Aetna Pays Employees To Sleep

If you work for Aetna Inc., you can get paid to sleep and count sheep.

According to a CNBC interview, Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna Insurance, is offering his employees up to $500 to get more sleep. Sleeping on the job? Gotta love it.

I’m not sure if Bertolini and George Costanza are somehow related, but great minds surely think alike. And enjoy their beauty sleep, of course.

The perk is a part of Aetna’s ever-improving wellness campaign for their employees. While many companies offer wellness benefits such as gym memberships or smoking cessation assistance, Aetna is going straight to the core of wellness by providing incentive to wake up refreshed and well rested, and not just to lower annual coffee bills.

Improved shut-eye is something Bertolini claims is “really important.” The program is offering employees $25 per night of 7 hours plus of sleep for 20 nights in a row, with an annual cap of $500. The sleep will be tracked by the ever-popular fitness trackers you can see on the wrists of nearly everybody these days, which apparently are more useful than checking your heart rate after walking up a flight of stairs.

The program isn’t solely vested in the interest of good sleep or more time spent dreaming, but in pursuit of a more effective and alert workforce. According to the National Institutes of Health, 7 hours of sleep per night is the recommended minimum a person should get. But I am so done with recommendations for anything other than desserts.

Bertolini is hoping this incentive will help show up in Aetna’s revenue down the road. He quoted in a CNBC interview saying “It’s going to show up in our bottom line and in the Street’s confidence that we can do it quarter after quarter; year after year.”

I’m all for a good afternoon nap at work. But getting paid for doing so it truly a dream come true.

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Dyson Goes from From Vacuum to Vroom

.Dyson is is not sucking wind. They’ve gone from vacuum to vroom. Racers, start your silent electric motors. It looks like a new competitor in the race to produce the best electric car may be soon in the running next to Tesla.

A History of Innovation

The Dyson company has long been known to be forerunners on innovation and design. Their bagless vacuum cleaners were the first of their kind, and other products like the Air Blade and BallBarrow have shown Dyson’s commitment to providing the consumer market with new and unique twists on everyday necessities. No bathroom is complete without an Air Blade, right?

In an interview with The Independent, Dyson CEO Max Conze said how the Dyson company is similar to Apple in their desire to perfect their products. Apple has seen its fair share of rumors recently around the creation of electric cars as well, which could be yet another product the company could slim down until perfection. Products like their Rotork Sea Truck, a cargo boat used by the military, have shown an interest in transportation for Dyson. Maybe it’s time to evolve from sea to land.

It’s All About the Batteries

When it comes to building the next electric car to race Tesla to the finish line, the battery and electric motor are the keys to success. We’re not talking about AA’s here either, these batteries are top-notch and are what keep these cars and inventions high-powered for extended use.

Creating a electric car won’t be as simple as throwing a few wheels on a vacuum cleaning however, but the Dyson company appears to be ready for the challenge. Their acquisition of Sakti3, a solid-state battery company, in October points to a line of improved batteries for all their electric products. Improved batteries are the key towards efficient electric cars, which is one of the reasons Tesla’s promise of a Gigafactory creates so much hype in the tech market.

Additionally, in 2014, Dyson spoke out publicly on working towards improved electric products over the coming years. Dyson claimed his company would dedicate 1.5£ billion on research for new electronic products, and would aim to have 100 new products on the market by 2018.

Maybe one of these products will be a car? If nothing else, hopefully they will at least make a ride-on vacuum cleaner to make house chores a little more fun.

The Waiting Game

Only time will tell what Dyson has in store for us as far as electric cars go. That market, however, is seeing a significant growth of interest with Tesla leading the way. With all the technological advances in electric motors, batteries and cars on the horizon, it sounds like our future transportation may be a lot quieter and easier on the gas stations.

There is still one last burning question we have about the potential Dyson electric car: regardless of price, ingenuity and reliability, is it self-cleaning?

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