Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Nov 4, 2013 (I)

choi

(1) Matthew Campbell and Aaron Kirchfeld, London Calling to Faraway Towns.
www.businessweek.com/news/2013-1 ... s-as-banks-retrench

the first two paragraphs:

"The Swiss town of Baar boasts clean air, easy access to ski slopes and some of Europe’s lowest personal taxes. London? Traffic and perpetual drizzle.

"Yet executives at Noble Corp, a provider of deepwater oil drilling rigs, are in the process of moving headquarters from Baar to the British capital, citing the talented workforce and easy airline connections from Heathrow, Europe’s busiest international airport. On top of that, the UK tax rate is now competitive with Switzerland’s historically corporate-friendly tax regime.

My comment:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Foreign companies are moving headquarters to the British capital
(b) quotation underneath the title in print: "You have a much larger talent pool * * * language and lower tax rates"
(c) Noble Corp, formed by (an American) Lloyd Noble in 1921 and an American company based in Switzerland (until recently), is "one of the largest offshore drilling contractors in the world today," according to its website.
(d) The report says that UK prime minister David Cameron's reducing corporate tax has made Ireland and the Channel Islands less attractive as corporate headquarters "because the tax differential is lower."
(e) There is no need to read the rest.


(2) Dexter Roberts, Chinese Rage at the Pension System.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... -the-pension-system

Quote: “China’s 10 million civil servants, as well as 30 million doctors, teachers, and researchers at state-affiliated institutions, don’t have to contribute anything to their pensions, which pay as much as 95 percent of their salaries in their retirement. Other workers pitch in 8 percent of their salaries (with employers giving 20 percent) and on average receive only 40 percent to 45 percent of their pay when they finish working, estimates Hu Yuwei, China representative of Spanish bank BBVA. ‘The general public is very discontented with this fact,’ says Hu. (Rural Chinese get a token pension of as little as 700 to 1,200 yuan a year.)

Note: summary underneath the title in print: Civil servants get the best benefits while the rest get much less

choi

(3) Katarina Gustafsson and Niklas Magnusson, Does That Homeless Guy Take American Express?
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... credit-card-readers

Quote:

“In the most cashless society on the planet” (Sweden), the homeless hawking a culture magazine “were equipped in September with portable card readers to accept payments from fellow Swedes. The move marks a world first

In Sweden, which printed Europe’s first bank notes in 1661, bills and coins represented just 2.7 percent of the economy in 2012, compared with an average 9.8 percent in the euro area and 7.2 percent in the US, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: He does in Sweden. Welcome to the cashless society
(b) Bank for International Settlements
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements
(an international organization; serves as a bank for central banks; established in 1930 by an intergovernmental agreement by Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Italy, Japan, United States and Switzerland)

choi

(4) Mark Glassman, Study Hard, Marry Well.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... t-for-your-marriage
(BA “is great for your marriage. A recent survey of people born from 1957 to 1964 shows a bachelor’s degree not only inreases the likelihood of marriage, it also lowers the risk of divorce”)

Note: the survey:

Marriage and Divorce; Patterns by gender, race, and educational attainment. Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, October 2013 Monthly Labor Review).
www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/articl ... onal-attainment.pdf

(a) paragraph 1: "Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (ULSY79), this article examines marriages and divorces of young baby boomers born during the 1957-1964 period. The article presents data on marriages and divorces by age, gender, race, abd Hispanic origin, as well as by educational attainment.

(b) summary: ""Marriage patterns differed markedly by age at marriage and by educational attainment. College-educated men and women married at older ages compared with their counterparts who had fewer years of schooling. About equal proportions of men and women who received a college degree married by age 46, 88 percent for men and 90 percent for women. Men and women who did not complete high school were less likely to marry than were men and women with more education. Men who earned a bachelor's degree were more likely to marry than men with less education. The chance of a marriage ending in divorce was lower for people with more education, with over half of marriages of those who did not complete high school having ended in divorce compared with approximately 30 percent of marriages of college graduates."  pages 1

(c) The BusinessWeek graphic is based on, in the Bureau article,
"Table 6 Duration of marriages begun by individuals ages 15 to 46 in 1978-2010 by age, gender, and educational attainment"  pp 15-16.

* The Bureau article does not distinguish people with Master’s

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(5) Shruti Date Singh, A Chicken of Convenience.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... o-sell-more-chicken
(Springdale (Ark.)-based "Tyson Foods is the largest US commodity beef and chicken supplier, with slaughterhouses that process an average of 132,000 head of cattle and 41.4 million chickens weekly. But the company is seeking fortune beyond the supermarket meat department. That’s why it’s rushing to sell piping-hot Buffalo chicken bites -and other prepared food] at many of the gas stations and 149,000 convenience stores")

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Tyson Foods looks for growth in the 7-Elevens of the world
(b) quotation underneath the title in print: "Convenience stores * * * want to become a food destination"
(c) The title is wordplay on a phrase “a marriage of convenience.”
(d) Springdale, Arkansas
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springdale,_Arkansas
(Springdale is the location of the headquarters of Tyson Foods, the largest meat producing company in the world, and has been dubbed the "Chicken Capital of the World" by several publications)
(i) So named thanks to springs. See History Of Elm Springs, Arkansas
elmsprings.net/History.html
(City of Elm Springs is "six miles west of Springdale, Arkansas. * * *Located among great springs of such power that, not far from their openings, John Ingram, in 1844, found them strong enough to run a water-mill “ in Elm Springs)
(ii) The City of Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered, is nearby.
(e) Taiwan’s 7-Elevens chain (wholly owned by Uni-President 統一企業) knew and perfected this decades ago in Taiwan.

choi

(6) Venessa Wong and Susan Berfield, For Starbucks, Coffee Is So 1990s.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... r-its-teavana-chain

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: After popularizing café culture in the US, it's time for tea
(b)
(i) About Teavana. Teavana, undated
www.teavana.com/about-us
(“As our name implies, Teavana's goal is to be a heaven of tea“)

It is clear that the name is wordplay on nirvana 涅槃 in Buddhism 佛教.
(ii) “Teavana was started in Atlanta, Georgia in 1997 [and still based there], with the opening of the first teahouse at Lenox Square[, an upscale shopping mall in the Buckhead district of Atlanta. The name "Buckhead" comes from a story that Henry Irby, who purchased the place in 1838, killed a large buck deer and placed the head in a prominent location].” Starbucks paid $620 million in cash to buy Teavana Holdings Inc; the acquisition was completed on Dec 31, 2012.  Wikipedia
(iii) Greg Bluestein, Teavana’s Transformation Into a Tea Titan. Atlantic Journal-Constitution, Nov 23, 2013
www.ajc.com/news/business/teavan ... -a-tea-titan/nTDRr/
(Andrew “Mack quit his job, and he and his wife, Nancy, poured their life savings into a 700-square-foot store in Buckhead in 1997 where curious Southerners wandered in to sip tea that wasn’t served over ice”)
(iv) Urvaksh Karkaria, How Many Teabags Can You Buy for $333.4 Million? Atlantic Business Journal, Nov 14, 2012
www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news ... u-get-for-333m.html
(Andrew “Mack, a former Applebee's restaurant manager, owned 21,510,860 Teavana shares as of early August. Based on Starbucks offer price of $15.50 a share, Mack stands to pocket $333,418,330. * * * Nancy, a former Walt Disney World Resort customer service manager * * * Teavana went public in July 2011”)

choi

(7) Kyunghee Park, Why the Longest Fights Are Saying So Long.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... est-nonstop-flights

Quote:

"On Nov 25, Singapore Airlines will stop its 100-passenger daily run from Singapore to Newark, NJ, the world’s longest nonstop commercial flight. * * *The carrier is stopping the all-business-class service on a four-engine Airbus A340-500 after ending the second-longest flight, from Los Angeles to the island city [Singapore], on Oct 22. * * * The Newark service is more than 10,300 miles, while the Los Angeles flight was about 8,700 miles. The longest nonstop commercial flight by distance will now be Qantas Airways’ 8,575-mile flight from Sydney to Dallas, which uses a Boeing 747-400ER. * * * Singapore Air started the Newark flight in June 2004 with 181 business and economy seats. Almost four years later it was converted to a 100-seat all-business-class configuration.

"Scoring a boarding pass on the world’s longest flight doesn’t come cheap. A round-trip ticket in mid-October on the Singapore-Newark nonstop cost as much as S$13,400 ($10,850). Flights to JFK via Frankfurt [the route taken after the nonstop service is discontinued: from Singapore to New York's JFK with layover at Frankfurt] are as much as S$10,700.

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Fuel costs are behind the demise of Singapore Air's 19-hour nonstop
(b) quotation underneath the title in print: "It's virtually impossible to make money on ultralong-haul flights"
(c) figure in the window of print:  $11k  Appropriate price of a round-trip on Singapore Airlines' Network nonstop, the world's longest flight
(d) The “so long” in the title means “good bye.”