The True Story Of How One Man Shut Down American Commerce To Avoid Paying His Workers A Fair Wage by Ian Millhiser Posted on "The True Story Of How One Man Shut Down American Commerce To Avoid Paying His Workers A Fair Wage" Note: The following is adapted from the author’s forthcoming book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s Nearly Unbroken History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted. In 1894, Chicago was the Midwest’s gateway to the rest of the United States. Twenty-four different railroad lines centered or terminated in Chicago, covering the nation in over forty thousand miles of rail. Farmers, merchants, craftsmen and factories hoping to bring their goods to the rest of the nation — and potentially, to the rest of the world — had to first bring those goods to Chicago to begin their journey down one of the city’s many rail lines. On May 11, 1894, a strike began just outside of Chicago in a company town run by one of the wealthiest Americans who has ever lived. A Long Time To Spend On A Train The Baron Outside Chicago the idea of Pullman is un-American.
Capitalism in Crisis Amid Slow Growth and Growing Inequality A new buzzword is circulating in the world's convention centers and auditoriums. It can be heard at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Bankers sprinkle it into the presentations; politicians use it leave an impression on discussion panels. The buzzword is "inclusion" and it refers to a trait that Western industrialized nations seem to be on the verge of losing: the ability to allow as many layers of society as possible to benefit from economic advancement and participate in political life. The term is now even being used at meetings of a more exclusive character, as was the case in London in May. Some 250 wealthy and extremely wealthy individuals, from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to Unilever CEO Paul Polman, gathered in a venerable castle on the Thames River to lament the fact that in today's capitalism, there is too little left over for the lower income classes. Running Out of Ammunition 'Wider and Wider'
Time to Imagine By Nathan Schneider Some might consider it a high honor to have their livelihood ridiculed on the right-wing talk-show circuit. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt did not. In February he published an article in Politico celebrating a projection that the Affordable Care Act might result in millions of workers’ scaling back from full-time to part-time jobs. "What do you suppose this man’s job might be, if he even has one?" "Those of you laying around right now listening to the show," Cain continued, "you’re getting an A!" One commenter at the Daily Caller website opined, "Leisure Studies/Tenure = Why this Country lags behind most other Countries." Among the experts in health, sports management, and child care in Iowa’s leisure-studies program, Hunnicutt is the chief historian. That dream, however, has few defenders now. Recent decades have seen a curious decline of interest in leisure. The word "school," together with "scholarship," derives from the Greek word for leisure.
Page 6 of The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn't take it anymore. "It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. Featured News From Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" in the bank's mortgage operations. Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she's kept her mouth shut since then.
How automation could take your skills -- and your job Nicholas Carr's essay IT Doesn't Matter in the Harvard Business Review in 2003, and the later book, argued that IT is shifting to a service delivery model comparable to electric utilities. It produced debate and defensiveness among IT managers over the possibility that they were sliding to irrelevancy. It's a debate that has yet to be settled. This new book may make IT managers, once again, uncomfortable. The Glass Cage examines the possibility that businesses are moving too quickly to automate white collar jobs, sophisticated tasks and mental work, and are increasingly reliant on automated decision-making and predictive analytics. This book is not a defense of Luddites. In an interview, Carr talked about some of the major themes in his book. The book discusses how automation is leading to a decay of skills and new kinds of risks. Where do you think we stand right now in terms of developing this capability? What is the worry here? Let's talk about software developers.
The Twilight of the Indoor Mall On Memorial Day weekend, one of the bigger shopping weekends of the year, I stopped by the Collin Creek Mall in Plano, a Dallas suburb. Sitting back about a quarter mile from the highway, the mall has a hundred and thirty stores, over six thousand parking spaces, and more than a million square feet of retail space. It is faceless, sprawling, silent; the exterior walls are fading beige brick. On the day that I visited, it looked like it was going to rain. A security guard in a golf cart endlessly looped the parking lot, which was nearly empty. Pharrell’s “Happy” played over the hi-fi inside the mall. I first talked to the guy who worked at the sunglasses stand just outside the food court. “Dude,” I said. “The mall?” “Dead right now? “Oh Christ,” he said. “Like what?” He looked around to see if anyone was listening. “A movie theater,” he said. I walked further into the mall, looking for someone who could explain what was happening to the mall I had been coming to since I was a teenager.
The Astonishing Weaponry of Dung Beetles Photo On a still-sweltering evening in Tanzania more than a decade ago, my colleagues and I crouched around a fresh pile of elephant dung to witness an epic struggle of wills. Immediately upon our arrival, beetles began plonking into the grass around us. Soon dozens were raining down from the sky at once, and, not being the most agile fliers, they tumbled into our hair and bounced down the backs of our necks. The most astonishing thing about these creatures — aside from their diet, perhaps — is their weaponry. Observing the beetles’ behavior, it became clear why only some species have big weapons. Males of all dung-beetle species face intense battles for opportunities to feed and mate, but the context of these battles differs. Before he gets there, however, an S. pius male may have to fend off a dozen or more challengers. Other species like Onthophagus nigriventris fight inside burrows, where big weapons make all the difference. Not all O. nigriventris males have horns.
Welcome to the Failure Age! An age of constant invention naturally begets one of constant failure. The life span of an innovation, in fact, has never been shorter. An African hand ax from 285,000 years ago, for instance, was essentially identical to those made some 250,000 years later. The Sumerians believed that the hoe was invented by a godlike figure named Enlil a few thousand years before Jesus, but a similar tool was being used a thousand years after his death. During the Middle Ages, amid major advances in agriculture, warfare and building technology, the failure loop closed to less than a century. During the Enlightenment and early Industrial Revolution, it was reduced to about a lifetime. The closure of the failure loop has sent uncomfortable ripples through the economy. Innovation is, after all, terrifying. After a tour of Weird Stuff, Schuetz mentioned a purple chair that he kept among the office furniture piled haphazardly in the back of his facility. Photo Corporate leaders weren’t stupid.