A 16-year-old South Sudanese girl was sold for marriage via Facebook in a disturbing case that’s been described as “reminiscent of latter-day slave markets.”
The winning bid in the auction was for 500 cows, three cars and $10,000, and the girl was married off at a ceremony on Nov. 3 in the country’s Eastern Lakes State, according to Plan International, a humanitarian organisation focused on children’s rights.
The recent plunge in the stock market is a cakewalk compared to what’s going on with cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin prices are down more than 15% in just the past week and have plummeted nearly 70% so far this year.
Bitcoin hit a peak above $19,000 in December 2017. Its is now trading at around $4,600.
Shares of companies with ties to the crypto market have plunged lately too, including chipmakers Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD), which make graphics cards used by bitcoin miners. Online retailer turned blockchain investor Overstock (OSTK) and digital payments firm Square (SQ) are also sharply lower. Each stock is down between 15% and 35% in just the past month.
So it seems safe to say that the bitcoin bubble has burst. Should investors start to dip their toe back in to bitcoin and other crypyto-related assets?
David’s Bridal has been buried under a mountain of debt. It hasn’t helped that fewer people are tying the knot lately.
The nation’s largest bridal retailer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday. It owes between $500 million and $1 billion to creditors, according to court records.
As part of the bankruptcy, David’s Bridal reached a deal with lenders to reduce the company’s debt by more than $400 million. The agreement will allow David’s Bridal to continue to operate its more than 300 stores.
Let’s rewind to October 2017. Kate McClure, a New Jersey woman, ran out of gas on an interstate ramp outside of Philadelphia. Johnny Bobbitt, a homeless man, was allegedly panhandling nearby, and used his last $20 to buy McClure enough gas to get home. In return, McClure and her boyfriend, Mike D’Amico, took to GoFundMe, asking givers to help them raise $10,000 toward rent, a car, and a few months of basic living expenses for Bobbitt. The fundraiser went viral. In all, over 14,000 donors eventually contributed to the goal-shattering total of $402,000.
In a fascinating and scorching editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, three authors argue that the myth that exercise is the key to weight loss – and to health – is erroneous and pervasive, and that it must end. The evidence that diet matters more than exercise is now overwhelming, they write, and has got to be heeded: We can exercise to the moon and back but still be fat for all the sugar and carbs we consume. And perhaps even more jarring is that we can be a normal weight and exercise, and still be unhealthy if we’re eating poorly. So, they say, we need a basic reboot of our understanding of health, which has to involve the food industry’s powerful PR “machinery,” since that was part of the problem to begin with.
Samsung has unveiled the W2019, a high-end flip phone that is packed with flagship-level specifications such as 6GB of RAM and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845.
Samsung announced the smartphone at a launch event in China, according to GizmoChina. The W2019 is the successor to last year’s W2018, which was powered by the Snapdragon 835.
American writer and former president of Marvel Comics Stan Lee has died at the age of 95.
In 1961, Lee created The Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics, and went on to create titles including Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk.
The legendary comic book author died at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to a family lawyer.
prodnose
PROD-nohz
verb intr.: To pry.
noun: A prying person.
After Prodnose, a pedantic and nosy character, who appeared in the newspaper columns of J B Morton in the Daily Express. J B Morton wrote under the pen name Beachcomber. Twenty years before the word appeared in his column, the poet Dylan Thomas once wrotein 1934: “I want you to think of me today … singing as loudly as Beachcomber in a world rid of Prodnose.”
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TIP OF THE WEEK
SBA 7(a) loan approvals for the fiscal year ending September 30th totaled $25,372,457,900. That’s 0.3% less than the prior year.
Being a prodnose about this, I calculated the correlation coefficient between SBA 7(a) loan volume and GDP for over six years using the Microsoft CORREL function. It came out to a statistically significant 0.86.
That would imply the economy won’t continue to grow as rapidly as it is now.
Continue reading “The SBA and PROdnose – The Wisdom and Musings of Jim Ely, SBA pro”
GOOGLE ANNOUNCED CHANGES to how it will handle claims of sexual harassment among employees, including making arbitration optional for individual harassment and sexual assault claims. While additional transparency and protection for workers is a sign of progress, the change is incremental rather than transformative, because Google’s arbitration provision still prohibits collective action. Harassment claims will no longer be forced into private arbitration, but only individuals can now bring their claims before a jury.
Even though cryptocurrencies technically have no physical presence, they really do a make a impact on the environment — and even could affect the amount of money people have in their accounts.
From January 2016 to June 2018, the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education in Cincinnati monitored how much energy it took to mine Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero on a daily basis.
