Today I am due to receive a new mailbox. I bought it from Amazon. Amazon is not the largest employer in the U.S.. That honor falls to Walmart, with approximately 1.6 million U.S. employees. Walmart. It’s been the largest retailer in the U.S. since 1990. The top ten retailers as of 2025 (by revenues) are: 1. Walmart – $534 billion, with 5,300+ locations. 2. Amazon – $387 billion, with 600+ physical stores. 3. Costco –…
Tomorrow is the first Sunday of November and we are due to “Fall Back” an hour on the clocks. For some, this release from daylight savings time means an hour more of sleep on a crisp Sunday morning. When I was in college, my friend Robbie, who was desperate to do well enough in his grades to get into medical school, was so focused on time management that he would “bank” his hour and “use”…
In the work I do around the house and grounds, sometimes I do something, plant something or build something that perfectly suits the spot. But that only happens some of the time. As much of a planner as I like to consider myself, when it comes to the gardens, I admittedly follow a more whimsical and random approach. There is planning involved in execution, but not so much in overall design. I tend to get…
I have promised myself that I will not write about my ongoing saga with weight loss too often. That said, in the 23 days since I started this new regime, I have already written about the process in one way or another four times. While that is only 17% of the stories I have posted, I heard inadvertently from my friend Steve from Phoenix that he wanted me to update him on my progress privately…
Tonight, I am doing something extremely unusual for me. I’m watching game three of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. You see, I’ve never been much of a spectator sports fan. I attribute this to both growing up for many years overseas (nine of my first 17 years), and to the fact that I didn’t have a male figure in my life since my father exited our family…
Burning Man is an annual experimental community and arts event held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which is in the remote northwestern part of the state. It has evolved from a small beach gathering into one of the world’s most distinctive cultural phenomena. Burning Man began in 1986, when Larry Harvey and Jerry James spontaneously built and burned an 8-foot wooden man on Baker Beach in San Francisco. The event was inspired by Harvey processing…
Back in 1989 I was given responsibility in my business brief for my bank’s business in Canada. At the time, that consisted of one office in Toronto that took the form of what was called a Schedule B bank, which was basically a small banking office that performed all the basic functions of a bank. The operative word in that description is small. Canada was approximately 10-11 times smaller than the U.S. economy. The United…
Inspector Gadget was a bumbling, cyborg detective and the main character of the animated TV series “Inspector Gadget” that premiered in 1983. He was a clumsy, well-meaning but incompetent detective with a body full of gadgets (hence the name). He worked for a law enforcement agency that constantly battled the evil organization M.A.D. (Mean And Dirty). He was completely oblivious to danger (in the Maxwell Smart tradition), and he accidentally and regularly solved crimes while…
From my perch in my living room, if I look out to the west I have to look through floor-to-ceiling glass windows out to my deck and then through a 42” high plate glass railing out to the distant vista beyond. It’s a tad misty this morning, but as I look out in that direction, what I see is an end-to-end array of rolling hills that populate the dozen or so miles from this hilltop…
With the AWS cloud storage outage that occurred yesterday, we are probably all wondering if we should be paying more attention to the AI and data center buildout issues that are being written about every day. I am also seeing more articles about how the data center demands on both power grids AND water supplies are starting to impact communities. Data centers use staggering amounts of both electricity and water and both are starting to…