JB Smuckers does. They lobbied hard for tarrifs and donated heavily to Trump.
Imported jam like Bonne Maman has been killing them. They claim it’s due to unfair pricing or something, but I suspect it’s because of the HFCS, trans fats and other crap they’ve put in their products over the years.
There are other reasons businesses might go to other locales other than price. Capability is the obvious big one, some capabilities aren’t possible at any price. Regulatory environment is another.
For all but 4 people, it's on the way to their own desks.
I bet that when someone just drops the card on the kitchen table, someone else would carry it to Kasia. As far as I know, dropping the card has never happened.
Nonetheless, the comment is spot on. If people needed to go far from their regular tracks, it might have been less reliable. Good system design means that doing the right thing is the easy/easiest thing.
Hm, you’re right. I’m thinking a nearby Raspberry Pi with a camera facing the box. It uses an LLM to identify the box contents and send update messages to Kasia each morning. I’m surprised they didn’t think of this already.
Technically that's not really a different problem than exists. With the current system, Kaisa has to poll her desk every day to see if new milk needs to be ordered. Depending on what her activities entail, maybe there are entire days when she's not at her office. Some place has to be polled in any case, but we can choose the best place(s).
In an extreme case where there's a 100-floor building with Kaisa's desk on the first floor, it might well be more globally optimal to have boxes every 10 floors being polled, instead of everyone having to move 50 floors on average to her desk.
Appreciate thinking of problems that might have made it work not so well.
Having said that, the office is a single floor. The grocery order is once every few weeks.
There's quite some time flexibility in ordering stuff.
There is plan B (buying a couple of cartons in a grocery shop on the same block).
The system is scaled to what we need. And I don't say anyone should copy it blindly. If we talked about several floors, multiple coffee corners, etc., the flow of index cards might have required much more conscious thought.
In our case, we need none of this.
Also, continuous improvement (kaizen): start with something simple, then improve it. There's not much point in solving hypothetical problems with system design. Most of the time, we'd only be unnecessarily complicating the solution.
Which (tongue in cheek) is half of the history of software development :)
If there is only one fridge, the solution that minimises total distance travelled is trivial: Move Kasia into the fridge.
For n > 1 fridges at known locations, Kasia can be positioned anywhere (including partway along an edge) on an optimal TSP tour through them all.
OTOH, if fridges pop into and out of existence dynamically over time, then having a single Kasia traverse all of them is not feasible. In this case, other employees will need to walk to her desk when they discover the last carton of milk at some fridge. If we can assume that the density of fridge creation/destruction is uniform, then the strategy resulting in minimum total distance travelled in expectation is a spherical office building with Kasia at the centre.
When I was younger, dark room, dark screen was fine. Gets harder to focus as you age. Bright screen and room cause smaller pupils and therefore easier focusing like a pinhole camera.
Constant fans are sucking outside air into your house. Could be part of your Heat/AC efficiency problem mentioned in your post. A timer to run every 10th minute would be a simple improvement.
A lot of newer building codes require fans to be constantly running anyway due to the other part of the building codes requiring high r-value insulation.
We do have an ERV. But I suppose the cat fans don't actually exhaust through it. Maybe we could have arranged that had we thought harder about it before construction...
Sir, I want to add that it was deeply inspiring. While I’m struggling at 40 just being a CEO of 14 people, which by one measure is excellent but I have put aside so many lives for it and failed at all my social ventures (yes I mean friends and dates); You, you succeed to have time for a wife (a potentially intellectually interesting person at that, according to your brief summary), you succeed to build a house, manage a lot of people at work, have friends with proper deep connections, and still have energy for home renovations. It’s like you’re living 9 lives at once. Oh yeah and kids. Like my uncle, who, beyond children, still had time for home renovations to build a cozy nest everywhere they lived.
In this day of international men’s day, maybe I should still enquire about your internal mental health, because stress can be discreet, but still, the outer appearance you give from your allocation of time and clarity of mind seems absolutely perfect.
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