Cross-Country Cannonball Record Broken
The crew that drove a disguised Mercedes AMG in a recent Cannonball run made it from coast to coast in a record 27.5 hours at a blistering and terrifying average speed of 103 mph. The car was outfitted with a gimbaled thermal scope on the roof (for deer spotting, apparently), gyro-stabilized binoculars, a custom fuel cell and more.
Via The Prepared
Why are we all paying a tax to credit card companies?
“The American payments system specifically has six fundamental pillars: cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, wire transfers, and the Automated Clearing House (ACH). They all developed separately, but they also overlap and support each other in fundamental ways. To understand how Visa and Mastercard are raking in so much cash, it’s helpful to get a sense of the underlying infrastructure on which they rely.”
Why Did The Boeing 737 Max Crash?
Outsourcing is a symptom of a larger move towards cost-cutting. Like many large bureaucracies, the aircraft industry is siloed by department. Instead of taking a comprehensive look at the system, managers analyze the business under a microscope. Each slice of the organization is responsible for minimizing their own costs instead of reducing costs for the organization at-large.
Systems, though, are interconnected. An improved engineering process can reduce the cost of designing or manufacturing a product. Rather than minimizing costs in isolation, Smith advised Boeing to take a bird’s-eye view of the manufacturing process. After all, one system-wide cost reduction is worth more than 20 small and isolated efficiency gains.