Tough Supply-Chain Choices<\/p>\n
It’s been a little more than a week since a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 400 people. Suddenly, companies and consumers across the world are finding themselves in a moral quandary: How can you make (or purchase) clothing cheaply without compromising supply-chain ethics? There’s a lot to read on this topic, from information<\/a> about companies<\/a> whose products are made in Bangladesh to companies\u2019 attitudes about gestures of contrition<\/a>. One company, however, had decided to leave Bangladesh prior to the collapse: Disney. Steven Greenhouse says<\/a> deadly fires in Bangladesh and Pakistan contributed to Disney\u2019s decision to issue new production rules for thousands of licensees and vendors, and his piece situates Disney\u2019s move within the context of tough supply-chain choices that many global companies are facing. These businesses might consider suggestions from supply-chain scholar Steve New, who advises three radical steps<\/a>, including the mandatory public disclosure of provenance data. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n I Would Give This Five Stars, But…<\/a><\/p>\n \n Thanks to Yelp, Amazon, and a plethora of other sites that feature customer ratings, everyone\u2019s an expert on everything. Sure, based on your extensive experience with artisanal pizzas, you found the sauce at the place down the street lacking. But what’s your (allegedly) superior tomato palate doing to the role of the critic? Will truly knowledgeable, authoritative voices vanish, leaving us to wallow in our own crowd-sourced ignorance? Tom Vanderbilt explores this question through the lens of labor scholarship and philosophy, asking what the “messy, complicated, often hidden dynamics of taste and preference, and the battles over it,” say about how we determine what we buy and value. (Also worth a look: this article<\/a> about prison Yelp reviews.)\n <\/p>\n \n Geek Diversity <\/a><\/p>\n \n Here’s a classic negative-feedback loop: The lack of female role models in the tech community is seen as the top deterrent keeping women from pursuing science-related careers and becoming — yes — female role models in the tech community. Men and women agree on this, by the way, according to Elance’s survey of nearly 7,000 freelance workers, mainly in the U.S. But what about the claim that the real reason women stay out of tech jobs is that they\u2019re put off by the nerdy culture? Just a myth, apparently. Although a third of male respondents guessed that geek culture is a top tech-career deterrent for women, only 20.6% of female respondents agreed with that assessment. —Andy O’Connell<\/em>\n <\/p>\n \n But It’s Just Good Management <\/a><\/p>\n \n America has done a pretty good job of eradicating infectious diseases that caused early deaths throughout the twentieth century. Now, writes Ezra Klein, people are living longer but are increasingly saddled with chronic illnesses like diabetes and certain cancers. You can live into your seventies or eighties now, but only with proper disease management. This, perhaps, is one of the biggest issues in medicine, and one that Health Quality Partners in Virginia is mastering. With attentive, in-person care, the medical group has reduced hospitalizations by 33% and cut Medicare costs by 22%. So why is Medicare trying to close it down? It\u2019s a story of what happens when business, government, and health care collide.\n <\/p>\n \n You Want Me to Innovate Where? <\/a><\/p>\n \n For technologies from the global South, worldwide success usually means shedding local ties and, if all goes well, returning home triumphant. It\u2019s a treacherous road, and most of the benefits of such innovations never make it back to the communities where they started. But the alternative strategy of focusing just on local problems and solutions is even less appealing. Yuri Takhteyev traces the surprising trajectory of the programming language Lua from Rio to San Francisco and thence to the world. —Jeff Kehoe<\/em>\n <\/p>\n \n BONUS BITS:<\/a><\/p>\n \n If MBAs Are Useless, We’re All in Big Trouble<\/strong> (Quartz)<\/a> \t\t<\/p>\n Tough Supply-Chain Choices It’s been a little more than a week since a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 400 people. Suddenly, companies and consumers across the world are finding themselves in a moral quandary: How can you make (or purchase) clothing cheaply without compromising supply-chain ethics? There’s a lot to read on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7371,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-656058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7371"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Star Wars Wilson Quarterly<\/em><\/a><\/h4>\n
Why Women Aren’t Interested in Tech Jobs Fortune <\/em><\/a><\/h4>\n
If This Was a Pill, You’d Do Anything to Get It Washington Post<\/em><\/a><\/h4>\n
From Brazil to Wikipedia Foreign Affairs<\/em><\/a><\/h4>\n
Brought to You By the Letter “M”<\/a><\/h4>\n
The Mobile Phone in the Future<\/strong> (London Business School)<\/a>
If It\u2019s May, It Must Be Scam Month<\/strong> (The Guardian)<\/a>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/img><\/a>
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