Although the study uses some sophisticated statistical methods, its basic point is straightforward: in the long term, economic output (G.D.P.) is constrained by the quantity and the quality of economic inputs (labor, capital, and technology). If the growth rate and quality of these inputs decline, the potential growth rate of G.D.P. will fall, too—it’s just a matter of arithmetic.
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Has the U.S. Economy Been Permanently Damaged? : The New Yorker - 0 views
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With hiring rates down, many workers have given up searching for jobs and have dropped out of the labor force.
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With budgets tight, corporations and government departments have cut back on investments in new plants and machinery, computer hardware and software, and research and development.
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The authors come up with a variety of numbers, including one that has received a lot of attention: potential G.D.P.—broadly speaking, the level of G.D.P. consistent with stable inflation—“is currently about 7 percent below the trajectory it appeared to be on prior to 2007.” According to the latest figures from the Commerce Department, the G.D.P. is now close to seventeen trillion dollars, and seven per cent of that figure is $1.2 trillion. This is a lot of money to have gone missing, especially if it will never be recovered. Hence Krugman’s dire conclusion: “By tolerating high unemployment we have inflicted huge damage on our long-run prospects …. What passes these days for sound policy is in fact a form of economic self-mutilation, which will cripple America for many years to come.”
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As well as figuring out the current level of potential G.D.P., the authors estimate its growth rate. This is the more important figure, because it’s what determines living standards over the long term
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In the period from 2000 to 2007, the paper says the average potential growth rate of G.D.P. was 2.6 per cent.
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In the nineteen-eighties, Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard, who is now the chief economist of the I.M.F., resurrected the idea and gave it a new name, which they borrowed from engineering: hysteresis. Blanchard and Summers examined hysteresis in Europe, where high rates of unemployment have long been a problem.
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The good news is that things aren’t quite as bad as the figures in the Fed paper might suggest. If we can get policy right and sharply increase the level of over-all demand in the economy, most of the damage done in the past five years is reversible.
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At the moment, sadly, there is no prospect of any more fiscal stimulus, let alone a war-sized one, and the onus is falling on the Fed to gee up the economy.
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Coming Full Circle in Energy, to Nuclear - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In a typical day, Mr. Durgin tells me, 21 trains depart the mine, pulling 135 cars each. Each car bears 120 tons of coal. At this pace, he says, there is more than 20 years’ worth of coal ready to mine under my feet.
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North Antelope Rochelle is among the biggest coal mines in the world. It produced 108 million tons last year — about 10 percent of all the coal burned by the nation’s power plants.
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North Antelope Rochelle and the other vast strip mines cutting through the plains of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin — whose low-sulfur carbon met standards imposed by the Clean Air Act — were the result
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Today renewable energy supplies only about 6 percent of American demand. And most of that comes from water flowing through dams. Solar energy contributes next to nothing.
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The arithmetic is merciless. To make it likely that the world’s temperature will rise no more than 2 degrees Celsius above the average of the preindustrial era — a target agreed to by the world’s governments in 2010 — humanity must spew no more than 900 billion more tons of carbon dioxide into the air from now through 2050 and only 75 billion tons after that, according to an authoritative new study in Britain.
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The United States Energy Information Administration forecasts that global energy consumption will grow 56 percent between now and 2040.
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“We have trillions of tons of coal resources in the world,” Vic Svec, spokesman for Peabody Energy, told me. “You can expect the world to use them all.”
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The only way around this is to put something in coal’s place, at a reasonably competitive price. Neither the warm glow of the sun nor the restless power of the wind is going to do the trick, at least not soon enough to make a difference in the battle to prevent climate change.
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Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Now, they are trying to respond, making lighter, stronger steel in a bid to retain one of their most important customers, the automakers.
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chief executive of Severstal North America, the United States subsidiary of Russia’s Severstal Group, which now owns the Rouge steel operations.
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At Severstal’s Dearborn factory, for example, carmakers including Ford and others account for 70 percent of sales,
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The shift to aluminum is gaining momentum. Automakers are under increasing pressure to meet strict new fuel-economy standards by 2025
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United States Steel has invested $400 million in a joint venture with Kobe Steel of Japan to make advanced high-strength steel in a Leipsic, Ohio, factory expected to produce 500,000 tons annually.
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Inside Severstal’s steel mill on a cold January day, hissing heavy machinery removed oxides from steel sheets, reducing their thickness to the equivalent of five human hairs.
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For nearly a century, Ford’s River Rouge factory and its neighboring steel mill have worked in close harmony
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Steel makers argue that they still have advantages in price — aluminum can cost as much as three times more — and flexibility, both for the manufacturer and the mechanic who will be fixing the car.“When you build a mass-produced vehicle, you really need to think about the consequences of the supply chain and repair and insurance costs,” Mr. Dey said.
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new federal fuel-efficiency standards that will require a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a significant boost from the roughly 25 m.p.g. that vehicles average today.
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“Sometimes there is a push from the aluminum side, and they win over with a particular model, and steel tends to be the comeback kid, with more innovation,” said Felix Schuler, a Munich-based partner in the Boston Consulting Group’s metals and mining practice.
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What seems certain is that ordinary steel is likelier to lose out to its new and improved cousin than to aluminum, Mr. Schuler said.
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Novelis is investing nearly $550 million to upgrade plants in Oswego, N.Y., and Nachterstedt, Germany, and to build a new factory in Changzhou, China, to triple its capacity from a year ago to 900,000 tons annually.
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Alcoa, the country’s biggest aluminum producer, is investing about $670 million in its Iowa, Tennessee and Saudi Arabia facilities.Continue reading the main story
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“Henry Ford was a control freak, and he wanted to control as much of the manufacturing as possible,” Mr. Casey said. “He made the steel, he made the glass, he made the tires.”
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An interview with Athanasios Orphanides: What happened in Cyprus | The Economist - 0 views
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Cyprus had developed its financial center over three decades ago by having double taxation treaties with a number of countries, the Soviet Union for example. That means if profits are booked and earned and taxed in Cyprus, they are not taxed again in the other country. Russian deposits are there because Cyprus has a low corporate tax rate, much like Malta and Luxembourg, which annoys some people in Europe.
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This government took a country with excellent fiscal finances, a surplus in fiscal accounts, and a banking system that was in excellent health. They started overspending, not only for unproductive government expenditures but also they raised implicit liabilities by raising pension promises, and so forth.
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The size of the banking sector and exposure to Greece were known risks but at that time there was no banking problem in Cyprus
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The containers were part of a shipment going from Iran to Syria that was intercepted in Cypriot waters after a tip from the U.S. The president took the decision to keep the ammunition. [NOTE: An independent prosecutor found that Christofias has ignored repeated warnings and pleas to destroy or safeguard the ammunition, apparently in hopes of one day returning it to Syria or Iran.]
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Instead, they started lobbying the Russian government to give them a loan that would help them finance the country for a couple more years, and Russia came through, unfortunately,
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I say unfortunately because as a result the government could keep operating and accumulating deficits without taking corrective action.
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The next important date was the October 26-27, 2011 meeting of the EU council in Brussels where European leaders decided to wipe out what ended up being about 80% of the value of Greek debt that the private sector held. Every bank operating in Greece, regardless of where it was headquartered, had a lot of Greek debt.
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For Cyprus, the writedown of Greek debt was between 4.5 and 5 billion euro, a substantial chunk of capital.
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The second element of the decision taken by heads of states was to instruct the EBA to do a so- called capital exercise that marked to market sovereign debt and effectively raised abruptly capital requirements. The exercise required banks to have a core tier-1 ratio of 9%, and on top of that a buffer to make up for differences in market and book value of government debt. That famous capital exercise created the capital crunch in the euro area which is the cause of the recession we've had in the euro area for the last 2 years.
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The Basle II framework that governments adopted internationally, and that the EU supervisory framework during this period also incorporated, specifies that holdings of government debt in a states' own currency are a zero-risk-weight asset, that is they are assigned a weight of zero in calculating capital requirements.
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the governments should have agreed to make the EFSF/ESM available for direct recapitalization of banks instead of asking each government to be responsible for the capitalization.
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Following a downgrading in late June 2012, all three major rating agencies rated the sovereign paper Cyprus below investment grade. According to ECB rules, that made the government debt not eligible as collateral for borrowing from the eurosystem, unless the ECB suspended the rules, as it had done for the cases of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. In the case of Cyprus, the ECB decided not to suspend the eligibility rule.
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The governments have created risk in what before last week were considered perfectly safe deposits. This is going to have a chilling effect on deposits in any bank in a country perceived to be weak. This will mean the cost of funding will increase in the periphery of Europe and as a result, the cost of financing for businesses and households will increase. That will add to the divergences we already have and make the recession in the periphery of Europe deeper than it already is. This is really a disaster for European economic management as a whole.
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U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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Between 2000 and 2011, on average, 17 manufacturers closed up shop every day across the country, according to research from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
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yes, it means jobs, but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process. Take Parkdale: The mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.
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“We just avoid so many big and small stumbles that invariably happen when you try to do things from far away,” he said. “We would never be where we are today if we were overseas. Nowhere close.”
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Time was foremost among them. The Indian mill needed too much time — three to five months — to perfect its designs, send samples, schedule production, ship the fabric to the United States and get it through customs. Mr. Winthrop was hesitant to predict demand that far in advance.
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The North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was the first blow, erasing import duties on much of the apparel produced in Mexico.
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How Putin Forged a Pipeline Deal That Derailed - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The pipeline, known as South Stream, was Mr. Putin’s most important European project, a tool of economic and geopolitical power critical to twin goals: keeping Europe hooked on Russian gas, and further entrenching Russian influence in fragile former Soviet satellite states as part of a broader effort to undermine European unity.
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The bill that Parliament took up on April 4 was arcane. But it swept aside a host of European regulations — rules that Mr. Putin did not want to abide by — for a pipeline that would deliver gas throughout southern Europe. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage In Diplomatic Defeat, Putin Diverts Pipeline to TurkeyDEC. 1, 2014
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In France, the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, recently acknowledged that her party had received a loan for 9 million euros, or about $11 million, from a Kremlin-linked bank.
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Faced with punishing sanctions, a petro-economy pushed to the brink by plunging oil prices and the wildly gyrating value of the ruble, Mr. Putin this month halted the project.
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Geological surveys suggested that Bulgaria could be sitting atop an underground ocean of natural gas, enough to be self-sufficient for years, enough to eclipse the advantages of South Stream.
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On April 4, 2014, soon after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, Bulgaria’s Parliament gave initial passage to a bill that effectively exempted South Stream from a number of European Union regulations, most important, the one that would have forced Gazprom to allow non-Russian gas to flow through the pipeline.
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“If I hear one more word about competition, I’m going to freeze your you-know-whats off,” Mr. Putin reportedly shouted.
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The anti-fracking movement became so broad that in January 2012, Parliament banned not only the extraction of shale gas, but even exploration that would quantify the country’s reserves.
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When the Bulgarian government refused, the European Union cut off tens of millions of euros in regional development funds.
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In desperate need of the European funds, the prime minister announced the next day that South Stream would be halted until it had full European Union approval.
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While “he overreached, and he underestimated the response” to his intervention in Ukraine, said Mr. Gray, the former American diplomat, the Russian leader has been “quite effective” in countries like Bulgaria.“He won a great deal by getting Nabucco stopped,” Mr. Gray said. “Ultimately, his goal is to keep as much control over the former parts of the Soviet empire as possible.”
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Why Do Americans Stink at Math? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them.
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In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices.
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Carefully taught, the assignments can help make math more concrete. Students don’t just memorize their times tables and addition facts but also understand how arithmetic works and how to apply it to real-life situations. But in practice, most teachers are unprepared and children are baffled, leaving parents furious.
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On national tests, nearly two-thirds of fourth graders and eighth graders are not proficient in math. More than half of fourth graders taking the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress could not accurately read the temperature on a neatly drawn thermometer.
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On the same multiple-choice test, three-quarters of fourth graders could not translate a simple word problem about a girl who sold 15 cups of lemonade on Saturday and twice as many on Sunday into the expression “15 + (2×15).” Even in Massachusetts, one of the country’s highest-performing states, math students are more than two years behind their counterparts in Shanghai.
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A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy.
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On a scale of 1 to 5, 29 percent of them scored at Level 1 or below, meaning they could do basic arithmetic but not computations requiring two or more steps.
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One study that examined medical prescriptions gone awry found that 17 percent of errors were caused by math mistakes on the part of doctors or pharmacists.
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“I’m just not a math person,” Lampert says her education students would say with an apologetic shrug.
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In the 1970s and the 1980s, cognitive scientists studied a population known as the unschooled, people with little or no formal education.
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For instance, many of the workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education. But they were able to do math, in order to assemble their loads efficiently, that was “equivalent to shifting between different base systems of numbers.”
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Studies of children in Brazil, who helped support their families by roaming the streets selling roasted peanuts and coconuts, showed that the children routinely solved complex problems in their heads to calculate a bill or make change.
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The answer-getting strategies may serve them well for a class period of practice problems, but after a week, they forget. And students often can’t figure out how to apply the strategy for a particular problem to new problems.
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In the process, she gave them an opportunity to realize, on their own, why their answers were wrong.
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At most education schools, the professors with the research budgets and deanships have little interest in the science of teaching
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Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
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A year after he got to Chicago, he went to a one-day conference of teachers and mathematicians and was perplexed by the fact that the gathering occurred only twice a year.
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More distressing to Takahashi was that American teachers had almost no opportunities to watch one another teach.
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In Japan, teachers had always depended on jugyokenkyu, which translates literally as “lesson study,” a set of practices that Japanese teachers use to hone their craft. A teacher first plans lessons, then teaches in front of an audience of students and other teachers along with at least one university observer. Then the observers talk with the teacher about what has just taken place. Each public lesson poses a hypothesis, a new idea about how to help children learn.
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The research showed that Japanese students initiated the method for solving a problem in 40 percent of the lessons; Americans initiated 9 percent of the time.
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Similarly, 96 percent of American students’ work fell into the category of “practice,” while Japanese students spent only 41 percent of their time practicing.
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Finland, meanwhile, made the shift by carving out time for teachers to spend learning. There, as in Japan, teachers teach for 600 or fewer hours each school year, leaving them ample time to prepare, revise and learn. By contrast, American teachers spend nearly 1,100 hours with little feedback.
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In one experiment in which more than 200 American teachers took part in lesson study, student achievement rose, as did teachers’ math knowledge — two rare accomplishments.
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Examining nearly 3,000 teachers in six school districts, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently found that nearly two-thirds scored less than “proficient” in the areas of “intellectual challenge” and “classroom discourse.”
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Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Michael A. Cusumano, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., said he thought Apple no longer had the juice to create the world-beating product it needs.
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The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman - The Atlantic - 0 views
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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.)
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the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.
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there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”
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At the end of the day, they say, ‘If we were doing this for the U.S. market, we should never have gone to China in the first place.’ ”
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But the logic of onshoring today goes even further—and is driven, in part, by the newfound impatience of the product cycle itself.
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Just a few years ago, the design of a new range or refrigerator was assumed to last seven years. Now, says Lou Lenzi, GE’s managers figure no model will be good for more than two or three years.
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Products that once seemed mature—from stoves to greeting cards—are being reinvigorated with cheap computing technology.
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Taiwan's information-technology industry: After the personal computer | The Economist - 0 views
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its companies make 89% of the world’s notebooks, as well as 46% of desktop PCs. These days they make them mainly with Chinese labour: 94% of their hardware, by value, is produced on the mainland.
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It is moving into retailing and wants to develop its own technology, for which it intends to hire another 5,000-10,000 engineers in Taiwan.
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The leading ODMs have realised that they cannot rely on the PC for ever. One option is to go where the growth is: mobile devices.
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Wistron spread into cloud computing, after-sales service (of which it already did plenty), medical equipment and recycling—which Patrick Lin now runs.
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Taiwanese companies can adapt in a very short time,” says Chris Hung, an analyst at MIC. They have done so before, such as when they moved production to China to take advantage of its big, cheap labour force. Up against Chinese capital as well as labour, not to mention the South Koreans, they must do so again.
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As Panama Canal Expands, West Coast Ports Scramble to Keep Big Cargo Vessels - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The ports in Tacoma, Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach and elsewhere offer much shorter sailing times than Gulf Coast and East Coast ports. But for shippers of some goods, the web of logistics, including trucks and railroads, ends up being less expensive if they go through the Panama Canal.
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While the widened Panama Canal will allow an all-water route for big ships to the East Coast, the project — originally scheduled to open this year — has been plagued with construction delays. And the authorities have yet to announce toll charges for passing ships. In the end, it might be too expensive for some ships to use.
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At the same time, sailing patterns may shift as Asian manufacturing continues to move from China to countries to the south, like Singapore and Vietnam, which are actually closer by sea to East Coast ports through the Suez Canal than to West Coast ports across the Pacific.
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For trade with China, Prince Rupert’s appeal is proximity. Prince Rupert is two to three days closer than the western coast of the United States, helping ships cut fuel costs.
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While the railways and truck lines in Canada have a history of labor instability, cargo carriers sailing into the country can avoid taxes levied by the United States government.
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Is Europe's gas supply threatened by the Ukraine crisis? | World news | The Guardian - 0 views
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more than a quarter of the EU's total gas needs were met by Russian gas, and some 80% of it came via Ukrainian pipelines. Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland soon reported gas pressure in their own pipelines was down by as much as 30%.
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While it was eventually resolved through a complex deal that saw Ukraine buying gas from Russia (at full price) and Turkmenistan (at cut price) via a Swiss-registered Gazprom subsidiary
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But three years later, the same row erupted again: Gazprom demanded a price hike to $400-plus from $250, Kiev flatly refused, and on New Year's day 2009, Gazprom began pumping only enough gas to meet the needs of its customers beyond Ukraine.
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Again, the consequences were marked. Inevitably, Russia accused Ukraine of siphoning off supplies meant for European customers to meet its own needs, and cut supplies completely
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several countries – particularly in south-eastern Europe, almost completely dependent on supplies from Ukraine – simply ran out of gas.
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Many industry experts, though, point out that the world has changed since 2009, and that there are any number of reasons why Moscow's natural gas supplies may not prove quite the potent economic and diplomatic weapon they once were.
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higher than normal temperatures are forecast to continue for several weeks yet, significantly reducing demand for gas and leaving prices at their lowest for two years
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since the first "gas war" of 2006, many European countries have made huge efforts to increase their gas storage capacity and stocks are high. Some countries, such as Bulgaria, Slovakia and Moldova, which lack large storage capacity and depend heavily on gas supplies via Ukraine, would certainly suffer from any disruption in supplies
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New Gazprom pipelines via Belarus and the Baltic Sea to Germany (Nord Stream) have cut the proportion of Gazprom's Europe-bound exports that transit via Ukraine to around half the total, meaning only about 15% of Europe's gas now relies on Ukraine's pipelines. Gazprom is also planning a Black Sea pipeline (South Stream), expected in 2015, meaning its exports to Europe will bypass Ukraine completely. Ukraine itself has cut its domestic gas consumption by nearly 40% over the past few years, halving its imports from Russia in the process.
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Europe is increasingly installing specialist terminals that will allow gas to be imported from countries such as Qatar in the form of liquefied natural gas – while Norway's Statoil sold more gas to European countries in 2012 than Gazprom did. "Since the Russian supply cuts of 2006 and 2009, the tables have totally turned," Anders åslund, an energy advisor to both the Russian and Ukrainian governments, told the Washington Post.
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Europe accounts for around a third of Gazprom's total gas sales, and around half of Russia's total budget revenue comes from oil and gas. Moscow needs that source of revenue, and whatever Vladimir Putin's geo-political ambitions, most energy analysts seem to agree he will think twice about jeopardising it.
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Work Like a German - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In the German job-share model (known as “Kurzarbeit”), if an employer cuts an employee’s hours so that income is reduced by more than 10 percent, the government compensates workers for a large portion of wages lost. This enables companies to cut costs during downturns without having to lay workers off.
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For the long-term unemployed who take significantly lower-paying jobs (typically, at minimum-wage levels), the unemployment benefits could offer stop-loss insurance to put a floor under their losses.
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The new program should also subsidize employers to provide paid sick days, family leave and child care support — measures that are especially important for disadvantaged women in the work force.
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Taking another page from the German system — this time, its apprenticeship program — training should include both internships and postgraduate job placements.
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Once workers go on the Disability Insurance rolls, it has proved very hard to get them off; all the while, their skills and contacts in the workplace atrophy. In the fiscal year 2013, the program is estimated to have cost a record $144 billion.
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Squash Seeds Show Andean Cultivation Is 10,000 Years Old, Twice as Old as Thought - New... - 0 views
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Seeds of domesticated squash found by scientists on the western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old, about twice the age of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region, new, more precise dating techniques have revealed.
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The excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and 6,000 years old, respectively
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Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including a grain, manioc and unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period of time.
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The article also noted that 10,000-year-old cultivated squash seeds had recently been reported in Mexico, along with evidence of domesticated corn there by 9,000 years ago. Scholars now think that plants were domesticated independently in at least 10 “centers of origin,” including, in addition to the Middle East, Mexico and Peru, places in Africa, southern India, China and New Guinea.
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In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, an arc from modern-day Israel through Syria and Turkey to Iraq, wheat and barley were domesticated by 10,000 years ago, and possibly rye by 13,000 years ago. Experts in ancient agriculture suspect that the transition from foraging to cultivation had started much earlier and was not as abrupt a transformation as indicated in the archaeological record.
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The distribution of building structures, canals and furrowed fields, Dr. Dillehay said, indicated that the Andean culture was moving beyond cultivation limited to individual households toward an organized agricultural society.
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Suspension Bridges - Inca - Andes - New York Times - 0 views
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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Similar bridges existed in other mountainous regions of the world, most notably in the Himalayas and in ancient China, where iron chain suspension bridges existed in the third century B.C.”
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The last existing Inca suspension bridge, at Huinchiri, near Cuzco, is virtually rebuilt each year. People from the villages on either side hold a three-day festival and gather stiff grasses for producing more than 50,000 feet of cord. Finally, the cord is braided into 150-foot replacement cables.
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Irish Charm With Germans Leads Nation Out of Bailout Wilderness - Bloomberg - 0 views
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Before the new government could go on the offensive, it needed to play defense. It fended off an attack on Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, the cornerstone of an economic policy that transformed Ireland from a financial backwater into a European hub for companies such as Pfizer Inc., the maker of Viagra, and Google Inc.
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Two days after commencing his premiership, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, 62, became embroiled in what he called a Gallic spat with French President Nicolas Sarkozy after refusing to raise the tax rate in return for an interest-rate cut on aid.
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Within months, the central bank injected more than 1 trillion euros of three-year loans into the region’s banking system
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Noonan then ramped up his efforts to broker a deal on banking debt. He had a consistent line: it was payback time. The government hadn’t imposed losses on senior bank bondholders, preventing contagion spreading across the euro region from the Irish banking crisis.
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The economy emerged from recession in the second quarter, unemployment dropped for six months in a row, and house prices in Dublin are rising again. The yield on 10-year bonds is down to 3.5 percent, lower than Italy and Spain.
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“The Germans disagree all the time until the very end, and then they agree,” he said. “Once you realize that, you keep talking, you keep chipping away.”
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Why Apple Got a 'Made in U.S.A.' Bug - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Today, rising energy prices and a global market for computers are changing the way companies make their machines.
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Hewlett-Packard, which turns out over 50 million computers a year through its own plants and subcontractors, makes many of its larger desktop personal computers in such higher-cost areas as Indianapolis and Tokyo to save on fuel costs and to serve business buyers rapidly.
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In 1998, President Bill Clinton visited a Gateway Computer factory outside Dublin to cheer the role of American manufacturers in the rise of a “Celtic Tiger” in technology.That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China
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A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).
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More recent products, laptops and notebook computers, were in many cases originally assembled in China, and they are still largely made there. So are most smartphones and tablets. Every week, H.P. sends a group of cargo containers filled with notebooks to Europe.
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The labor cost on a notebook, which is about 4 to 5 percent of the retail price, is only slightly higher than the cost of shipping by air. Soon even that is likely to change because of the twin forces of lower manufacturing costs from automation and higher transportation costs from rising global activity.
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Intel, which makes most of the processors, has plants in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Israel, Ireland and China.
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Many other chip companies design their own products and have them made in giant factories, largely in Taiwan and China. Computer screens are made in Taiwan and South Korea, for the most part.
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The special glass used for the touch screens of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, however, is an exception. It comes primarily from the United States.
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As cheap as a Chinese assembly worker may be, an emerging trend in manufacturing, specialized robots, promises to be even cheaper. The most valuable part of the computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.
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That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China. Dell, which made its mark by developing lean manufacturing techniques in Texas, closed its showcase Austin factory in 2008 as part of a companywide move to manufacturing in China. A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).
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