froindt

I'm curious, what's your interest in the train schedules?

One day at an antique shop, I came across a book from ~1910 which had hundreds of pages of annual reports from railroads with many metrics we'd expect to see in the 10-K reports public companies file.

The book was published annually, but had much of its data in tables with grouped headers and cells, which could make automated OCR-ing with a good (useful) end result challenging.

I think it'd be interesting to map out the Railroad consolidation, track all their financial metrics over time, and do some level of forensic accounting to see if/which companies probably had funny business going on.

Thanks, I learned that since posting my comment but hadn't heard it mentioned as a symptom.

From reading I did earlier, GI issues may be more common in older groups.

I agree from a purely production point of view. But then the marketing director says "if we're the one on the shelves, people will remember our brand positively and drive up brand loyalty/future sales".

I wonder what the current toilet paper manufacturers are going through right now? I'm an industrial engineer, so production issues and supply/demand issues are always of interest to me. A few possibilities:

* Adding shifts at overtime pay to meet demand (lower profit/unit, but more equipment utilization and total profit)

* Potentially higher freight charges (entirely unsure how freight rates are going these days compared to normal)

* Calloffs from employees from illness, exposure, or fear

* Lacking supply if they're working on a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) system - where the supplier owns inventory until pulled by a customer, at which time the supplier gets paid. These agreements often have parameters about stocking and forecast levels, which are typically fine, but then Sales talks about the "customer relationship" and wants to make drastic changes to how the factory runs (sub-optimizing production) to keep $bigCustomer happy.

Per the manager, the grocery store near me averages 10 units/day of toilet paper sold (good size town in the Midwest, with many grocery stores). One day about 2 weeks ago they sold 3,000 units. They have ~75 feet of shelf space (4 shelves high) dedicated to toilet paper. Literal semi's full of toilet paper flying off the shelves. They now have a limit if 1 unit per trip.

I've been to the store twice since then and always check the toilet paper aisle as a gauge of how they're doing. Still completely empty when I visit after work.

COVID-19 doesn't show GI issues as a symptom. Consumption isn't going up notably, but demand has been bonkers. Everybody will have months of toilet paper in their inventory at home, causing demand in the coming months to drop significantly. They may need to reduce the number of shifts or eliminate overtime at the factories.

Shelf space at grocery stores is expensive. If the toilet paper companies pay for less shelf space, they may not get it back. Grocery stores won't be excited to use that much space for a product that's moving at <50% of previous volumes.

It really is a weird issue and I don't envy the people figuring out how to deal with it.

I've read of people routinely asking Amazon for compensation when their packages arrive in over 2 days. Some ordered regularly enough the $5 credit they hand out like candy more than paid for the entire membership.

The article makes it sound like the ventilators have a wide enough range of operation to accommodate. It may not work for the tail end (set of 4 people each with large lung capacity), but could work for many.

This is terrible timing for the class of 2020 and 2021. Classes are online or canceled, many are paying rent on apartments they aren't living in (staying with parents after spring break), losing income from their university town/campus jobs since campuses are shutdown, and many companies are on hiring freezes while things shake out.

I know internships were the difference between me taking out loans and graduating debt free. I also converted my last internship into a full-time offer. I feel for anyone directly affected by this.

I wonder if 5 years from now we'll see the classes of '20 and '21 significantly hindered in their workforce progression and pay as was seen of the 2008 era?

I have been building a employee scheduling system in a factory environment. New employees need to be trained on machines, for a certain number of shifts, with a limit of how many employees can train on a machine at a time.

A question becomes "how many new employees could we handle?".

I looked at some solutions, but landed on an Excel spreadsheet with a small macro for spreadsheet setup, conditional formatting to call out an employee being allocated to 2 positions on the same shift, and a visual way to show for each operator, how long it takes to be fully trained. HR or a manager can setup training schedules by manually allocating people to training slots.

There were some constraints the business wanted (train on machine #1 before #2, do 2 days of training if you haven't already trained on _x_ machine). They would have been hard to accommodate in a way the end user could configure, so I have a notes section they can fill in (and they have to manually observe these constraints).

Totally open to other ideas people have on how to approach the proble.

Absolutely! My company makes thousands of unique specs with a constantly changing mix. The bottleneck is a moving target as business conditions change. It makes things more challenging for sure, but also keeps you on your toes.

Unfortunately the process to move money from a 401k to an IRA (and moving money in general in he US) isn't great. In many instances the check is sent to the individual who then needs to send it to the receiving institution.

I've also read that upon receiving the money, brokerages don't always show it to the end user right away, using it on their end for a few days (and at scale, that matters).

Fair point regarding the 401k match - but are they issuing new stock to complete the match? I haven't looked at how a match with company stock is funded before, but intuitively I'd think they'd issue new stock, diluting existing stock a tiny bit, but keeping the same overall company valuation.

As originally presented I saw the issue with your wife's 401k and padding the stock price as part of the same issue.

My optimization class was one of the most interesting classes of my undergrad (industrial engineering). My professor was trying to explain why optimization was important.

"Optimizing your solution ensures someone else can't come into your industry, get the same suppliers and contract terms, and beat you"

We then went through an example for an oil refinery with different sources of oil (differing proportions of sweet and sour, and quantities available), refinery production constraints, and market prices for different end products. He showed the difference between a "naive manual optimization" and the mathematical optimal.

Ever since that class, I'm particular about what "optimize" means. Factories talk about optimizing many things at the same time (on-time delivery, profit, throughput on a machine, throughput on the bottleneck machine, minimizing labor). I can't tell you how many times I've said "pick one thing to optimize - you're not going to hit them all at once". You can make an objective function a weighting of all those factors, but they won't all be at their best possible values.

>Well you can be fucked by your employers 401k manager. The day my wife quit, she was locked out of here 401k for 2 weeks. They divest everything during that term, and you have no control over the timing.

What type of a company did your wife work for? I actively learn about personal finance and retirement plans and have never heard of a lockout from a 401k.

> It's volatile enough presently that you could lose $$$ of they decide to sell at a low to boost their stock, and you can't re-invest in time.

Short of working for a privately traded company, or being a very well compensated executive, the shares owned by an individual employee are almost always negligible compared to daily traded volumes. "Selling at a low to boost their stock" wouldn't even move the needle.

Edit: One possibility came to mind after posting. Was your wife's 401k balance under $5,000? If so, the company can force liquidation. And to say doing so would help the stock price would only be meaningfully true on a penny stock.

Kobe Steel out of Japan was doing similar back in 2017. In one week their stock dropped 41%. Compared to immediately before the scandal, it's down 75% in that time.

I'm unsure if the drop is due to their scandal and poor management, something specific to Japan/Japanese steel, or if that's a larger issue in the steel market. Nippon also saw a ~55% drop on the same time period.

>The university is then forced to hire all kinds of staff to run and maintain these buildings, lest they ruin their reputation by allowing the fancy buildings to fall into disrepair.

I talked with one of my professors at Iowa State about this topic. He said back in the day, donors only needed to pay the cost of the building and then the university would get hit with tons of maintenance and utility expenses.

For some time now, they have to donate the cost of the building and money for an endowment for expected maintenance costs and operating costs.

Lighting behind a truck is poor (no white lights on the back), and it gives an idea of how bad the roads are getting between snow plows. This is useful since plows often run notably slower than normal traffic can safely run for the conditions.

My girlfriend's track pad was acting up. The Genius said it wasn't working because she had Google Chrome installed, and wasn't using Safari.

I'm not an Apple guy myself, but I lost a lot of respect for them as a company.

Every couple years a "failure resume" gets trending on LinkedIn or reddit, and I always love reading the comments.

It's also a refreshing reminder that "just because someone is successful and has a great resume doesn't mean they're flawless".

Resumes and LinkedIn pprofiles are like Instagram posts - enhanced to bring out the best aspects and with enough photoshop/makeup to hide the worst.

This looks great! I've been looking at tools to do viewshed analysis. Already being familiar with Blender, this is just the type of project I was looking for.

I'm interested in some what's visible through the horizon. I wonder, does the 3d model import take into account the curvature of the earth, or is a projection onto the plane they start with?

We have "rewards" on our credit cards. Rewards aren't free, so they increase the fees.

>For banks, the $91.2 billion in fees they earn on credit-card portfolios is now more than the interest they charge on the loans.

The fees are ridiculous. Profit margins at restaurants are often 3-5% (per Google). There is still a cost to handling cash, but if cash cost ~1% all-in, their profits would go up 20-30%, just like that, assuming consumption stayed the same.

Fast food venues didn't accept credit cards for a long time, but eventually found people spent more paying with a card than cash. A $300 TV and a $5 hamburger "feel" exactly the same with cards, which certainly doesn't help consumerism in the US.

As an example, when I pay my property taxes, I can either pay by sending a check in the mail, doing an electronic check (ACH transfer that takes 2-3 business days to clear) and paying $0.25, or pay a 2% transaction fee. Stamps are $0.50, eventually I'll need to reorder checks (at a cost), so I do the ACH transfer.

That won't save you. The doctor left the room and did a quick phone consult with a radiologist about your x-ray. Radiologist is out of network, so you'll get a big, fat, separate bill from them.

>A piece of software that plays (at least) one sound on every user action, and the sounds are completely arbitrary and 8bit at best.

I've worked places that have SAP, Oracle, and one place that had both. I've never personally used SAP, and rarely dealt with Oracle.

I would be curious though, if it makes that many sounds - how much error checking is done because something "didn't sound right"? Does doing business tasks sort of turn into a song, with an expected sequence of sounds which feels wrong when not executed correctly?

If I'm typing and talking to someone at the same time, I intuitively know "I typed f rather than g, quick backspace and keep going". Do people internalize the pattern of noises they should hear while completing their work?

Planet Money had an episode on it this fall.

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/766556249/episode-942-capital...

I did an industrial automation class in college. We had a PLC setup with optical sensors and were sorting cylinders by height.

We wired it up tested it, then called the TA over to review. It failed despite no changes and working minutes earlier.

We changed some logic, tested again, and again called the TA over. It failed. We had another team look at our code and see if we were missing something obvious. Nope, it looked the same.

Finally I realized I was standing when we did the testing. I shaded the sensors and kept them from being overloaded with sunlight. We were the only table in direct sunlight, so only we were experiencing the issue.

I get what you're saying. It does have an anticompetitive/colluding feel to it.

I don't know exactly where my opinion lies in this case. I think the cloud backup space currently has many players and that even if all players agreed to this - the net result would be Google earning less, each of those companies having less ad spend, and therefore greater profitability.

Heck, imagine if a 3rd party existed to "bypass" the Google ad auction through collusion on generic terms like 'computer backup'. (I'm not in this space, so some of the feasibility is speculative). Each company puts in their bid parameters for search terms. 3rd party evaluate the bids, submit 2 slightly different bids to minimize ad spend, and since the whole market coluded, Google made less money.

It's fragile, it's collusion. It's easily by passable by anyone going to Google directly. Was anyone harmed?

>I also think firms should be able to buy "blank space." For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result.

Backblaze had a competitor who bought ads for the search term "backblaze". The CEO successfully contacted the competitor CEO and they agreed they'd be in a pissing match throwing money at Google if the practice and retaliation (backblaze buying on their search term) occurred. The competitor promptly stopped the ad campaign.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/save-marketing-money-nice/

Is that all within the same city, or is the casino shuttling people from nearby cities?

If multiple nearby cities, you could go anywhere in the network via the casino!

I'm an industrial engineer, so these sorts of questions fascinate me.

My intuition is their revenue is so much higher because of a mix of higher service people are willing to pay for (almost casual versus definitively fast food), higher average cost per person, and cheaper inputs (chicken versus beef price per pound).

# Speed of Service

I've ordered Chick-fil-a and literally been handed my food before the credit was done processing. That's not the norm, but was surprising. They get fast casual pricing while still being able to complete orders in a fast food

#Cost per Person

Chick-fil-a doesn't have a value menu. As a quick reference, look at the menu prices for Chick-fil-a [1] and McDonald's [2]. It's not a perfect datasource, but it roughly aligns with what I've seen.

At McDonald's you can get 2 cheeseburgers for $2. The cheapest sandwich at Chick-fil-a is listed at $3. Chick-fil-a doesn't have a "value menu" or "dollar menu" like other fast food chains do.

# Menu Simplicity

Chick-fil-a does a better job of keeping their menu simple. While it's not a direct effect on revenue, it would help training and there would probably be bigger containers of ingredients and fewer to reach over (reducing completion time).

Compare the unique ingredients between McDonald's [3] and Chick-fil-a [4]. There are way more combinations with McDonald's than Chick-fil-a. Additional complexity to be dealt with behind the scenes (though I've heard they make it dead simple to learn how to make the food). Taco Bell can (or used to be) be noted for only having about 8-10 ingredients which were mixed and matched into their entire menu!

[1] https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/chick-fil-a-prices/

[2] https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/

[3] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu.html

[4] https://www.chick-fil-a.com/OrderFood

> But you went to Georgia Tech. Most schools with athletics programs are not Georgia Tech.

I don't have a quick summary of all the financials of all the schools in the country and whether athletics is a net positive/negative. I did find a datasource which could at least guide the discussion. [1] An anecdote doesn't prove the rule - but can help make a case that "it can be done".

Iowa, Iowa State, and University of Northern Iowa are ranked 18, 47, and 142 respectively out of 230 programs listed. Georgia Tech is #42. The three Iowa universities, each in different divisions with vastly different TV revenue share agreements, represent 2.3% of total revenue on the list.

Now, all three have "Student Fees" listed as a portion of their funding. I'm not certain how these are assessed and how it works per the rules the Iowa Board of Regents (governing body) set. The total of student fees is 4.75M out of 245M in revenue. The only university where it'd be a real game changer would be UNI (2M out of 20M revenue).

[1] https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/

I'm from Iowa and went to a high school of around 2,000 students. They built a ~15M dollar stadium which was completed right after the marching band season. Not quite the $50M stadium(s) of Texas, but still excessive.

Starting a few years ago, all Iowa public university Athletics programs were required to basically have separate finances and not be pulling funds from the rest of the university. It took the University of Northern Iowa a bit longer to achieve, but all three regents universities are successfully not taking money from tuition or normal state funding.

It certainly can be done. Iowa also has a balanced budget provision in its constitution. Not sure if it's in any way related, but it'd be understandable that taxpayers wouldn't want to be pouring money into athletics programs. That's not the primary intent of funding universities.