off as strategies too. This is usually made obvious by an absence of clear, simple words. In these cases, “fluff” – superficially restating the obvious while applying a heaping portion of buzzwords – takes on the appearance of high-level thinking.

The fundamental strategy of one major retail bank is a perfect example – in their own words, they offered “customer-centric intermediation.” Let’s unpack this, shall we? “Intermediation” means simply that they take deposits and lend them to others, and “customer-centric” means that they focus on the customer. By taking the fluff and unraveling it into simple, meaningful language for the layman, we quickly discover that their “fundamental strategy” for banking was simply “be a bank!”

What’s missing in both these business examples is a plan of action. Essentially, if you have no plan of action, then you don’t have strategy.

Every good strategy has a diagnosis, a guiding policy and a set of coherent actions.

All good strategy has a basic underlying structure that contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy and a set of coherent actions.

The diagnosis is a simple analysis of an often-complex set of circumstances, and the guiding policy lays out the approach that will be used to tackle this diagnosis.

One example of these components at work can be found with IBM in 1993. During that year, IBM was on the decline – their previously successful strategy of offering complete computers no longer worked in a fractured industry where many computer companies had started offering individual parts.

While many believed that they should adapt to this fragmentation, CEO Lou Gerstner developed a different diagnosis: instead of fragmenting IBM’s different departments, they would instead integrate and centralize them to become new market leaders in IT consulting.

In order to enact this diagnosis, they then created a new guiding policy that focused company resources on customer solutions.

The final component of the strategy is a set of coherent actions that ensures that the guiding policy is effective. In other words, the actions needed to achieve the goals of the guiding policy can’t contradict one another.

One example of a failure to establish coherent actions can be found in the Ford Motor Company. When they acquired Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin, their new guiding policy was to exploit these brands and simultaneously take advantage of economies of scale. This led them to consolidate the design and manufacturing processes between the brands.

However, this approach lacked coherence, since the value of these brands lay in their unique qualities. Volvo buyers don’t want a safer version of a Jaguar, just as a Jaguar buyer doesn’t want a sportier version of a Volvo, and Ford’s strategy suffered for it.

Make a choice to move in one specific direction.

Most people don’t like to choose between two things – they’d rather just have both. Unfortunately, this is rarely possible – when forming a strategy, the choice of one thing over another is simply unavoidable.

A good strategy demands that you prioritize what’s most important and focus your resources there – trying to have it all will leave you struggling.

For example, in 1988 computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was struggling to compete with a new type of PC. Executives couldn’t decide how they should respond to this new situation: they were torn between focusing on building ready-to-use systems, customer solutions or new microchip technology. They were told to find a compromise, but they just couldn’t, and ended up failing to choose a single direction and act on it.

Finally, in 1992, their new CEO decided that they would focus on chips, but it was too little too late. By then they had missed the boat and been overtaken by competitors, and were eventually bought out by a rival company.

Unfortunately, tough choices will often damage other areas of the business, and thus encounter strong opposition. However, you must have the constitution to overcome this and drive through the decision anyway.

For example, Intel found itself having to make hard choices after many Japanese companies in the manufacturing market made it tough for them to compete. Their CEO, Andy Grove, was forced to make a decision and shift the company’s focus to manufacturing microprocessors. This move met opposition from many areas of the business, including the salespeople and researchers, who were attached to the old habits and processes.

While it might have been less stressful to back down in the face of opposition, Grove instead persevered with this new direction. And a good thing, too: by 1992, Intel was the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductors.

Ensure your strategy gives you leverage over your rivals.

Once you have a strategy, how do you use it to gain an advantage over your competitors? In short, you need to ensure that your strategy offers you leverage over your competitors, i.e., that you anticipate opportunities before your competitors have a chance to act.

Anticipation, however, doesn’t mean foreseeing the future; it means having an insight into the present that enables you to spot emerging possibilities and act on them.

We can gain some insight into leverage by looking at Toyota. Even while they were profiting from booming SUV sales, Toyota invested more than $1 billion into engineering hybrid electric-gasoline technologies. Why? Their insights had shown them that the dwindling supply of fossil fuels would eventually drive demand for hybrid cars, and that if they could pioneer the first acceptable hybrid technology, other manufacturers would then license their system rather than develop their own. In other words: they would gain leverage.

In order to anticipate an opportunity (and thus gain leverage), you must identify your market’s central pivot point – meaning the best way to succeed in that field.

The convenience store chain 7-Eleven did precisely that in Japan when they discovered that their Japanese customers easily became bored with the same selection of soft drinks. To exploit this, they identified the central pivot point: variety. To accomplish this, they created a strategy around this point.

The average 7-Eleven store can stock only 50 varieties of soft drinks – only a fraction of over 200 brands available in Japan – so the firm created a system to maximize soda variety on their shelves by researching and recording local tastes. Each store would then sell a range of brands that appealed to those local tastes, thereby allowing 7-Eleven to shift an enormous variety of drinks.

By identifying and focusing on the pivot point, 7-Eleven gained leverage over rivals whose stores lacked what the Japanese market wanted.

Balance your resources and actions

By now you might be thinking that you’ve fleshed out a good strategy for your business. There is still some important work to be done! You should ask yourself: do I have the resources for this, and does it reflect my current situation?

A good strategy is composed of actions that are based on your current situation and all fit together to maximize your advantage.

One classic example of a pristine strategy can be found in ancient history with the military maneuvers of the Carthaginian general Hannibal. When Hannibal invaded the Roman Empire in 216 BC, he soon ran into trouble: at the battle of Cannae, a Roman army that outnumbered his troops by 85,000 to 55,000 met him. So what did he do? He created a strategy based on his limited resources and current situation.

First, he had his men form an arc, the middle of which then pulled backwards to feign a retreat as the Romans approached. The Romans then charged after the retreating soldiers and thus into the gap Hannibal’s army had left. As more Romans poured forward, they became crammed into a smaller and smaller space until they couldn’t properly swing their weapons. The sides of the arc then circled behind the Romans, and the slaughter began. Over 50,000 Romans died that day, compared to Hannibal’s 5,000 or so losses.

So what can we take away from this gruesome story? Hannibal carefully considered every single action in his strategy so that each one naturally followed the last. Thus his strategy won him a decisive victory in spite of the odds against him.

The best strategies, such as Hannibal’s, recognize the trade-off between resources, possible actions, and the optimization of both. Like Hannibal, you should strive to ensure that your strategy utilizes your limited resources in the most efficient way possible.

Use the dynamics of changing business circumstances to gain the higher ground

The world of business is one that is constantly changing; it’s lucrative to develop strategies that take advantage of these shifts, but how do you make it happen?

In many cases, the biggest effects of changes will be so obvious that they can’t offer you any clear advantages. However, with these effects come many other opportunities if you look for the less obvious second-order effects.

For example, when television first emerged, it was easy to anticipate that free TV would produce huge competition for movie theaters. Yet there were many second-order effects, which were much harder to predict. One involved the organization of Hollywood studios.

In the past, these studios had a captive audience. But that audience disappeared with the advent of the television, so they had to make up for this lost revenue by taking up roles financing independent films that could draw specialist audiences to the cinema.

Indie directors and writers therefore benefited from major studio funding to produce their specialist films, thus enjoying the hidden second-order effect of television’s introduction to the market.

However, in some, markets changes are relatively rare due to the prohibitive cost of improving the existing technologies. In these cases, you can create changes through innovation.

For example, in the 1960s black and white photographic film had been improved upon to the point where investments in fresh research no longer provided a worthwhile return. This made it difficult for newer companies to challenge the Goliaths of the industry, such as Ilford in the UK and Ansco in the United States.

However, a few smaller companies, such as Kodak and Fuji, did challenge these giants’ market share by developing color film, where the opportunities were far more plentiful. By further developing this new technology and making it more effective, these companies instigated a change in the market and managed to rise to the top.

Maximize your competitive advantage

Now that you understand the nuts and bolts of a strategy, it's time to ask yourself how a strategy turns visions into realities. In most cases they do this by maximizing competitive advantage– namely the ability to produce more value at lower costs than competitors.

So how can you engineer a strategy that accomplishes this? One way is to use isolation mechanisms, which give you a competitive advantage in an area by limiting your competitors’ opportunities.

For example, Apple’s iPhone is protected by many isolation mechanisms working in concert: the brand name, the company’s reputation, and then the complementary iTunes service with its huge media database. These factors make it difficult for competitors to create rival products; not only are they competing with that product, but also with its marketing, its comprehensive operating system and its image.

Apple has so effectively cornered its market that the only opportunity for a competitor to enter would be to sell a comparable product at a lower price, which is certainly no small feat.

Another way to achieve competitive advantage is by creating a higher demand for any of the resources you have at your disposal.

One example of this is the marketing methods of the POM Wonderful pomegranate juice company. While pomegranates were originally only a minor crop in their orchards, the owners realized that they made more money per acre from pomegranates than from other crops.

They then invested in research, discovering previously unknown health benefits from pomegranates, and bought 6,000 acres for cultivating pomegranates, thus increasing US pomegranate production capacity six fold.

They then starting selling their pomegranate juice as a fresh fruit drink, emphasizing its many health benefits. And because they were now the largest producer of pomegranates, they were able to reap all the rewards of the high demand that they had created, without having to share with other manufacturers or competitors!

Approach strategy like a science

So you now know about the components of a good strategy and how they can and have been used in real-life scenarios, but how can you become an effective strategist? You must first start making strategic hypotheses – educated estimations of how a given situation works or could work, which help when you contemplate your strategy.

As an example, consider this hypothesis, developed by Howard Schultz after a visit to Italy in 1983: “The Italian espresso experience could be re-created in America and the public would embrace it.” Schultz was awed by the grace and flair of Italian coffee bars, where expensive coffee was served in a relaxed social setting, and struck by the contrast to the coffee culture in America, where the mass market was comprised of cheap, bland coffee.

Having developed his hypothesis he decided to test it by convincing his employers at a roasting company in Seattle to give him space to set up a small espresso bar. That company was Starbucks.

Like Schultz, you too should test your hypothesis to gather new information, and form new hypotheses based on those results.

Schultz started by copying the Italian original, but he soon noticed that Americans preferred lounging in chairs to standing at the bar, so he introduced chairs and tables. He then discovered that many American customers wanted their coffee to go, so he introduced paper cups.

What can we learn from his success? He tested his hypothesis, which was recreating the Italian espresso experience – but needed to modify it for American preferences in order for them to truly embrace it. His company then purchased Starbucks’ retail and trademark in 1987, and by 2001 brought in $2.6 billion in revenue.

Indeed, strategy is much like a science: we must come up with a possible explanation, or working hypothesis, and constantly refine it.

Learn from other people’s past failures.

Statistically, you’re five times more likely to have a car accident if you’re talking on a cell phone while driving – roughly the same as if you’re drunk. However, though many people are aware of this fact, when faced with a decision they tend to think: “It won’t happen to me, I am a good driver.”

This phenomenon is called the inside view – the tendency to ignore lessons others have learned in a similar situation and to believe that our specific situation is somehow different.

Many of us follow the inside view, and so often the results are fatal. The 2008 financial crisis is a perfect example. In the years preceding the crisis, it was widely believed that the economic histories of other nations were no longer relevant to modern America, and many thought that the Federal Reserve’s expertise had finally eliminated economic booms and busts entirely.

This inside-view thinking caused people to ignore problems within the system, which then led to the greatest financial crisis in half a century.

In order to avoid this disastrous way of thinking, we should seek to gain perspective by closely scrutinizing a situation from the outside view.

A good strategy does this by asking: Why have other people in a similar situation to mine succeeded or failed? In addition, a good strategy recognizes that in the vast majority of cases, our situation is far less unique than we might imagine.

The 2008 financial crisis could have been avoided if analysts had looked at financial history with an outside view, and realized that crises always happen. Similarly, how many accidents do you think could have been avoided if people looked at the statistics with an outside view?

Good strategies benefit from paying close attention to other people’s experiences and the lessons they’ve gained from those experiences.

Luckily we can all learn how to become good strategists. By understanding what makes a solid strategy and by finding the hidden power of a given situation, be it leveraging, maximizing your resources or anticipating change, you too can become an effective strategist.

#Effective strategist

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webart-studio · 5 years

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Why Digital Publishers Are Creating Merchandise (And You Ought to Too)

“A product is one thing made in a manufacturing unit; a model is one thing that’s purchased by the client. A product could be copied by a competitor; a model is exclusive. A product could be rapidly outdated; a profitable model is timeless.”

Stephen King

Constructing a product is straightforward. Map the challenges your trade faces – brainstorm over the options – decide one which’d be a straightforward target- rent a crew of certified engineers – construct. However, equally difficult is the idea of constructing a model. I’ll let you know why.

On March 21, 1978, when inflation was excessive, a startup referred to as “NoName” was launched by Loblaw with 16 non-branded gadgets in yellow and black packaging. NoName gained large recognition in its preliminary years because of assured financial savings of 10 to 40 p.c over different nationwide manufacturers. Nonetheless, the startup flopped though it was yielding nice options.

In response to an article revealed by The New York Instances in 1986, No Frills, No Sale, NoName didn’t survive lengthy. As per analysts, it got here to some extent of extinction in 1983 because of the degrading religion of individuals in generic merchandise that lacked a model title, a purchaser may blindly rely on. NoName’s failed makes an attempt at constructing a rapport with its prospects gave its opponents an upper-edge that consistently have been leveraging common promotions to construct a model for themselves.

As concepts form the course of historical past, a brand new NoName, this time referred to as “Brandless” received launched in July 2017 with an analogous motto.

Brandless promised to promote every product, from the listing of 115 merchandise it was rolled out with, at an inexpensive price ticket of $3. The direct-to-consumer model claimed to get rid of the hidden prices, as much as 40 p.c, below “model tax” related to branding, promotions, distributions, and many others of the merchandise.

Although the thought was marvelous, it didn’t take lengthy for Tina Sharkey, co-founder at Brandless, to comprehend the importance of dealing with the irony. Brandless joined palms with Crimson Antler, a branding company in New York that works with giants like Google and Casper, to put the one piece left to finish the Jigsaw. And, it paid off properly – the Brandless model introduced a $240 million funding spherical final July.

Being a product proprietor, the perfect factor in your energy is to supply nice options. Whereas, turning that product right into a model requires far more than that. A model wants proof. It asks you to earn a buyer’s belief. It asks you to repeatedly interact with that buyer. Greater than something, it expects that buyer to succeed in your subsequent prospect earlier than your rivals/their prospects do. Model constructing is a tough win. Retailers would know greatest, as many within the trade have now began to comprehend the battle. The affect that an viewers proprietor, in the identical market, exerts over the focused persona is difficult to match for these retailers. And, that’s precisely why they want viewers house owners to again them up.

Wait, however who has this viewers?

Commerce publishers right now evaluation merchandise and canopy their main updates day-in-day-out. It’s a core a part of their job to attach dots to anticipate a product’s subsequent huge transfer, carry out product breakdowns and create an intriguing case research that both boasts concerning the product or drills right down to its foolish errors.

On-line retailers have began approaching these publishers to shift this content material below their hood. Amazon – the most important on-line distributor, reached out to small or much less established publishers of late and requested them to put up their content material straight on its web site. The place Amazon received to experiment with its conversion through owned content material tactic, many entry-level publishers took it as their huge break and readily agreed. How good can this focusing on be?

What’s placing publishers in a crucial spot?

On a land, not too far, six fully-fledged bedding shops proper now breathe below the umbrella of Parachute. Born on-line, in contrast to many manufacturers on this house, this bedding and toilet linen startup focuses on constructing a model id that doesn’t depend on the walled gardens. Luke Droulez, the chief advertising and marketing officer at Parachute, in a podcast said – “I don’t wish to be referred to as a Fb model or an Instagram model”. As a substitute, he’d like Parachute to be referred to as a life-style model that has individuals’s best-kept secrets and techniques.

To attain this, manufacturers have to work together with their viewers throughout a number of touchpoints. Dependence on a 3rd celebration channel for the model constructing would grow to be as derailing as banner blindness in promoting.

How does this have an effect on publishers?

An viewers with a model related to it’s a writer’s most useful asset. Therefore, posting content material on a 3rd celebration channel, like Amazon, turns into too dangerous to think about.

The large-name publishers will all the time resist submitting their “carton of long-term advantages” to a retailer after what they’ve earned from the digital walled gardens. However, these struggling for recognition within the trade received’t assume twice.

Is there something that the trade can do to ease the plight? Enter commerce publishers constructing the options (merchandise) that they have been directing their viewers too.

The success metrics of publishers reside in constructing a following that trusts their opinions. A fanbase that believes what they foresee inside the trade. Actionable solutions to such a fanbase personal excessive risk of not simply getting adopted and adopted but in addition really useful (to not point out, high quality of merchandise should match the set requirements). With nice attain and energy, comes nice accountability. Publishers can’t simply afford to flounder the belief that they’ve constructed through the years. This affect as soon as earned, which many of the huge names within the trade already do, can convey incremental {dollars} to a writer that owns the product as a substitute of simply being an affiliate.

Affect on the writer monetization stack

Promoting merchandise constructed by themselves improves a writer’s monetization stack which at the moment is experiencing shrinking advert income and poorly performing gated content material monetization modeling. The mannequin is relatively less complicated to adapt and owns excessive possibilities of scaling given the connection, pre-built with web site viewers.

Publishers have to search for a sustainable income supply that after equipped doesn’t roll again the best way advert income from the duopoly (Google and Fb) did. Promoting owned merchandise, particularly for area of interest publishers which have spent 1000’s of hours constructing an experience within the area, can grow to be one such dependable supply because of:

Experience within the area (modern merchandise offering nice options)

Common website guests searching for related options (owned platform of the person persona)

Gained belief of the viewers (simpler to ask for a demo and convert)

Publishers may also think about growing “straightforward to construct” instruments which might be wanted frequently of their group. These instruments cut back enterprise expenditure in the long term and can be utilized as a monetization channel supplied it resonates along with your trade.

What does a writer have to enter commerce?

An viewers!

You want a repeatedly engaged web site viewers that trusts your model. You want a rapport in place with this viewers. As we all know, the perfect enterprise offers let each events win. You promote the merchandise and take your minimize. On the identical time, the viewers doesn’t really feel disenchanted with the acquisition and by no means regrets investing religion in your model. A dependable viewers is all you want.

To construct your strategy to this monetization supply, you want to:

Create a map of the trade that your web site talks about. Break it into parts and hyperlink what capabilities subsequent with an arrow. Discuss with the picture under.

Create a product catalog, below every element, that your viewers would discover helpful.

Analyze the person conduct with information from the web site on Google Analytics and third celebration suppliers like Moz, Ahrefs, SemRush, and many others.

Choose the potential segments of the viewers.

Select the way you’ll enter the battlefield

a. Turn into an affiliate

Promoting merchandise from firms that focus on your web site viewers has grow to be a widespread apply in publishing. Turning into an affiliate shouldn’t be very tough. It is advisable to discover the manufacturers that focus on your potential segments. This may be achieved by trying to find related listicles on Google SERPs. For example, if you need a listicle of the manufacturers offering sports activities attire, you possibly can seek for “Finest x sportswear manufacturers”. Select from plenty of listicles rating above. Examine and attain out to grow to be a associate.

If discovering manufacturers searching for an affiliate appears backbreaking to you, turning into a associate at affiliate applications is all the time a neater manner out. You’ll be able to select from varied applications together with the likes of the Amazon associates program and Shareasale. The income per sale is likely to be lesser right here because of the presence of a 3rd celebration platform. However, these which might be starting their journey with affiliate promoting ought to think about making an attempt their abilities on a longtime platform first to construct an understanding of the channel. Comply with the respective directions of this system you’ve chosen. Hyperlink the product the place the possibilities of promoting are excessive and promote. Submit on social media, newsletters, your homepage, and many others.

b. Purchase merchandise, you see the potential in or construct your personal model label

Mid and huge enterprise publishers have began to work with this beginner of late. Promoting owned merchandise put rather a lot at stake however, it’s a monetization supply that after equipped leaves no room for the product to roll again. Begin with mapping challenges the trade faces. Brainstorm to succeed in essentially the most environment friendly options. Discover current options and listing the favorable ones contemplating its market worth, buzz amongst the viewers, and efficiency. Conduct product evaluation and take consultations. Whereas taking part in huge, recommendation from somebody a lot skilled to help with the dos and don’ts, all the time helps. Construct a crew to help with buyer queries.

Or grow to be the answer supplier that builds to unravel the core challenges of its viewers. Give your followers another reason to really feel proud. Construct merchandise that don’t present a compromised resolution.

Begin with determining the answer, discovered above, that may get solved with an easy-to-build product. Analyze the market and create a product roadmap. Outline the worth it would add to your buyer’s drawback. Outline the acquisition price per buyer. Seek the advice of trade leaders with extra experience. Rent a crew to construct the product and one later to help with buyer queries. Share your model story. Merchandise don’t simply promote by themselves, you’ll have to leverage promoting and common promotions

Studying from the go-getters

Is anybody calling the Police? As a result of Buzzfeed is on fireplace!

Spreading viral content material since 2006, this American media firm is simply not slowing down. It’s all the time searching new sources to stretch its income muscle mass. Wait, not once more.

Buzzfeed’s Tasty

Buzzfeed launched Tasty (to spice up income from native adverts) as an experiment which turned out to be its best entrance into eCommerce. Tasty was discovered to have 98 million followers on Fb in January 2019.

Nicely, who wouldn’t have a yen for his or her delicacies like keto-free lasagna? The platform is stuffed with recipes that may both take you to a cookbook web page or would require you to purchase an prompt pot from Tasty’s cookware line. To the shock of these fighting shrinking advert income, the model is working wonders with no soiled methods related. The product line of the #1 content material writer on Fb offered round 1.5million merchandise final yr. And no, the above-mentioned methods weren’t soiled however a commendable strategy in direction of producing extra and higher alternatives.

BuzzFeed has again and again proved that they know precisely what the world wants subsequent. Tasty, in 2017, rolled out a $149 Bluetooth enabled sizzling plate which BuzzFeed known as a “precision good cooktop”. With an included thermometer, detecting the interior temperature of the meals and a One Prime App notifying when to flip or when so as to add the following ingredient, this invention, in line with BuzzFeed, capabilities as a culinary Swiss Military knife.

Tasty has additionally began a three way partnership with Walmart. Sure, the most important international retailer will now be offering a devoted shelf to the Tasty-branded kitchen merchandise of their 4000 shops. These merchandise would come with spatulas, cooking steels, mixing bowls, and many others with a value starting from $4.Four to $99. Buzzfeed has entered the straightforward streets in a world dreaded by the duopoly.

Extra than simply Tasty

Now, maintain the jaw dropped as I transfer ahead. Tasty is only one of their six verticals which have shocked the trade with its cutting-edge improvements. BuzzFeed’s different vertical – Goodful just lately collaborated with the Macy to launch a houseware-product-line with 100 merchandise starting from $15 to $230. Buzzfeed Critiques, based final yr completely for affiliate companies, is a product advice website that takes a minimize from each product they assist getting offered. Buzzfeed Information, with a membership plan of $5/month, brings the most recent lumps of viral international information in its emailer. In August 2018, Buzzfeed began asking its readers to donate between $5 to $100 to help the group and, what may shock you, the typical donation made was of $20.

Being an affiliate is clearly good. Why construct merchandise?

As a result of the viewers consuming your content material is actually good. And, for a wise viewers, figuring out merchandise that you simply personal and those you’re simply getting a fee out of, isn’t robust. Don’t imagine me? Go forward and put up 10 reputable causes for utilizing product x of a selected materials. Point out an affiliate product subsequent to that and watch readers scrolling previous it pondering it’s a daily gross sales pitch. Like they all the time do.

Or construct one your self and pitch that as an answer. Let the viewers understand how followers contacted you with a bag filled with issues and prompted you to provide you with an answer like that. Inform them what makes the product completely different from these which might be failing to fulfill expectations. Share the story your product has. Put it up for sale on newsletters, social channels, your homepage and watch readers testing the product. Like they hardly ever do.

It received’t be a product suggestion to them anymore however an modern strategy pulled off by essentially the most trustworthy trade chief.

Downsides of being an affiliate

To place this straight, being an affiliate comes with quite a lot of obligations and onerous work. Being a performance-based advertising and marketing channel, internet online affiliate marketing requires you to do common promotions and stuff hyperlinks wherever you possibly can. It wants an enormous chunk of site visitors AND subscribers to chew the preliminary shopping for section of a product. Let’s go away the unsubscriptions that comply with for the following time.

Principally, as an affiliate, you break your neck to promote one thing that many such as you already are. That too for a similar value, on the identical time, in all probability utilizing the identical gross sales pitch. Inform me one thing – does a slivered fee justify the efforts you place in for another person’s product? Sure, slivered! Solely 5% of associates make greater than $100 a month. Everyone knows how huge of a race you would need to win to enter that high 5%. Constructing your personal product helps to get out of the remainder of 95% striving for extra income.

How can a income technology strategy be so flawless?

Nicely, it’s not. The most important flaw in constructing merchandise for eCommerce income is coping with ongoing points. Being a writer, you maintain the experience within the area. You’ve been burning the midnight oil to determine the place the trade proceeds subsequent. What you, nonetheless, don’t possess are the technical abilities. It isn’t possible for a writer to rectify and proper the technical malfunctions every so often. Publishers would want somebody to show to at such time limit. In fact, there are answers (with, ahem! investments).

Look, engineers are costly to maintain. Everyone knows that. However, we’re progressing past adverts and associates right here. And, past adverts and associates, you’ll expertise a number of pitfalls together with boosted income, which is completely truthful. You’d want to rent a fully-fledged buyer help crew for such circumstances.

Too late to start out?

Completely not. Commerce publishers have been hanging round, exercising their affiliate monetization methods, for some time now. Whereas, promoting owned merchandise continues to be a budding monetization technique. However, those who have been bored with working with Google and Fb, and making far too little for the worth they have been delivering, tried this. Those who have been backed by quantity of viewers, constructed their merchandise and made it huge. Try to be subsequent.

Visitor writer: Neha Tanwer is a Product Marketer at iZooto the place she helps publishers monetize their digital content material.

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