What We’re Reading
In 1927, Donald Hall and Charles Lindbergh designed and built Spirit in 60 days. “To determine the amount of fuel the plane would need, Lindbergh and Hall drove to the San Diego Public Library at 820 E St. Using a globe and a piece of string, Lindbergh estimated the distance from New York to Paris. It came out to 3,600 statute miles, which Hall calculated would require 400 gallons of gas.”
Pay for the bottom 25% of wage earners rose 4.5% in November from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Wages for the top 25% of earners rose 2.9%. Similarly, the Atlanta Fed found wages for low-skilled workers have accelerated since early 2018, and last month matched the pace of high-skill workers for the first time since 2010.
Ad companies are governed by a rule as durable as gravity: they must make their products worse over time. Corporations must produce profit, and the fastest path to increase revenue is at the cost of user experience. Amazon and Google used to feel powerful and sleek. Now they’re like Costco on Black Friday. Noisy, tacky and ad-riddled. And more profitable! (For now.)
This increase in revenue comes at the cost of long-term customer satisfaction, but nobody knows how to really measure that, so investors don’t care. Now Instagram has too many ads and finding a genuine phone charger on Amazon requires a degree in investigative journalism.
Parachutes were so precious to the Apollo program that only three people in the nation were qualified to hand-pack the parachutes for the Apollo 15 capsule: Norma Cretal, Jimmy Calunga and Buzz Corey, who in 1971 — the year of that mission — all lived in Ventura County. Their expertise was so vital, they were not allowed to ride in the same car together for fear that a single auto accident could cripple the space program.
Electric stoves made food prep faster. Automatic washers and dryers cut the time needed to clean a load of clothes. Refrigerators meant that housewives and the help didn’t have to worry about buying fresh food every other day.
Each of these innovations could have saved hours of labor. But none of them did. At first, these new machines compensated for the decline in home servants. (They helped cause that decline, as well.) Then housework expanded to fill the available hours. In 1920, full-time housewives spent 51 hours a week on housework, according to Juliet Schor, an economist and the author of The Overworked American. In the 1950s, they worked 52 hours a week. In the 1960s, they worked 53 hours. Half a century of labor-saving technology does not appear to have saved the typical housewife even one minute of labor.
Have a good weekend.