Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
San Francisco voters approved Prop. C, a ballot measure that will more than double the city’s affordable housing requirement for new housing projects. Housing developers and their supporters are now bracing for how to make future developments financially feasible in a city where building housing is already costly and takes several years. Enlarge Residents wait…
I have always liked to imagine that I was conceived the night before my dad went to war, mid-October 1939. I know he came home in 1940. He was part of the British Expeditionary Force that retreated from northern France and he was on the last boat leaving Cherbourg just as the Germans were on…
“Our significantly expanded compliance office today not only evaluates new client candidates, but also existing accounts, and especially those that were established prior to the new international regulatory regime coming into effect,” a spokeswoman said in a written statement, referring to a 2010 law passed by Congress. “It wasn’t always this way.” The firm’s American…
An audit report published on Thursday suggests that debt-laden Puerto Rico may be able to void some of its borrowing because politicians exceeded constitutional debt limits and their own authority. The report, shared with MarketWatch, states that some of Puerto Rico’s debt may have been issued illegally, allowing the government to potentially declare the bonds…
So much for that much anticipated rebound in the participation rate. After it had managed to rise for 5 months in a row through March, hitting the highest level in one year, the disenchantment with working has returned, and the labor force participation rate promptly slumped in both April and May, sliding 0.4% in the…
Examples of these markets include San Antonio, where Blomquist says flippers are actually purchasing at a 7.8 percent premium above estimated full market value, as well as Austin, Texas; Salt Lake City; Naples, Florida; Dallas and San Jose, California. Despite the premium to buy, flippers are still seeing growing gains in profit. Home flippers realized…
The biggest near term threat to the stability of nations might not be climate change, terrorism, or nuclear war. It just might be robots—putting millions of people out of jobs. Where will they all go? There are only a few possibilities. The widespread automation of jobs—millions and millions of jobs—is not a sci-fi theory, or…
Peter Thiel offers a case study in the way America’s top tax rate is much, much too low. This week, we learned that Thiel — a Silicon Valley techno-libertarian billionaire who co-founded PayPal, sits on the board of Facebook and is estimated to be worth $2.7 billion — is trying to sue Gawker Media out…
French police raided Google’s offices in Paris Tuesday, looking for evidence of money laundering and tax evasion. The state prosecutor said specialist anti-corruption officers and 25 tech experts took part in the search. They were trying to establish the scale of Google’s business in France and to determine whether it has paid enough taxes. French…
PARIS — On Monday, the Western world may well wake up to the news that, for the first time since the defeat of Nazism, a European country has democratically elected a far-right head of state. Norbert Hofer, of the Austrian Freedom Party, claimed 35 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential…