Eight black men were passengers aboard an American Airlines flight scheduled to depart Phoenix for New York on January 5, 2024. They didn’t know each other, and weren’t seated together. A white male flight attendant complained about body odor, so the flight crew rounded up all the black [...]
Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
May 25th, 2024 - 2:48 pm § in Business
How badly do you want this job?
You knew going in that landing the job would be difficult, but the reality is beyond what you anticipated. The interview process is “extremely unpredictable, usually requiring two to three rounds of interviews.” You’re told you may be called in for further interviewing on short not[...]
Credentials inflation
Just as bad as sky-high grocery prices, or ridiculous F-150 sticker prices — perhaps worse — is employers demanding degrees for jobs that don’t require them. This forces kids to go to college and rack up student debts they can’t afford which conservatives are adamant must be [...]
May 16th, 2024 - 4:04 pm § in Business, Law and Courts
Federal consumer agency survives Supreme Court test
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), brainchild of former law professor Elizabeth Warren, now a U.S. Senator, has survived a crucial legal test in the Supreme Court, which issued a 7-2 decision upholding its funding mechanism on Thursday, May 16, 2024 (read story here). Warren proposed a[...]
May 15th, 2024 - 8:01 pm § in Business
Union-busting at REI?
The beatings will stop when morale improves the union organizers leave. Employees bitterly mutter that old joke about morale when heavy-handed management gets on their nerves. When many people think about REI, they think of a laid-back outdoorsy company reminiscent of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinar[...]
Is corporate greed the real cause of inflation?
Not all of it, but fattening bottom lines has played a role. It’s basic economics that when supply and demand are out of balance, prices will rise or fall until they’re in balance again. They teach that in college-level Economics 101 classes. The pandemic created supply bottlenecks and s[...]
May 5th, 2024 - 11:34 am § in Business, Environment
The wind didn’t knock out your power
When it’s windy and the lights go out, you may assume a tree limb fell on a powerline somewhere in your neighborhood. Not necessarily. The electric utility may have deliberately cut power. It’s a tactic to prevent fires in the dry windy conditions that are becoming increasingly prevalent[...]
Florida governor forces residents to eat meat
GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed legislation banning the sale of lab-grown meat in Florida. Lab-grown meat is “produced in steel tanks using cells from a living animal,” and is different from plant-based proteins, Huffington Post says (read article here). Sounds like cloning to me. DeSan[...]
Employers steal more $$$ than criminals
I was surprised to read that in the U.S., workers “have an estimated $50bn-plus stolen from them every year, … surpassing all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined,” the Guardian said on Thursday, June 15, 2023 (read story here). I knew wage theft was a problem, a[...]
The commercial real estate crisis
The commercial real estate sector is in trouble for two big reasons: High vacancy rates, and falling property values. Nationally, about 18% of America’s office space lacks tenants. There may have been some overbuilding, but this is primarily due to the switch to working from home. The pandemic[...]