At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowan posted his ten favorite science fiction novels. A very interesting list that includes some of my favorites. I have read 9 out of those top ten. (I have not read the highly rated The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, of which I have only heard rave reviews. I hope to read it soon). I doubt that I will ever be able to read all Science Fiction that I would like to read. But, the list made me think of what my favorites would be. For the list, I am considering books I have loved reading when I read them (some in early-teens), and books that I have continued to come back to and enjoy, with no…
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Lego’s revenues for 2017 are now out. In September 2017, Financial Times reported on problems at Lego, which was then planning to cut about 8% of its workforce. Indeed, Lego has been suffering from increasingly bigger global operations problems, with poor sales in Europe and North America. There have been reports of inventories piling up at distribution centers. One of the reasons attributed for Lego’s troubles is that Lego has been distracted from its core competencies, by investing in movie franchising and so on. While that is partly true, as I will explain below, Lego’s core business itself has some fundamental issues, that need to be resolved. Let’s look at some Data and I point out two issues with Lego’s Operations Planning.…
Leave a CommentSnap’s adventurous foray into the hardware market continues. Cheddar and then Verge reported that Snap is busy working on Version 2 of Spectacles. Here is Alex Heath from Cheddar: But Snap won’t stop with version two of Spectacles. The company has also begun work on a more ambitious, third generation of Spectacles with a new design and two cameras, the people said. Snap has prototyped an aluminum design with more circular lens frames and two cameras that would allow for 3D-like depth effects in videos. Snap has additionally considered including a built-in GPS and a leather case, as well as a potential price tag of around $300, which would be more than double the current $130 cost for Spectacles. Snap…
Leave a CommentIn 2013, a guy who was trying to pitch a company, called DoorBot, that sold security doorbells, went nowhere on Shark Tank, as the sharks rejected his offer. The founder Jamie Siminoff positioned the idea at $7M. Here is the video. Last year, the company was valued at $460M. Last week, the company, now called Ring, was acquired by Amazon for $1B. This is not a post to castigate the poor assessments of Ring’s original business idea: As ideas evolve they get better, and some cosmic confluence of interests can be helpful for a firm. — Ring, at one Billion USD, is a tremendously expensive acquisition for Amazon. In fact, Ring is Amazon’s second-biggest acquisition, after Whole Foods. Similar large…
Leave a CommentElena Ferrante, like Thomas Pynchon, in a galaxy of admired literary stars, shines with an idiosyncratic allure of being anonymous. However, unlike Pynchon, the name “Elena Ferrante” itself is an assumed pseudonym. The identity of the author has been a source of intense speculation and prurient journalism. I found the book, My Brilliant Friend, mesmerizing and quite strange. I loved the bildungsroman aspects of lower-middle-class teens living in 1950s Naples: the dreamy aspirations, the class divide, petty squabbles contained in a neighborhood at an infinite distance to the Neapolitan Sea. Ferrante is at her best, I think when describing the complicated transition from childhood, both emotional and physical, into female adolescence. Especially the latter. I also found the text in My Brilliant Friend measured,…
Leave a CommentI wrote about Workampers, old retirees that move around the country in search of work, in my earlier blog post that discussed the excellent book, Nomadland by Jessica Bruder. In that post I mentioned that: So, it is very likely that it was not a young person that picked, packed or shipped the gift that you bought online this Holiday season. Instead, it is very likely that it was an old retiree… Increasingly e-commerce channels rely on retirees to pick products in the warehouse, which are then shipped to customers. (Picking is the lowest entry-level job in warehouses). Much of such retirees were people who lost their savings during the 2008 recession. Recently, one of the best reporters writing on operational issues in…
Leave a CommentHow to think about the role of Artificial Intelligence in Operations? Many people talk up AI, IoT, automation, etc, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (following steam power, electricity, and computerization). Here is an example. I am more persuaded by the counter-arguments. For example, see a post by Luke Muehlhauser arguing there was only one industrial revolution, because one of the revolutions is substantively larger than, and different from the others, as exhibited in the figure below (data from the site). The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, which ironically, I read on paper, explores the effects of the rapid digitization and information technological advances (AI, Automation, etc) on the nature of work, wealth and society. Brynjolfsson and McAfee…
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