Imagine you're driving for Uber or Lyft. As an independent contractor, you enjoy setting your own work hours, picking up people you like chatting with (well, for the most part), learning about new parts of town, and earning back some of the investment in your car. Then, one day, an email from your ride-sharing service informs you that some bureaucrats you've never heard of have decided that Uber is now your employer. You have to work a certain number of hours and within prescribed times, and the... (more)
Swedish doctor Hans Rosling loads a washing machine with laundry on stage at the beginning of his TED talk. When his talk is over, he returns to the washer and pulls out ... books.
His presentation, "The Magic Washing Machine," is about how this one example of consumer technology is far more than a convenience. By mechanizing the arduous process of doing the household laundry, the washing machine gav... (more)
It's now less than three weeks until Buckeye State voters head to the polls in an off-year election, and they make make Ohio the first Midwestern state to legalize marijuana. A poll this week that asked specifically if respondents supported the initiative on the ballot had 56% saying yes.
They will be voting on Issue 3, a controversial proposal sponsored... (more)
The Nobel Prize just gets cheaper and cheaper. Recent laureate Bob Shiller graces the New York Times with his latest rant that free-markets stink, bolstering his argument by making stuff up.
For starters, Shiller writes that America’s wealth “can be attributed” to regulation. Well, sure, it “can be attributed” to Zeus. Or sunspots. In ... (more)
Many college students are eager to upgrade to Apple's new iPhone 6s -- or so my daughter tells me. But she's not. The battery life of her $100 Android phone is at least 48 hours on one charge; her friends can't get through the day without charging their iPhones. She's okay with her smaller screen and its lower resolution; battery life is her value driver.
"What presidential candidate are your iPhone-using friends supporting?" I asked her.
The biggest bank in the western world has just come out and declared that the global economy is “already in a recession”. According to British banking giant HSBC, global trade is down 8.4 percent so far this year, and global GDP expressed in U.S. dollars is down 3.4 percent. So those that are waiting for the next worldwide economic recession to begin can st... (more)
Playboy has finally found a new way to shock and titillate America.
The magazine has announced that it will no longer feature full nudity. Instead, it will be moving toward a partially clad, cheesecake pin-up style.
When I heard the news, I immediately wondered what the great economist Joseph Schumpeter would have made of it. Schumpeter, who famously sought to become the world's greatest economist, lover, and... (more)
In a remarkable video posted by activist Mark Dice, several people he stopped on the street would not even entertain a guess at the value of silver, with some not seeming to understand what the precious metal is.
Dice gave several respondents the opportunity to win a 100 ounce silver bar if they could guess its value. He even agreed to give the ... (more)
We've pointed out a few times in the past that while everyone refers to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement as a "free trade" agreement, the reality is that there's very little in there that's actually about free trade. If it were truly a free trade agreement, then there would be plenty of reasons to support it. But the details show it's ... (more)
Is there a war on food truck vendors? In San Antonio, Texas there is…
Imagine if you had to ask permission from your competitors to continue doing business or face closure?
As more people catch the entrepreneurial bug, vending trucks make good sense. It's a relatively mobile business that saves tens of thousands on start-up costs, creates independence and even bolsters local economies.
That is until cities in tandem with restaurant organiza... (more)
Standing in the back of the main programming room at Uber headquarters, one looks across hundreds of focused employees with open browsers. They are following requests and rides in hundreds of cities around the world. The people making deals are connecting peer to peer. But there's still more work to do. Uber employees are observing traffic flows, tweaking pricing, troubleshooting, testing new features, fixing issues, monitoring bandwidth, approving new drivers, and taking other actions to keep t... (more)
The popular belief that the U.S. economy has been steadily recovering has endured months of disappointing data without losing much of its appeal. A deep bench of excuses, ranging from the weather to the Chinese economy, has been called on to justify why the economy hasn't built up any noticeable steam, and why the Fed has failed to move rates off zero, where they have been for seven years. But the downright dismal September jobs report that was released last Friday may prove to be the flashing r... (more)
New data show that worker compensation is rising faster in the federal government than in the private sector. After rapid growth in federal pay during the George W. Bush years, growth slowed from 2011 to 2013 after policymakers enacted a partial freeze on federal wages.
That era of restraint is now over. The latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) show that wages rose 2.9 percent in the federal government in 2014, on average, compared to 1.7 percent in the private s... (more)
The federal government uses very carefully manipulated numbers to cover up the crushing economic depression that is going on in this nation. For the month of September, the federal government told us that 142,000 jobs were added to the economy. If that was actually true, that would barely be enough to keep up with population growth. Sadly, the truth is that the real numbers were actually far worse than that. The unadjusted numbers show that the U.S. economy actually ... (more)
The TuringPharma case has received widespread coverage, but as Techdirt readers know, it's hardly a unique example of the pharmaceutical industry taki... (more)
