Group items tagged

The problems in India were cultural, bureaucratic and practical.

Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.

In 2012, the M.I.T. Forum for Supply Chain Innovation and the publication Supply Chain Digest conducted a joint survey of 340 of their members. The survey found that one-third of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering moving some production to the United States, and about 15 percent of the respondents said they had already decided to do so.

Last year Ukraine consumed about 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, most of it imported from Russia, while producing about 19 billion cubic meters, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Shale gas technologies are altering the geopolitics of energy from Russia to the Middle East. Three territories — Russia, Iran and Qatar — hold about half the conventional reserves of natural gas. But shale is found in many other places, including India, China, Australia and in Eastern Europe, undercutting the power of the oil sheikhs and the Kremlin.

Ukraine, despite producing some domestic gas by conventional extraction, remains highly dependent on Russia’s Gazprom, which cut off its supplies in 2006 and 2009 in pricing disputes. As a result, Ukraine pays exceptionally high prices for natural gas,

As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T., said, “This is the biggest challenge of our society for the next decade.”

Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 are among the most skilled in the world, according to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Younger Americans are closer to average among the residents of rich countries, and below average by some measures.

You can think of Mr. Obama’s argument as falling into two categories (even if he didn’t say so): the reasons that overall economic growth may accelerate, and the reasons that middle- and low-income workers may benefit more from that growth than they have lately.

On the growth side of the ledger, both energy and education have been problems.

And the number of high-school and college graduates is rising. The financial crisis deserves some perverse credit, because it sent people fleeing back to school, much as the Great Depression did

Mr. Balter calls Apple a financial “Rock of Gibraltar"— it is sitting on $150.6 billion of cash

Chief among them is a reliance on small creative teams whose membership remains intact to this day

And Mr. Ive pointed to another enduring value: a complete focus on the product.

The iEconomy

American and 2 Japanese Physicists Share Nobel for Work on LED Lights

In Africa, millions of diode lamps that run on solar power have been handed out to replace polluting kerosene lamps.

For the same amount of energy consumption, LED bulbs produce four times the light of a fluorescent bulb and nearly 20 times the light of an incandescent bulb.

Alibaba Is Investing Huge Sums in an Array of U.S. Tech Companies

Europe, Facing Economic Pain, May Ease Climate Rules

On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal that is likely to be much harder to enforce.

The magic is in that head: GE has put a small heat pump up there, and the GeoSpring pulls ambient heat from the air to help heat water. As a result, the GeoSpring uses some 60 percent less electricity than a typical water heater. (You can also control it using your iPhone.)

The GeoSpring is an innovative product in a mature category

We really had zero communications into the assembly line there.”

Once Celebrated in Russia, the Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

Mr. Putin’s big challenge is falling oil prices, which Mr. Durov calls “the only chance” for economic and political reform.“When the petrol prices are high, there is no incentive for those reforms,” he said. “It can stay like this forever; nobody really cares.”

Mr. Durov has also described himself, with tongue in cheek, as a Pastafarian, a quirky atheistic “faith” that can involve wearing a colander on your head.

Traffic Snarls Expected in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber

Several of Europe’s largest cities were snarled by traffic jams on Wednesday when thousands of taxi drivers blocked roads and held rallies in protest of ​an upstart​ American​ service that lets customers book rides through smartphones.

Founded in 2009

A European Energy Executive’s Delicate Dance Over Ukraine

Major Western oil companies like BP and Exxon Mobil have extensive exploration deals in Russia that they fear could be jeopardized if the United States and European Union impose stiffer sanctions on the Putin regime.

“This is by far the toughest time for European energy security that I have seen,” said Mr. Scaroni. “This issue might stop the supply of Russian gas.”

Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis

Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. In fact, by midcentury more than half of the American economy will run on electricity. Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal’s footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply.

“This will require a heroic cooperative effort,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who directs the Sustainable Development Solutions Network at the United Nations,

“Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”

Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building.

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, excluding South Africa, the entire electricity-generating capacity available is only 28 gigawatts — equivalent to Arizona’s — for 860 million people. About 6.5 million people live in Arizona.

Over the last 30 years, China moved an estimated 680 million people out of poverty by giving them access to modern energy, mostly powered by coal. Yes, this has resulted in terrible air pollution and a huge increase in greenhouse gas emissions. But it is a trade-off many developing countries would gratefully choose.

Today, 81 percent of the planet’s energy needs are met by fossil fuels, and according to the International Energy Agency, that percentage will be almost as high in 2035 under current policies, when consumption will be much greater. The unfortunate fact is that many people feel uncomfortable facing up to the undeniable need for more cheap and reliable power in the developing world.