Saturday mail delivery was supposed to disappear this August--a cost-cutting measure by the U.S. Postal Service--but the Government Accountability Office said that the change would be illegal. The next time you're frustrated by regulations, just be thankful you're not the Post Office, which has long been foiled by its maker.
Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general, is given authority to hire as many postmasters as necessary, sowing the seeds for decades of wasteful patronage appointments.
Private competitors deliver mail faster and cheaper. Congress isn't yet made in Ron Paul's mold: It tightens the Post Office's monopoly, putting private services out of business.
The USPS aims to save $100 million by closing 400 rural post offices. Outraged lawmakers react by hindering its ability to close offices, even if service won't be affected.
Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, introduces a bill to save the USPS about $4 billion annually, but it means cutting Saturday delivery. The bill dies in committee
Let it never be said that our nation stood still while others carried forth the banner of progress.
A person in a hot dog suit poses with two women at a roller derby match (flickr/9stars).
The Fourth of July, high holy day of the hot dog, is upon us. It may seem the fourth marks the eternal return of barbecues and fireworks, a seasonality for those without fields to tend. But time's arrow shapes even the cookout. Here, we survey the year in hot dog innovation through patents filed since the last time we celebrated the nation's independence with fire and processed meat.
Let it never be said that our nation stood still while others carried forth the banner of progress. The Double Dog
"The present invention relates to a meat product used in conjunction with a bun for the consumption of elongated cylindrical meat products comprising: a dual elongated cylindrical meat product, where the meat product is served within the bun. The bun includes a first half; a first well within the interior of the first half, where the first well provides a means for the placement of a first portion of the meat product; a second half, where the second half adjoins the first half along one side the second half; and a second well within the interior of the second half, where the second well provides a means for the placement of a second portion of the meat product." Inflatable Hot Dog Marketing "The inflatable decorative receptacle may also be useful in environments other than tailgating parties. For example, vehicles used for food or other vending purposes depend on their visibility to passing motorists and pedestrians. After setting up in a parking lot, street corner or fairground, the inflatable decorative receptacles are deployed on the ground or on the roof of a vehicle to attract attention. For example, a hot dog vendor may deploy a large inflated hotdog or even inflatable words such as 'HOT DOGS!' " A Printing Press for Corn Dogs (Or Any Stick-Mounted Food Item)
"The cooking appliance includes a pair of opposed heated cooking plates. Each cooking plate includes a primary reservoir/cavity and a secondary reservoir/cavity for receiving the batter and the food item therein. The cooking plates are hinged together whereby the plates can be abutted together such that the reservoirs and the cavities create a cooking enclosure to cook the food item and the batter therein. A stick receiving bung retains the stick in an orientation such that the food item is coaxial with the primary reservoir. Each secondary reservoir includes raised and recessed surfaces which cooperative define a recognizable image. Upon pouring and cooking batter within the secondary reservoirs, this image is transferred to the outer surface of the cooked battered food item." A Better Sweet Onion Condiment
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"The most well-known of all commercially available sweet onion sauces is manufactured by Marathon Enterprises, Inc., of Englewood, N.J., under the brand SABRETT. While SABRETT sweet onion sauce does very well commercially, due to its frequent packaging with a more potent hot dog, its ingredients are largely unnatural and include a significant number of chemicals (i.e., preservatives, etc.), which lead to an undesirable flavor. Thus, there is a need for an improved sweet onion sauce and a method for manufacturing the same." The Hot Dog Innovation Ecosystem
"More recently, such roller grill units have been utilized to heat food products other than hot dogs in a vending situation. For example, burrito products have been manufactured to roll on and be heated by a roller grill. Such other products, however, have not been very successful because of the relatively short product life experienced by such products. While hot dogs and sausage type products are traditional and well understood and have dimensions and structures that work well on roller grills and for grab-and-go eating, other food products are a challenge to adapt for roller grills and for grab-and-go consumption... The present disclosure relates to novel and advantageous food products comprising, a filling substrate and a batter and breading layer surrounding the substrate, wherein the food product is cylindrically shaped, and wherein the food product maintains its shape when the food product is held at one end." Disrupting the Hot Dog Roaster "The conventional hot dog roaster is disadvantageous in that when the number of the gears is much greater than three, the length of the hot dog roaster will be too long for a small space and that since the hot dog roaster cannot be rotated relative to the grill, uneven cooking of the hot dogs may occur due to hot spots of the heating action of charcoal in the grill. Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide a cooking device that can overcome at least one of the aforesaid drawbacks associated with the prior art." Disrupting the Elongated Food Market
"'[F]ood shaping' is generally limited to the restricted food types as set forth above or to frozen food products. However, there is a desire for cooking devices which are capable of customizing a variety of different food products into potentially utilitarian configurations. Such shaping of food products may also be more appealing from an aesthetic point of view as well as providing certain practical features, which make the consumption and handling of the specifically shaped food product more enjoyable. By way of example, the conventional "hotdog" or sausage type sandwich is enjoyed in many countries throughout the world not only because of the flavor and texture but also because of the elongated configuration allows a hotdog, sausage, etc., to be picked up and consumed without the need for forks, knifes, or like eating utensils." Biomedical Hot Dog Roller
"One embodiment of the present invention provides a method of applying a coating to a luminal surface of an implantable medical device. The method comprises providing the implantable medical device defining a lumen and having a longitudinal axis; rotating the medical device about the longitudinal axis; applying a first polymer in liquid form to the luminal surface; and at least partially solidifying the first polymer while rotating... The implantable medical device is rotated about its longitudinal axis by any suitable means, including a bed of rollers. In one aspect the rotation means is a hot dog roller such as the Lil' Diggity Hot Dog Roller or Hot Diggity Hot Dog Roller available from Gold Medal Products, Cincinnati, Ohio. The rollers are preferably made of stainless steel."
What does Bloomington look like in 2040? Where and how should we live, work, learn, and play? What are our priorities for the future? How do we get there? These are just a few of the many questions that ImagineBloomington will help answer. ImagineBloomington will decide what Bloomington should be like in 25 years and create the road map, the City's comprehensive plan, to get there.
This is a unique opportunity for your thoughts and opinions to be an integral part of the city's future. We invite you to participate and get involved!
WHEN AMAZON OPENED ITS WAREHOUSE IN THE FORMER COAL-MINING TOWN OF RUGELEY, ENGLAND, RESIDENTS THOUGHT THE COMPANY MIGHT BRING BRIGHTER ECONOMIC PROSPECTS. AS PHOTOGRAPHER BEN ROBERTS HOPES TO SHOW, THAT’S NOT EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED.
Shining blue and bright above a subterranean labyrinth of hollow shafts, a warehouse sits upon the abandoned remains of a coal mine that once defined this working-class English town. It is as bright as the mines are dark, as vast as the shafts are claustrophobic, as clean as they are filthy. This warehouse represents a future of shopping that does to brick-and-mortar retail what it has already done to the coal mine that used to thrive in its place: Bury it without filling the hole it left behind.
This warehouse is the focus of one particular vision of retail’s future captured by Ben Roberts in Amazon Unpacked, a haunting series of photographs exposing the inner workings of Amazon’s massive fulfillment center in the English Midlands.
Roberts was originally sent to Amazon’s fulfillment warehouse to contribute to a Financial Times article about the online retail giant’s impact upon the town of Rugeley, which fell on hard economic times after the closure of the area’s main employer, a coal mine, back in 1990. In 2011, Amazon announced its intent to set up a fulfillment center in the once vibrant town. It would be a packaging and delivery nexus through which Amazon’s centralized computer brain orchestrated the shipment of millions of packages every year, all throughout the U.K. More important? It would hire a significant number of locals, some of whom had been out of work for 20 years.
Rugeley was hopeful that Amazon’s move into the city limits would result in brighter prospects for the area after two decades of economic gloom. As Roberts’s photographs show, however, Amazon’s future may be bright…but it’s also soulless.
"Vast but one-dimensional. That’s what the Rugeley center is like," Roberts tells Co.Design. "It’s shockingly quiet there."
Workers at Rugeley spend their days wandering the massive warehouse, either squirreling away incoming products, pulling orders down from shelves, or packing them up for shipment. In each of these activities, the workers’ motions are not driven by the engine of human judgment or expertise but rather by the massive engine of Amazon’s exquisitely complex fulfillment mechanism: a computer that both tracks and commands every worker’s movements throughout the day.
An Amazon fulfillment associate might have to walk as far as 15 miles in a single shift, endlessly looping back and forth between shelves in a warehouse the size of nine soccer fields. They do this in complete silence, except for the sound of their feet. The atmosphere is so quiet that workers can be fired for even talking to one another. And all the while, cardboard cutouts of happy Amazon workers look on, cartoon speech bubbles frozen above their heads: "This is the best job I ever had!"
"The workers at Rugeley are effectively human robots," Roberts says. "And the only reason Amazon doesn’t actually replace them with robots is they’ve yet to find a machine that can handle so many different sized packages."
It’s a stark metaphor that emphasizes the way in which Amazon has managed to mechanize even the human element of its e-retail empire. In trying to capture it, Roberts found himself taking pictures that were very different from the tone of his usual work, which often focuses upon the intimacy and immediacy of the connection between people and their environments. There is no such intimacy on display in Amazon Unpacked. Instead, his photos of the warehouse are reminiscent of the massive industrial landscapes captured by Edward Burtynsky, a comparison that Roberts says is "almost inescapable" due to the barren humanity of the facility.
The issue at Rugeley is not that workers are ungrateful for the jobs Amazon has given them, or even that they find these jobs unpleasant. Most of Rugeley’s workers come from mining families, a stock not exactly known for its weak-livered dandyism. It doesn’t matter that these jobs are hard. It’s that they have no future.
"Mines aren’t by any stretch of the imagination utopias. Any kind of mining is a dirty, dangerous, high-risk job." Roberts says. "But what the mining industry did offer workers was a job for life. If you started working for the mine at 18, you could be the head of an entire team of miners by the time you were 35."
This is not the case at Amazon. The jobs in the Rugeley fulfillment center are almost always temporary positions handed out by agencies on zero-hour contracts. Nothing is guaranteed, and a fulfillment associate’s job can completely disappear between one day and the next. As such, the local economy is not recovering as locals hoped. Amazon is not investing in the town’s people; instead, it’s mechanizing them.
For Roberts, this isn’t about how something you order off of Amazon comes to your door. It’s about how fulfillment centers like Rugeley represent the invisible cost buried in every low Amazon price.
"When you buy something from an independent retailer, you might pay more than Amazon, but that extra bit is an investment," Roberts explains. "When you pay it, you’re investing in the quality of not only your own life but the life of the community around you."
Without that investment? No need to imagine a world without shops, just imagine the walls of a fulfillment center like the one in Rugeley--growing as fast as Amazon does--extending into the horizon, forever. And even shoppers might one day become the automatons wandering between the shelves.
"The inflatable decorative receptacle may also be useful in environments other than tailgating parties. For example, vehicles used for food or other vending purposes depend on their visibility to passing motorists and pedestrians. After setting up in a parking lot, street corner or fairground, the inflatable decorative receptacles are deployed on the ground or on the roof of a vehicle to attract attention. For example, a hot dog vendor may deploy a large inflated hotdog or even inflatable words such as 'HOT DOGS!' "
"The conventional hot dog roaster is disadvantageous in that when the number of the gears is much greater than three, the length of the hot dog roaster will be too long for a small space and that since the hot dog roaster cannot be rotated relative to the grill, uneven cooking of the hot dogs may occur due to hot spots of the heating action of charcoal in the grill. Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide a cooking device that can overcome at least one of the aforesaid drawbacks associated with the prior art."
