Quinton Richards Essays (1034 words) - Las Vegas Strip,

Quinton Richards Professor Bell Sociology 101 October 9, 2017 CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES Deadly wildfires roared across California on Monday, forcing evacuations and destroying homes and businesses in their paths. The biggest fires burned in the wine country of Napa and Sonoma counties. The fires ignited Sunday night and Monday and spread with alarming speed because of dry conditions California Fire Director Ken Pimlott said at a news conference more than 20,000 people evacuated some with little notice. These fires have destroyed structures and continue to threaten thousands of homes necessitating the evacuation of thousands of residents the governor's emergency proclamation said. These fires have damaged and continue to threaten critical infrastructure and have forced the closure of major highways and local roads. According to social media postings the fire spread smoke across the San Francisco Bay area and the Anaheim area fire turned the sky red over Disneyland. The National Weather Service in San Francisco on Sunday issued a "red flag warning" for the Bay Area becaus e of current or impending critical fire weather conditions. The warning cited dry windy locations through the Napa Valley and northern Sonoma County valleys. Gusts ranging from 35 mph to more than 60 mph were recorded. But the winds and the fire weather threat will decrease Tuesday in the north, but a threat will remain in Southern part of California the weather service said. Forecasters said the warning will likely remain in effect because of the warm and dry conditions and the presence of wildfires. US Warship Approaches Korean Peninsula for Drills with South Korea The USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier along with a guided-missile cruiser and a nuclear-powered submarine are on their way to the Korean Peninsula to prepare for a potential war with North Korea, while Pyongyang reportedly plans new missiles tests. As of Friday afternoon, the USS Ronald Reagan with nearly 80 aircraft on board, was in the South China Sea on its way to the shores of US ally South Korea. The two allies will conduct joint drills to detect, track, and intercept ballistic missiles in addition to anti-submarine warfare training. North Korea has carried out a series of nuclear tests over the past few months, in response to which the UN Security Council imposed several rounds of harsh sanctions against Pyongyang. President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader have since exchanged a series of threats, with Trump saying the US coulddestroythe North if attacked and that Kim Jong-un who he often refers to as Rocket Manwon't be around much longerPyongyang responded in kind ca lling it a declaration of war and threatening to shoot down American planes and unleash a nuclear attack on the US and its allies. Hurricane Maria Leaves Puerto Rico Facing Months Without Power Hurricane Maria the most powerful storm to hit the U.S. territory in almost a century ravaged the island demolishing homes and knocking out all electricity. It could take half a year to restore power to the nearly 3.5 million people who live there. The eye of the storm moved offshore overnight but the danger remained Thursday Intense flooding was reported particularly in San Juan where many residential streets looked like rushing rivers. The storm has been blamed for the deaths of 18 people including two in Puerto Rico but many fear that toll could climb as authorities were beginning to assess the extent of the damage and search for survivors. Las Vegas Shooting On the night of October 1, a gunman opened fire on a large crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip killing 58 people and injuring 489. Between 10:05 and 10:15 p.m. PDT 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada fired thousands of rifle rounds from his suite on the 32nd floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel. About an hour after firing ceased, he was found dead in his hotel room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His motive is unknown. The incident is the deadliest mass shooting committed by an individual in the United States. The crime reignited the debate about gun laws in the U.S. with attention focused on bump firing, a technique Paddock used to allow his semi-automatic rifles to fire at a rate like that of a fully-automatic weapon. Country

Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business essays

Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business essays This biography of Andrew Carnegie starts off focusing on his family's immigration to the United States of America and their reason for doing so. He was born in Scotland in 1835 and came to the United States in 1848. It then talks about his apprenticeships as both a manager and as a financier before going on to become one of the richest and most powerful businessmen in history. In 1865, established his own business enterprises and eventually organized the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh. The social and economic changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution allowed Carnegie to amass his fortune in the United States. He was ruthless in his cost-cutting endeavors, and he was willing to experiment with his new business methods that would increase production and profits. At age 65, he sold his company to J.P. Morgan for $480 million. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this Scotland native was one of the richest men in the world. He then devoted his life to philant hropic activities and writing. He gave away his fortune through numerous personal gifts and the establishment of various trusts. By the time he passed away in 1919, he had given away more than 350 million. Some of the book's primary sources include the Carnegie papers in the Library of Congress, Joseph Frazier Wall's book Andrew Carnegie, Burton J. Hendrick's The Life of Andrew Carnegie, and James Howard Bridge's book The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company. These three books gave the author good material to work with because they each have some insight either first hand or through Carnegie's friends. The book's secondary sources include F.C. Mather's book Public Order in the Age of the Chartists, George Rogers Taylor's book The Transportation Revolution 1815-1860, and Edward C. Kirkland's Industry Comes of Age. These books give the author some insight of the economy during Carnegie's era and the history of m ...

What are the strategies of Apple Incorporated Essay

What are the strategies of Apple Incorporated - Essay Example Center of discussion in this paper is Apple as a very unique company because it dominated a market segment which is not its core business. Apple was launched in 1976 in a garage with Steve Wozniak and was able to revolutionize the computing industry with the introduction of its product line Macintosh (Mac) that â€Å"dramatically changed personal computing through its user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI), which allowed users to interact with screen images rather than merely typing text commands†. Apple’s success is not solely attributed to the creativity and functionality of its product line but also to its pricing strategy which has been a big change from the 1990s when consumers regarded Apple as a producer of overpriced tech baubles that cannot effectively compete against the far cheaper Windows PCs. This change was a result of a succesful implementation of its value chain activities that has significantly lowered its price. It became very pronounced with the launching of Ipad which price was far lower than what they expected. Its introductory price last year of $499 stunned everyone, which led John Gallaugher, an associate professor of information systems at Boston College to comment â€Å"It was a very competitively priced device†. The same is true in the notebook product line. When Macbook Air was introduced in 2008, it was priced at an exorbitant $1,799. This became possible by the briliant management of Apple’s supply chain due to capitalizing its organizational capability of having huge cash reserves. It made its supply chain a strategic weapon to lower price in order to capture the market. It tapped into its huge war chest of $82 billion in cash and marketable securities to lock up supplies of parts for years to enable it push down cost by the scale of its purchase (Wingfield, 2011). It also bought manufacturing capacity ahead of its time and made its components scarce that, in turn, made its competitors scrambling for any parts that are left and drove the cost of its products up while Apple had lowered its own (Wingfield, 2011). To date, Apple has been recorded as the biggest buyer of flash memory chips in the world according to the research firm iSuppli (Wingfield, 2011). The effect of using value chain management as a strategic weapon proved to be a nemesis among its competitors. When this effective value chain management was reflected in retail prices, competitors had to slash their prices where Motorola’s Xoom tablet was pushed to lower its price at $379 at Best Buy (for a limited time) and virtually won the competition with Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad line of tablets which were pushed to be sold at $99 to clean the inventories. III. What is the core of Apple from a product point of view? The core product of Apple was its desktop computer Macintosh. Its main revenue source however comes from its other product line such as Ipad, Iphone and Ipod. IV. Are all products and servic es equal to Apple? If not what are the key pieces? Use your entire toolkit, especially the financials, to support your decision.   Apple Incorporated made itself distinct by making its hardware and software work in synergy that enabled its products and services unequalled by its competitors. The best example that we can show for this is the synergy that its operating system iOS5 that provide synergy among the different product lines of Apple. It powers the iPad, iPod and iPod touch which allows the three products to interact and complement each other. Its new computer operating system Lion also has an Air-drop feature that has made sharing of information between Mac computers very convenient. Air-drops peer