 |
|
|
|||||
The horrific death of a man who was ejected from a Six Flags roller coaster in Georgia is drawing attention to the safety of amusement park rides that have become increasingly faster and steeper in their quest for the biggest thrill.Even so, deaths on roller coasters are still extremely rare, and Georgia officials have said little about what happened Monday when Hassan Jihad Ibn Kariem, 42, was thrown from his seat while riding the Goliath at Six Flags Over Georgia before striking other patrons and then landing below the ride.Goliath uses a sheer drop from 200 feet (61 meters) to reach top speeds of 70 mph (112 kph) and focuses on velocity and downhill plunges rather than turning riders upside down through loops or corkscrews. It has operated at the park for two decades.Six Flags temporarily closed nine similar coasters across North America following the death, saying it was doing so out of an abundance of caution.Ride manufacturer Bolliger & Mabillard said it is “actively investigating the incident and will not comment further until we have a better understanding of what happened.” The US has a patchwork of rules regarding rides In the U.S., roller coasters and other rides at major amusement parks such as Six Flags are not regulated by the federal government. That responsibility falls to states.Some say this has led to an inconsistent patchwork of rules where some states have strict regulations and others have little to no oversight.U.S. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts has repeatedly introduced legislation to close what he calls a “loophole” in federal law that allows U.S. safety officials to regulate mobile rides but prevents the Consumer Product Safety Commission from overseeing stationary rides like those at major amusement parks.Brian Avery, a University of Florida professor and amusement ride safety expert, agrees that more federal regulations are needed.“Who’s watching those in these organizations to ensure that they are adequately trained, that they are compliant, that they are monitoring these rides to the level in which the standards have established?” Avery said.Georgia’s Office of Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, which oversees annual ride inspections in the state, is “conducting an indepth and comprehensive review” of what happened Monday at Six Flags, said Garrison Bennett, a spokesperson. Amusement park industry has set its own safety standards Amusement park operators worldwide generally adhere to what are known as ASTM standards set by industry experts, which cover everything from ride design and construction to how much acceleration and force each rider is allowed to experience.The industry has multiple layers of inspection, said Dennis Speigel, a theme park consultant and past president of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, a trade group. Park operators are under pressure from insurance carriers that could face a hefty payout if something goes wrong.“With the checks and balances that are put in place, theme parks are really one of the safest places to be on the planet,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday.The trade group said the chance of being seriously injured on a U.S. amusement park ride is 1 in 15.5 million rides taken.Martin Lewinson, a roller coaster expert and a professor at Farmingdale State College, said it was difficult to imagine there being a mechanical malfunction on a roller coaster such as Goliath because of its design.The ride features a pull-down lap restraint, called a “clamshell,” that works with a ratchet mechanism that makes clicking sounds as you press it down over your hips. These have multiple disks to ensure redundancy if one fails, Lewinson said.“They’re dependable. They’re not so technically advanced that theme parks have difficulty with operations,” Lewinson said.The operator then has a safety system that displays a green “go” light for every seat on the train before it can be dispatched. The train should theoretically not be allowed to proceed unless all restraints are locked, Lewinson said.But few things are 100% safe.In 2022, a 14-year-old Missouri boy fell to his death from an Orlando amusement park ride when the harness didn’t lock properly due to his size. In 2013, a 52-year-old Dallas woman was killed when she slipped out of her seat on the Texas Giant ride at Six Flags Over Texas. Six Flags has since added redesigned restraint-bar pads, seat belts and a coaster seat at the ride’s entrance so guests can check before they get on whether they fit safely into the cars.Nick Mendenhall, who has been on the Goliath more than a dozen times in recent weeks, said he saw Six Flags staff check the restraints each time he rode it.“There are two employees, one on either side of the train, and with their hands they push down and they make sure it locks every time. I’ve never seen them not do it,” Mendenhall said. States handle oversight in different ways In California, the state Department of Industrial Relations approves new rides and rides that have been modified. State officials either directly inspect them and how they are being operated each year or rely on an annual inspection by the owner, according to the department’s website.Florida’s largest theme parks, on the other hand, are exempt from state safety inspections, unlike smaller venues and fairs. Instead, the largest theme parks like Walt Disney World and Universal conduct their own inspections and have their own protocols, but they must report to the state any injury or death. Texas, similarly, relies on inspections carried out by private inspectors hired by park operators or their insurance companies.Arizona, where Six Flags Hurricane Harbor Phoenix is located, does not have a state-level agency that regulates amusement park rides or conducts safety inspections at all. The law requires an annual private inspection, with enforcement largely by local government. Jaimie Ding, Dylan Lovan and Sudhin Thanawala, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
The school calls in the middle of the workday. Your child is sick. That means you have to leave the meeting, cancel the rest of your afternoon, and rearrange appointments for tomorrow. Research shows that when this happens to a father, he has a childcare problem. But when it happens to a mother, she can become the childcare problem. That distinction explains something we dont talk about enough when we discuss working parents. The inequality isnt just about who spends more hours doing laundry, cooking dinner, or making appointments for the family. Its also about which parent gets uninterrupted time to work and what happens when family life (inevitably) disrupts it. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/Girl-Li.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/souter.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/subscribe","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457710,"imageMobileId":91457711,"shareable":false,"slug":"","wpCssClasses":""}} Its about more than hours We usually assess the unfairness that occurs with working parents by looking at hours. How many hours is one parent spending over the other. Who makes dinner most nights? Who helps with homework? Who drives the kids to their orthodontist appointments? But another important aspect that gets overlooked is how much time you can devote to work without being interrupted. Three hours of work is different than three hours of focus. Most default parents tell me there is often some family matter that requires attention during the day. Schedule the parent-teacher conference. Order larger cleats. Get a birthday gift. Fill out that permission slip. Wonder if your childs rash is no big deal or will you be at the pediatricians office half the day tomorrow. Ok, now back to that quarterly report you are working on. The problem isnt really the number of minutes taken away from work. Its the projects they interrupt. The tough assignment that gets broken up into smaller chunks. The good idea you have to abandon part way through. The project that is supposed to be done by morning that you now have to take home and finish after the kids go to bed. Yes, you can still get everything done on time and excel at your job. But youve had to work around interruptions that someone else may never have to consider. A cumulative effect None of these items seem too burdensome on their own. Which is the point. Nevertheless, cumulatively they can take up a chunk of your day. This is why I loved the book Fair Play by Eve Rodsky. Her argument wasnt simply that women perform more household labor. It was that so much of family life involves noticing, anticipating, planning, and remembering. In one study, researchers looked at 322 mothers with small children and asked them about common household responsibilities. They wanted to understand who did the task but also who did the invisible work of making sure it got done. Mothers did about 73 percent of the planning and organizing and 64 percent of the actual execution. So, your partner might take your son to the dentist, but you found a dentist that takes your insurance, made the appointment, added it to the family calendar, and reminded your husband to leave on time. Uneven penalties However, the consequences go beyond workday disruptions. A study published in Gender Work & Organization gave 975 managers in the United States hypothetical situations about mothers and fathers losing productivity because of childcare situations. They were both held accountable. But when asked if they would raise the pay of that person or promote them, mothers were penalized more than the fathers even when the scenarios were identical. Male managers gave dads the benefit of the doubt and still viewed them as capable, committed, and wanting to move up in his career. His issue was seen more as an unfortunate circumstance, but hers was more likely to become evidence of her inability to perform as expected. What to do Naturally I wondered, how do we fix this? Women (and surely all default parents) know how to manage the mental load. Probably too well. The better question is why do we expect one person to constantly handle everything that needs to be done? At home couples should start sharing these tasks and be explicitly clear about who does what. If your domain is dental appointments, that means taking care of appointments, follow ups, phone calls, ordering that lost retainer for the third time. And not waiting for someone else to remind me. The Fair Play system is a great guide for divying things up equitably. Employers should play a role too. They need to recognize thatfamily responsibilities dont change someones ambition or ability. Employees should be judged on consistent performance standards and not assumptions about which parent is supposedly more dedicated. And for couples, it means recognizing that uninterrupted time is something both parents need and deserve. And I am not talking about catching up on work after everyone goes to bed. You should have real time to think, create, and concentrate. The real privilege isnt just having fewer things to do. Its having the freedom to devote your full attention to things that matter to you. And that freedom shouldnt be a luxury given to just one parent. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/Girl-Li.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/souter.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/subscribe","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457710,"imageMobileId":91457711,"shareable":false,"slug":"","wpCssClasses":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
A sweet treat can turn a bad day around and make a good one great. Since today (Wednesday, October 14, 2026) is National Dessert Day, it’s the perfect time to celebrate cakes, ice cream, donuts, cookies, and more. Before looking at the sugar rush of deals that you can score today, lets take a look at the history of a classic dessert, the chocolate chip cookie: A brief history of the chocolate chip cookie In the grand scheme of desserts, chocolate chip cookies are fairly modern inventions. Many sources attribute the invention of the chocolate chip cookie to Ruth Wakefield. According to the Gastropod podcast hosted by Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, this is inaccurate. One of the expert guests on the podcast, pastry chef and author Stella Parks, told the hosts that she found a 1928 newspaper article with a chocolate chip recipe that predated Wakefields version. The yummy cookies were also found in supermarkets before Wakefield got involved. Despite probably not inventing the classic dessert, per se, Wakefield did help popularize it for the masses. She and her husband opened the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, in 1930. Partly because of its location between Boston and Cape Cod, many celebrities such as Cole Porter, Joe DiMaggio, and Eleanor Roosevelt began frequenting its restaurant. At that time, modern chocolate chips as we know them now did not exist. Chocolate bars were broken into small pieces or chipped to make the necessary ingredient. Nestlé took notice of the increase in chocolate bar sales and approached Wakefield about her recipe. She allowed the company to print the instructions, and it became known as Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies. Not too long after that, Nestlé created the chocolate chips we know and love today, specifically for chocolate chip cookies. As chocolate chip cookies got more popular, the lore around their origin took on a life of its own. National Dessert Day deals Now that we know how the cookie really crumbles, lets take a look at some freebies, deals, and limited-time offerings. MilkShake FactoryMilkShake Factorys National Dessert Day deals will bring all the boys and the girls to the metaphysical yardor, more accurately, its locations. Grab a friend and take advantage of its BOGO deal. This is good not only for milkshakes, but also sundaes, floats, and molten cups. 7-Eleven, Speedway, and Stripes Participating 7-Eleven, Speedway, and Stripes stores are leaning into cozy fall vibes this National Dessert Day. For a limited time only, stop in to enjoy 7-Select Pumpkin Spice Cheesecake Bites, 7-Select Pumpkin Cheesecake Snack Pies, 7-Select Pumpkin Cheese Danish, or 7-Select Pumpkin Donut Holes. White CastleWhite Castle’s National Dessert Day offering is good until October 19 and comes on a stick. All you have to do is join the White Castle Craver Nation Rewards program, purchase a combo, and enter promo code DESSERT when you check out online. The reward of a free Dessert-on-a-Stick is worth all the effort. Kroger Kroger wants to help you stock up on supplies to make an at-home dessert bar. All you have to do is log in to your Kroger account online or in the Kroger app. Add items like Private Selection Gourmet Extreme Chocolate Decadent Brownies, Sea Salt Caramel Truffle Ice Cream, and Simple Truth Protein Soft Baked Espresso Mini Cookies to your cart. You will find a coupon to clip and redeem for $30 off your first online order of $75 or more. This is valid now until October 20 at select Kroger locations for your first pickup or delivery order only. Portillo’s Do you love Oreos? Then head to Portillos. There you will find an Oreo shake, Oreo cake, and Oreo cake shake. If you happen to be a perk member, from October 12 through the 18, you can even score a $1 Oreo cake slice with a purchase of $5 or more. Wherever you plan to celebrate National Dessert Day, we hope the occasion is sweet.
Category:
E-Commerce
Artificial intelligence has finally given B2B marketers what they’ve always wanted more of: capacity. More content, personalization, audience segments, campaign variations, and ways to push an idea across more channels. As AI becomes increasingly capable, marketers should be questioning how much they can trust it to assist them. Trust is now harder to ignore as AI moves from generating outputs to taking actions. Recent security incidents involving autonomous AI agents, plus AI leaders publicly debating oversight and control, show that capability and judgment are different things. For B2B marketers, that distinction is important. The first wave of marketing AI made existing tasks faster. The next wave can influence the decisions that shape a go-to-market strategy, which is a bigger opportunity that demands more from the technology and the humans using it. THE REAL AI OPPORTUNITY BEGINS BEFORE EXECUTION Much of the conversation around AI in marketing still starts with a prompt. Write this. Create that. Personalize this. Those applications save time, but they place AI at the end of the decision-making process. The bigger opportunity is moving it closer to the beginning. A campaign should start with an understanding of whats happening in the market, which accounts show signs of demand, and which topics are gaining momentum. Those questions need intelligence before they need content. B2B marketers have access to more data, but data alone doesnt create a strategy. The challenge has always been turning disparate signals into a clear understanding of opportunity. This is where AI shines. The best multi-channel ABM platforms combine proprietary engagement signals, intent data, account insights, and historical performance to show where opportunity is building. They surface which accounts are active, what theyre researching, whos in the buying group, and where the gaps are. The shift is moving from asking AI to produce something to asking it to help marketers understand something. That’s where AI becomes a strategic capability, not just a shortcut. COMPRESS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN INSIGHT AND ACTION The biggest inefficiency in B2B marketing has always been the distance between having information and acting on it. A marketer can have intent data, CRM data, and competitive intelligence, and still spend weeks turning those inputs into a campaign brief while the market moves in real time. AI can shorten that gap by processing more signals than a person can reasonably evaluate manually. It can identify patterns, surface audiences, compare historical performance, and recommend a mix of channels and investments. Marketers move from a static view of the market to a more dynamic one. The significance goes beyond speed. When AI can turn current market intelligence into an actionable strategy in minutes, marketers can respond to whats happening now, instead of chasing assumptions made when the planning process began. A NEW PROBLEM: MORE ACTIVITY AI makes marketing dramatically easier to scale, but as the volume of activity increases, individual activities become weaker performance indicators. More content doesnt necessarily create more influence. More impressions do not necessarily indicate more intent. At the same time, marketing is getting harder to measure, and thats not a coincidence. That gap is most important in B2B, where the buyer is rarely one person. A deal moves only once a group of stakeholders, each with their own concerns and timelines, reaches enough shared confidence to act. No single click, download, or AI citation tells you where that group stands, only that something happened. Marketers need to become more selective about what content deserves to be produced. AI can help, but only when it’s connected to real market intelligence, shifting its value from producing another asset to determining whether that asset is needed at all. The more AI increases our ability to manufacture activity, the more valuable intelligent prioritization becomes. THE CASE FOR HUMAN OVERSIGHT There’s caution emerging alongside the excitement around agentic AI. As systems become more autonomous, the consequences of a bad decision grow, and recent security incidents have shown that highly capable systems can behave unpredictably once given unmitigated access to tools. Technology leaders are still debating how fast capabilities are outpacing the safeguards meant to control them. Marketing may seem far removed from those scenarios, but the lesson applies. The more authority we give AI, the more important it becomes to define where human judgment belongs. A marketer should be able to look at a recommendation, understand why it was made, and challenge it when business context tells a different story. That call, whether it’s the right audience, channel, or budget, still belongs to someone who understands the brand and the buyer, not the model. That counts even more in B2B, where decisions involve complex products and large buying committees. AI is good at leveraging data to spot patterns or proposing a channel mix, but it can’t tell you whether that approach is appropriate. That call still belongs to the marketer. None of this works without transparency built in from the start. A marketer should be able to see what signals drove a channel recommendation, and that visibility gives them a basis for pushing back before the asset ships. The strongest model for AI in marketing looks less like a human replacement and more like a partnership. AI handles the scale and pattern recognition, while humans provide context, judgment, accountability, and strategic direction. SMARTER AI SHOULD CREATE BETTER MARKETERS Marketing organizations are investing in technology built to increase capacity when many teams already have too much activity, too many channels, and too many disconnected decisions. The real payoff is freeing marketers to spend their time differently. They can develop ideas and understand customers. They can shape brand strategy and make the judgment calls that require context, while AI handles the analysis. The teams that succeed will use AI aggressively where it creates leverage, cautiously where it creates risk,and intelligently everywhere in between. When everyone can produce more, the real advantage comes from providing the insights to know what is important, and the judgment to act on it. Keith Turco is CEO at Madison Logic.
Category:
E-Commerce
Away’s aluminum carry-on sells for $625, but right now you can snag one for $436. A medium suitcase in navy usually goes for $345, but you can get it for $293. There’s a catch, though: Some of these bags may have a little scuff here or a dent there. The suitcases are available on Away Reclaimed, a new site where the luggage brand sells its own products that cannot be sold as new. Its inventory comes from customer returns, which Away accepts within 100 days of purchase, as well as from the last few units of a limited-edition color or collab that the company didn’t manage to sell. And theres more. The site also sells Away’s backpacks, totes, and duffles. Later this month, the company plans to add an “Employee Archive,” which will include luggage that staffers have gently tested, along with one-of-a-kind production samples. [Image: Away] Because it no longer has to waste perfectly usable inventory, the company can be more sustainable. The platform also provides a new revenue stream. Jessica Schinazi, Away’s CEO, says Reclaimed could effectively introduce the brand to new consumers who are looking for products that are slightly more affordable, perhaps turning them into loyal customers down the road. A sustainability problem Before Reclaimed, much of Away’s returned merchandise didn’t have an obvious place to go. That’s a problem across retail, where returns are among the biggest sources of waste. U.S retailers expected 15.8% of their annual sales would be returned in 2025, or $849.9 billion worth of merchandise, according to a study by the National Retail Federation and the return platform Happy Returns. Brands generally treat wasted returns as a cost of doing business. Many returned products never make it back onto shelves. Some items are liquidated to off-price retailers like T.J. Maxx; others are donated. A lot ends up in landfills: 9.6 billion pounds annually, according to the reverse logistics company Optoro. [Photo: Away] But today, shoppers are much more comfortable acquiring things that aren’t brand-new. For instance, 59% of consumers shopped secondhand apparel in 2025, up 7% in three years, according to ThredUps most recent report. Schinazi says Aways own customers have been asking for a resale option for years. But resale is complicatedit takes a reverse logistics system to collect old products, inspect them, and list them online. That’s why Away is starting with its own returned and unsold inventory. To build Reclaimed, the company partnered with Trove, which powers the resale programs for many brands, including Carhartt, Cotopaxi, and Eileen Fisher. Away opened a dedicated reverse logistics warehouse, where every product is inspected, cleaned, refurbished, and graded on a three-point scale from excellent, meaning its essentially new, to good, which means theres some noticeable wear. Away replaces wheels, trolley handles, linings, or anything else that affects the functionality of the suitcase. If the item is not performing the way that it should be, we will not sell it through Reclaimed at all, Schinazi says. If theres a sticky zipper, we will never sell a product like that. Customers have been snapping these bags up. Away soft-launched Reclaimed in August with no marketing and sold 80% of its initial inventory within the first two weeks. The company says return rates on Reclaimed purchases have been low, and some customers have already come back to buy a second piece. Its an interesting testament to how important those kind of programs are for the American consumer today, Schinazi says, pointing both to interest in sustainability and to shoppers who are watching their wallets. [Photo: Away] For now, the biggest thing holding Reclaimed back is supply. Since inventory largely comes from returns, Away cannot control how many pieces come in. “We’re learning as we go in these early months,” Schinazi says, noting that the company is exploring a buyback program that would take back suitcases customers have owned for years. For now, though, it’s running a test through its Trade In, Trade Up event this month. Customers can bring in a wheeled suitcase from any brand in any condition to a participating Away store October 16 through 18 and October 23 through 25 (by appontment) and receive $100 toward a new suitcase from Aways newly redesigned Series 3 line. The company will use the event to learn how trade-in programs might eventually feed into Reclaimed. Selling discounted versions of its own products could, in theory, cannibalize Aways full-price sales. But Schinazi isn’t particularly worried. She believes Reclaimed will be an entry point, especially for younger shoppers who aren’t willing to spend full price on a carry-on. “We know that Away Reclaimed might be their first purchase,” she says. “But we’re going to be able to have them experience our bags.” As they travel more, she hopes they will buy new pieces for themselves, their family, or as gifts.
Category:
E-Commerce
Sites : [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] next »