Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
CREDIT: Shutterstock Every three months, the government takes the temperature of the economy by releasing Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, figures. GDP goes up: the economy is supposedly healthy. GDP goes down: there’s a bug (or an all-out contagion, as during the Great Recession). But GDP — which adds up the value of work being…
There is no state in the union where a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment for less than 30 percent of his paycheck (which is a standard measure of housing affordability). That’s the depressing takeaway from a new report by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. The paper includes this map tallying…
The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third. After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break. But that was only the start….
Photo Ada Colau, center, a leftist candidate, won a race for mayor of Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city. Another left-leaning candidate, Manuela Carmena, is poised to become Madrid’s mayor. Credit Josep Lago/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images MADRID — Ada Colau, 41, was not even born when Manuela Carmena, 71, joined Spain’s underground Communist party and started…
La Razon, May 25, 2015 “Instability,” reads the Monday headline of conservative Madrid daily La Razon, after the strong showing of two upstart parties in Spain’s local and regional elections threatened the longstanding two-party duel between the Popular and Socialist parties. The conservative Popular party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suffered its worst local results in a generation, losing some of its support in Sunday’s voting to…
Metropolitan hot dog vendor Ahmed Mohammed is in hot water—he’s been fired after he was found to be charging tourists $30 for a hot dog. So… when are they giving him the key to the city? DeBlasio? New York City, once reputed to be a gritty urban hellhole where “only the strong survive,” has now…
Over the last few years, Taylor Swift has become one of the two or three biggest pop stars in the world. She has accumulated no fewer than four homes (including a $3.5 million place in Beverly Hills and a $20 million Tribeca penthouse) and drawn enormous press and media attention. She’s still on the cover…
“On a plate.” A short animated story. Hitting a little too close to home – Album on Imgur.
In a story so shocking it’s not shocking at all, news comes today that six of the too-biggest-to-failiest banks in the entire world worked together in secret to control currency prices, for SIX YEARS, and thus enriched themselves in the process. And now they have to pay $5.8 billion in fines, because they are guilty…
Planning to retire? Not long ago, many of us would have automatically answered “yes” to that question, and with good reason. In the 20th century, retirement became the norm—something most people did. Thanks to generous programs like Social Security (enacted in 1935) and Medicare (1965), millions of people who once might have worked till they…