Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Al Lord, the former chief executive of student-loan giant Sallie Mae, has a complaint about higher education: The price of college is too damn high. Paying for his grandchildren’s education in recent years, he said, left him appalled at the tuition bills that land on his desk every semester. For those who know (or in…
Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits. If one of those words is in an article’s headline, Fidelity won’t place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more…
Talks continued over the weekend to avert a programming blackout that would affect more than 24 million customers of AT&T’s DirecTV, U-verse and WatchTV services. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News Updated March 24, 2019 2:29 p.m. ET Carriage deals between pay-TV distributors and programmers typically hinge on price. In the negotiations between AT&T Inc. T…
Facebook Inc. has spent the better part of a year telling its users, Congress and the readers of this paper that we’re in charge of our personal data and the ads we see. The network has streamlined its privacy settings, shared more details about how data is used and highlighted how its ad controls work. If we take advantage of all these privacy controls, it shouldn’t still feel as…
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is…
Amazon’s options for advertising include its delivery boxes. Photo: Amazon Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.25% handles nearly half of all online sales in the U.S., giving it a popular platform and a wealth of consumer data. Now it’s on track to become the next juggernaut of online advertising, and its rise threatens to upend Silicon Valley’s…
Mercedes-Benz unveiled its dream of a fully autonomous multipurpose vehicle this week. The announcement was full of buzzwords—the modular Vision Urbanetic “enables on-demand, sustainable and efficient movement of people and goods” and “reduces traffic flows, relieves inner-city infrastructures and contributes to an improved quality of urban life.” Hardly a week goes by without fresh signposts that…
The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether a fugitive Malaysian financier laundered tens of millions of dollars through two associates and used the funds to pay a U.S. legal team that includes former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and a lawyer who represents President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. Jho Low, the…
In the past two decades there has been a sharp drop in the share of national income going to working- and middle-class Americans. As the discontent among these workers begins to affect their livelihoods and the entire nation’s politics, policy makers must either hope the market will somehow fix wage stagnation or enact policies to…
Cheddar Inc. set out to upend traditional cable TV with its financial news-focused streaming service. Now it is making a push onto the cable dial. The company this week went live on WOW, a Denver-based cable and broadband provider with close to 800,000 subscribers. The network has been made available to about 400,000 of WOW’s…