The 'Crying Indian' ad that fooled the environmental movement - Chicago Tribune. The Wealthy Aren’t Paying Their Share. How Do We Get Rid of Tax Havens? - by Erlend Sandøy and Saskia Kerkvliet. 1477942. Canonical link: “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years.
For most of my adult life, I had bought my winter boots by going to Filene's Basement – the original one, in downtown Boston – in August. Then, one year, I failed to acquire boots in August. Unsurprisingly, after winter had already started, my worn, cheap boots failed me. But, you know: what the heck. Stop buying crap, and companies will stop making crap. How Much to Tip at the Nail Salon: Your Ultimate Guide. Trump was right. The rest of the G7 were wrong | George Monbiot. He gets almost everything wrong. But last weekend Donald Trump got something right. To the horror of the other leaders of the rich world, he defended democracy against its detractors. Perhaps predictably, he has been universally condemned for it. His crime was to insist that the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) should have a sunset clause.
In other words, it should not remain valid indefinitely, but expire after five years, allowing its members either to renegotiate it or to walk away. To howls of execration from the world’s media, his insistence has torpedoed efforts to update the treaty. In Rights of Man, published in 1791, Thomas Paine argued that: “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it.
Even if the people of the US, Canada and Mexico had explicitly consented to Nafta in 1994, the idea that a decision made then should bind everyone in North America for all time is repulsive. The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure? Ultimately, the new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success. The marshmallow test isn’t the only experimental study that has recently failed to hold up under closer scrutiny. Some scholars and journalists have gone so far as to suggest that psychology is in the midst of a “replication crisis.”
In the case of this new study, specifically, the failure to confirm old assumptions pointed to an important truth: that circumstances matter more in shaping children’s lives than Mischel and his colleagues seemed to appreciate. There’s plenty of other research that sheds further light on the class dimension of the marshmallow test. Inequality gap widens as 42 people hold same wealth as 3.7bn poorest | Inequality. The development charity Oxfam has called for action to tackle the growing gap between rich and poor as it launched a new report showing that 42 people hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.
In a report published on Monday to coincide with the gathering of some of the world’s richest people at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Oxfam said billionaires had been created at a record rate of one every two days over the past 12 months, at a time when the bottom 50% of the world’s population had seen no increase in wealth. It added that 82% of the global wealth generated in 2017 went to the most wealthy 1%.
The charity said it was “unacceptable and unsustainable” for a tiny minority to accumulate so much wealth while hundreds of millions of people struggled on poverty pay. It called on world leaders to turn rhetoric about inequality into policies to tackle tax evasion and boost the pay of workers. These terrifying photos of Sears clearance sales in Canada show the devastating impact of the retail apocalypse. Sears has struggled to attract shoppers in recent years.Getty Images Sears Canada, which is separate from Sears' business in the US, is liquidating all of its assets.As it closes stores, everything has gone on sale.The resulting photos are apocalyptic.
Sears is shuttering its Canadian locations — and the stores are descending into chaos. Earlier in October, Sears Canada announced it would seek court approval to liquidate its remaining stores and assets in the nation. Now, liquidators have taken over the locations. First, they bumped up the prices on items that were previously on sale, Consumerist reported. Now they're dragging prices down until everything is gone.
The result is apocalyptic. Here's some of the worst carnage yet of the retail apocalypse. Everything your caregiver wants to tell you but isn’t privileged enough to say — Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. It has been three glorious months since I closed my home daycare and became the Artistic Director of b current performing arts. In those three months I have had some time – not a lot of time, mind you, since being an AD, I have learned, means sleeping with one eye open – to reflect on my experiences caring for children. I have worked as a youth educator since I was 15, but owning a home daycare was by far the most challenging to my patience.
It was a wonderful journey for me in which I had the honour of making lifelong friends (including the last two families I served) and I got to test the limits of my multitasking abilities and athletic prowess. At the end of my six years of daycare work, I could expertly trudge through a snow storm with a baby on my back, one trailing behind me on an attached sled, and a toddler on each arm.
It was like an episode of American Gladiator but with snotty noses and leaking diapers. Not only is this an ableist notion, but it’s a load of bullshit. A New Oakland Museum Imagines a World Where Capitalism Is Dead. It’s works such as Rimini Protokoll’s that emphasize the Museum of Capitalism’s surreal setting. The museum’s temporary location is tucked away in Oakland’s Jack London Square, a developed waterfront area that was initially envisioned as a tourist destination but has been plagued with storefront vacancies for the past decade—and is eerily deserted on most days of the week.
Steves and Furstnau partnered with the Jack London Improvement District to move into a massive empty building that was designed to be a bustling vendor marketplace. To reach the museum from the street, visitors must cross railroad tracks via an elevated walkway with a sci-fi feel. Once in the second-floor exhibition space, they can peer down into the still-vacant first floor of the building and see scaffolding left behind like a ghost of the intended marketplace—almost a work of art in itself.
Without the Museum of Capitalism there, the area would seem ordinary to any Oaklander. —Sarah Burke. American Airlines gave its workers a raise. Wall Street freaked out. How an Ad Campaign Made Lesbians Fall in Love with Subaru. Subaru’s marketing strategy had just died in a fit of irony. It was the mid 1990s, and sales of Subaru cars were in decline. To reverse the company’s fortunes, Subaru of America had created its first luxury car—even though the small automaker was known for plain but dependable cars—and hired a trendy advertising agency to introduce it to the public.
The new approach had fallen flat when the ad men took irony too far: One ad touted the new sports car’s top speed of 140 MPH, then asked, “How important is that, with extended urban gridlock, gas at $1.38 a gallon and highways full of patrolmen? " After firing the hip ad agency, Subaru of America changed its approach.
This search for niche groups led Subaru to the 3rd rail of marketing: They discovered that lesbians loved their cars. This was the type of discovery that the small, struggling automaker was looking for. Yet Subaru decided to launch an ad campaign focused on lesbian customers. You Are What You Drive From Subaru to ‘Lesbaru’ Sorry, Pepsi Haters, But Social Justice Needs Capitalism – Liberal Currents. Last week’s backlash to the Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner and an army of hipster-looking protesters was fast and fierce. Accused of “co-opting the resistance,” and insensitivity to movements like Black Lives Matter, Pepsi was forced to pull the ad within 24 hours.
The irony of the fiasco is that Pepsi was repping social justice long before it was cool — and forged real progressive change along the way. But in their haste to build a firewall between social justice and corporate capitalism, Pepsi’s haters have missed the ways in which the two are not merely compatible, but in many ways mutually reinforcing. More Woke Than Coke Flashback to 1940, just a couple years after Walter S.
Mack Jr. assumed the reins as CEO of Pepsi-Cola Company. In the pre-civil rights era, companies like Coca-Cola systematically refrained from advertising to African-American populations. World War II’s sugar rations forced Pepsi into hiatus, but when the war economy subsided Mack got back at it. Samuel Hammond. One Quarter (23%) of In-Debt Canadians Say They’ll Never be Debt Free; Those More Optimistic Say It Will Take 8 Years to Pay Down | Ipsos. Toronto, ON – Three in four Canadians (73%) are currently in debt, whether it is a mortgage only (15%) or some level of consumer debt (58%), a new Ipsos poll for BDO reveals. One in three (36%) Canadians say they have ‘a little bit of consumer debt’, while two in ten (18%) have ‘a good deal of consumer debt’ and 4% have ‘a lot of consumer debt’.
Only one in four (27%) describe themselves as completely debt-free, with no mortgage, loan, line of credit or credit card debt. Canadians aged 35-54 are the most likely to have higher levels of consumer debt, suggesting that this group has had enough time to rack up some important debts, but not quite enough time to fully pay them down yet. Three in ten (28%) 35-54 year olds have a good deal or a lot of debt, more than the 20% of those aged 55+ or the 16% of those younger than 35 who have a good deal or a lot of debt. Regionally, Atlantic Canadians (30%) are most likely to indicate they have a good deal or a lot of debt. (Click to enlarge image) Hippie Capitalism. The golden moment for a reporter on assignment comes in the evening.
You stumble into a room at some two-star hotel, throw notebooks and gadgets onto the bed, plug in your computer, splash water on your face, get to work. You have a story, and all night to tell it. No kids. No clutter. Just sweet solitude. Alas, out here in Mountain View, California, where I’ve been reporting June’s Walrus cover story on digital privacy, solitude is unaffordable.
Holiday Inn: $466 (US) per night. “I call it ‘collaborative consumption.’ Airbnb—as most readers already know—is Uber done up in bricks and mortar. When the door opens, I am greeted by a fifty-something woman with soft manners and grey hair done up in a casual style. I cast my gaze across the bungalow: a young teenager doing homework at a coffee table, books and papers organized in giant stacks, and two dogs—one happily chewing up a pair of adult Crocs. “Oh, technology, business, that sort of thing,” I respond. Get the Walrus Weekly newsletter. McDonald's Improving Sales Linked to Employee Benefits. McDonald's' sales are booming — but don't thank All-Day breakfasts. Flickr/Mike Mozart When the burger chain reported an increase in comparable sales for the third straight quarter late last month, CEO Steve Easterbrook said that the positive growth was in part linked to better employee benefits and higher wages. Easterbrook said lower employee turnover and higher customer satisfaction were linked to employee compensation package improvements.
"The improvements we made to our compensation and benefits package to employees in U.S. In April last year, the company announced it would raise wages for the estimated 90,000 workers employed at company-owned U.S. stores, or about ten percent of McDonald's restaurants. In addition to an hourly wage increase that will cap at $10 per-hour by the end of 2016, the company also instituted paid time off, as well as assistance with education costs for some workers. John Taggart, epa Twitter/SEIU Share your opinion. The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States. Last September, at a law firm overlooking San Francisco Bay, Andrew Penney, a managing director at Rothschild & Co., gave a talk on how the world’s wealthy elite can avoid paying taxes. His message was clear: You can help your clients move their fortunes to the United States, free of taxes and hidden from their governments.
Some are calling it the new Switzerland. After years of lambasting other countries for helping rich Americans hide their money offshore, the U.S. is emerging as a leading tax and secrecy haven for rich foreigners. By resisting new global disclosure standards, the U.S. is creating a hot new market, becoming the go-to place to stash foreign wealth.
Everyone from London lawyers to Swiss trust companies is getting in on the act, helping the world’s rich move accounts from places like the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands to Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota. Others are also jumping in: Geneva-based Cisa Trust Co. The U.S. In a section originally titled “U.S. Why a bunch of Silicon Valley investors are suddenly interested in universal basic income. Basic income is having a moment. First Finland announced it would launch an ambitious experiment to see if it would work to give everyone in a given area is given a set amount of cash every year from the government, no strings attached. Now the Silicon Valley seed investment firm Y Combinator has announced it wants to fund a basic income experiment in the US.
YC's president, Sam Altman, announced on the YC blog that the company wants to hire a researcher to "work full-time on this project for 5 years," and supervise an experiment wherein Y Combinator will "give a basic income to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period, though we’re flexible on that and all aspects of the project. " Basic income as an insurance policy for the robot takeover Shutterstock Y Combinator — a startup incubator that counts Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit among its alumni — seems mostly interested in basic income as a response to technological unemployment.
What Y Combinator's study could add Rob Hurson. Fast Fashion Problems- Why I Don't Buy Cheap Clothes. Before I buy any piece of clothing or accessory, I like to know a little bit about where and how it’s made. I ask questions. I avoid companies that aren’t up to my standards. I buy fewer things of higher quality. And apparently you don’t like me. According to a study that came out earlier this month, not only do most people choose to remain willfully ignorant of the conditions in which their clothing is made, they also look down on the type of consumers who do care. In the study, 174 undergrads at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business were given three pieces of information about a pair of jeans in order to evaluate them: the style, the wash, and the price.
Most of the participants chose to hear about the control attribute, remaining willfully ignorant of how the jeans were made. What’s more — and this is what got my hackles up — those unconcerned consumers rated ethical shoppers boring, odd, less fashionable, and less sexy. When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid' Economix Comix. The True Cost | A Documentary Film. 7 Everyday Things Poor People Worry About That Rich People Never Do. The Average Hipster Employs 27 Slaves Each Day. Here's How To Change That. Eizabeth Robsong Ordon. The Economics (and Nostalgia) of Dead Malls. Stop land grabs. Strength In Every Day - Gender Dichotomy in Cancer Culture - Gender Dichotomy in Cancer Culture.
The Invisible Hand - Radio Summer - Radio - CBC Player. ACT | Citizen Capitalism. “Citizen Capitalism” makes you responsible for your world. The Non-Consumer Advocate Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. The Smoking Kid: Messengers of cognitive dissonance.