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The latest articles can be found below. Enjoy.
Industrial manufacturing is more efficient than ever, and the jobs are safer, but there are less of them. In a nutshell, that’s the story the following three infographics tell us.
Credit for the worker safety and American Manufacturing jobs infographics go to Forbes deputy editor Jon Bruner.
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WORKER SAFETY – NOW AND THEN
Source: LabSafety.com
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PRODUCTIVITY VS EMPLOYMENT
Source: Fisher Investments / Flickr
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AMERICAN MANUFACTURING JOBS
Source: Grainger.com
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Renewable energy is an important goal. Fossil fuels won’t last forever, and they also pollute. Nuclear energy generates nuclear waste that must be safely stored for thousands of years. It also has the potential for catastrophic failure, a potential that has been realized in the former Soviet Union, in Japan, and even in the United States.
Renewable energy sources, however, have their own problems. They are not without environmental impact.
According to an article in New Scientist, “Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, and in some cases produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels.” Hydropower damages river habitats and hydroelectric dams can cause disrupt fish migration. Dams have significantly contributed to the decline in salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and California.
Solar farms have problems as well. They are land intensive–they can even be more land intensive than the fossil fuel projects they are meant to replace. Wind farms have the same problems and are also noisy and kill birds.
Geothermal power, incredibly, causes earthquakes. In 2009, a $60 million geothermal project in Basel, Switzerland was cancelled because of the earthquakes it was causing and would continue to cause.
In additional to these problems, renewable energy is expensive. Even the most viable renewable energy source, wind power, is at least twice as expensive as traditional energy.
What to do? Technology will improve and solutions will be found. Some dams already are designed to allow fish to migrate naturally. Some wind power facilities shut down their turbines when there is high change of hitting many birds–some even track flocks of birds via radar.
A Shell International study predicted that in fifty to one hundred years, most of America’s energy needs will be served by renewable sources. This may well be true. In the meantime, it’s important to support real progress rather than feel good solutions. And, as always, we need to be on the lookout for unintended consequences.
Sources
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-280.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046-hydroelectric-powers-dirty-secret-revealed.html
http://www.powerscorecard.org/tech_detail.cfm?resource_id=4
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/01/21/21greenwire-geothermal-advocates-tout-plants-smaller-envir-84426.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/science/earth/11basel.html
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I spotted this sculpture while driving to the buffalo airport to pick up a friend.
The Make a Wish caption on the symbol of a buffalo (ok technically its a bison) made me do a double take as the buffalo is on our company logo.
I’m partial to the Buffalo. It’s an animal that is rugged and resilient (qualities of our industrial equipment products).
But getting back to the caption ‘Make a Wish’ … that phrase is used every day in countless situations
You hear the phase just before someone blows out birthday candles. Or when a young couple throws coins into a fountain. Or when brothers and sisters with small fingers are tugging on the Thanksgiving turkey’s wish bone, each hoping to get the bigger half.
We use it so frequently it may have lost some if it’s original luster, and it’s power.
I’ll explain. In times of past (and I guess still today in some places) a king or sovereign who wielded complete authority over his realm would use the words ‘It is my wish that ___ (fill in the blanks) be done.
He said ‘It is my wish’ because he did not need to issue a command. That would be beneath him. His simple wish was enough. He was the supreme authority over the land.
The rejoinder of ‘your wish is my command’ from the one receiving the wish/request likely originated from that understanding.
So often, when making a wish, we dispense of it as if tossing a coin into a fountain. There is no expectation the wish will actually materialize.
Next time, make your wish with the knowledge all things materialize from thought. As Buddha said 2500 years ago, “with our thoughts, we create our world”. If you wish like issuing a royal command to the universe, the universe has no rejoinder other than ‘your wish is my command’ and will work on bringing it into reality.
Because you are the king of your domain and the sovereign of your life.
Thanksgiving is the traditional time to reflect on this world we have created. We survey the kingdom we have built from our intentions, and on what we’re grateful for and what is bringing joy and true satisfaction into our lives.
Reflection may also reveal to us what is amiss. Where we need to focus our intentions in the future.
Try applying the Pareto Principle to your life. Is eighty percent of your happiness coming from twenty percent of your life activities? If so, focus your intentions on the twenty.
So when we hear ‘Make a Wish’ we need to remember the power of our intention and the command we are issuing. So that we create exactly what we want.
Make many good wishes on this happy Thanksgiving.
We are CB Power and Industrial Equipment, supplying new, replacement and spare parts on major power and industrial equipment. For expert advice or a quote, call 1-888-317-8959 today.
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Writing this post has been exceedingly difficult. During research, my mind was continuously swept off course by interesting links, Twitter profiles and conversations. The bite-sized info-chunks make for compelling reading.
For those who believe Twitter has long since been a contaminated datastream, polluted with inane opinions and spamvertising, they’re only half right. Twitter CAN be a vacuous waste of time, and it can be an incredible source of business intelligence, current news, trends, celebrity gossip – pick your poison. It is both.
FOLLOW THE THOUGHTLEADERS
The quality of your Twitter experience and it’s usefulness to you relies almost wholly on who you listen to. If every time you glance at your Twitter stream, you wince, it’s because you’re not following people that are aligned with your interests.
Mind you, you don’t need to follow a single person to benefit from what Twitter has to offer. You don’t need to visit Twitter.com either as smartphone users can tweet via third party applications. You can even have a cherry picked list of your favorite Tweeters delivered via email, so you can read/scan it anywhere. More on that later.
Yes, the feature I’m talking about is Twitter lists, and we’re going to use it for Business Intelligence in the Manufacturing sector.
Lists allow users to organize “Tweeple” (Twitter parlance for other Twitter users) into various groups, associations or categories. For example, aspiring chefs might compile a list of their favorite celebrity chefs who are tweeters. Another list could be classmates he went to Chef School with, and yet another list of food and beverage retailers who tweet their daily specials. The number of categories are only limited by the creativity of the list builder.
For manufacturing, the categories would be vastly different and equally unlimited. Depending on your market and your own position in the company, your lists might include competitors, suppliers, management philosophies or manufacturing news. Whatever you want to learn more about or stay on top of, you’ll likely find it.
MAKING THE BESTSELLER LIST
So, let’s imagine you are compiling a list of top B2B salespeople. You could start with someone who you’re already following and datamine the person’s lists. You can also view that person’s favorite tweets by going to their Twitter page and clicking the Favorites tab. See any Tweeters who have been favorited frequently? If so, they are prime candidates to include on your list and/or follow. You can even subscribe to the lists they built.
Don’t know who to follow? Then head over to Listorious, a popular Twitter people search on the web where you can find anyone by topic, region or profession. Here you will easily find quality Tweeters to build your list with.
Personally, as I continue to prune my lists, finding new ones, spelunking into the vast abyss of information, I am humbled with how smart people some people are and how much there is for me to learn (about any topic). I am also often sleep deprived because reading the tweets of these thought leaders is more addictive than crack cocaine. It’s the freshest, hottest information in the world regularly delivered to my email.
So how do you have the lists emailed to you? I use and recommend Tweetymail.com, a simple yet robust web service that enables you to create custom email alerts for tweets, mentions of your brand or an industry keyword, Twitter lists, and Twitter searches – and have them delivered automatically to your inbox. Monthly subscriptions start at only $2.99 (I have no affiliation with this service, I’m only a happy user).
DIRECT MESSAGE PACKAGE TRACKING
There are other web services that interface nicely with Twitter and can be of use to your business. Twitter’s direct message feature work with cutting edge package tracking services like TrackThis, which will notify you via DM when your UPS, Fedex, USPS, DHL package is in motion.
A final word of warning: Leveraging this constant stream of choice industry related data is competitively advantageous, but the stream can be more like a firehose. Tweetymail makes it easy to turn it off as well.
We are CB Power and Industrial Equipment, supplying new, replacement and spare parts on major power and industrial equipment. We also provide emergency rental boilers with customized energy solutions to fit your requirements.
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Despite the real possibility we (as in the human race) will run out of fossil fuels in our lifetime, and that fossil fuels, which power our cars, heat our homes and enable the manufacturing of consumer gadgets etc also contributes to climate change, we don’t seem anywhere near finding a replacement.
Maybe part of the problem is that we’re looking for that one, all-encompassing renewable fuel source that will allow us to live our consumer oriented lives uninterrupted. It likely doesn’t exist. A more plausible reality is that various alternative energy sources will need to be cobbled together in a customized, individualized way.
The ideal all-in-one energy solution would embody these five characteristics:
1. Abundant
2. High energy density
3. Environmentally friendly to extract and utilize
4. Predictable and reliable
5. The energy yield must be far greater than the capital cost of extraction and utilization
When you think about it, no current energy source fulfills all the above requirements. Coal, while meeting most of the criteria, isn’t environmentally friendly by a long shot. Neither is oil or natural gas.
Hydroelectricity, on the other hand, is environmentally friendly but to make it requires altitude and rainfall. It also doesn’t have a high energy density.
The intermittent nature of wind makes wind power fail number four, although it seems to meet the other criteria when you include deep and shallow offshore wind sources.
Solar power is unquestionably the most abundant renewable energy, but it fails on cost, specifically the cost of installation.
Biomass is a renewable energy source derived from garbage, wood, waste, landfill gases, and alcohol fuels. Being renewable doesn’t mean it’s environmentally friendly however. Biomass produces air pollution at levels that rival or even surpass coal or natural gas.
Nuclear power meets most of the criteria handily, but while radioactive waste is less than one percent of total industrial toxic wastes, much of it remains hazardous indefinitely.
So as you can see, there is no “one size fits all” solution to our imminent fossil fuel troubles. Then again, even if fossil fuel supplies went on forever, our current rate of consumption can’t. Every product we buy puts more pressure on our planet and on the finite natural habitats we are stewards of.
Because we’re nowhere near finding a replacement for Mother Nature.
We are CB Power and Industrial Equipment, supplying new, replacement and spare parts on major power and industrial equipment. For expert advice or a quote, call 1-888-317-8959 today.
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