Karl Albrecht, Billionaire Co-Founder of Aldi, Dies at 94

I ask that, because I worked at 7-11 in Oklahoma for awhile, years ago. The Ok 7-11's are their own separate corporation. We didn't have scanners for anything except cigarettes, and it didn't take long before you knew total price, including tax, someone would have to pay for various combinations of standards prices (.99 + .99 + 1.05 + .59 or what have you).

Mostly just a pedantic difference, but I thought I'd throw my experience into the mix.

Still pretty crazy when you get someone that's been there awhile and knows basically all of them.

I think my closest experience to this was when I was an order picker at a warehouse with no computers. We had guys on forklifts that seemed to know where every single item was in a warehouse with thousands of bays, and could tell you not just where something was, but what the number of the bay was. Pretty crazy.

We saw order pickers that just memorized their pick sheet when it was printed out for them and never looked at it again until they dropped off their pallet. They would also reorganize the pick order in their head for the most efficient route so trying to keep looking at what was an out of order pick sheet was a big time sink for them. So while we were thinking of trying to print the items out in the most efficient order, we realized they were already doing it themselves and wouldn't look at it anyway.

This is one thing that I really, really like at Aldi: well trained cashiers.

Of course, two skills the cashiers were required to have were the ability to memorize lots of numbers and trustworthiness to handle large amounts of cash. It was likely worth it to pay employees enough to make getting fired enough of a deterrence to theft.

Also AFAIR on Mac OS X you can just long-press for alternative letters.

And I didn't really mean to say de Grey had all the answers - I'm by no means a fanboy. But I think his approach deserves a lot more attention and research dollars than it's getting. It's far too premature to write it off as "not panning out" - with respect, the medical establishment's efforts aren't "panning out" either, with orders of magnitude more budget.

I am not a doctor either, but I am a student of history, and history is replete with established fields of study resisting disruptive (and correct) new ideas until the very last. I'm not saying this is the case, but it is something we need to consider when you write of the dismissal of all these "working scientists", with their educations and investment in the status quo. It seems extremely plausible to me that a maintenance-based approach will win in the end, and de Grey's work, while not perfect, is at least a decent first effort.

And I doubt this 94-yr-old had any specific knowledge. 94 is on the upper end of a normal lifespan, given healthy lifestyle and the best medicine money can by. It's a little disingenuous to claim that by pure dint of that longevity he knows more than de Grey, who has spent years studying the matter, doctor or not.

The standard response to your viewpoint is to point to the SENS Research Foundation advisory board, which includes George Church, Anthony Atala, Judith Campisi, Maria Blasco, and so on and so forth for a list of luminaries in subfields of medical research relevant to aging:

http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board

It is also worth looking at the ongoing research collaborations, which involve noted labs at institutions such as Wake Forest, the Buck Institute, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Cambridge University, and so on and so forth.

http://www.sens.org/research/extramural

I'm not sure why you think this research work is not panning out when it has barely even started. This is early stage work, creating the building blocks and foundations. The most advanced of the necessary lines of research is ablation of senescent cells, which has been shown to work in accelerated aging mice and is current in studies in normal mice. That is a few years away from technical possibility in humans, further once you add in the regulatory issues, and everything else is further into the future.