Just-in-time delivery

36 results back to index


pages: 376 words: 101,759

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

Gas is delivered through pipelines: it is just-in-time delivery. There is very little storage for gas at a power plant, though there is storage to feed the pipelines. But no matter how much storage can feed the pipelines, the pipelines can carry only a certain amount of gas at a given time. Since electricity is made and used instantaneously, and natural gas for power plants is delivered just in time for use, sometimes the two “just in times” don’t mesh, and that leads to trouble. New England winter and gas use POWER PLANTS RECEIVE natural gas through pipelines, a just-in-time delivery scenario. In New England, in summer, the pipelines can deliver enough gas for the power plants, even on a hot day with high electricity demand on the grid.

Mere ratepayers will never learn what “stakeholders” share with each other. No accountability: Nobody is accountable for the grid. A power-plant owner can run his power plant well or badly: it’s not his plant’s fault if the grid can’t get enough power. Just-in-time natural-gas plants can take over a grid, and just-in-time deliveries can fail in cold weather. It’s not the RTO’s problem to keep a mix of plants on the grid, for resilience. In RTO areas, generation utilities own power plants, and distribution utilities own power lines and substations. Distribution utilities still have regulated rates of returns and have to keep their lines and substations in good shape.

I think this sort of thing is what led Department of Energy Secretary Perry to think that something had better be done about the fuel-security situation on the grid. Perry is from Texas, and I think he probably has no particular problem with having lots of natural gas on the grid. “No gas!” is not likely to be his issue. Much of the Permian Basin (a major oil and gas resource) is in Texas. However, natural gas is just-in-time delivery. Perry was trying to ensure the security of the grid in bad weather, by rewarding plants that keep fuel on-site. Perry may have noticed that FERC was happy with complex formulas to keep oil on-site at a gas plant but was unwilling to reward plants that kept fuel on-site as a natural course of business.


pages: 282 words: 92,998

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake

air gap, barriers to entry, complexity theory, data acquisition, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, Golden arches theory, Herman Kahn, information security, Just-in-time delivery, launch on warning, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, packet switching, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, undersea cable, Y2K, zero day

During that decade evangelical information-technology companies showed other corporations how they could save vast amounts of money by taking advantage of computer systems that could do things deep into their operations. Far beyond e-mail or word processing, these business practices involved automated controls, inventory monitoring, just-in-time delivery, database analytics, and limited applications of artificial-intelligence programs. One Silicon Valley CEO told me enthusiastically in the late 1990s how he had applied these techniques to his own firm. “Somebody wants to buy something, they go online to our site. They customize the product they want and hit BUY.

Our system notifies the parts makers, plans to ship the parts to the assembly plant, and schedules assembly and delivery. At the assembly plant, robotic devices put the product together and put it in a box with a delivery label on it. We don’t own the computer server that took the order, the parts plants, the assembly plant, or the delivery aircraft and trucks. It’s all outsourced and it’s all just-in-time delivery.” What he owned was the research department, the design team, and some corporate overhead. At companies like his, and in the U.S. economy in general, profitability soared. What made all of that possible was the deep penetration in the 1990s of information-technology systems into companies, into every department.

In the experiment, code-named Aurora, the test’s hackers made it into the control network from the Internet and found the program that sends rotation speeds to the generator. Another keystroke and the generator could have severely damaged itself. Like so much else, the enormous generators that power the United States are manufactured when they are ordered, on the just-in-time delivery principle. They are not sitting around, waiting to be sold. If a big generator is badly damaged or destroyed, it is unlikely to be replaced for months. Fortunately, the Federal Electric Regulatory Agency in 2008 finally required electric companies to adopt some specific cyber security measures and warned that it would fine companies for noncompliance up to one million dollars a day.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

Michael Osterholm is an epidemiologist who has studied the possible impacts of pandemics. He told me that now, a few factories in China make nearly all of these vital supplies, as the global industry takes advantage of low labor costs and economies of scale. This is efficient. Hospitals rely on constant, just-in-time deliveries of these items, too: keeping stocks costs money, so this is also efficient. During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when much of China was affected, there were fears deliveries would stop, either because China needed more of these things than usual or because factories or shipping might shut down as employees were quarantined.

Public transport collapsed, grocery stores emptied, hospitals ran minimal services, hazardous waste piled up, bodies went unburied. The government had to step in. A subsequent study predicted economic collapse in Britain if all road haulage, not just fuel deliveries, was shut down for only a week. Today, we all depend even more on just-in-time deliveries: if the trucks stop because drivers are locked down, or sick, or dead, or caring for sick family, cities will rapidly have no food, vehicles won’t have fuel, food in depots will rot. In the future, if deliveries depend more on automated systems, trucking may not remain as vulnerable—but the principle remains that if certain hub industries are paralyzed by loss of people, the impact can be far-reaching.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Based on our experience across sectors, a combination of project reprioritization, shortening of project life cycles, and tight project execution can deliver as much as a 10 to 25 percent reduction in spending and a 20 to 50 percent reduction in delays.47 A real estate company in the Middle East, for example, reduced cycle time by 30 percent for a $500 million tower project by taking advantage of lean management techniques—such as performance dialogues and war rooms—and prefabricating forms for beams and construction joints. These efforts allowed it to avoid $50 million in penalties for time overruns, while reducing the overall cost.48 When money becomes more expensive, not tying it up unnecessarily becomes more crucial. The just-in-time delivery processes pioneered by Asian manufacturers were, at root, efforts to avoid tying up capital unnecessarily in parts and supplies that would sit idle on factory floors. Today, Japanese and Korean automakers are increasingly adopting a “capital-light” approach to product design and processes.

.), 158, 159 (table) See also Talent Land management, 117 (table), 121 (table), 122 Latin America connectedness ranks in, 81 (table) immigrant talent in, 77 labor market gap in, 163, 164 new consuming class in, 102 Latin American countries Argentina, 77, 81 (table), 113 (table) Bolivia, 77 Chile, 116, 195 Colombia, 164, 176 Mexico, 113 (table), 123, 191 Peru, 28 See also Brazil LG Electronics, 104–105, 109, 122 Life expectancy, 58, 60, 61 LinkedIn, 49 Localization future government centralization or, 191–192 goods and services customization and, 102–105 manufacturing, 27, 105 London, England, 29, 31–32, 143 Lyft, 47, 48, 154 Ma, Jack, 165 Mangalyaan (spacecraft), 3 Manufacturing agility in, 82–83 automation of, 151–152, 153 (table), 154 circular economy approach to, 123–125 commodity demand increase in, 114–116, 117 (table) cycle time reduction in, 141 economic center of gravity and, 17 energy efficiency in, 123 globalized new competitors in, 84 just-in-time delivery processes, 141–142 labor market gap in, 155 local, 27, 105 overruns, 141 for reuse and recycle, 123–125 3-D printing and, 35 (fig.), 37–38, 39, 45, 50, 60, 84 See also Automotive manufacturing industry Marketing to aging population, 66–68 to new consuming class, 105–107 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 28, 155 Materials science, 34–36 McAfee, Andrew, 6 McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), 11 Media.


pages: 133 words: 36,528

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

This points to a better way of managing demand for road travel. Efficient road freight operators under contract with the supermarket chains for long distance transport between central depots and stores typically have to deliver within 30‑minute time slots or face a penalty—an example of what is known as ‘just in time delivery’. This they can achieve because they know the location and control the progress of each vehicle and understand where traffic congestion arises. I had the opportunity to ask a senior executive of a well‑known freight haulier to what extent unanticipated congestion affected performance. His memorable response was that it had less impact than unanticipated delays at customers’ premises.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Capital’s immediate purpose is to increase productivity, efficiency and profit rates, and to create new and, if possible, ever more profitable product lines. When considering the trajectories of technological change, it is vital to remember that the software and the organisational forms are every bit as important as the hardware. Organisational forms, like the control structures of the contemporary corporation, the credit system, just-in-time delivery systems, along with the software incorporated into robotics, data management, artificial intelligence and electronic banking, are just as crucial to profitability as the hardware embodied in machines. To take a contemporary example, cloud computing is the organisational form, Word is the software and this Mac, upon which I write, the hardware.

It was the profitability of the steam engine makers rather than that of the different industries using steam power (for example, transport, cotton factories and mining) that mattered, though plainly the profitability of the one could not be achieved without that of the other. The search for ever-newer and better forms of not only the steam engine but also energy and power application quickly followed. The search for generic technologies that could be applied almost anywhere – in recent years think of fields such as computers, just-in-time delivery systems and theories of organisation – became important. A vast business of invention and innovation catering to all and sundry sprang up, providing new technologies of consumption as well as of production, circulation, governance, military power, surveillance and administration. Technological innovation became big business, not ‘big’ necessarily in the sense of some vast consolidated corporation (though examples of that sort now abound in fields like agribusiness, energy and pharmaceuticals) but ‘big’ in the sense of multiple firms, many of them small-scale start-ups and venture enterprises, exploring innovation for innovation’s sake.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Iwasaki donated some of her royalties to the Japan Drucker Workshop and the Peter Drucker and Mastoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. But the novel did more than this: it promoted a salutary debate about the business habits of a country that, thanks in part to Drucker, had shaken up the business world in the 1960s and 1970s with a succession of management innovations, such as “lean production” and “just-in-time delivery,” but has been locked in a recession for two decades. Should Japanese companies set themselves clearer objectives rather than wallowing in consensus? And should they adopt clearer structures rather than sprawling into dozens of businesses? Five years after his death, Drucker still mattered.

When the first operation is done, the second patient is already in place. These three business innovations are remarkable. But something even more fundamental is going on: business innovation in the emerging world has arguably gotten to the point where all the individual advances add up to more than the sum of their parts. Just as Japan’s quality circles and just-in-time delivery were part of a new system called “lean production,” so the emerging world’s reverse innovation and frugal production are part of a new approach to management. This new management paradigm pushes two familiar ideas beyond their previous limits: that the customer is king, and that economies of scale can produce radical reductions in unit costs.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

At the Central Bank itself, tense meetings between international financiers, American management consultants, British Treasury advisers and Cypriot bankers suddenly broke off. Four very large green juggernauts laden with euros had arrived from the European Central Bank, just hours before Cyprus’s banks were due to reopen. An historic just-in-time delivery. That afternoon a Boeing 767 cargo plane in the livery of Maersk Star Air had been spotted amidst a crowd of smaller private jets parked at the end of the runway at Larnaca airport. Flight logs record that the Boeing 767, registration OY-SRH, had flown from Cologne to Munich in the early hours, and then, via Athens, to Larnaca.

This is the first time since the Second World War that the United Kingdom has been able to absorb a very large depreciation of its currency without domestically generated inflation wage costs picking up. I think that’s an achievement for monetary policy and I think the MPC [Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England] can be rightly proud of that.’ I first saw this dynamic at first hand at the Honda factory in Swindon in 2009. Japanese just-in-time delivery stretched to their employment practices. A collapse in demand for cars was transmitted immediately around the world and led to them cutting down on working time as much as on steel. Workers accepted a 3 per cent pay cut for workers and 5 per cent for management in the place of compulsory redundancies, to cope with the slump in world trade after the Lehman collapse.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.” That’s why J.C.’s real passion isn’t just to build a few isolated, militarized retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modeled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralization of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers.


pages: 614 words: 176,458

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Assuming for simplicity, that the latter two effects compensate each other, the total annual meat transport-induced CO2 emission would be in the order of 800–850,000 tonnes of CO2. 62 In other words, ‘for simplicity’, the FAO has omitted to take into account all surface transport and airfreight anywhere in the world – all the cattle trucks and milk tankers, the lorries loaded with hay and straw, the vets’ visits to farms and the relief milkers’ trips to work, the deliveries of feed and fertilizer, the Spanish artics and the Tesco vans, the just-in-time deliveries of McDonalds burgers and M & S chilled beef vindaloo – all of this is discounted in order to cancel out a modest overestimate made in its calculation about international shipping. Sea transport represents a minor part of food transport emissions. The UK imports around 40 per cent of its food, but international shipping represents just 13.5 per cent of transport emissions, whereas road transport constitutes 73 per cent and aviation 13.5 per cent.63 It is hard to pin down what other assumptions the FAO may have made to ‘simplify’ their calculations.

The FAO analysis accounts for CO2 from tractors, fertilizers, on-farm processing and a miniscule amount for transport – but it doesn’t register all the high impact baggage that tends to come with intensive farming, in order to accommodate its so called economies of scale: 4x4s, concrete yards, paved roads, electric lights, air conditioning, refrigeration, burglar alarms, slaughterhouse costs, animal waste disposal, health and safety measures, carcase incineration, livestock registration and identification, product tracking, computerized accounts, conferences, packaging, advertising, middlemen, retail chains, just-in-time delivery, supermarket journeys, processing waste disposal, domestic waste disposal, journeys to work etc. You don’t buy into the intensive farmers’ club with just a tractor and sack of fertilizer – intensive farming brings with it all the paraphernalia of an industrialized urbanized lifestyle, which the peasant in a local economy for the most part manages without.


pages: 756 words: 167,393

The Tylenol Mafia by Scott Bartz

AOL-Time Warner, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, independent contractor, intangible asset, inventory management, Just-in-time delivery, life extension, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, too big to fail

Officials never disclosed the name of the distributor that delivered the poisoned Tylenol capsules to Central DuPage Hospital, but they did spend a great deal of time questioning employees at the largest distributor of Tylenol to hospitals in the Chicago area - the Louis Zahn Drug Company. 19 ________ The Louis Zahn Drug Company When Central DuPage Hospital converted its pharmacy to a unit-dose system in 1974, it also contracted with a local distributor to manage its inventory and provide frequent deliveries of drugs and other products to its pharmacy. Distributors make “just in time” deliveries to hospital pharmacies, usually several times per week. This system allows pharmacies to keep very low inventory levels and thus reduce costs. The distribution company that gained the pharmacy-service-provider contract for Central DuPage Hospital is the same distribution company that delivered the cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules to the hospital’s pharmacy.

Bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules were rarely delivered to retail customers by the full case of 72 bottles. Rather, they were delivered in multiples of six Tylenol bottles or one Tylenol bottle, depending on how the picking system was set up. Retail stores and hospital pharmacies received just-in-time deliveries of drugs and other products. Most retail stores ordered just enough Tylenol bottles to cover sales until the next shipment arrived, typically, no more than a week later. Managers at Jewel stores told NBC-News that they were selling one or two bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules per day.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

The hormone diverts some of the cow’s metabolic energy from other bodily functions to milk production. (Cattle breeding over centuries has done much the same thing but not to the same degree.) The cost of increased production is lowered resilience. The cow is less healthy, less long-lived, more dependent on human management. • Just-in-time deliveries of products to retailers or parts to manufacturers have reduced inventory instabilities and brought down costs in many industries. The just-in-time model also has made the production system more vulnerable, however, to perturbations in fuel supply, traffic flow, computer breakdown, labor availability, and other possible glitches


pages: 255 words: 68,829

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

The hierarchical and bureaucratic model was criticized and replaced by a type of organization in which participants were more autonomous, multi-specialists, participating in decision making. The Japanese Toyota model played a significant role, bringing to antiquated Taylorism the new charms of constant improvement, “just in time” delivery, and “zero delay.” This was the time of the “lean, open, and stable company”6—“lean” because to be responsive, the company could no longer operate with multiple hierarchical ladders; “open” in the sense that organizations had to be streamlined and there should be no hesitation in relying on subcontractors; and “stable” because the organization had to be carefully planned.


pages: 244 words: 79,044

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager by Lars Kroijer

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, family office, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Long Term Capital Management, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, NetJets, new economy, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

It was amazing how different our worlds were. The CEO of Bure, Lennart Svantesson, was a real hands-on guy who relished and excelled at sorting out operational issues facing the portfolio companies. His struggles involved meeting delivery dates and managing working capital while facing down the unions. He even used the term ‘just-in-time delivery’ which was the first time I had heard the expression since business school. By contrast, he clearly did not know what to make of me. At 33, I was too young to have come up through the ranks of an operating business to suddenly appear on his list of leading shareholders. He knew that I ran my own investment firm and therefore he did not have to look over my shoulder to see who was really making the decisions, but he also gathered that I had not grown up with wealth.


pages: 258 words: 83,303

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

Because the cheap-oil subsidy that makes Norwegian salmon affordable is about to disappear. And as it does, your world is about to get smaller—much, much smaller. To get that salmon from the ocean to your plate takes a ridiculous amount of energy. Think of the fuel for the fishing boats, container ships and just-in-time delivery trucks; the energy to freeze and process the fish, to sell it in a supermarket (retail stores use almost as much energy per square foot as factories do, just on heating, cooling and lighting). We invest a lot more energy to get that salmon than we get out of it when we eat it, which in itself makes the fish a bad energy deal.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Will consumers who currently do their weekly grocery shop send a car to pick it up for them using some future Instacart-style service? Will shoppers seek to return to city centres if driverless cars make them more pedestrian friendly, at the expense of out of town malls? Perhaps the growth of just in time deliveries (via drones[246] or robots), anticipatory shipping[247] and re-order technologies such as Amazon Dash[248] will change the nature of shopping patterns regardless of driverless cars? Obvious changes to the relative importance of gas stations in a world of driverless cars (and likely a world of more electric vehicles) will be accompanied by changes in the sales for products that sell in significant volumes as impulse or attached purchases.


pages: 309 words: 85,584

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit by William Keegan

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, congestion charging, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, gig economy, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, Just-in-time delivery, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, transaction costs, tulip mania, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

One is geopolitical rather than economic: it seems unwise, to put it mildly, to try to unhook ourselves from the rest of Europe when the United States, under Donald Trump, has declared a trade war on the rest of the world and Europe is very concerned about a threat from President Putin’s Russia. The second concern is obviously economic: we have spent forty-five years being integrated into the wider European economy and in effect we have become an economic region of the EU. So much industrial production is geared to intricate supply lines and what is known as ‘just in time’ delivery systems. I suspect that a lot of the people who voted for Brexit do not realise that many of the things they take for granted, like the ability to buy fruit and vegetables delivered to their supermarkets overnight from France, Spain and other European countries, would be put at risk by the kind of customs restrictions that would be imposed by Brexit.


pages: 791 words: 85,159

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

Page 94 Perfecting Process It is perhaps significant that many of the celebrated cases of business process reengineering come from a fairly narrow band of operations. Procurement, shipping and receiving, warehousing, fulfillment, and billing are favorites. These generally account for the most impressive results, with inventories transformed into just-in-time delivery, fulfillment and billing accomplished in days rather than weeks. In these areas of work, processes are relatively well defined. They usually have clearly measurable inputs and outputs. And, as we might expect from a process-oriented view, they emphasize a linear view of how organizations work.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

These companies operate in what design entrepreneur Scott Belsky calls the “interface layer,” using appealing design to clarify and rationalize messy aspects of cultural life into simple, dependable choices.32 The Interface Economy If Zynga and its cohort of game-makers have found ways to extract labor value from entertainment, the new wave of interface layer companies is reframing labor as a kind of entertainment, adopting the optimistic framing of the “sharing economy.” Their rhetoric relies on the notion of technological collaboration and just-in-time delivery: taking advantage of unused resources like empty seats in cars, unused rooms in houses, and so forth. But all of these interactions are grounded in the mediating computational layer that manages ad hoc logistics, matches buyers and sellers of services, and structures access to platforms through carefully constructed interfaces.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

This typically produces a perpetual stream of innovations in technologies and organisational forms simply because those capitalists with more efficient, effective and productive labour processes gain higher profits than the rest. The quest for greater efficiency actually encompasses all aspects of the circulation of capital, from the procuring of labour supplies and means of production (hence the supply-chain structure of just-in-time delivery from subcontractors to the modern corporation) through to efficient and low-cost marketing strategies (the Wal-Mart syndrome). Capitalist entities, from individual entrepreneurs to vast corporations, are therefore forced to pay close attention to organisational and technological forms and are always on the look-out for those innovations that yield them excess profit, at least for a time.


pages: 227 words: 32,306

Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence: Avoid Pitfalls and Maximize Roi by Lyndsay Wise

barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, the market place

Even though there isn’t a single solution that will meet the requirements of everyone within the organization, fine-tuning a solution to meet the needs of most will eliminate the need for rework later on.1 Applying this directly to technical considerations means identifying all of the factors that affect the business from a technical standpoint. For example, manufacturers require the ability to manage 1 http://mimiandeunice.com/ Evaluating the current IT infrastructure 145 parts how many exist in what place at any given time, defective parts, just-in-time delivery, supply chain and parts management, as well as placements in warehouses before use. For e-commerce and retailers, similar requirements exist. Not only do products need to be tracked, but sales trends and customer preferences need to be identified to make sure that consumers have positive experiences to induce them to become and/or remain customers.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Turning our attention to automation—which is essentially the process of gathering all the data collected by the IoT, turning it into a series of next actions, and then, without human intervention, executing those actions. Already, we’ve seen the first wave of this in the smart assembly lines and supply chains (what’s technically called process optimization) that have enabled things like just-in-time delivery. With the smart grid for energy and the smart grid for water—what’s technically called resource consumption optimization—we’re seeing the second wave. Next up is the automation and control of far more complex autonomous systems—such as self-driving cars. There are even further opportunities in finding simpler ways to connect decision makers to sensor data in real time.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The ship anchored frustratingly close to the coast and waited for better weather. I asked the chef how long it would be. “Only mother nature knows,” he laughed. We eventually pulled into Alat, a port near Baku, around two a.m. the next morning. From dock to dock, the trip took about thirty-two hours. That is hardly a revolution in today’s world of just-in-time delivery, but it could become an improvement over the status quo, especially if backers of the new port can deliver their promise of an eighteen-hour crossing. Even greater gains could be achieved by reducing the waiting time on land. But not all inefficiencies are accidental or easily fixed. The art of the middleman is turning uncertainty into advantage.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

A single container ship foundering in the Suez Canal disrupts supply chains worldwide. “The networks that connect us can amplify any shocks. A breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere,” Bar-Yam observed. Corporations solely motivated by profit can make matters worse by optimizing their operations to the fullest extent possible. Just-in-time delivery can be very profitable, as long as supply chains work as planned. When they don’t, the whole chain can fracture as slowdowns at choke points ramify through the system. Imagine an entire global economy based on optimized supply chains (and food chains), all backed and managed by computer-driven financial markets increasingly susceptible to extreme events.


pages: 405 words: 109,114

Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

As the reality of lower volatility came to be accepted, the debate moved to explaining this moderation. Three main explanations were put forward: structural changes in the US economy, good luck, or better monetary policy. Investigators generally placed some weight on structural changes coming from the adoption of “just in time” delivery as a result of the information technology revolution. The timing worked, as such techniques were introduced in the early 1980s. In addition, the fall in output volatility was accompanied by a reduction in the variability of production relative to sales, consistent with the view that firms were able to use technology to better synchronize production with the demand for their goods.


pages: 326 words: 29,543

The Docks by Bill Sharpsteen

affirmative action, anti-communist, big-box store, collective bargaining, Google Earth, independent contractor, intermodal, inventory management, jitney, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, new economy, Panamax, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, strikebreaker, women in the workforce

Geraldine Knatz, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, tells me about cargo coming off a Maersk ship 155 156â•… /â•… The Shipper that was delayed at the port because of a crane fire that held up the discharge operation by a measly thirteen hours. But that was all it took to miss the train leaving for Dallas, where the containers filled with items for a department store chain’s Labor Day sale were headed for further distribution in the Midwest. Because the shipment had been scheduled for just-in-time delivery, there was no way to catch up. The products were too late for the store sales, and the corporate office had to yank the sale ads before they were published. And while it’s entirely possible that no one in Kansas City cares about what happens at the port, as Knatz puts it, “If I lived near that store and I was going to get my kids’ school clothes right before Labor Day and I went in there and they didn’t have the school uniforms, I would have really been pissed off.”


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Unloaded by crane from boat to truck to train to barge, no backs were wrenched, no whiskey or watch or gold gone missing. Today, a skeleton crew of a dozen hands can navigate a vessel freighted with up to six thousand containers, each the size and shape of a railroad car. Containers made shipping fast and predictable, enabling the just-in-time delivery system that retailers have come to depend on. In the estimations of some economists, containers made the transport of goods so cheap as to be essentially free. They certainly help make many things from China unbelievably cheap. Big Boxes, Category Killers, Bargain Basements, and Dollar Stores all owe their existence to fast boats from China and the containers they carry.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

In addition to running their undercover operation in the sidewalk stand, they are targeting a number of operations in other countries, which probably provides a foretaste of what’s going to happen in mainland China a few years down the road. Most East Asian countries have sort of a stolen intellectual property shopping mall where people sit all day in front of cheap computers swapping disks, copying the software while you wait—the vaunted just-in-time delivery system. After a few of these got busted, many switched to a networked approach. One guy in Taiwan is selling a set of 7 CD-ROMs containing hundreds of pirated programs. He has no known name or address, just a pager. Taiwan, the most technologically advanced part of Greater China, makes a lot of PCs, all of which need system software, so there the name of the game is counterfeiting, not pirating.


pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Jeffrey Bader, president of a Port Newark–based trucking group, the Association of Bi-State Motor Carriers, estimates that the unreimbursed cost for trucking companies and truckers alone was in the tens of millions. “It was a nightmare,” Bader said. “We lost a lot of money, and we’re angry.” The wider cost of Maersk’s disruption to the global supply chain as a whole—which depends on just-in-time delivery of products and manufacturing components—is far harder to measure. And, of course, Maersk was only one victim. Only when you start to multiply Maersk’s story—imagining the same paralysis, the same serial crises, the same grueling recovery—playing out across dozens of other NotPetya victims and countless other industries does the true scale of Russia’s cyberwar crime begin to come into focus.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

Pandemic studies will all call for more research on virology, and international pandemic studies will call for more money from rich to poor nations. And despite the dismal subject, they remain strangely upbeat. Note that the quote above does not say that the United States or Oregon should stock up on masks, gloves, or drugs that we have been buying on just-in-time delivery from China and other foreign suppliers. An honest scenario analysis would not wax eloquent about global coordination but predict closed borders, restricted travel, and collapsing supply chains. It would not just mention “obedience to protocols.” It would lay out the conditions that might warrant forced obedience versus those that permit a modicum of individual freedom.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

Lessons learned, we will create greater long-term stability. A gradual economic rebalancing will take place. Inexorable trends, such as outsourcing of US manufacturing to China, will reverse themselves over time. In fact, that has already begun to happen. Concerns over logistics costs, rising wages in China, and productivity issues such as just-in-time delivery have now given US companies an edge. US manufacturing has made a gradual recovery, which in turn will create more jobs. The unanswerable question is when. Many of our contributors have bravely tried to answer this question. They have ably presented their knowledge and experience and have offered their assumptions for debate with the reader.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

I use the term in a slightly different context, referring to the overall breakdown of the thesis that technology necessarily enables single large global markets, mediated by a set of common rules. 4 Philip Garnett, Bob Doherty, and Tony Heron, ‘Vulnerability of the United Kingdom’s Food Supply Chains Exposed by COVID-19’, Nature Food, 1(6), 2020, pp. 315–318 <https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-020-0097-7>. 5 Alex Lee, ‘How the UK’s Just-in-Time Delivery Model Crumbled under Coronavirus’, Wired, 30 March 2020 <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stockpiling-supermarkets-coronavirus> [accessed 11 September 2020]. 6 UBS, The Food Revolution, July 2019 <https://www.ubs.com/global/en/ubs-society/our-stories/2019/future-of-food/_jcr_content/mainpar/toplevelgrid_1749059381/col1/linklist/link.1695495471.file/bGluay9wYXRoPS9jb250ZW50L2RhbS91YnMvZ2xvYmFsL3Vicy1zb2NpZXR5LzIwMTkvZm9vZC1yZXZvbHV0aW9uLWp1bHkucGRm/food-revolution-july.pdf>. 7 ‘Growing Higher – New Ways to Make Vertical Farming Stack up’, The Economist, 31 August 2019 <https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/08/31/new-ways-to-make-vertical-farming-stack-up> [accessed 4 August 2020]. 8 ‘World’s Biggest Rooftop Greenhouse Opens in Montreal’, Phys.org, 26 August 2020 <https://phys.org/news/2020-08-world-biggest-rooftop-greenhouse-montreal.html> [accessed 5 September 2020]. 9 Elizabeth Curmi et al., ‘Feeding the Future’, Citi Global Perspectives and Solutions, November 2018 <https://www.citivelocity.com/citigps/feeding-the-future/> [accessed 18 March 2021]. 10 Joel Jean, Patrick Richard Brown and Institute of Physics (Great Britain), Emerging Photovoltaic Technologies (Bristol, UK: IOP Publishing, 2020), pp. 1–5 <https://iopscience.iop.org/book/978-0-7503-2152-5> [accessed 12 October 2020]. 11 Brendan Coyne, ‘Vehicle-to-Grid: Are We Nearly There Yet?’


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

This was a boon for the economy. Logistics is a general purpose industry and its own improvements have direct consequences for innovation and competition in other sectors. The logistics revolution in the 1980s was critical for the growth of lean production, an important process innovation that required just-in-time delivery of many source products and components. It provided companies with many new opportunities for where to start or grow businesses, and ways to reach consumers. Market deregulation helped to accelerate the diffusion of new technologies, making it easier for a company to take an innovation to market and for a user to adopt it.35 Moreover, changes in product market regulation reduced the capacity of companies to use market power such as first-mover advantage to limit innovation competition or to block markets to new entrants.36 Even in markets that have become more concentrated in recent phases of globalization, the spirit of competition brought by deregulation has been maintained and continues to limit the role of first-mover advantage.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

TliE qfobAl JNfoRMATiON JNfRASTRUCTURE led TO A "qUss pipEliNE," whERE The MOVEMENT of All PARTS ANd psoducTS ANd pEople could bE closely TRAckEd Th«ouqh EVERY sTAqe of pRoducriON, AbNq WlTh ThAT fltNdAMENTAl cliANqE JN COMMUNICATIONS, JN MOViNq INfORMA- TiON, CAME A biq IEAP foRWARd IN woviNq Thtwqs, A NEW qewERATiON of VERY IAST fREiqhTERS ANd lARqe CARqo pUwes bEEfed up Tk CARRyiNq CAPACITY white kEEpiwq TRANSPORT COSTS low, IN 2005, A NEW cUss of supERfREiqhTCR T!<AT could CARRY EVEN bulk CARQO, likE W^EAT, WENT INTO SERVJCE, CUTTINq lllE TIME foR TRANSPORT fROM T^E EAST COAST of AE UNlTEd STATES TO EUROPE ffiOM TEN dAyS TO T^REE. MANAqERS BECAME Much MORE efficiENT wi?h jusT'iN'TiME dEliveRiEs of EVERYThiNq fRow RAW MATERIA! TO polished pRoducis, Awd AvoidiNq Niqh INVENTORIES which WERE All COST ANd liwlE VAluE. IN AddmoN, ih£ ENTIRE wofild could bE usEd TO qer The besT pRices ON supplies,- NO BUSINESS OR CONSUMER WAS TRApped IN A loCAlilEd MARkET. IN ThE EARly iNdusTRiftl ECONOMY, All MAJOR PARTS supptas foR A DETROJT AU' TOMAkER hAd TO be locAl.


pages: 415 words: 103,231

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

., told me that there are “3 to 10 job opportunities” for every welder who graduates from his school.73 The backdrop for all of these challenges is the fact that the industry has little spare production capacity. For watchers of global business, that fact should not be a surprise. The oil industry has simply adopted some of the strategies of other major industries that use just-in-time delivery systems. In every industry, spare capacity of any type (manufacturing, power generation, consumer goods) is expensive. In order to stay competitive, companies are providing only as much production capacity as is needed by their customers at any given time. They meet the demands of their customers and they do it just in time.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The core insight was not just to reduce the number of journalists but to spread their output over time. It was reminiscent of Walmart’s strategy to spread warehouse costs across store clusters. Planned journalism resulted not only in fewer journalists but in greater productivity. Journalists could write more and better. Munck spoke of the contrast: “Just-in-time delivery resulted in more mistakes, worse designs, less flexibility, loss of editorial control, higher costs, and staff working late. And the news was still old.” In contrast, by planning ahead, “you have more time, you do better research, you do more investigative journalism, you can get all the graphics and rich multimedia that you can’t get when a story comes up five minutes before deadline.”


pages: 537 words: 149,628

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P. W. Singer, August Cole

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, air gap, augmented reality, British Empire, digital map, energy security, Firefox, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Google Glasses, IFF: identification friend or foe, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, old-boy network, operational security, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, stealth mode startup, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Marine Corps put the garage-door opener back in the plastic sandwich bag and shoved it into the cargo pocket on her pants. Nothing could go to waste in this kind of war. It was all so different from any of the combat she had seen in Yemen from the pilot’s seat of an MV-22K Osprey gunship. Here everything itched, everything rusted, and everything had to be scavenged. There was no just-in-time delivery of whatever ammunition or spare part you needed. And instead of government-issue combat footwear, they fought in sandals and running shoes, the group being made up of a few escapees from the captured bases and those who’d been lucky enough to be on leave the day of the attack. Between the dirty civilian clothes and the tactical playbook they were cribbing from, the insurgents quickly realized they were becoming the very bastards they’d spent most their professional military careers fighting.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

*2 As the Yale political scientist Bruce Russett has demonstrated, conflict is highest in regions such as the Middle East and Central Asia where there is low intra-regional trade and despotic rule. *3 The unoriginal name BCIM (Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar) is an acronym arranged to avoid sounding like the ICBM missile. *4 Toyota’s twin innovations of simplifying the number of components and accelerating toward just-in-time delivery ushered in a new era of lean management in global supply chains. But since the Taiwan earthquake in 1999 and the Japanese tsunami of 2011, companies learned not to over-concentrate the production of critical components in a single geography that, if suddenly lost, would send shock waves through the system.


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

Because of learning and increased competitive pressures, we should expect em firms to use more of these good management practices, relative to firms of today. These practices include performance-based rewards and job-placement, demanding but attainable goals, managers evaluated on attracting and retaining talent, regular equipment maintenance, thorough analysis of failures, clear job descriptions, just-in-time delivery, tracking production by order, pricing orders based on production costs, and frequent and detailed tracking of inputs, outputs, and performance. Many other business practices today are suspected of being inefficient, even if the case against them isn’t quite as strong. We should also (more weakly) expect these practices to decline in em firms, because of continued firm learning and increased competitive pressures.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

According to the US categorization, ready-mixed concrete and electroplating of metals count as parts of manufacturing but beneficiation of ores is a part of mining and “publishing and printing” are part of the information sector: a book is obviously a manufactured artifact but because its value “to the consumer lies in the information content, not in the format” (USCB 2018) it gets excluded. And a much more fundamental problem is the changing nature of modern manufacturing, as the sector depends on astute management; on just-in-time deliveries of parts and components coming in by trucks, ships, and airplanes; on efficient payroll and accounting; and, above all, on R&D activities that are necessary to update and to improve established designs and to introduce entirely new products in order to remain competitive in the global market.


pages: 611 words: 186,716

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

British Empire, clean water, dark matter, defense in depth, digital map, edge city, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Mason jar, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, the scientific method, Turing machine, wage slave

Just knowing it was in there gave him such an attitude that no one in his right mind would Rick with him, especially when they saw his Sights and the black leather. He got his way just by giving people the evil eye. It was time to move up the ladder. He sought work as a lookout. It wasn't easy. The alternative pharmaceuticals industry ran on a start, just-in-time delivery system, keeping inventories low so that there was never much evidence for the cops to seize. The stuff was grown in illicit matter compilers, squirreled away in vacant low-rent housing blocks, and carried by the runners to the actual street dealers. Meanwhile, a cloud of lookouts and decoys circulated probabilistically through the neighborhood, never stopping long enough to be picked up for loitering, monitoring the approach of cops (or cops' surveillance pods) through huds in their sunglasses.


Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The availability of reliable and cheap electricity has transformed virtually every industrial activity. By far the most important effect on manufacturing was the widespread adoption of assembly lines (Nye 2013). Their classic, and now outdated, rigid Fordian variety was based on a moving conveyor introduced in 1913. The modern, flexible Japanese kind relies on just-in-time delivery of parts and on workers capable of doing a number of different tasks. The system, introduced in Toyota factories, combined elements of American practices with indigenous approaches and original ideas (Fujimoto 1999). The Toyota production system (kaizen) rested on continuous product improvement and dedication to the best achievable continuous quality control.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

A company manufacturing television sets in China might not be as efficient in transporting those sets as a specialized transport enterprise would be, but at least they were less likely to damage their own TV sets by handling them roughly in transit. One of the other side effects of unreliable deliveries has been that Chinese firms have had to keep more goods in inventory, foregoing the advantages of “just in time” delivery practices in Japan, which reduce the Japanese firms’ costs of maintaining inventories. Dell Computers in the United States likewise operates with very small inventories, relative to their sales, but this is possible only because there are shipping firms like Federal Express or UPS that Dell can rely on to get components to them and computers to their customers quickly and safely.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

O n e c a n well i m a g i n e w h a t C h r y s l e r w o u l d h a v e s a i d h a d t h i n g s g o n e t h e o t h e r way. W h e r e fair play? 490 T H E W E A L T H AND POVERTY OF N A T I O N S japonaise and holding their wage bill down. To keep inventories lean, they are demanding just-in-time deliveries, some of them at twentyminute intervals. Some affiliated partsmakers are now working for outside car makers as well as for the mother assembly plant, thereby maximizing the rate o f utilization. C o m e a strike against the parent company, should the workers in the plant continue to produce for competitors?