There’s a glaring snag in the landmark civil rights bill that was passed in Congress yesterday. Though it purports to protect workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation, it doesn’t cover the transgendered.
First, a little background. When the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in April, it did include gender …
A couple of months ago I lamented my struggle with the flood of blog posts that poured through my Google Reader, even though I only subscribed at the time to 16 feeds, and asked for advice about what to do. In the comments, Felix Salmon recommended that I “get get a proper (ie not web-based) newsreader,” while Peter Varhol and a couple …
Okay, I’ll admit it. I want to write like Nick Carr when I grow up:
“Once every hundred years media changes,” boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. And it’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, like clockwork,
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I’m not on Facebook. I may or may not have once started an account with the intention of putting up a page someday as research for this column. But I haven’t visited since, seeing as I don’t need to hear one more giant sucking noise in the soundtrack of my already jammed life.
Yet I keep getting friended. I keep getting messages in my …
What to make of the falling dollar? The Italian economist is hopeful (via Mark Thoma):
Results from numerical exercises developed in joint work with Martin, and Pesenti, suggests that closing the US current account deficit (from 5% of GDP to zero) could lead to a combination of lower US consumption (-6%), and higher US employment (+3%),
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So I was walking down the hall the other week and noticed that one of the offices was occupied by a guy I’d never seen before. I didn’t recognize the name on the placard outside his door, either. Baffled, I asked my colleague Josh, “Who the heck is that?”
Turns out the new dude had been here a few months already, and before that had …
Lots of people have been wondering when one of the big oil-exporting countries, fed up with the weakening dollar, will demand to be paid in euros. But few had been paying attention to the far greater threat that supermodels might demand payment in currency harder than the greenback. Until now:
According to Brazil’s weekly magazine Veja,
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Imagine coming to work every day and having to pretend to be someone else. Imagine you’re Joe Smith from Indianapolis, but you have to remember to be John Sales from Boston. You’ve got to do the accent, to have a whole back story, cover up the inevitable slips.
Stressful, right? That’s what closeted gay workers say they experience every …
One great thing about business crises is the way they turn so many of us semi-amateurs into temporary financial geeks. Five years ago it was all about stock-option accounting and special purpose vehicles. Now it’s collateralizalized debt obligations, special investment vehicles, and my personal favorite of the moment, “level 3 …
You might have read about the collapse of Japan’s largest English-teaching school, Nova. From the Wall Street Journal:
…more than 4,000 foreign-language teachers working for Nova [were] slammed by the biggest scandal in Japan’s foreign community in years. The company, renowned in Japan for the hip-shaking pink bunny in its
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Federal Reserve governor Frederic Mishkin gave a speech Monday at the Risk USA 2007 conference in New York. He said some interesting stuff:
Two types of risks are particularly important for understanding financial instability. The first is what I will refer to as valuation risk: The market, realizing the complexity of a security or the
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Nope. Turns out a “homer” is something a worker makes, using company resources and on company time, for use at the home. This from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge web report:
A factory worker uses company time and materials to fashion a lamp he will take home for personal use—an artifact called a “homer.” The practice is
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