Warren Buffett says economy is weaker than people think | Money CNN

November 15, 2016November 14, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Warren Buffett is worth $70 billion. He is the second-most wealthy person in the world. But he recognizes that the growing income inequality gap in the United States is a big problem. And it may have helped Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

“The Forbes 400 had $93 billion in 1982, and they got $2.4 trillion now. And that’s 25 times as much,” Buffett told CNN’s Poppy Harlow in an exclusive interview in Omaha on Thursday.

“If you’ve been working 40 hours a week, maybe holding a second job, and, you know, you work with the Little League and you’ve been a good parent, and you’re really struggling, you think, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?'” he added.

Um, why am I being targeted with Australian anti-refugee ads on Facebook? | Mashable

November 14, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Those “No Way: You will not make Australia home,” campaign ads from the country’s government have made it to Facebook, and they’re targeting…Australians.

Earlier in the week, the government proposed a lifetime ban on refugees who arrive by boat. Now, some Australians are being served the same anti-immigration campaign as people in other parts of the world are seeing. Including myself.

The anti-immigration ads have been around since 2014, aiming to deter would-be asylum seekers from making their way to Australia by boat.

They’ve been translated into 16 different languages, including Tamil, Arabic and Vietnamese. The format has even been copied by far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

I have a Vietnamese background, but as someone born and raised in Australia, I’m not really sure why I’m being served the ads.

There Is A Major Climate Issue Hiding In Your Closet: Fast Fashion | Co.Exist

November 11, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

This month as world leaders meet in Morocco to discuss implementation of the Paris climate agreement, which recently entered into force as most major economies began committing to some kind of carbon emissions reduction, there is little talk about one major contributor to climate change: fast fashion.

Fashion has been largely left out of the Paris climate talks. There’s lots of chatter about the more . . . fashionable low-hanging fruit: energy efficiency, conservationism, or the ramp up of renewables. But there’s little talk about textiles and what we’re wearing.

What’s Pushing the Tech Giants to Make an $8,500 Smart Fridge? | Bloomberg

November 10, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The Note 7 isn’t the only Samsung product with problems. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is also working with the Korean company to address safety issues with its washing machines. Customers who bought certain top-load Samsung washers should use only the delicate cycle for bulky items such as sheets to reduce the risk of “impact injuries or property damage,” the CPSC warned in late September following a series of consumer complaints, including a class action contending that Samsung’s machines “explode during normal use.” The company declined to comment.

What’s bad for Samsung may be good for homegrown rival LG, which has been promoting appliances loaded with the latest technology. In September the company unveiled a fridge with a 29-inch touchscreen powered by Intel equipment and running Windows 10; an onboard computer can store recipes and send alerts about needed ingredients to a mobile app. A few weeks later, LG set up an exhibition in New York’s Rockefeller Center to show off its current slate of high-end appliances, including a Signature fridge with doors that open when you wave a foot near a floor sensor. Tap the door twice, and a glass panel goes from opaque to transparent, revealing what’s inside.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and the Future of Disaster Response | WIRED

November 10, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

DAVID MORAN WAS all set to go out that Saturday night. He thought he might hit Parliament House, Orlando’s oldest gay nightclub, or maybe make it over to Pulse, another mainstay. But after he and a friend ended their shift at the restaurant where they both worked, car trouble kept them marooned in the parking lot for an hour. So Moran went home and fell asleep watching Bob’s Burgers on Netflix instead.

He was awakened just before 5 am by the sound of his phone buzzing next to him on his bed. He fished it out from between the covers and found a text message asking if he had heard the news about Pulse. “Mass shooting,” said the message that arrived next. Now wide awake, Moran instinctively thumbed his way to Facebook.

Born-Again Debt: What Is Re-Aging, and Is It Legal? | The Simple Dollar

November 9, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The world of credit is filled with terms that can sound quite foreign to most people who don’t work in the industry. Once such term is “re-aging.” And, if you currently have the unfortunate experience of collection accounts appearing on your credit reports, it’s a term you should definitely understand.

Re-Aging Defined

Credit problems are not allowed to haunt your credit reports forever. This is great news if you’ve made credit mistakes in your past. Thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) there are very strict limitations regarding how long derogatory information is permitted to remain on your credit reports.

Cancer-Causing List: 7 New Substances Added by US | Live Science

November 4, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Seven new substances have been added to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ list of cancer-causing agents.

Six of these substances are listed as “known” to cause cancer, while one is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen,” according to a statement today (Nov. 3) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

9 Digital Marketing Stats You Need to See From This Week | Adweek

November 4, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a fine week of digital marketing stats, so check out the nine data points below that got our attention:

1. Instagram-Snapchat face off

Adweek commissioned a survey from Survata that asked 511 Instagram and Snapchat users ages 13 to 34 how they feel about the apps and their impressions of the ads. Two of the more fascinating findings: 26 percent of respondents remembered seeing specific Snapchat ads, while 37 percent remembered seeing specific Instagram ads.

Millennial Women Ditching Corporate World for Entrepreneurship | Business News Daily

November 3, 2016November 3, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Instead of waiting their turn to rise to the top at work, a number of younger women are taking a different approach to breaking the glass ceiling, new research finds.

A study from the consulting firm REAL revealed that among millennial female entrepreneurs, nearly 90 percent left their job in the corporate world to start their own business. This has not only given them the opportunity to take on executive leadership roles, but it also allows them to employ largely female staffs, execute flat business structures that have no, or few, levels of middle managers between exectuives and employees, and encourage greater employee consideration and inclusion, according to the study.

LinkedIn plots a place on the economic graph, launches Salary to chart what we earn | TechCrunch

November 2, 2016November 3, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

LinkedIn — the professionally-oriented social networking platform that’s being acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion — has made a play to build what it refers to as “the economic graph“, a concept that combines your profile with LinkedIn’s own analytics and data trove to chart the connections between you, your career, your industry and the wider economy. Today, it’s launching a new product that fits in squarely with that strategy.

LinkedIn Salary, a new portal and tracker to collect and analyse salaries globally, will let users find how much a particular job earns (salary, bonus, and equity data), with the ability to drill down using parameters like years of experience, location, and education level.