Weekend Digest: The Yankee Doodle Dandy Edition
by July 4, 2015 8:21 am 134 views
TV PREVIEW: THE JULY 4TH EDITION
This week on Talk Business & Politics, which airs Sundays at 9 a.m. on KATV Channel 7:
The U.S. Supreme Court makes a number of major decisions on the death penalty, Obamacare subsidies, and same-sex marriage. Our political roundtable – John Burris, Michael Cook and Janelle Lilley – analyze the political ramifications.
On the business front – trouble in Greece, gas taxes at home, and a globetrotting Governor. TB&P business editor Wes Brown and host Roby Brock discuss these topics and more in our 4 Minutes, 4 Questions segment.
And the state’s fiscal year closes. Were Arkansas tax collections in the red or the black, and what happens next?
Tune in to Talk Business & Politics Sunday at 9 a.m. on KATV Channel 7.
THE ‘MACARONI’ FEATHER
From Mental Floss, did you ever wonder why Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his hat and called it ‘Macaroni”?
What’s going on here? Why would Yankee Doodle do something like that? What’s macaroni got to do with anything?
The first bit of context you need in order to understand the sense of this line is that the song “Yankee Doodle” was not always the proud, patriotic ditty we know today.
It was originally sung by British soldiers in mockery of the rough, unsophisticated, American colonials they had to fight alongside during the French and Indian War. The thrust of it was “look at these ridiculous yokels!”
Read more of how this patriotic song was adopted by the early Colonial fighters and became such a part of our American fabric.
IT’S A BUST
For Greece that is. And Greece’s debt crisis is not only about money. Reuters says, “The Greek problem cuts to the heart of Europe’s future.”
For the euro zone – and Germany in particular – it is a test of unity, of whether countries within the 19-nation single currency bloc that fail to meet its economic standards and agreed rules can be brought into line, or not.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called for a referendum “to hand the decision over Greece’s fate to the nation’s voters.”
He informed ministers of his plan, the cabinet approved it and he announced the referendum in a late night television broadcast. The abruptness of the move took some European leaders by surprise.
The bombshell said much about the long-running struggle between wayward Greece and the megalithic European Union, a struggle beset by blunders and serial brinkmanship. As this account details, all parties had their flaws and misjudgments.
With citizens lining up to take cash out of ATM’s and with Greece failing to make its latest payment to the International Monetary Fund, the crisis compounds.
And now rumors are circulating that the July 5th referendum could be canceled, so how did it all come crashing down?
Click on this link as Reuters takes an in-depth look at “How Greece went bust.”
IS YOUR STARBUCKS UNIQUE?
Like snowflakes, no two Starbucks are planned exactly alike. Sure, there are many similarities in design and layout, but the coffee retail giant takes painstaking steps to differentiate its locations now, including some spectacular one-of-a-kind settings across the globe.
The secret? There is a secret room and a team of design professionals led by a former employee who returned to the company that plans elements of each and every store.
This may be the most important room at Starbucks HQ. Because this is where the $58 billion company (market cap) is trying to solve one of the most bedeviling challenges for any business that grows as large it has: How can Starbucks use design to make every store feel not like a mass-produced product out of Seattle, but rather a bespoke, local coffee shop? And do it within a language that still lets you know where you are?
Read more about the efforts and lengths Starbucks goes to in order to design the perfect coffee shop for each location.
HIGH TENSION AT BLOOMBERG NEWS
It should be the best of times. Bloomberg News won its first Pulitzer Prize in its 25 years of publishing this past April for Zachary Mider’s groundbreaking story on corporate tax inversions. But at the awards ceremony two of his top ranking editors were missing. Oh their excuses were plausible enough, or were they?
But fair or not, several editors and reporters in the newsroom took their absence from the lunch as a snub. To them, it symbolized what they fear are the shifting priorities of the new top editors at Bloomberg, ever since Michael Bloomberg returned to the helm in January.
In the intervening months, the former mayor’s homecoming has reshaped the newsroom, giving rise to dramatic changes to the masthead and a tense struggle over its editorial vision.
For more on the regime change and tensions at Bloomberg, go to this link.
A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
After almost being declared legally dead, Forbes reports, “Microsoft, like dozens of giant tech companies, is rushing to declare its love for Docker’s technology, which represents one of the biggest shifts in application development in years.”
Netflix, Google Search, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat all seem to just work magically, but under the hood they’re composed of dozens or hundreds of components that deal with memory, databases, security and networks. The developers who build them want to focus on what makes each special, not the backroom piping. They want their apps to run on any cloud server or device, update quickly and withstand the Web equivalent of a loose screw. Docker aims to do all that with a technology called containers.
So what’s different about Docker’s magic “containers” and how has this start up become the darling of the giant techs? Full story here.
WHAT COMES AFTER SMART PRODUCTS
Harvard Business Review says, “Companies today are on a journey from digitization 1.0 to digitization 2.0. This means advancing from simply overlaying digital functionality on existing offerings to learning the customer context via connected products and services and adapting them to meet customer needs.”
With digitization 1.0, companies create products and services that allow manufacturers to collect data on how their products are being used by customers in different settings and learn to modify them for future use. Digitization 2.0 is about the exchange of “in-context” data on how consumers and enterprises use different interconnected products and services across industry boundaries. This exchange will result in the adaptation of products and services across organizational boundaries to meet customer needs.
Many managers think of digitization 1.0 as the endgame, but the real disruption and value shifts occur at the frontier of digitization 2.0.
So how can your company prepare to win in the digitization 2.0 world? Follow this link to find out.
UNCLE SAM IN ARKANSAS
Think Uncle Sam is fictional? Think again. He actually was a “real person” reports ABC News, and he has relatives who live in Conway, Arkansas.
The direct descendants of Samuel Wilson – a meat packer from Troy, New York, who supplied beef rations to soldiers during the war of 1812 and is commonly recognized as inspiring the nickname and poster for “Uncle Sam” – were recently revealed to be living in Arkansas, thanks to research scientists at genealogy site MyHeritage.
For perhaps one of the best stories involving Arkansas heritage to come along in a great while, follow this link.
TRUMP TRIGGERS MEXICAN FURY
He’s running for President and he needs publicity, but The New York Times reports the kind of publicity Donald Trump has garnered in Mexico is “infamy.”
“He’s just ignorant,” said Ricardo Arevala, 18, who works at a piñata shop here, adding that someone recently came into the store looking for a smackable rendition of Mr. Trump. “He speaks in stereotypes.”
In case you missed what “The Donald” said to ignite the ire of the Mexican people, click here for full details.
ANOTHER DEMOCRAT ENTERS THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL RING
Former Virginia senator Jim Webb has become the fifth Democrat to join the presidential race for 2016.
While several presidential contenders professed indecision about their plans merely as a way to keep raising unlimited funds, for months Webb appeared genuinely undecided. He chafes openly at the demands of the campaign trail and has expressed doubt about his fundraising ability. He left the Senate in 2012 after one term, frustrated by the institution’s slow pace.
The 69-year-old former Republican and Secretary of the Navy joins former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chaffee, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the democratic race for president.
Who is Jim Webb and what will his tack be on the presidential trail? The Washington Post takes a look at this link.
IF CONGRESS LIFTS CUBAN EMBARGO, ARKANSAS RICE GROWERS TO BENEFIT
This past week President Obama announced the U.S. will open an embassy in Havana but until the embargo is lifted, Arkansas rice farmers can only wait for this potential market bonanza for their exports.
However, should Congress decide to lift the embargo, the rice industry will be ready, says Terry Harris with Riceland Foods, a large rice miller and marketer.
“We have the abilities, we have the infrastructure,” he says. “We could ship rice to [Cuba] starting next week.”
Go to this link for the complete story from Marketplace.
FOR A REAL BANG ON THE FOURTH
It may be a little late for you to catch a flight, but check out some of Travel’s favorite places to celebrate July 4.
There’s nothing as American as: apple pie; a baseball cap; or a Fourth of July cook-out.
Whether it’s parades, fireworks, history or boy bands you’re after, here is a list of our favorite places to celebrate Independence Day.
A STEPHEN COLBERT WARM UP
Stephen Colbert will be taking over The Late Show this September, and as a warm up the comedian and satirist gave us a possible taste of what we can expect when he appeared recently on a local public-access show in Michigan.
If you need further proof that Stephen Colbert is an evil comedy genius, please take the above video into consideration. Presumably warming up for his Late Show takeover this September, the Comedy Central vet took to the public-access airwaves of Monroe, Michigan, to guest-host “Only in Monroe,” a television talk show of which you’ve absolutely never heard. And Colbert didn’t just log in a few minutes, either — which certainly would have been enough to give the clip viral momentum once it found its way onto the Internet.
Instead, Colbert hosted all 40 minutes of the program — during which time he interviewed Eminem, read some local Yelp complaints, drank white wine with the show’s usual hosts, and used his Colbert Report–style comedy take on Monroe news headlines.
Take a look at this link.
WHY DID FISH DIVERSITY EXPLODE?
To be more exact ray-finned fish, which according to Science “make up more than 95% of all fish species.”
Yet paleontologists have been unsure when and why ray-finned fishes exploded into such prominence, in large part because the preservation of fish fossils is a very hit-or-miss affair. Now, researchers have taken a new approach to the problem.
Find out at this link.