Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
(bigstockphoto) Over 100 years ago in America — before Social Security, before IRAs, corporate pensions and 401(k)s — there was a ludicrously popular (and somewhat sleazy) retirement scheme called the tontine. At their peak, around the turn of the century, tontines represented nearly two-thirds of the American insurance market, holding about 7.5 percent of national…
If you want to know Ahmed Mohamed — not the hoax bomb suspect or the vindicated celebrity, but the motormouth kid with a schoolbag full of inventions and a head full of questions — ask a teacher. Ask at Sam Houston Middle School, where the boy from Sudan mastered electronics and English, once built a…
I don’t have any savings, but I also don’t have any wants. I don’t know about you, but I like to enjoy my life. I like to go out to eat, buy clothes I don’t “need” and spend money with friends on memorable nights out. This goes back to a piece of advice a very…
So let’s talk about ad blocking. You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we’re really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of collateral damage. iOS…
My husband and I study history, specifically the late Victorian era of the 1880s and ’90s. Our methods are quite different from those of academics. Everything in our daily life is connected to our period of study, from the technologies we use to the ways we interact with the world. Five years ago we bought…
Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, went after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer this morning. On Bloomberg Surveillance, Galloway told host Tom Keene that Mayer’s announcement that she is pregnant with twins is what’s giving her job security. “If she hadn’t announced she was pregnant with twins, she’d be out of a…
Fox & Friends host Elizabeth Hasselbeck asked a guest Monday morning why the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement has not yet been classified as a hate group. Fox invited conservative African-American commentator Kevin Jackson on the show to discuss the group of #BlackLivesMatter protesters who disrupted the Minnesota state fair while chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry them like…
Our future workplaces are increasingly managed by apps and algorithms. Is technology empowering workers, or making them ever more helpless cogs in a corporate profit machine? When we talk about the “on-demand economy”, we are really talking about two things: the ability of a consumer to summon a vehicle, their lunch, or their groceries with…
Simon and Schuster Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, who claims to be biracial, is accused of lying about his race by conservative news website, Breitbart. Raymond Boyd/Getty Images Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King received a scholarship to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Larry French/Getty Images King criticized Oprah Winfrey about her suggestions…
First things first. “HitchBOT,” for all practical purposes, was a garbage can with an iPhone in it. It could not walk or stand or fire lasers or open a can of beans. By what standard was this piece of useless shit a “robot” in the first place? The answer: a shabby standard. A Canadian one….