If you must think, do not strain yourself

A brilliant piece of unquestioning journalism. The big reveal:

Holbreich recently did a study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which found very low rates of allergies among Amish children living on farms in Indiana. He says the reason may be because the children get exposed very early on to dirty environments, and to a variety of dust and germs. Even young kids are often in the barn, working with animals, and drinking raw milk.

“We think there’s something about milk,” Holbreich says. “That’s key, along with exposure to large animals, particularly cows.”

Scientists don’t know exactly what it is in raw milk, or in the barn, or on the cows, that helps boost the immune system. They’re researching that now. But Holbreich cautions against drinking raw milk or serving it to your child. It contains too many dangerous, disease-causing bacteria.

[Edit] H/T Art Sido.

Amazon buys Kiva

Labor is increasingly expensive and hard to retain for warehouse work. For piece-picking (the majority of outbound traffic for direct-to-consumer operations like Amazon), the Kiva system reduces the amount of time the warehouse worker spends traveling to find the next pick, and concentrates the time they spend picking (the task that still challenges robotics).

The concept is pretty attractive, but note that Zappos (now owned by Amazon) no longer uses Kiva. And, as Bob Trebilcock says, we’ve seen this story before (closing paragraph).

Turnover

Can you imagine working in an industry where “highest turnover level on record was 134 percent [was] set in the fourth quarter of 2005” and today is at 89 percent?

To go above 100% turnover means that the trucking industry replaced some drivers more than once in the quarter. In fact it stands to reason that there would be some quantity of drivers who stayed, there was probably a pretty good rate of new drivers getting replaced within one quarter.

I never wanted to be a truck driver, but it is hard to imagine what a last-resort job it must be if your turnover casually exceeds 50% and can pass 100 percent.

Sinking Feeling

Since the official record will reflect the endemic optimism that prevails in marketing unless doom appears certain, let me cry from the cynic’s lair that the first quarter of next year (possibly touching on the second, but not past May) will include doom and gloom for the general US economy. Various European catastrophes could make this any degree of worse; but by my read, some of the doom has already happened and is merely making its way down hill.

One,
Two,
Three
negative reports on shipping.

I think everyone is holding their breath hoping for a “black” Christmas, and when Santa Claus does not show up there will be mid-winter depression.