Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
GTM DataLayer Umbel End Umbel [if lte IE 9]>< ![endif][if gte IE 10]>< ![endif] Google Tag Manager Container In recent months, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has deployed his daughter Ivanka to show that the family has a compassionate side, which, among other things, will push both her and her father to advocate for better lives for working people. Such…
A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders. Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30%…
Herbert Whitehouse was one of the first in the U.S. to suggest workers use a 401(k). His hope in 1981 was that the retirement-savings plan would supplement a company pension that guaranteed payouts for life. Thirty-five years later, the former Johnson & Johnson human-resources executive has misgivings about what he helped start. What Mr. Whitehouse and…
One of the lesser-known casualties of Newt Gingrich’s ghoulish Contract with America was the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a small government agency charged with producing impartial reports for Congress and other officials about issues of scientific and technological concern. From 1972 until 1995, the OTA produced studies, often with the help of academic experts,…
Students at Columbia University protested on Monday at the Manhattan campus over the university’s decision to challenge the recent vote by graduate students to unionize. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times The battle over whether graduate students at universities can unionize entered a new phase on Friday, when Columbia University filed a challenge…
Image: Getty Amazon is a very rich company, with a market cap of $361 billion and stock price of over $750 a share. But as we’ve seen, the fortune of huge tech companies don’t often translate down to its employees. In some cases, it leaves them living in squalor. Take the blight of Amazon’s warehouse…
The American dream hinges on the idea that future generations will do better than the ones that preceded them. But a new study (pdf) from a team of economists and sociologists at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California is bad news for a whole generation: Only half of American 30-year-olds today earn more money…
British scientist Prof. Stephen Hawking gives his ‘The Origin of the Universe’ lecture to a packed hall December 14, 2006 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Hawking suffers from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrigs disease), which has rendered him quadriplegic, and is able to speak only via a computerized voice synthesizer…
In his 29 years in prison, David Bonner has mopped floors, cooked hot dogs in the cafeteria and, most recently, cut sheets of aluminum into Alabama license plates. The last job paid $2 a day — enough to buy a bar of soap at the commissary or make a short phone call. “This is slavery,” said Bonner, who is 51…