Author Archives: legallysociable

Globalization relies on pallets

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Tom Vanderbilt exposes the hidden workhorse of globalization: the humble pallet.

And yet pallets are arguably as integral to globalization as containers. For an invisible object, they are everywhere: There are said to be billions circulating through global supply chain (2 billion in the United States alone). Some 80 percent of all U.S. commerce is carried on pallets. So widespread is their use that they account for, according to one estimate, more than 46 percent of total U.S. hardwood lumber production.

Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its “Bang” mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer’s cupboard). After the changes, it was possible to fit 2,204 mugs on a pallet, rather than the original 864, which created a 60 percent reduction in shipping costs. There is a whole science of “pallet cube optimization,” a kind of Tetris for packaging; and an associated engineering, filled with analyses of “pallet overhang” (stacking cartons so they hang over the edge of the pallet, resulting in losses of carton strength) and efforts to reduce “pallet gaps” (too much spacing between deckboards). The “pallet loading problem,”—or the question of how to fit the most boxes onto a single pallet—is a common operations research thought exercise…

As USDA Forest Service researchers Gilbert P. Dempsey and David G. Martens noted in a conference paper, two factors led to the real rise of the pallet. The first was the 1937 invention of gas-powered forklift trucks, which “allowed goods to be moved, stacked, and stored with extraordinary speed and versatility.”

The second factor in the rise of the pallet was World War II. Logistics—the “Big ‘L’,” as one history puts it—is the secret story behind any successful military campaign, and pallets played a large role in the extraordinary supply efforts in the world’s first truly global war. As one historian, quoted by Rick Le Blanc in Pallet Enterprise, notes, “the use of the forklift trucks and pallets was the most significant and revolutionary storage development of the war.” Tens of millions of pallets were employed—particularly in the Pacific campaigns, with their elongated supply lines. Looking to improve turnaround times for materials handling, a Navy Supply Corps officer named Norman Cahners—who would go on to found the publishing giant of the same name—invented the “four-way pallet.” This relatively minor refinement, which featured notches cut in the side so that forklifts could pick up pallets from any direction, doubled material-handling productivity per man. If there’s a Silver Star for optimization, it belongs to Cahners.

I will attest to the importance of pallets from my two summers spent working in a book publisher’s warehouse. The second summer, much of my work day consisted of loading boxes onto pallets, driving the forklift with the pallet to an unloading area, and then unloading the boxes so that workers along the line could start the books moving down the line to what would become packed boxes. Without pallets, I have trouble imagining how so many boxes of books could have been moved.

This did raise some other questions for me:

1. How much money can be made manufacturing pallets? Clearly the world needs a lot of pallets…

2. How many pallets become unusable each year and what happens to these pallets?

3. Do people like products that are specifically designed for better packing on a pallet, like Costco’s rectangular milk containers?

h/t Instapundit

More on Twitter co-founder and his teardown vs. neighbors in San Francisco

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I recently wrote about Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ fight with his San Francisco neighbors over his proposed teardown McMansion. Here is more information about the story:

“We don’t want nouveau riches McMansions sprouting up all over our ridges,” one resident wrote to San Francisco’s Planning Department.

And here, at least, is one local example of the side-effect of a tech boom that the city has fought hard to fuel. San Francisco worked hard in particular to convince Twitter to keep its headquarters in town in hopes that it would amp up the tech scene north of Silicon Valley. Williams, who is 40, was Twitter’s CEO before stepping down in 2010 to support more tech startups…

The strife started after Williams and Lundberg Design, the design firm hired by Williams, contacted neighbors about the couple’s plans. A couple of longtime residents quickly began circulating a handwritten flyer around the neighborhood, decrying the “APPALLING” plan to demolish a “widely coveted, unique and historic (to most) house.”

“TEAR DOWN is NEEDLESS, WASTEFUL, POLLUTION, DISRESPECTFUL,” the flyer said in all caps. It asked people to send in one letter per person if possible because “volume counts.”…

Williams isn’t alone in his neighborhood woes. Other high tech moguls have run into opposition from neighbors, including late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was trying to demolish a Woodside property and rebuild as well, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who sued his Pacific Heights neighbors last year for their overgrown trees. Ellison’s Pacific Heights residence was, coincidentally, designed by Lundberg Design.

Sounds quite contentious. The columnist suggests San Francisco might have to change a little if it wants to keep important firms; what if the Twitter co-founder threatened to move away, taking away tax revenue and jobs? Communities compete against each other by offering tax breaks or other incentives so couldn’t corporations and their leaders make stipulations about housing issues?

Rising income segregation in the United States

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Sociologist Stephen Klineberg discusses income segregation and a new Pew Report that suggests it is growing in the United States:

So what’s happening – as the gap between rich and poor increases, people increasingly live in very separate worlds and we’ve always sort of been more comfortable in communities made up of what the Wall Street Journal once called PLUs, people like us. Right? We never liked it too much. There were a lot of people much poorer than us or much richer than us. We’d like to be in those communities where we felt at home and with people like ourselves and you see it in Houston, I think, more than most other cities because Houston is still, today, the most spread out, least dense major city in the country…

The great danger for the future of America is not an ethnic divide. It’s a class divide…

Oh, tremendous consequences of the isolation of the poor in places where there are only other poor people with very few connections to the job opportunities that are out there, to the knowledge. We know that there are several forms of capital. Right? There’s human capital, which is education. There’s financial capital and there’s, above all, social capital. Who do you know? Who are you connected with? Who can you go to for advice? Who will know about jobs that are opening and help connect you to those jobs?

And so the isolation of the poor creates two things. Number one is it isolates the poor in ways that make it much more difficult for them to work their way out of poverty and it isolates the rich so that they live in worlds where they have no clue as to the kind of challenges that people are facing.

This is not a new issue. However, several decades ago, the focus was more on the extremely poor/the hypersegregated living in inner cities, and now the problem is perceived to be affecting more people.

The Pew report can be found here and here are some of the findings:

The analysis finds that 28% of lower-income households in 2010 were located in a majority lower-income census tract, up from 23% in 1980, and that 18% of upper- income households were located in a majority upper-income census tract, up from 9% in 1980.

These increases are related to the long-term rise in income inequality, which has led to a shrinkage in the share of neighborhoods across the United States that are predominantly middle class or mixed income—to 76% in 2010, down from 85% in 1980—and a rise in the shares that are majority lower income (18% in 2010, up from 12% in 1980) and majority upper income (6% in 2010, up from 3% in 1980)…

By adding together the share of lower-income households living in a majority lower-income tract and the share of upper-income households living in a majority upper-income tract, this Pew Research analysis has developed a single Residential Income Segregation Index (RISI) score for each of the nation’s top 30 metropolitan areas…

Among the nation’s 10 largest metro areas, Houston (61) and Dallas (60) have the highest RISI scores, followed closely by New York (57). At the other end of the scale, Boston (36), Chicago (41) and Atlanta (41) have the lowest RISI scores among the nation’s 10 largest metro areas.

Worth paying attention in the years ahead. Even in the era of Facebook, Twitter, and more weak ties, neighbors and neighborhoods still matter for a number of important life outcomes.

Discovering America’s consumer habits at yard sales

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A photographer discusses what he has seen at American yard sales:

After traveling the country for four years shooting Yard Sales, Ruffing’s photos document consumer habits, low-budget marketing, the movement of military families and telling evidence of the economic recession…

Ruffing, 33, says he spent several days working on the assignment [at the “world’s longest yard sale” 700 miles long] and was quickly drawn in by the culture. One of the first things he noticed was the way yard sales have become their own little marketplaces with unique advertising strategies. Sellers aren’t creating high-end Nike or Budweiser commercials, but he says they will go to great lengths to create inventive ways to increase traffic…

Yard sales also have a unique way of demonstrating consumption habits, he says. While his work doesn’t compete with the famous photos of people squished against Best Buy doors on Black Friday in terms of pure shopper madness, they are still a window into our lust for stuff…

Fortunately, there is also a flipside to the doom and gloom, he says. To many people, both buyers and sellers, he says yard sales also represented a new and more calculated approach to living within our means.

I wonder if anyone has calculated the average lag time for how long certain products take to make it to yard sales.

It sounds like we could draw another interesting conclusion: Americans simply have a lot of stuff. This reminds me of the book Material World: A Global Family Portrait which includes photographs of families from around the world with all of their worldly possessions in their front yard. Even with an “average” American family, the Americans had far more stuff than everyone else. And I would suspect Americans have only collected more (on average) since that books publication in the 1990s.

This also reminded me of Dave Ramsey who often tells people to hold a yard or garage sale so they can make some quick money and popular shows like Pawn Stars where people are looking to turn their objects into cash. People may like their stuff but they also often like turning that stuff into cash (often overvaluing their own possessions – just look at Craigslist) so they can they buy more.

ProCure proton therapy: you are not “close to downtown Chicago”

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I’ve heard plenty of radio commercials for the ProCure proton therapy facility in Warrenville, Illinois and one thing gets me every time: the ad claims the center is “close to downtown Chicago.” A few thoughts about this:

1. The actual distance from Chicago to the facility is 30 miles. While the drive is relatively simple (Eisenhower to I-88 and then about 0.6 miles off the Winfield Road exit), this is not “close.” It probably wouldn’t even qualify as nearby. In no traffic, this drive would take at least 35-40 minutes and during the day would be longer. In my world, 10 miles or less would be close to downtown Chicago.

2. I’m not sure why the facility was built in Warrenville: the land is conveniently located near an interstate, close to Central DuPage Hospital (CDH), I assume the land was cheaper than in or near Chicago, and was able to be put up in “record time.” And there was competition: Northern Illinois University wanted to build a proton therapy facility in West Chicago and CDH filed a lawsuit against NIU that was withdrawn when a regulatory board gave the go ahead to the Warrenville facility.

3. One reason they might make this claim is because not too many people have heard of Warrenville. Going to Warrenville, a small community, doesn’t sound as good as going to somewhere “close to Chicago.”

4. Another reason they may have made this claim is that they want to win market share in the Chicago region. The ProCure facility has teamed with CDH which provides care to western DuPage County and has designs on a larger healthcare footprint (with a recent merger with Delnor Hospital) but may not be familiar to all of Chicagoland. Perhaps the claim of being close to Chicago is more about winning the PR battle against Chicago hospitals such as University of Chicago, Northwestern, Rush, and Loyola.

Argument: New England neighborhoods attract movies because they have character and don’t have McMansions

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A columnist in Swampscott, Massachusetts argues New England neighborhoods have a sense of place, don’t have many McMansions, and therefore attract filmmakers:

If you’ve ever traveled outside New England, you begin to notice that most of the rest of the country looks a lot alike. Rapid development on a budget lends itself to a landscape of boxy stores in strip malls and cookie cutter homes. Some of these cookie cutter homes are “McMansions,” and very nice to live in, but even so their exteriors are unmemorable, duplicated a million times over.

New England—Swampscott—looks different.  Neighborhoods have personalities. The roads curve in unpredictable ways.  Houses don’t all look alike. I happen to like the intricate purple paint on a certain home on Paradise Road, but we all have our favorites…

Yet there is true value in this difference.  Part of the reason that Massachusetts has attracted so many movies is because of our location—place matters.  Grown-Ups 2 is here because Swampscott looks like a typical New England town, and New England is a good brand, a marketable brand.

And crucial to the New England brand is a community’s willingness to embrace its historic past, to pay attention to its older buildings, and to, in short, care about the way something looks. A quick drive through the Olmstead District will remind all of us how lucky we are that the Mudges had the foresight to hire someone so talented to lay it out, that the town pays to upkeep the greens, and that the homeowners in the area now take such pride in their property.

New England does indeed have its own style and character though plenty of other places in the United States have historic preservation districts that are intended to save older buildings.

There is an interesting implication here that McMansions developed in places with less character. This would be intriguing to track: did the term first arise in Sunbelt locations or in more historic communities that felt threatened by new, big, mass produced homes?

I also wonder how many movies actually do film in New England compared to other locations. According to the Massachusetts Film Office, five films are in production or have recently finished filming. Like many other places, Massachusetts offers incentives for filmmakers:

Massachusetts provides filmmakers with a highly competitive package of tax incentives: a 25% production credit, a 25% payroll credit, and a sales tax exemption.

Any project that spends more than $50,000 in Massachusetts qualifies for the payroll credit and sales tax exemption. Spending more than 50% of total budget or filming at least 50% of the principal photography days in Massachusetts makes the project eligible for the production credit.

Employers to applicants: not being a member of Facebook means you are suspicious

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Beware job applicants: not having a Facebook account could cast suspicion on you.

On a more tangible level, Forbes.com reports that human resources departments across the country are becoming more wary of young job candidates who don’t use the site.

The common concern among bosses is that a lack of Facebook could mean the applicant’s account could be so full of red flags that it had to be deleted…

It points out that Holmes, who is accused of killing 12 people and an unborn child and wounding 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and Breivik, who murdered  77 people with a car bomb and mass shooting, did not use Facebook and had small online footprints…

And this is what the argument boils down to: It’s the suspicion that not being on Facebook, which has become so normal among young adults, is a sign that you’re abnormal and dysfunctional, or even dangerous, ways.

Facebook is the new normal, but the idea that people not on Facebook are necessarily suspicious is a gross overgeneralization, particularly when tied to just two tragedies. I can imagine a variety of good reasons for being a nonuser that doesn’t indicate one is a psychopath.

The interest employers have in Facebook certainly is interesting. I blogged a while back about some employers wanting the password of applicants so they could look over their profiles. How does looking at a profile stack up against other ways of getting information such as reading a resume, doing a background check, and checking references?

 

Facebook’s company town gets a new Main Street

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Disneyland has its own Main Street, Walt Disney’s vision of idyllic small-town American life, and now Facebook’s campus is getting its own version:

Unlike the days of Henry Ford and George Pullman, when industrialists built towns surrounding manufacturing operations, Facebook is bringing retail shops onto its sprawling private campus on the outskirts of Menlo Park where there are few commercial establishments other than fast-food joints.

The company is subsidizing the construction; handpicked merchants will offer discounted prices to employees.

“It is the 21st century company town,” said Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo, managing director of foresight at investment research firm Discern Analytics…

But Facebook had to come up with new carrots when it moved its headquarters a few months ago to a suburban outpost at the edge of tidal mud flats and salt marshes cut off from the rest of Menlo Park by a six-lane highway. It’s so isolated that when former tenant Sun Microsystems occupied it, the campus was nicknamed “Sun Quentin.”…

“It’s just a great perk: ‘My company has created a little city for me,’ ” said Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, coauthor of “The Progress Principle,” who studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance.

The comparison to company towns is fascinating: as I remember it, these towns didn’t last long. Pullman, for example, might have been viewed as efficient but workers ended up seeing it as paternalistic. So why exactly is this “21st century company town” strictly a perk – because Facebook is cool? Because the jobs don’t include manual labor manufacturing work and are creative class jobs that pay well? Because Facebook is reclaiming this brownfield of sprawl? Couldn’t the Main Street be viewed as controlling and an inducement to ask people to work even longer hours?

Two other quick questions:

1. What would happen if employees didn’t like the Main Street, stopped going, or started protesting? It is company property so I assume activities are somewhat restricted though a company like this doesn’t want to alienate all of their workers.

2. It is interesting that Americans like to hearken back to small town life even when we as a country have rapidly moved to an urban (and often decentralized) landscape. Is this Main Street more like a theme park, akin to Disneyland? Perhaps Facebook should start including some dormitories so that Main Street could have more activity around the clock.

Battle in Redlands, California over teardown McMansion

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There is an involved public battle taking place in Redlands, California between one homeowner and his neighbors as the neighbors try to stop his proposed teardown:

Monte Vista Estates residents lost another round in their fight against a neighbor who plans to tear down his house and build a larger one that will block their views of the San Bernardino Valley and mountains…

Hunt and the neighbors referred to McMansions — a derogatory term for oversized luxury homes — while discussing Canada’s project. They said the house, though it meets city zoning requirements, would begin a major change in the ranch-style neighborhood as houses are remodeled to reclaim their views.

Hunt told Canada that she values the rights of property owners but said she did not understand why he would want a house so much taller. His existing house has one of the best views in the neighborhood, she said…

Biggs said allowing such a large home — neighbors estimate it at 3,800 square feet — in an older, established neighborhood goes against Redlands’ pattern of preserving historic homes and older neighborhoods.

“The impetus for the Historic and Scenic Resource ordinance was to prevent that kind of shift from what we have, which is so different from the rest of the world … to the McMansion approach where you build to the absolute limits of the zoning ordinance,” Biggs said.

Two interesting points here:

1. As I’ve noted before, when neighbors or opponents of a particular home want to drive home their point, using the term “McMansion” is quite effective. I can’t think of any other term for such a house that would be so effective as it ties the homeowner to all sorts of negative ideas such as bad taste and excess.

2. Biggs’ comment about “the McMansion approach” is revealing. Indeed, my study of the use of the word McMansion found of times when references to McMansions was really about something bigger and not just one way: a way of life involving sprawl or excessive consumption. Living a McMansion life might include (and these are examples of how the term McMansion was applied to other objects) having a large RV, building a large mausoleum or headstone in a cemetery, and eating ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery. In this point of view, McMansions may simply be emblematic of a negative American lifestyle.

The 2020 Census to have different questions about race?

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The Los Angeles Times reports that the US Census Bureau is looking into possibly changing the questions about race and ethnicity in the 2020 Census:

The bureau’s new recommendations were based on research findings of a number of experimental questions given to 500,000 households during the 2010 census. The findings showed that many Americans believe the racial and ethnic categories now used by the census are confusing and don’t always jibe with their own views of their identity.

For example, asked to state their race on the 2010 census, more than 19 million people, including millions of Latinos, chose “some other race,” rather than select from the five categories offered on the census form: white, black, Asian, American Indian/Native Alaskan or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.

One of the changes proposed now would simply ask respondents to choose their race or origin, allowing them to check a single box next to categories that would include white, black or Hispanic.

Another would add write-in categories to allow those of Middle Eastern or Arab origin to specifically identify themselves, officials said.

A third change would end the practice of offering the controversial term “Negro” as an alternative for African-American or black. Some African-Americans in 2010 criticized the government’s continuing use of the word, saying it was outdated and offensive.

As cultural definitions change, so should the Census in order to better match the lived reality. Of course, this attempt to improve the validity of the results makes it more difficult for researchers and others to match up results from newer Census results, marring the reliability. And as the article notes, this has political implications and this could play into the definitions as well.

It would be interesting to hear more about the experimental results from the 2010 survey as this is a good example of an experiment that doesn’t require a laboratory. What else did people like or not like? I assume the Census Bureau is not going to cave in to those who don’t want to answer a race or ethnicity question at all and/or those who simply answer “American.”