There’s a sobering article on Alternet today titled “Why Do We Pay Our Plumbers More Than Our Caregivers?” It caught my eye because my husband and I are already on the lookout for career opportunities for our two-year-old, and we determined early on that plumbing offers an attractive income and requires low-cost training (i.e., no …
It’s not a subprime meltdown, it’s a badly managed hedge fund
Calculated Risk, a really smart financial blog that because I’m a navel-gazing MSMer I only read for the first time last week, had a post over the weekend (link via Barry Ritholtz) mocking the New York Times for explaining away Bear Stearns’ hedge fund problems as “fallout from loose lending practices that showered money on people with …
Dads Do Diapers, Too
I chatted today with Dana Glazer, a New Jersey filmmaker whose current project is called The Evolution of Dad. It’s about how the role of fathers has changed dramatically over the past few generations. Glazer, a “work-at-home dad” himself, juggles freelance filmmaking jobs with childcare, as does his wife, an interior designer.
But …
Al Gore likes being a businessman
My friend Ellen McGirt has a cool article on Al Gore in in the July Fast Company (which I know about because she hegemonically posted a link to it on her Facebook page). An excerpt:
Since his nonelection, Gore has become a millionaire many times over, bringing him, in financial terms, shoulder to shoulder with the C-suite denizens he
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The Washington Post’s take on Cheneynomics
Today brings us the economic-policy chapter of the big Washington Post series on how Dick Cheney runs America. It’s not nearly as dramatic or sinister-seeming as yesterday’s installment on torture ‘n’ stuff. Economic policy is like that, I guess.
One big takeaway is that economic policy in the Bush administration is run not by the …
No flight from risk just yet
John Authers in the FT makes the point (subscription required) that the great flight from risk that people with respect for market history have been predicting for a while now still hasn’t come to pass:
Angela Montero, of Société Générale, pointed out last week that Mexican bonds yielded 5.85 per cent. 10-year bonds in Colombia,
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Hegemons prefer Facebook
From the latest fascinating essay by danah boyd, UC Berkeley grad student and online-social-networking guru (link via Howard Rheingold via joerissen):
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of
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Jack Welch Book Review by Reader!
All hail John Struan, my hero reader who has written his second, I repeat, second book review for WiP. That’s right, other readers to whom I’ve sent books and heard nary a peep (LaDawn, you’re excused; the British post is probably still cycling to your house). This is a book about which I was particularly eager to read a review (note I …
A Dutch newspaper gives real meaning to the term ‘widely read’
A cousin who was passing through Schiphol over the weekend bought me a copy of my favorite newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad. I haven’t had time to actually read it yet, but I was immediately struck with how the NRC, always one of the widest newspapers on the planet, has so far resisted the trend toward skinnification. Next to the Wall …
I Don’t Really Hate My Dog
But he does annoy the crap out of me sometimes. I suppose I overlooked a lot of his neuroses before I had a child, but now I simply don’t have the time or the patience. Sometimes when I get home from work to find a giant dog dump on the kitchen floor, it’s that one last straw after a long, hard day, you know what I’m saying?
I wrote an …
America’s poor, overtaxed corporations
Reader Marcus Choudhary has urged me to mention, amid all this talk about the sweet tax deal that private equity firms and private equity partners get, that corporate tax rates in the U.S. are pretty high. So if the folks at the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees really want to make our tax system more consistent and …
What’s so emotional about wanting a fair and consistent tax system, Mr. Blankfein?
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein says it’s “emotion” that’s driving the Congressional push to change the tax treatment of private equity:
“Right now, sentiment is what is really transcendent,” Mr Blankfein said in an interview with the Financial Times. “But as you get into the consequences . . . for competitiveness and fairness .
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