Results for “markets in everything” 1803 found
Government shutdown (price-capped) markets in everything
Dozens of air traffic controllers are keeping Austin-Bergstrom International Airport functioning smoothly through the longest government shutdown in US history — and all without a paycheck.
Friday was the first payday since the shutdown began and while hundreds of thousands of federal workers can expect to be paid for the work they put in during the shutdown, they are not receiving paychecks until it ends. Tuesday marks Day 25 of the shutdown.
Austin pilots want to do what they can to help their aviation fellows who are affected by the shutdown.
“Those controllers have always had my back, during the normal flights and the rare times that I’ve had a slight abnormal flight that caused me concern,” Ken VeArd said, a longtime pilot.
VeArd recently posted on social media asking his fellow pilots to help him give back to ABIA’s controllers.
“I just made a post saying this is what I am thinking about doing and before I knew it, it just got out of control,” he said. “Whether you need diapers, milk or eggs, or even if all you need is a six pack of beer,” VeArd hopes it’s the small things that will make a difference.
He’s been buying $20 gift cards from H-E-B for the controllers.
“My biggest concern with this thing is that we try to do something nice for our air traffic control friends and it turns out to be a problem, we don’t want to make problems any worse than it is,” VeArd said. “So we capped it at $20.”
Here is the full story, via Air Genius Gary Leff.
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs
In a nation where people lead ever more busy lives and increasingly view their dogs as family members, professional dog walking is flourishing. And along with it is what might be viewed as the unusual art of dog walker communication. Many of today’s walkers do not simply stroll — not if they want to be rehired, anyway. Over text and email, they craft fine-grained, delightful narratives tracing the journey from arrival at the residence to drop-off. They report the number of bathroom stops. They take artistic photos, and lots of them.
“For an hour-long walk, I send six or eight, depending,” said Griffin, 44, who holds a treat in her hand when shooting to ensure her charge is looking at the camera. “Then I give a full report that includes not only peeing and pooping but also kind of general well-being, and if the dog socialized with other dogs.”
After walking a dog named Stevie Nicks earlier this year, Griffin’s blow-by-blow mentioned that the dog had collected a chicken bone from under a bush, then “crunched down on it and broke into 3 pieces.” At the end of another walk, Griffin related that she “picked the foxtails out of her little beard and mustache,” and explained precisely where the foxtails had come from — “the fence around the yard at the corner.”
Dog walkers’ notes are often more exhaustive than those parents get from the caregivers of their human children.
The article is interesting throughout:
“Ongoing, two-way communication is actually one of the most important components to a successful walk,” White said. “What we’ve heard from owners is the more details, the better. You can’t have too many details.”…
“All of our dog walkers have been really good communicators, but Perry wins the prize,” said Tucci, a nonprofit executive. His texts “are really are more logistical and poop-oriented than anything else. But they’re always so enthusiastic.”
Corporate science fiction markets in everything
…the business world has been increasingly aware of the genre’s potential. In 2017, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the professional services firm that advises 440 of the Fortune 500 companies, published a blueprint for using science fiction to explore business innovation. The same year, the Harvard Business Review argued that “business leaders need to read more science fiction” in order to stay ahead of the curve…
A number of companies, along with a loose constellation of designers, marketers, and consultants, have formed to expedite the messy creative visualization process that used to take decades. For a fee, they’ll prototype a possible future for a [corporate] client, replete with characters who live in it, at as deep a level as a company can afford. They aim to do what science fiction has always done — build rich speculative worlds, describe that world’s bounty and perils, and, finally, envision how that future might fall to pieces.
Alternatively referred to as sci-fi prototyping, futurecasting, or worldbuilding, the goal of these companies is generally the same: help clients create forward-looking fiction to generate ideas and IP for progress or profit. Each of the biggest practitioners believe they have their own formulas for helping clients negotiate the future. And corporations like Ford, Nike, Intel, and Hershey’s, it turns out, are willing to pay hefty sums for their own in-house Minority Reports.
That is from Brian Merchant on Medium.
Price discrimination markets in everything
Parents who give up their phones during dinner will be rewarded with free meals for their kids at one U.K.-based restaurant chain. For the first week of December, Frankie & Benny’s is running its “no-phone zone” campaign in an attempt to improve family interactions at the dinner table.
The promotion was announced following a study that the Italian restaurant chain ran earlier this year, where they studied the dinner table behavior of over 1,500 people. And the results were staggering—almost a quarter of the parents admitted to not only using their phones during mealtime but that they did so while their kids were talking about their day.
Here is the full story, via Tadd Wilson.
Insurance markets in everything
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has paid $424,000 to insure itself against a significant drop in tuition revenue from Chinese students.
In what is thought to be a world first, the colleges of business and engineering at the university signed a three-year contract with an insurance broker to pay the annual six-figure sum, which provides coverage of up to $60 million.
The university came up with the idea in 2015 and implemented it last year but received permission from the broker to discuss it in public only earlier this month.
Here is the story.
Nairobi information markets in everything
I recently spent several weeks in the slum districts of Nairobi, researching al-Shabaab’s criminal activities in the Horn of Africa. I expected to learn about the traditional criminal practices of terrorist groups: drugs, arms, money laundering, and perhaps even a regional particularity like sugar smuggling. What I wasn’t expecting to discover was a highly structured, hierarchical network in which sex workers sell information gleaned from their customers — specifically, corrupt police officers — to al-Shabaab. As one interviewee noted, “If you want information here, you use the prostitutes and street kids — they see everything, go everywhere, and nobody notices them.”
The strength and depth of this sex worker-militant network surprised me and many terrorism experts in the West I spoke with, but it’s an open secret among Nairobi residents. My first interview subject didn’t understand why I wanted more details — surely everyone knew about it? Many of my interviewees were neighbors of, or otherwise friendly with, the sex workers involved. They described an arrangement in which al-Shabaab offered money to women who picked up interesting information in the course of their regular sex work — pillow talk from politicians, police officers, and businessmen. One local memorably opined: “Of course! Half the reason these men go to [sex workers] is to complain about their lives. Why not get paid for listening?”
Here is more from Katherine Petrich.
Smell markets in everything
Previously, she has made dairy products from the perspiration of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Here is the full article. And:
In one exhibition, [Sissel] Tolaas captured the armpit sweat of severely anxious men from Greenland to China, recreated their individual smells and painted them onto the walls of the installation. (“There was a composite odor of anxiety that just infused the whole room, and it was really unhinging,” said Howes, who saw it in Basel, Switzerland). After the smell of fear, Tolaas recreated the smell of violence from cage fighters in East London. She has recreated the scents of Berlin’s famed Berghain nightclub, New York’s Central Park in October, World War I, communism and the ocean. Her shows are immersive and emotional in a distracted world. They aim to grip audiences right by the lizard brain.
And:
Tolaas also invented 1,500 “smell memory kits” — abstract odors that have never been smelled before. When you want to remember an event, you open the amulet and inhale, sealing the moment in your emotional core. For the London Olympics, she made a Limburger cheese sourced from David Beckham’s sweaty socks, which was served to VIPs.
File under “Department of Why Not?”
Kenyan hospital markets in everything
The Kenyatta National Hospital is east Africa’s biggest medical institution, home to more than a dozen donor-funded projects with international partners — a “Center of Excellence,” says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The hospital’s website proudly proclaims its motto — “We Listen … We Care” — along with photos of smiling doctors, a vaccination campaign and staffers holding aloft a gold trophy at an awards ceremony.
But there are no pictures of Robert Wanyonyi, shot and paralyzed in a robbery more than a year ago. Kenyatta will not allow him to leave the hospital because he cannot pay his bill of nearly 4 million Kenyan shillings ($39,570). He is trapped in his fourth-floor bed, unable to go to India, where he believes doctors might help him…
The hospitals often illegally detain patients long after they should be medically discharged, using armed guards, locked doors and even chains to hold those who have not settled their accounts. Mothers and babies are sometimes separated. Even death does not guarantee release: Kenyan hospitals and morgues are holding hundreds of bodies until families can pay their loved ones’ bills, government officials say.
Dozens of doctors, nurses, health experts, patients and administrators told The Associated Press of imprisonments in hospitals in at least 30 other countries, including Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China and Thailand, Lithuania and Bulgaria, and others in Latin America and the Middle East.
Here is the full story by Maria Cheng, via Daniel Lippman.
Chocolate markets in everything
You Can Rent This Cottage Made Entirely of Chocolate
Booking.com is making your Willy Wonka dreams come true with its new chocolate cottage (you read that right, chocolate) in Sèvres, France.
No, this isn’t simply a cottage filled with chocolate treats. Instead, it’s a cottage made entirely of the sweet stuff located at the glass house L’Orangerie Ephémère in the gardens of the Cité de la Céramique.
“Designed and manufactured by Jean-Luc Decluzeau, the renowned artisan chocolatier who specializes in chocolate sculptures, this unique, 18-square-meter chocolate cottage will be crafted out of approximately 1.5 tons of chocolate,” Booking.com shared in a statement.
Unusual failed Beatle Asimov markets in everything
[Paul] McCartney was still wrestling with the comparison between the two bands [the Beatles and Wings]. A few months earlier he had commissioned veteran sci-fi author Isaac Asimov to write a screenplay. “He had the basic idea for the fantasy, which involved two sets of musical groups,” Asimov recalled, “a real one, and a group of extraterrestrial imposters. The real one would be in pursuit of the imposters and would eventually defeat them, despite the fact that the latter had supernormal powers.” Beyond that framework, McCartney offered Asimov nothing more than “a snatch of dialogue describing the moment when the group realised they were being victimised by imposters.” Asimov set to work and produced a screenplay that he called “suspenseful, realistic and moving.” But McCartney rejected it. As Asimov recalled, “He went back to his one scrap of dialogue out of which he apparently couldn’t move.”
That is from Peter Doggett’s excellent You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup.
Delaware markets in everything
A 2003 Mercedes station wagon fetched nearly $420,000 at a Delaware auction last month—$6,800 for the car, $410,000 for the license plate.
“I wanted it,” says the tag’s winning bidder, William Lord. “I’m happy I did it.”
And who wouldn’t be? The plate reads “20,” a highly coveted low Delaware license-plate number.
The bidding was fierce. “I got caught up in the moment,” says Dr. Lord, 83, a retired dentist in Rehoboth Beach, Del. “My father and I used to go to auctions to buy cattle, machinery. There was nothing I liked better than looking at an opponent across the way and outbidding him.”
For a fringe of American drivers, having a fine car isn’t enough. They must have low license-plate numbers, too, and they’re fueling competition for the tags that can be relentless. In Delaware, a decadeslong obsession over tags with few digits has given rise to a vibrant private market.
This isn’t China, however, where lucky numbers are part of a longstanding cultural or even religious tradition. May I be allowed to wonder whether the residents of Delaware have nothing better to spend their money on? This point has at least been addressed:
“It’s a real part of who we are,” says state Transportation Secretary Jennifer Cohan. “We’ve got some loyalty to some strange things, and license plates is one of them.” A low number signifies one of two things, she says: deep roots or deep pockets.
“They are something people fight over a lot. A lot,” says Delaware divorce lawyer Marie Crossley. “It’s almost a badge of how Delaware you are.”
Here is the WSJ article, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. And note: “The state has never used letters, thanks to a population under a million.”
Markets in everything
I am surprised issues of this kind have taken so long to surface:
Amazon is investigating claims that employees accepted bribes to disclose confidential data that would give sellers that use its marketplace a competitive advantage. The company confirmed the investigation following a report in the Wall Street Journal that Amazon employees, working through brokers, have sold internal sales data, the email addresses of product reviewers, and the ability to delete negative reviews and restore banned accounts. “We are conducting a thorough investigation of these claims,” an Amazon spokeswoman said.
These practices seem to be a particular problem in China, though not only. Here is more from Shannon Bond at the FT. Here is further coverage at Verge: “The WSJ also reports that it costs roughly $300 to take down a bad review, with brokers “[demanding] a five-review minimum” per transaction.”
The crack culture that is Long Island, vending machine markets in everything
Suffolk County locals in New York’s Long Island are on alert in the wake of the appearance of three potential crack pipe vending machines, with authorities trying to find out who planted them.
The town of Brookhaven received complaints about the machines last weekend and two have been removed. One of the machines that was removed was partially destroyed by the community, according to WABC-TV.
The station reported that the machines featured the words “Sketch Pens” and were mounted in cement into the ground. It would dispense a small glass tube and a filter for $2 in the form of eight quarters.
The dispensers were initially reported to officials as merely pen dispensers as it was the first week of school in the community.
Here is the full story, via David C. and John C., more information here.
Japanese markets in everything
Stressed out, overworked, or just over it: Workers in Japan who want to leave their jobs — but don’t want to face the stress of quitting in person — are paying a company called Exit to tell their bosses that they won’t be back.
People hoping to never set foot in their workplace again pay Exit $450 to help them quit their full-time jobs; those who have had it with part-time work can pay around $360. And as Alex Martin reports for Japan Times, “Repeat clients get a [$90] discount.”
Here is the full NPR story, via Andrea O’Sullivan.
Moroccan Medina markets in everything
Stanley emails me:
Since Google Maps and even most paper maps don’t help navigate a visitor around the Fez Medina (particularly the inner non-tourist parts), it creates an interesting markets in directions. Gentleman (nearly all as far as I can tell) stand around the various pedestrian-only streets* (if you can call them that) and offer to help, which usually ends up with them walking alongside you in the direction they think you might want to go (or the place you requested thinking it was simply a free helping hand). At the end of the partnered walk they ask for money (even though they insisted it was free or pretend they didn’t hear you ask before embarking). While most people would see this as a “tourist trap” (and it certainly is), the more interesting part to me (as a former econ major and MR enthusiast) is the the market problem – that is, lack of technology/tools and asymmetric information – is paired with a market solution, which is the locals providing only the information they know (directions)…In very minimal engagement in the market I found a piece of information cost between 5 to 20 dirham ($0.50 to $2.00) depending on the length of service (how far they walk with you) and your ability to negotiate.