Tag: consumer

Amazon’s robot army fuels expansion

Amazon's robot army fuels expansion

TRACY — In Amazon’s million-square-foot order-filling warehouse, two low-slung orange robots carrying stacks of consumer products are zipping across the floor, headed right at each other. One stops — not on a dime, it turns out, but rather over a QR code stuck to the floor — and allows the other to proceed, carrying inventory to a human worker who will pluck out an item, scan it and send it off for packing and shipping.

In this building the size of 28 football fields, containing four miles of conveyor belts and 15 million items awaiting customer orders from Northern California […]

The digital economy needs defending from the hard left and the far right

The digital economy needs defending from the hard left and the far right

Matt Hancock, Minister for the Cabinet Office Automate work, humanize jobs. That needs to be the mantra of the digital economy, according to Matt Hancock, who as Minister for the Cabinet Office in the UK government, has responsibility in part for fostering the digital revolution.

Hancock set out his stall at the 2016 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture. For the benefit of non-UK readers, Sir Keith Joseph was a British politician, whose long career saw him serve as a minister under four Conservative Party Prime Ministers – Harold McMillan and Alec Douglas-Home in the 1960s, Edward Heath in the 1970s and […]

Who Needs Factories Anyway?

Who Needs Factories Anyway?

Listening to our political leaders, you’d think everyone on the planet works in a factory. Donald Trump wants to stop China and Mexico from “taking our jobs” by preventing factories from moving there — and he’s willing to launch a trade war to do so. Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, recently claimed that a loss of 264,000 manufacturing jobs under President Obama was “a stark reminder of the failure of his policies,” as if the nearly 10 million other jobs added on Obama’s watch didn’t matter.

This obsession with factories threatens to undermine sound economic policy. […]