Art+Marketing:

You know those stories you hear about programmers sitting in their dorm rooms creating the next billion-dollar tech company? That’s gaming. You know those entrepreneurs that grind for 18 hours a day, by themselves (or with a small team) in a lonely apartment, sharing leftover pizza and three-hour old coffee? That’s gaming.

It's Time for the School Bus to Grow Up

Most other vehicles on the roads, including the school bus’s municipal counterparts, have evolved dramatically over the past few years, growing sleeker, safer, more efficient, and more electric. So how has the school bus—carrying what is arguably the country’s most precious cargo—evaded revolution?

Natural Wine - Pesticide, Chemical and Preservative Free

Once you know what to look for, natural wines are easy to spot: they tend to be smellier, cloudier, juicier, more acidic and generally truer to the actual taste of grape than traditional wines. In a way, they represent a return to the core elements that made human beings fall in love with wine when we first began making it, around 6,000 years ago. Advocates of natural wine believe that nearly everything about the £130bn modern wine industry – from the way it is made, to the way critics police what counts as good or bad – is ethically, ecologically and aesthetically wrong. Their ambition is to strip away the artificial trappings that have developed in tandem with the industry’s decades-long economic boom, and let wine be wine.

Spending on transportation accounts for nearly 41 percent of industry revenues in the U.S. This is followed by recreation, entertainment and shopping at nearly 25 percent, then accommodations at nearly 21 percent and food services and drinking places at 14 percent. (source)

Based on statistics by the Travel Industry Association of America, the average adventure traveler is not a young male in his mid- to late-twenties, but a 47-year old woman. Women overall are dominating the travel industry. Women ranging in age from 20 to 70 years old compromise 75 percent of people taking nature, adventure, or cultural-related trips. Tourism experts agree that women are promoting substantial growth in the industry by making 80 percent of the travel decisions. According to Harvard Business Review, by making most of the travel decisions, women hold $15 trillion in spending power. (source)

William Shakespeare's original accent sounded like something straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Remote workers: Vermont will pay you $10,000 to move there and work remotely.

Their Stay to Stay Weekends are even more interesting:

The Stay to Stay Weekend program is a lodging and networking package to connect guests to employers, entrepreneurs, and potential neighbors in local communities around Vermont. Stay to Stay Weekends begin with a warm welcome on Friday evening at a reception hosted by a local chamber or young professionals network where you’ll meet others interested in moving to Vermont, as well as community leaders, business owners, young professionals, and state and local officials. Spend the next two days exploring Vermont’s many attractions. On Monday, you’ll have the option to meet with employers that are hiring, take a driving/walking tour with a realtor, or visit an incubator/co-maker space to meet with entrepreneurs and other professionals.

Commonplace books became widely used in the early modern period, largely because literate people were discombobulated by the flood of information that the printing press had unleashed on them. (One 17th-century writer wailed, "We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.") Some of these were just scrapbooks... and would be places to store recipes, notes from sermons, remedies for common maladies... you know, everything. (source)

Sounds like it.

Hello, again, world. (Every blog needs a hello world.)

Seems like it.

Yet today, it takes the U.S. many years to spend the money that Congress allocates for infrastructure. New buildings seem to linger half-built for months or years, with construction workers often nowhere to be found. Subways can take decades. Even in the private sector, there are problems -- productivity in the homebuilding sector has fallen in recent decades.

That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking U.S. construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.