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Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Why Don’t All Ant Species Replace Queens in the Colony, Since Some Do

  There are lots of examples of method is very effective at creating lots of successful offspring but happens to be less than ideal in some situations. Natural selection is pretty amazing and awesome at creating effective genes but we certainly can look at the results sometimes and see improvements that would be useful.

  Likely if losing the queen was very common a good way of dealing with that would be found (or that species would be disadvantaged and at risk). If the queen happens to evolve to being very reliable (and able to produce offspring that produce more - often by leaving to found new colonies) coping with her death becomes less important.

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• Amazon Using a Costco Strategy?

  Amazon Prime is in some ways is similar to Costco’s membership fees. Costco make the vast majority of their profit on membership fees and largely breaks even otherwise.

  Amazon Prime costs $79 a year (in the USA) and provides free 2 day shipping and access to their streaming video content. Amazon doesn’t disclose the numbers of prime members (that I can find anyway) but educated guesses seem to say 20 million (or more). That would be $1.6 billion a year.

  Amazon’s net income for the full year was $274 million. Fees for Prime customers were $1.6 billion

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• Politicians Playing Special Interests and Visa Versa

  the special interest can pay or cajole politicians to give them a benefit that helps them a lot (they can pay the politician a portion of their benefit and still have a huge gain) while society loses, no one loses enough to care enough to try and pay or cajole politicians to save society from a big loss.

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• Email Isn't the Problem

  ... I find there are plenty of times when email is a great tool (for example: providing background material in advance of discussions). Yes, often email is misused and there are plenty of bad processes around email. But it isn't very sensible to say we shouldn't use a hammer (email) because when we use it to cut paper it isn't very useful. We shouldn't misuse a tool; that doesn't mean we shouldn't use the tool properly.

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• Email Isn't the Problem

  I find there are plenty of times when email is a great tool (for example: providing background material in advance of discussions). Yes, often email is misused and there are plenty of bad processes around email. But it isn't very sensible to say we shouldn't use a hammer (email) because when we use it to cut paper it isn't very useful.  We shouldn't misuse a tool; that doesn't mean we shouldn't use the tool properly.

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• USA Health Expenditures Reached $2.8 trillion in 2012: $8,915 per person and 17.2% of GDP

  health care spending growing above the rate of inflation is bad news and something that has to change. We have to start addressing the massive excessive costs for health care in the USA versus the rest of the world. The broken USA health care system costs twice as much as other rich countries for worse results. And those are just the direct accounting costs – not the costs of millions without preventative health care, sleepness nights worrying about caring for sick children without health coverage, millions of hours spent on completing forms to try and comply with the requirements of the health care system’s endless demand for paperwork, lives crippled by health care bankruptcies…

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• What Works for One Business May Not Work For Others

  The success of management practices is highly dependent on the rest of the management system of the organization.

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• Thaipusam Festival, Johor Bahru

  Thaipusam is a Hindu festival dedicated to Lord Murugan (Kartikeya) celebrated mostly by the Tamil community on the full moon in the Tamil month of Thai (January/February).

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• Don't Let the Need to Blame Prevent Safety Improvements

  Another question this raises is if 20,000 lives a year could be saved by self-driving cars and people didn't use that safety advantage are they liable for choosing a dangerous option (person driven car) even if they were not specifically negligent as far as the facts of the specific case are concerned. If we know drunk driving is more dangerous we pass laws and you can't drive drunk. Even without any proof your actions were at fault your state of being drunk makes you liable. Well, if drive less cars are much safer what is the difference, logically (I realize given the current laws there is a legal difference)?

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• How Countries Rank Based on H-index for Science Publications

  This data makes a good case for the USA, UK, Germany… producing a very high level of very influential science publications. Whether Italy (#7) is obviously more influential than Brazil (#22) or India (#24) I think is fairly questionable. Also the method has a fairly high lag, I believe, so if a country is gaining influence rapidly the h-index will take longer to have that show up.

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