FastCompany points to a study by the UK’s New Economics Foundation that proposes a 21-hour work week. The report reflects the organization’s British roots, but what if here in the U.S. we shifted to a shorter, perhaps a 24 hour, full-time work week? Last fall, media critic and writer Douglas Rushkoff asked Are jobs obsolete?. [...]
[12 Jan 2012]
Whereas most entrepreneurs in Dalmo’s position develop a retching distaste for paying taxes, Dalmo doesn’t mind them much. “The tax system is good—it’s fair,” he tells me. “What we’re doing when we are paying taxes is buying a product. So the question isn’t how you pay for the product; it’s the quality of the product.” [...]
[5 Aug 2011]
What we’ve been dealing with ever since is a painful process of “deleveraging”: highly indebted Americans not only can’t spend the way they used to, they’re having to pay down the debts they ran up in the bubble years. This would be fine if someone else were taking up the slack. But what’s actually happening [...]
[13 Dec 2010]
They don’t care that these mortgages wouldn’t have been available in the first place if the banks hadn’t found a way to sell oregano as weed to pension funds and insurance companies. Matt Taibbi just made me snort laugh. I know someone who actually did cut his weed inventory with oregano to boost profits. The [...]
[13 Nov 2010]
All my life I’ve heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution [...]
[7 Nov 2010]
The classic explanation of the evils of deflation is that it makes individuals and businesses less willing to use money, because the rational way to act when prices are falling is to hold onto cash, which gains in value. But in Japan, nearly a generation of deflation has had a much deeper effect, subconsciously coloring [...]
[16 Oct 2010]
Contrary to the popular narrative, most foreclosures were not on sprawling “McMansions” but rather on modest properties that were typically valued significantly below area median values at origination. One of the key findings from Dreams Deferred: Impacts and Characteristics of the California Foreclosure Crisis, a report by the Center for Responsible Lending. You can also [...]
[21 Sep 2010]
The delinquency rate on investment homes where the original mortgage was more than $1 million is now 23 percent. For cheaper investment homes, it is about 10 percent. That’s from yesterday’s New York Times piece, Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich. Makes sense, actually. Rich people can avoid the fallout of foreclosure more easily [...]
[10 Jul 2010]
Abominations such as apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane. They start here. They start with generalizing unwanted characteristics across an entire segment of a population. They start with trying to solve a problem by asserting superior force over a population. They start with stripping people of rights and dignity – [...]
[29 Apr 2010]
ZIP code 30032 near Columbia Drive and Glenwood Road, for example, was reappraised downward by a total of $287 million. The median decline in tax appraisals was 21 percent, but sales data show that the median price fell by nearly half. This suggests that tax valuations could have been cut even more, and that some [...]
[9 Dec 2009]