Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The unemployment rate is low by any historical standard at 5.1 percent. Businesses are complaining of worker shortages in industries like health care, construction and trucking. Household-name companies like Walmart and McDonald’s have announced increases to their pay for low-wage workers. Add those together, and it would seem to point to 2015 as the year…
Councilmember Laurie Cumbo and Assemblywoman Diana Richardson rallying with tenants outside of 285 Schenectady on Wednesday night (UHAB) Dozens of Crown Heights tenants and allies gathered for a candlelight vigil near the corner of Schenectady Avenue and Union Street last night, in solidarity with 55 families at 285 Schenectady and 1646 Union who will…
click to enlarge The Whole Foods market near Lake Merritt in Oakland was the site of a bloody “altercation” between a security guard and a black customer last night, according to a witness and the Whole Foods store. Facebook user Zoe Marks shared three graphic photos of the victim of the attack, who she says…
If you know your argument that restaurant owners universally revile the idea of an increased minimum wage is complete bullshit, that’s still OK! You can just make shit up, as one of the main restaurant industry lobbyists recently did. Lobbyist-mercenary and aspiring Nazgul Richard Berman recently launched Faces of 15, a shill website devoted to…
Politicians and pundits love to talk about the character-building experience of working your way through college. But how realistic is that ideal? As one way of answering that question, here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say you’re planning to attend your state’s best-known public university (at the in-state rate, naturally) and you’re hoping a minimum-wage job…
Katrina bus tours go all over New Orleans, but it’s illegal for them to go into the Lower 9th Ward, the area that’s been the slowest to rebuild. This week we go around talking to residents there about what matters the most to them (and what doesn’t) ten years after the hurricane. The episode we…
Somehow this is supposed to turn people *against* a higher minimum wage? http://t.co/KTRsXlMp4n pic.twitter.com/ff8qddakYc — Jody Avirgan (@jodyavirgan) August 26, 2015 On Monday, a billboard went up over Times Square ridiculing the call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers. The billboard depicts a doofy good-for-nothing millenial shrugging his way toward a…
Some Photoshop concepts, no matter how ill-conceived, must be seen to the bitter end Things are reaching a boiling point in the sleepy crime-riddled hamlet of The Hamptons, USA. There have been Uber shortages, LIRR restriction, helicopter bans, and fornicating yupster Bros aplenty. Dr. NY Times is here to diagnose the problems, which they…
Pavlina Tcherneva’s chart showing the distribution of income gains during periods of economic expansion is burning up the economics internet over the past 24 hours and for good reason. The trend it depicts is shocking: (Pavlina Tcherneva) For a long time, most of the gains from economic growth went to the bottom 90 percent of…
‘Bring a map of New Orleans.’’ That was all that Alden J. McDonald Jr., president and chief executive of Liberty Bank and Trust Company, said when I first asked to meet him. It was the summer of 2005, less than two weeks after the city’s flood-protection system failed to keep out the storm surge created…