Weekend Digest: The Apple iCar Edition
by September 26, 2015 7:28 am 126 views
TV PREVIEW: CENTRAL HIGH CRISIS & BEYOND
On this week’s TV edition of Talk Business & Politics:
Nearly 60 years ago this week, the crisis at Central High came to a climax. What happened this past week in Arkansas history? And why are we still struggling with racial divides today? State Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, is our guest for a conversation.
Highway funding. Multiple proposals were floated this week as a task force on highways prepares to send options to Gov. Asa Hutchinson. Craig Douglass from the Good Roads Foundation; Shannon Newton from the Arkansas Trucking Association; and Chris Villines from the Association of Arkansas Counties join the show for a roundtable conversation.
Our biggest stories of the week. KATV’s Janelle Lilley brings us the headlines, plus Jessica DeLoach Sabin, Wes Brown and Roby Brock share their top stories in business and politics.
Tune in to Talk Business & Politics with Roby Brock on KATV Ch. 7 Sunday at 9 a.m. And on a programming note, beginning next week TB&P moves to a new 9:30 a.m. time slot on Ch. 7.
THE MASCOT MAKER
There is only one type of designer that this quote could be attributed to.
“I love fur,” Tremblay said on a recent morning, some 35 years later, inside the same factory, as he pawed at a shelf full of faux fur — orange fur, purple fur, green fur — destined to become outerwear for zany creatures with weight issues and mischievous streaks. “When I touch the furs, I go crazy.”
Who else could it be but a mad-genius behind thousands of mascot costumes. His name is Jean-Claude Tremblay and The New York Times has chronicled his zaniness in a delightful post about the 68-year-old designer whose “work is everywhere.”
Dinosaurs who dance on minor league dugouts. Ducks who ice-skate between periods. Horses who celebrate touchdowns by spraying multicolored ribbons from their nostrils.
How did this Canadian artist get started and how many team mascots does he produce a year including those for the NFL? Follow this link for a great read.
HOW APPLE COULD MAKE A KILLING IN THE CAR BUSINESS
Forbes reports, “Apple is serious about building an electric car, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported earlier this week that the company is moving ahead with its secret ”Project Titan” and is tripling its automotive engineering staff with an eye toward launching a vehicle in 2019.”
It might seem like a long shot. What does a company that makes computers, tablets and smartphones know about building automobiles? The auto industry is heavily regulated, capital-intensive and far more complex than most outsiders realize. But it’s also an industry that is ripe for reinvention, which is why companies like Google and Tesla are trying to establish a foothold.
So how would Apple’s iCar be different, and what about that “killing” it could make? Take a look at this link.
WHO HOLDS YOUR OFFICE TOGETHER?
“Do you know?,” asks Harvard Business Review. It starts with a little something called “tending.”
As Wharton professor Adam Grant put it in a recent New York Times editorial, “[w]hen friends work together they’re more trusting and committed to one another’s successes . . . they share more information and spend more time helping” and can even “make better choices and get more done” if there’s still room for constructive criticism.
Psychologists call this relationship-building “social affiliation” or “tending,” and it helps sustain both health and wealth. And yet when it’s employee-to-employee, rather than employee-to-customer or employee-to-client, it’s often belittled as “office housework” and performed by the women on the team – think of your office’s birthday celebrations, retirement parties, and team-building outings. Who schedules them, orders the food, and tidies up afterward? But organizations hurt themselves by ignoring or devaluing those efforts that keep the office warm and sociable.
Corporations and LLCs are controlled by human beings with pulses, hearts, families, loyalties, and a preference for working with people they trust. Recognition of humanity goes a long way.
THE TWO RULES
Fast Company says there are “only two rules you need to know to be successful in work and life.”
There are three skills you need to be financially successful: making money, keeping money, growing money. James Altucher is mostly only good at making money.
“I’ve had several instances where I’ve started a business, sold it, made a lot of money, and then basically lost everything I made, whether it was $50 million or $5 million or whatever,” he tells Fast Company. “I always have a tendency to lose everything I made.”
At some point, Altucher started thinking about the routines and habits he kept while he was making money starting and running more than 20 companies, investing in over 30 companies, advising another 50 private companies (ranging from $0 in revenue to a billion in revenue), publishing a handful of books, including the upcoming “The Rich Employee,” and hosting a number of podcasts, including an upcoming one with Freakonomics’ Stephen J. Dubner called “Question of the Day.”
But, specifically, there are two rules that have always brought Altucher back to success every time he falls down and loses everything.
What are they? Find out by connecting to this link.
CAN POPE FRANCIS BRING US TOGETHER POLITICALLY?
That question posed by The Washington Post was in response to Pope Francis’ historic visit to the U.S.
With the first words that Pope Francis uttered publicly on American soil, he made it clear Wednesday that he does not intend to sidestep the deeply divisive political issues that are roiling this country.
Amid the pomp of a welcoming ceremony that drew 15,000 to the South Lawn of the White House, the first pope from the Americas introduced himself as “the son of an immigrant family” and said, “I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families.”
Coming from the hugely popular and charismatic Hispanic pontiff, that was an unmistakable reference to an issue that has come to dominate much of the race for the 2016 Republican nomination. GOP front-runner Donald Trump has vowed to deport the estimated 11 million immigrants who are in this country illegally and revoke the constitutional guarantee of citizenship to anyone born here.
Francis signaled that he intends to make maximum use of the national spotlight fixed on him for the next four days — and to amplify his influence as the spiritual leader of nearly 80 million Roman Catholics in the United States.
For the complete story click on this link.
BEHIND THE BOEHNER DECISION TO QUIT
U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner’s decision to quit his high-profile post and leave Congress was a shocker to the political establishment. What factored in his decision to leave and how did he navigate the conclusion to exit?
Mike Sommers was the only one John Boehner trusted with the news. The speaker’s 40-year-old chief of staff, who began his congressional career as an intern for Boehner in 1997, had been developing the exit plan for some time. The speaker would announce his retirement on his 66th birthday, Nov. 17, and hand over the gavel to his successor at the beginning of January. The Boehner Era would end when the New Year began.
But at 6 p.m. Thursday, shortly after a meeting with five of his conservative colleagues, Boehner came into Sommers’ office and said he was thinking seriously about resigning. The two spoke for an hour, weighing the decision and its implications for the House. Boehner then retreated to his office, where he sat in solitude for 45 minutes. When he returned, Boehner looked at Sommers and said, “Tomorrow’s the day.”
Read more of the story from Politico at this link.
HILLARY CLINTON: COME CLEAN OR GET OUT
Strong words from the National Journal’s Ron Fournier. Obviously in reference to “the email scandal” that the Journal says “is a distraction from the important work of the Democratic Party.”
If the Democratic Party cares to salvage a sliver of moral authority, its leaders and early state voters need to send Hillary Rodham Clinton an urgent message: Come clean or get out. Stop lying and deflecting about how and why you stashed State Department emails on a secret server — or stop running.
Tell her: We can’t have another day like this:
Like what day? Find out at this link.
WHICH GOP CANDIDATE WILL DROP OUT NEXT?
Predicting who will be next, Huffington Post Politics’ Chris Weigant takes a stab.
It absolutely does not matter for candidates who never had a chance in the first place. If you’re running just to see your name on the ballot, then it is irrelevant whether you even have any campaign appearances or staff. Likewise, if you’re running on some personal crusade for an individual issue, you are likely not going to be stopped by having no money – your cause is so great, you’ll keep going no matter what happens, because you see the issue as larger than yourself.
With this in mind, let’s try to predict who could leave the race next. To do so, I’m first going to divide the candidates up into three groups: vanity campaigns, crusaders and serious candidates. On that last one, by “serious” I mean the attitude of the candidate, and not how popular or successful any particular campaign currently is (just to be clear).
How do they sort out? Get Weigart’s predictions by connecting here (although he admits his track record is pretty lousy). It’s food for thought material.
HOW CONGRESS QUIETLY KILLED MILITARY HEALTH CARE REFORM
The Hill reports, “After years of resistance, Congress has spoken on military compensation reform. But only about one aspect of the whole package: retirement. Left undone? Health care and education reform.”
Retirement “reform” was mostly about expanding and adding new and generous benefits for over 80 percent of the force that only serves one or two tours of duty, then exits the military.
New benefits are expensive. Especially when other in-kind compensation is left unchanged. Because defense budgets are not rising, this is one reason the annual defense policy bill is at an impasse. There are no viable offsets to help pay for this generous retirement subsidy.
For the full story, follow this link.
AN AMERICAN TREASURE PASSES AWAY
Yogi Berra. That’s all you have to say. The Yankee great died this past week of natural causes.
Yankees legend Yogi Berra passed away on Tuesday at the age of 90. An 18-time All-Star, Berra appeared in 14 World Series as a member of the Yankees and won 10 of them.
Berra’s contributions to MLB history are incalculable, but his legacy might be even better remembered for what he contributed to American language. A sportswriters’ favorite, Berra had countless expressions and turns of phrase that were memorable because most of them didn’t make any sense. (At the same time, every one had some truth to it.)
Here are, “The fifty greatest Yogi Berra quotes” from USA Today Sports. Enjoy.
LET’S READ A BOOK
You know the kind with paper and a hard-back cover you get lost-in while cozying up with your ottoman on a rainy Saturday morning. Wait a minute. What’s wrong with that picture? Maybe readers have figured out what’s right with that picture after E-book sales have slipped.
Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.
As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”
But the “digital apocalypse” never arrived. So what happened and will publishing weather the tide? Get a sunny report at this link.
BUS STOPS NOWHERE
Ever been in a foreign place on a bus and were unsure of your stop? If you think you had a situation, Fast Company takes you to a country where bus stops are “insane masterpieces in the middle of nowhere.”
Actually that’s good. Sort it out at this link.