Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
article start The gender pay gap is widening again because men’s earnings are growing this year at twice the rate of women’s. The median weekly earnings for full-time male workers was $889 in the third quarter, the Labor Department said Tuesday. That’s a 2.2% increase from a year earlier. Meanwhile, full-time female workers’ earnings were $721, up…
The past week has been a nightmare for Americans who use Russell Simmons’ pre-paid RushCard debit cards and have been completely unable to access their money, including recent paychecks, thanks to glitches arising from a “technology transition.” Today marks the eighth day some customers are unable to access their funds. On its own, that’s stunningly…
Marcia Davis, a mother of six in Baltimore, walked to work this morning. And not for the fresh air or the exercise — she walked because she couldn’t pay for her bus pass. She couldn’t buy it for the same reason she can’t buy anything else: Since last week, she has been unable to access…
The morbid joke about the Great Recession was that it turned Americans’ 401(k)s into 201(k)s. Indeed, the nation’s 401(k)s and IRAs lost about $2.4 trillion in the final two quarters of 2008, and the average loss that year for workers who had been on the job for 20 years was, according to one estimate, about…
JOAN RIVERS, a comedian who died last year, did not let chores get in the way of a career in showbusiness. “I hate housework,” she joked. “You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again.” An escape from unpaid drudgery into paid work seems a…
Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that’s obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit,…
The rules that govern cross border profits enable systemic tax avoidance, because they allow profits to be shifted away from where they are generated to another country with a lower (or zero) tax rate – all as a matter of accounting rather than real economic activities. These rules frequently serve the economic interests of the…
On May 1st, International Workers’ Day, I will be publicly discussing my job title, my experience and my salary on #talkpay and I urge everyone to do so as well. Pay inequality is an oft-discussed topic. There are measurable pay discrepancies between groups when looking at race and gender which are further exacerbated when someone…
With the rise of coding bootcamps, it’s become a popular notion that being able to code is simply a matter of will, not dollars. “Learn how to code and become a developer, it’s easy! Take an eight-week course!” But this couldn’t be further from the truth: Becoming a developer is difficult and often out of…
The world is awash in personal wealth: $153.2 trillion in total, according to Allianz’s new Global Wealth Report 2015. That’s enough to pay three times the world’s sovereign debt, the debts of each nation. The report, which measured 2014 wealth, found 2014 was the third consecutive year in which global wealth grew more than 7%….