Free Republic

The housing crisis is a multi-faceted issue, based on problems such as the lack of land space, rising housing costs, and the fact not enough houses are being built. Yet, there could be a solution to the last one in the form of 3D printed homes. A city in the Netherlands, Einhoven, will be the first place in the world to have houses made by a 3D printer. Developed by the Dutch construction company Van Wijnen, in collaboration with Eindhoven University of Technology, Project Milestone as it is called will see five homes built in total. These will be a...

With a population about twice the size of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, Singapore has a GDP per capita that is 38 times larger than North Korea’s. Kim might just be taking notes when he heads to his summit with Donald Trump. Did President Trump choose Singapore as the site for next Tuesday’s summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un by accident? No way. One of Trump’s wildest cards in his unorthodox path to this meeting with Kim Jong Un is his vision of a prosperous North Korea. As Trump put it last week, “I truly believe North Korea has brilliant...

The Permian basin is on fire, and the current boom cycle in its oil industry is posing an interesting challenge that area in Texas: Right now, that challenge is a shortage of oil industry workers. The oil industry, in an attempt to keep up with increased oil production—particularly in the Permian Basin, is one-upping other employers in a mad dash to reclaim enough workers to keep the industry awash with oil. In fact, as the Dallas News pointed out on Wednesday, the industry is throwing double pay to woo workers away from other industries, such as school bus drivers, police...

He and the network reportedly clashed over a “Black-ish” episode that addressed NFL players protesting during the national anthem. Kenya Barris, the creator of ABC’s “Black-ish,” on Wednesday questioned why the network chose to reboot comedian Roseanne Barr’s show in the first place, given her history of promoting conspiracy theories alongside racist, transphobic and Islamophobic tweets. After praising ABC president Channing Dungey and Disney CEO Bob Iger for acting swiftly to end Barr’s show last week after she posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, longtime adviser to former President Barack Obama, Barris noted that network executives should have known...

BECKLEY, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- More coal jobs are coming to West Virginia. Bluestone Coal has announced it is hiring 250 employees, adding to its staff and providing high paying jobs at mines across southern West Virginia. According to a news release from the company, Bluestone is now producing at a level that requires additional workers. “We need both surface and deep mine workers,” Company CEO Jay Justice said. “All positions, ranging from foremen to mechanics, electricians, truck drivers and all types of equipment operators will be put to work as soon as possible.” A variety of jobs are being offered,...

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - If you want to work on the railroad... now is your chance. Norfolk Southern is going on a massive hiring spree. Each day 75-90 Norfolk Southern freight trains operate through Fort Wayne. There are more than 400 employees that currently work at the Norfolk Southern rail yard in New Haven. The booming economy has increased demand for railway workers. The railroad needs to hire up to 65 train conductors within the next year.The company plans to hold job fairs across northeast Indiana to fill those positions. Candidates do not need a high school diploma, however...

SEOUL, Jun. 8 (Korea Bizwire) — Yang Jong-moon’s routine for the past few months has involved dropping by his apartment complex’s community center once or twice a week to pick up breakfast before he heads off to work. In September, the Banpo Riche apartment building where he lives began to offer breakfast to its residents at the reasonable price of 4,500 won (US$4), although that has recently been adjusted to 5,500 won. The decision to offer the meal reflected demand from students, single-member and double-income households and seniors. “I prefer a light meal in the morning and think five minutes...

A great deal of the electricity in the United States goes to waste. Much is lost in the initial generation of electricity. And much is lost through the use of inefficient devices, like incandescent light bulbs that heat up a filament to produce light. But power is also lost in between, on the grid, as it is carried along hundreds of miles of wires, repeatedly shifted between different voltages, and converted from AC to DC and back, all in the split second between the time it enters the grid and the time it powers your computer. How much power is...

As snow fell on the fields of the Northern Neck in March, Justin McKenney was in his tomato greenhouse tending to his plants with his young assistants: daughters Josslyn, 5, and Joely, 2. In April, he was back in the greenhouse, and the plants were about 4 feet tall with plump, green tomatoes forming on the vines. He expects to pick the first ripe tomatoes by the end of April. He will harvest until December, with each of his 1,050 plants—growing to about 40 feet in length by then—producing upwards of 50 pounds of tomatoes for the year. Hydroponic farming...

Some people looking to secure a career in the technology sector might fear they are at a disadvantage if they lack technical skills like programming. But according to the head of Google's co-working campus in London, technical skills are not a prerequisite. "When I first came into tech, I was like, 'Isn't that just coders?'" Sarah Drinkwater told CNBC in an interview this week. "And that perception is just not true. When I look at a great company, they've got an amazing business development person, they've got marketers, they've got sales people, they've got technical people — great companies need...

AT&T will drop $100M on its four-block downtown Dallas campus, adding restaurants, a small outdoor concert venue and a six-story video wall. The renovation, which would be completed by the end of 2019, will join a number of redevelopment projects in downtown's southeast quadrant in the last year: the Statler Hotel renovation, a two-year upgrade of the Adolphus Hotel and the relocation of the Dallas Morning News to the old Dallas library. "We're looking to inject additional growth, commerce and entertainment into Downtown Dallas," AT&T Regional Vice President Mike Peterson said in a news release Monday. "This investment will result...

WWTCD? The colonel, most likely, would lose his mind over the recent news that KFC in Britain is experimenting with a vegetarian version of the founder’s famous fried chicken. You know, the top-secret Original Recipe chicken, the one with 11 herbs and spices that (reportedly) only two executives have access to at any one time. As part of a countrywide campaign to slim down, KFC UK is heeding the new guidelines issued by Public Health England, which recommends that British adults consume only 400 calories at breakfast and 600 apiece at lunch and dinner. KFC UK told the Daily Mirror,...

Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz is preparing to step away from the coffee chain he built into a global behemoth – and stoking speculation about a possible 2020 presidential run. Yet, in the era of real estate magnate-turned-President Donald Trump, Schultz is just one of several business titans whose possible political aspirations might influence the next campaign for the White House. For more than two centuries, most candidates for U.S. president had some public or military service on their resume before mounting a successful bid for the White House. But Trump's election in 2016 has opened the door for an...

After a sanctions-driven hiatus, dozens of North Korean women are again cutting cloth, pedalling sewing machines and manning production lines at a garment factory in a Chinese city buoyed by hopes of peace across the border. The workshop had been silent for months, whipsawed by United Nations sanctions that sent North Korean workers home, but machines have sprung back to life in the trade gateway of Dandong as tensions ease on the Korean peninsula. Beijing, an old ally of Pyongyang, has officially shown no signs of lifting the punishing UN measures, but President Xi Jinping's embrace of his younger North...

Last year was the year of cryptocurrency in South Korea. Bitcoin, ethereum and other digital currencies took the country by storm, some nine years after the world's first bitcoin was mined. When we compiled our list of South Korea's richest last spring, cryptocurrency holdings were not on our radar. But in researching our new list, it turns out that seven members have been busy investing in crypto. In February Forbes ranked another Korean, Song Chi-Hyung, at No. 19 among the world's biggest fortunes based entirely on crypto, but he fell short in making the country's top 50 in overall wealth....

Everybody has the right to a living wage. It's the responsibility of employers to pay their workers enough to live on comfortably, no matter what sort of work they do. No matter what it costs. No matter how much or how little value an individual employee provides. A job is a human right, and if you pay your employees anything less than a designated amount -- an amount that is not, and will never be, designated by you -- then you're a fascist and you'll be shamed and slandered and picketed until you comply. F*** your laws of economics, you...

The American economy just went off the charts when for the first time in history there are now more jobs than job seekers: The jobs market has reached what should be some kind of inflection point: There are now more openings than there are workers. April marked the second month in a row this historic event has occurred, and the gap is growing. According to the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released Wednesday, there were just shy of 6.7 million open positions in April, the most recent month for which data are available. That represented an increase of...

Marx believed that international free trade, or perhaps more accurately, Ricardian economic globalization, would pave the way for a glorious proletarian revolution. Specifically, Marx thought that free trade would increase wealth inequality and reduce wages for the majority of people, and that this tension inevitably would lead to conflict. While I hate to admit it, Marx is broadly right on this point. International free trade has indeed increased wealth inequality and reduced wages for the majority of Americans. In fact, the median American household was richer in the 1980s than today (better technology aside). Part of this is explained by...

South Korea has offered $1bn in official development assistance (ODA) to the Philippines to help boost the Duterte administration’s infrastructure programme, Malacanang said yesterday. In a news conference in South Korea, Palace spokesman Harry Roque said the commitment was made during a bilateral meeting on Monday between President Rodrigo Duterte and his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in, at the Blue House in Seoul. “On the economic co-operation aspect, South Korea has doubled its overseas development assistance for our infrastructure projects, to support our Build, Build Build programme,” Roque told reporters. “In previous years, they provide us $500mn in ODA. And...

Over the past couple of days the subject of athlete activism, always present to some degree in American sports, but recently revived by Colin Kaepernick and a few other football players in the form of silent protests during the National Anthem, exploded into a headline dominating news story. Lighting the fuse: President Trump directly inserting himself into the controversy. He did so during a speech on Friday night and during a series of tweets Saturday and continuing into this morning in which he urged NFL owners to “fire” or suspend players who do not stand for the national anthem. He...