- We Are Living in the Begging Economy
In this new paradigm, workers still have to work, but they don’t get paid at all. Instead, they beg for money on social media. It’s like replying to your viral Tweet with a link to your Soundcloud, only if you don’t go viral you have to ration your insulin (one third of GoFundMe’s campaigns are already for medical costs). This has been the case for many government employees for the entire duration of the shutdown, including the TSA employees who are supposedly there to prevent the next 9/11. It’ll be the case for the thousands more starting soon, so the Interior Department can continue to sell oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3m59p/we-are-living-in-the-begging-economy
- Microsoft pledges $500M to create affordable housing around Seattle
The money will be used in three ways: $225 million will be loaned at below-market interest rates to developers building units for households making between $62,000 to $124,000 a year; $250 million will be used for market-rate loans to support the construction of affordable housing for people making up to 60 percent of the local median income, or about $48,150 for a two-person household; and the rest of the money, $25 million, will be donated to services for low-income and homeless people. Loans will be made over a period of three years and any profit will be put back in the fund.
- How tax brackets actually work
- Sorry I Forgot Your Birthday, I’ve Stopped Checking Facebook
Michael Haber had been at his cousin Jasmine’s house for nearly two hours—chatting, playing with her children—when she brought out a fluffy chocolate sponge cake with a whipped-cream filling. “What is this for?” asked Mr. Haber, 26, a web designer in Beirut, Lebanon.
Jasmine explained that it was for her. It was her birthday.
“It was pretty awkward. But how would I have known?” said Mr. Haber. “I quit Facebook . ”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-quit-facebook-now-you-dont-know-anyones-birthday-11547652709
- Receipts are secretly really bad–why are we still using them?
“We started looking into this idea of receipts and whether we should move people towards electronic receipts,” says Phil Ting, a California assembly member from San Francisco. His staff calculated the amount of paper and water wasted to create receipts that often end up in the trash seconds later, and then learned about the health issues that receipts also pose. “As we did more research, we found out the receipts aren’t just printed with regular inkjet ink, which is recyclable. It’s [coated] with BPA which is not recyclable, and actually toxic.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90292886/receipts-are-secretly-really-bad-why-are-we-still-using-them
Photo by Kat Yukawa on Unsplash