Archive | Business & Finance RSS feed for this archive

Quick! OMG! Hurry! Tomorrow’s the second Sunday of May!

To better prepare readers of The Atlantic for appropriate ways to observe Mother’s Day, Nicole Russell, in an article captioned “[t]he second Sunday of May is a source of frustration and disappointment for men and women alike,” shares a little history and some pointers. Yet, somehow, she managed to contribute to the disappointment by including this […]

Leave a Comment Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: Sports

The NBA will find a way to make sure the Pacers lose

Every sports organization believes in something. For baseball, it’s tradition. For the NFL, it’s parity. The NBA believes in Major. Media. Markets. Now there’s some logic in this.  Pro basketball is a niche sport played by minorities and Europeans, making it an intrinsically harder sell than baseball or football. Without a solid position in major markets, they’d […]

4 Comments Continue Reading →
Business

Squirrel!: welcome to the Ricky Bobby School of Management

Part two of a series. Ricky Bobby is not a thinker…He is a doer. – Talladega Nights In part one of this series, we talked about a new analysis that explains how important stupidity is to the modern corporation. Today we’re going to have a look at what this means for you. In short, despite […]

2 Comments Continue Reading →
Business

American business: powered by Stupid®

Part one of a series. Phil Rizzuto: “Hey Yogi I think we’re lost.” Yogi Berra: “Yeah, but we’re making great time!” You know how certain segments of society think that governments and universities and public school systems ought to be “run like businesses”? And how those same people bitch at length about how messed up […]

7 Comments Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: BusinessFinance

Fall into the gap: Why are women still paid less than men for equal work?

In case anyone missed it today, I wanted to take the time to point people towards the Center for American Progress’s (CAP) terrific interactive feature “The Game of Wages.” It’s fun, it’s visually fantastic, and it drives home a problem that shouldn’t exist: that in 2013, women are still getting paid less than men for […]

9 Comments Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: Climate

Climate and agriculture: Wheatless in Hampstead

According to an article in yesterday’s Independent, the weather in Britain, especially England, has been so lousy that the UK is set to go from a wheat exporter to a wheat importer for the first time in a decade. The culprit here, if there is only one, appears to be the long spell of cold […]

Leave a Comment Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: BusinessFinance

Teaching underclass kids which fork to use

I recently came across a useful article over at Ragan’s PR Daily entitled “What to wear to work in the PR and marketing industry.” After reading through it, my first reaction was that it was mistitled – what it offers is good advice for what to wear to work in just about any industry. From where […]

9 Comments Continue Reading →
PlanesTrainsAutomobiles

The Tech Curmudgeon – thoroughly unimpressed by the Jeep Grand Cherokee

To paraphrase Canadian comedy group Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, “the Jeep Grand Cherokee blows (it blows and blows) and sucks, at the same time!”

1 Comment Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: Privacy

Google Glass: Welcome to the end of privacy

If you haven’t yet seen Mark Hurst’s piece on Google Glass over at Creative Good, you need to. You really, really need to. A lot of times cool new gadget and service roll-outs mainly just affect the manufacturers and the people with the cash to buy them. Sure, there can be collateral damage – World of […]

41 Comments Continue Reading →

Two reasons why the new CREDO Action petition to limit CEO salaries wouldn’t work

There’s a new petition going around – maybe you’ve seen it on Facebook. It points up our growing rich-poor gap and asks Congress to cap CEO pay, which is obscene in many cases. The ratio of CEO pay in the United States has ballooned to 380 times that of the average worker. Pass legislation to […]

1 Comment Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: FoodDrink

Maker’s Mark illustrates the importance of thinking BEFORE you act

In case you haven’t been tracking along, the folks at Maker’s Mark (which is owned by Beam, Inc.), faced with more demand than they could meet, recently announced that they’d be lowering their alcohol by volume (ABV) from 90 proof to 84 proof. You won’t even notice, they assured us. The backlash was swift and […]

1 Comment Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: BusinessFinance2

Why corporations are like Burmese pythons

Last week, many Americans were stunned to pick up their newspapers and learn that AIG was suing us taxpayers for saving them. We shouldn’t have been. That’s what any corporation would do. Indeed, the directors of AIG had to consider it or else get sued themselves. Corporations are the Burmese pythons of the economic ecosystem. […]

4 Comments Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: Journalism

The new transparency: Newspapers mine public data, and not everyone’s happy about it

Better get used to it, people. As governments increasingly place public information online, news organizations are going to demand access to it and print it — but not always with appropriate context. That must change. Among the leaders of the data-mining charge appears to be media conglomerate Gannett Co. Inc., owner of 82 U.S. daily […]

10 Comments Continue Reading →

AIG: Today it’s “Thank you, America.” Will it be “Screw you, America” tomorrow?

This just in from NYT’s DealBook: Rescued by a Bailout, A.I.G. May Sue Its Savior The board of A.I.G. will meet on Wednesday to consider joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government, court records show. The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed. It contends that the onerous nature of […]

2 Comments Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: Economy

Scrogues Converse: Lex asks an “innocent” question of Scrogue economists

At S&R, often there are days of debate and discussion on particular topics before we publish a post.  When these discussions are rich enough, we post them in the hope that you will weigh in on the conversation. Here’s one such discussion, started when one of our colleagues decided to ask the “innocent” question: Should the […]

2 Comments Continue Reading →
CATEGORY: PoliticsLawGovernment

Is $6 billion in political spending a big deal?

Is $6 billion a lot of money? Depends. To Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, perhaps not so much. To me and 99.99 percent of Americans, yeah, it’s a lot of money. But, like much in life, the assignment of value often lies in placing context around any piece of data. So what context should embrace […]

2 Comments Continue Reading →
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 3,643 other followers