Archive for the 'Economy' Category
More Robots to Hit the Aisles at Schnucks Grocery Stores in St. Louis Area
October 30th, 2018Via: St. Louis Post Dispatch: In at least 15 Schnuck Markets stores, the future is now. Aisle-scanning retail inventory robots, known as Tally, will soon be wheeling around in a growing number of locations as the St. Louis area’s leading grocer expands its partnership with San Francisco firm Simbe Robotics. The robot, which moves around […]
Waymo Autonomous Cars Coming to California
October 30th, 2018Via: Wired: The driverless cars cometh. Waymo just became the first company allowed to test fully self-driving cars—the kind with no carbon-based beings behind the wheel—in the state of California. The outfit that started life as Google’s self-driving car project has been running driver-free cars in Arizona for almost a year, where the state testing […]
Rise of the Machines: Automation Reshapes Job Market
October 27th, 2018Via: Daily Republic: Looking at a map of California on a projector screen, Johannes Moenius, an economics professor at the University of Redlands, hovered his mouse over the Inland Empire, which glowed with a splotch of red pixels. The colored dots signified how susceptible an area would be to job losses caused by automation. And […]
The Parallel Stories of Tesla and Apple, as Model 3 Has Its ‘iPhone Moment’
October 25th, 2018Part of my comment on Tesla from 9 October: The long argument, of course, is that Tesla is different. Is it? Yep. I think so. In my opinion, the correct past analogy is Apple and the initial release of the iPhone. What Tesla is doing is “iPhone” level in terms of EVs and energy storage. […]
America’s Homelessness Crisis Is Rapidly Exploding On Both Coasts
October 24th, 2018Via: The American Dream: The homelessness crisis in the United States is getting a lot worse, and it is happening at a pace that is absolutely frightening. Did you realize that more than half a million Americans are homeless right now? One out of every four homeless Americans actually has a job, but thanks to […]
Tesla Surprises with $312 Million Profit in Third Quarter
October 24th, 2018Via: Autoblog: Tesla is reporting that the Model 3 has gross margins of over 20 percent, which has in part driven Tesla into profitability. Ahead of the earnings webcast, Tesla released a shareholder letter detailing its third-quarter results. According to the letter, Tesla has turned a profit — and a sizable one. The letter reports […]
Caravan of 7,000 Central American Migrants Plan to Enter U.S.
October 22nd, 2018Via: Reuters: U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he had alerted the military and federal border authorities that a U.S.-bound migrant caravan from Central America was a national emergency, and that the United States would begin curtailing aid to the region. Trump, in a series of posts on Twitter, gave no other details about […]
China May Have $5.8 Trillion in Hidden Debt With ‘Titanic’ Risks
October 17th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: China’s local governments may have accumulated 40 trillion yuan ($5.8 trillion) of off-balance sheet debt, or even more, suggesting further defaults are in store, according to S&P Global Ratings. “The potential amount of debt is an iceberg with titanic credit risks,” S&P credit analysts led by Gloria Lu wrote in a report Tuesday. […]
How Many Households Qualify as Middle Class?
October 15th, 2018Via: Of Two Minds: By the standards of previous generations, the middle class has been stripmined of income, assets and purchasing power. What does it take to be middle class nowadays? Defining the middle class is a parlor game, with most of the punditry referring to income brackets as the defining factor. People tend to […]
Sears Files for Bankruptcy
October 15th, 2018Via: CBS: Sears has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, buckling under its massive debt load and staggering losses. Sears once dominated the American retail landscape. But the big question is whether its shrunken version can be viable or will be forced to go out of business, ending the final chapter for an iconic name […]
