Category Archives: wealth

May 5 2012

Black Women Continue Making Job Gains – Businessweek

Black Women Continue Making Job Gains – Businessweek – http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-04/black-women-continue-making-jobs-gains?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

Digging through the demographic data in the latest job numbers, one of the clear winners of the last few months has been black women. Since December, they’ve knocked more than 3 percentage points off their unemployment rate, from 13.9 percent to 10.8 percent. That’s the biggest drop over the last five months for any single demographic group broken out by race, sex, and age by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Education, health care, and retail appear to be factors. All three sectors were among those that posted the largest job gains last month.

Unemployment among black men dropped from 15.7 percent in December to 13.6 percent in April. For white women, the rate has essentially remained unchanged at 6.8 percent, which is the same rate as white men. Total white unemployment remains well below total black unemployment, though the gap has narrowed over the past year. In April 2011, white unemployment was exactly half that of black unemployment, 8.1 percent compared with 16.2 percent. Now the difference is 6.8 percent compared with 13 percent.

Falling unemployment among black women is not a function of people dropping out of the workforce. The employment participation rate of black women has steadily increased over the last few months, from 53.5 percent in December, to 56.1 percent in April. Employment participation has actually fallen among white women, down nearly a full percentage point since April 2011, from 55.6 percent to 54.8 percent.

Employment participation remains low for the total population, about 58 percent. That’s down from the most recent high of 64 percent back in 2000, and basically where it was back in the early 1980s. Back then, the dip was a sudden fall followed by a fairly quick recovery. Today, participation has flattened over the past few years, after plummeting from 62 percent beginning in summer 2008.

Apr 19 2012

5 Selfish Reasons to go Green! – Trulia

http://www.trulia.com/blog/taranelson/2012/04/5_shockingly_selfish_reasons_to_go_green_at_home?ecampaign=cnews201204C&eurl=www.trulia.com%2Fblog%2Ftaranelson%2F2012%2F04%2F5_shockingly_selfish_reasons_to_go_green_at_home

 

1. Save Money Now.  When it comes to the economics of most home improvements, homeowners spend hours and hours trying to project the return we’ll recoup on the upfront costs of our granite countertops and built-in theater equipment years down the road. And for the most part, the numbers look grim. Except for the basic upgrades that are essential to moving an older home, real estate insiders generally advise homeowners to avoid even trying to find an investment return on home improvements, and to simply execute improvements they can both afford and enjoy in the time they plan to live in the home.
However, many so-called ‘green’ home improvements turn this entire concept on its head. Studies show that utility bills are one of the highest monthly expenses for most households, and that green home improvements can bring those bills down by as much as 20 or 30%.  I did the math – on the average American home’s energy bill of almost $2,000/year, that would represent a savings of $400-$600 – potentially much more if you live in an area with temperature extremes!
If you install a tankless water heater, insulate your pipes and walls or even do something as simple as weather-stripping your doors and windows, you will begin to save money on your utility bills immediately. And, depending on how indulgent you really want to be, that’s cold hard cash you can redirect to the college savings fund, your own retirement accounts, or a tropical adventure.
2. Sell Faster.  Green homes simply sell faster than comparable homes without energy efficient features. Today’s home buyers want to save money (that’s why they’re buying now!) and are willing to prioritize homes that allow them to do this by way of energy efficient systems and upgrades.
The data particularly bears this out when it comes to homes with solar energy systems. The US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy recently released reported that solar homes sell twice as fast as a home without solar panels – even in a down market. (As an aside, don’t believe the old hype that going solar requires a big investment; in some states, homeowners can sign up for something called ‘solar power service’ and get solar savings without ever having to pay for panels.)
If your home isn’t currently on the market for sale, you might scoff at the notion of a speedy sale as a selfish aim. But if and when the day comes that your personal, career, family and financial plans are hanging in limbo, making the ability to move forward with your life and your vision contingent upon the sale of your home, you’ll understand what I mean!
3.  Boost Your Net Worth.  Not only are buyers willing to bestow a preference on ‘green’ or energy efficient homes, they are willing to pay more for them. And remember – the value of a home at any given time is based on what a buyer would pay for it.
The Appraisal Journal recently published data to this effect: for every $1 green home improvements decreased the property’s annual energy bills, the home’s value increases by $10-$25. That might not seem impressive on such a small scale, but these numbers translate to an increase of $8,000 to $25,000 to the market value of a greened-up 3,000 square foot home.
Same goes for solar homes; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory compared solar homes to similar homes without solar panels, and found that a solar system can add around $17,000 to a home’s value.
If you are like the average homeowner, your home may be your largest asset – or your largest liability.  One of very few ways you can reliably bulk up the value of this asset – and your net worth in the process – is to implement any number of green home improvements.  If this is a big motivator for you to go green, talk with an experienced local agent about what green features local buyers most value.
One more thing: think very broadly about what it means to ‘go green’. You could go solar or tankless, install insulation and weatherstripping, convert to low-flow toilets, and shower heads, switch out old aluminum windows for dual-paned – the options are limitless, and vary widely in cost.
4. Look better and live longer. There are green homes, and there are green households. I’m going to make the argument that if, in the process of greening your home, you take the next step and engage in the lifestyle activities that make for a green household, you can lose weight, feel better and possibly even avoid some of the chronic diseases that plague our society.
The green home element of this includes planting a kitchen garden and minimizing the water that is wasted just keeping your lawn green. Then you’ll have a back-yard (or front-yard, for that matter) harvest to reap and eat. Your household garden will attract birds, bees and, if your street is anything like mine, squirrels, deer or wild turkeys – fauna which all participate in the circle of life. (Hakuna matata.)
But maintaining a kitchen garden and implementing other green household practices like taking walks or public transporation may also increase you’re the quality of the air you personally breathe and help you shift the balance of your family’s diet from focusing on meat to the plant-based diet doctors now say minimizes the risk of heart disease and cancer, increasing lifespan. Plant-based, by the by, does not mean vegetarian or vegan; Wikipedia defines a plant-based diet as “an eating pattern dominated by fresh or minimally processed plant foods and decreased consumption of meat.”
If digging and planting is more than you can take on, you can support those who do this for your community on a larger scale and still get the benefits of a plant-based diet by subscribing to a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) program or walking to and shopping at your neighborhood farmer’s market on the weekend.
5. Live more comfortably.  In the fifteen years since I moved from my scorching-hot hometown to the very mild climes of the Bay Area, I have developed an issue I call my ‘thermoregulation challenge.’ I’m fine when I go visit my parents or vacay in Arizona, but it’s tough to stay warm at home when dressed like a normal person.  (This explains my penchant for wearing sweaters right around the calendar.)
So, I recently undertook a campaign to stop up all the drafts in my house, and wouldn’t you know it: life got way more comfortable – and fast.Call me a weatherstripping evangelist, but I can think of very few home improvements this inexpensive that make this much of a difference in the comfort level of your life. Drafts, begone!

And this increase in comfort from green home improvements was not a one-off, in my experience. I’d already noticed a major reduction in noise from installing dual-paned windows a few years back. The next thing I have my eye on is swapping out the big old vat of water that I pay to keep warm 24 hours a day for a quake-proof, tankless water-heater.  Sure – the energy-efficiency sounds great. But so does unlimited hot water, no matter how long a shower I take or how many dog baths I give.
I say there’s a reason why so many A-list celebs who are used to living in luxury live green lifestyles. The good deed piece of it makes for great PR, but make no mistake: the green life can also be the good life.

Apr 13 2012

H2O Conserve – 75 water saving tips

H2O Conserve.

Water-Saving Tips Here you’ll find over 75 tips to help you reduce your water footprint. The recommendations on this list will not only help you save water, they will also save you money, even if some tips cost a little money up-front. Remember, these tips are just the beginning. Keep challenging yourself to find other ways to save water every day!

Apr 11 2012

Why CEOs Should Allow Facebook in the Workplace [INFOGRAPHIC]

Why CEOs Should Allow Facebook in the Workplace [INFOGRAPHIC] – http://pulse.me/s/7U4q1

Many CEOs forbid use of social media at work, but recent research shows that web surfing leads to increased productivity.

This Keas infographic explores the benefits of social media in the workplace, showing that social connections make people happier and a brief recess involving Internet-browsing increases productivity.

An Academy of Management experiment gave three groups of people —a control group bundling sticks, a group taking an Internet-free break and a group browsing the Internet for 10 minutes —the simple task of highlighting as many letter A’s as they could among 2,000 words of text.

The three groups then had their mental exhaustion measured. Those browsing the Internet were 16% more productive than the Internet-free break group and 39% more productive than the control group.

Apr 11 2012

Men Are Becoming the Undereducated Gender

Men Are Becoming the Undereducated Gender – http://pulse.me/s/80YvP

Men Are Becoming the Undereducated Gender By Peter Coy April 11, 2012 3:11 PM EDT

Craig Torres of Bloomberg News has an alarming story today about how men are lagging in the job market because of under-education.

“It is terrific that women are getting higher levels of education,” Harvard University economist David Autor told Torres. “The problem is that males are not.”

This chart, based on data I downloaded today from the National Center for Education Statistics, shows the education gap between men and women is long-standing—and getting worse. By 2019, the center projects, there will be nearly three women in college classrooms for every two men.

The marketplace is shouting loud and clear that going to college pays off. The unemployment rate in March for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher was just 4.2 percent (PDF), the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last Friday. The rate for people with a high school education was 8 percent, while the rate for people with no high school diploma was 12.6 percent.

Apr 11 2012

Compare college costs with online tool

Compare college costs with online tool – http://pulse.me/s/83VDP

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is launching a new online tool to help students compare the cost of college.

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Wednesday released a new online tool it’s testing to help families compare the costs of attending different colleges and universities.

The bureau launched the financial aid online tool to help families estimate the cost of a degree at up to three different individual schools.

While the tool won’t reveal the exact the cost of an education for an individual student, it can help families evaluate financial aid packages offered at each school. On the website, students can plug in the amount of aid they were offered to compare schools.

Washington regulators are increasingly focusing on students’ ability to afford college in the wake of rising student loan debt, which has topped a trillion dollars. More alarming to officials: Since the recession, more students have been defaulting on loans or have fallen been falling behind in their payments.

“Our Financial Aid Comparison Shopper helps students make apples-to-apples comparisons of their offers and pick the one that works best for their financial future,” said Richard Cordray, director of the consumer bureau, in a statement.

The online tool has data for more than 7,500 state universities, private colleges, community colleges and vocational schools, according to the bureau. Students who plug in financial aid offers can compare monthly student loan payments after graduation. They can also figure out debt level at graduation compared to average starting salaries.

Apr 11 2012

West Africa: UN Attacks ‘Global Indifference’ to Food Crisis

West Africa: UN Attacks ‘Global Indifference’ to Food Crisis – http://pulse.me/s/84tmD

“We are appealing, all of us, for an end to global indifference that we have found so far,” said Anthony Lake, the Executive Director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), at a joint news conference in Geneva with his counterparts from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“I know that there is a certain fatigue. I have read comments in blogs and elsewhere that ‘here we go again; once more a famine; once more African children are dying; once more there is an appeal for help.’

“By acting vigorously and properly now, we can head off future crises… by building now in this crisis, health systems, community nutrition centres, more water bore holes… we can build capacity for the future,” he said.

Mr. Lake, who had just returned from a visit to Chad, noted that of the estimated 15 million people affected by the drought and conflict-related crisis in the region, about 1.5 million are children who face the prospect of severe acute malnutrition.

“I was in a town called Mao in central Chad a few days ago and visited a nutrition centre and they reported that admission rates at the nutritional centre for children suffering from severe acute malnutrition are already higher than at any point in last year’s lean season.

“This could be very bad and we are now across the region entering the so-called lean season, when families are drawing down the grains that they were able to harvest last year, but these families are in particular peril because in the drought of 2010 they had already sold off livestock, taking their kids out of school… therefore they are in a weakened position for this year’s crisis,” said Mr. Lake.

He said UNICEF and partners have been ramping up their response, but needed to accelerate the relief effort further.

UN agencies and partners last December appealed for $724 million to fund the humanitarian response to the crisis in the Sahel, but only 50 per cent of that funding requirement has so far been received, Mr. Lake said.

“To those who are fatigued, we would say that people and children, of course, are not simply statistics. All these are families fighting courageously in circumstances that few of us can imagine,” he said.

He spoke of meeting Fatuma, a young girl in a tent in Chad, who the previous week was among other children who were on the verge of death. “As I spoke to her mother I kept thinking about this not only being a life saved, but this is a whole future that was saved.”

“Let’s not look at them as objects of pity and charity, let’s look at them as people we need to support in their brave struggle for survival,” he said. He stressed that taking action immediately will be more cost-effective than waiting for the situation to deteriorate further.

“In the earthquake in Haiti, and even in the floods of Pakistan, the international community had very little warning. So we had to react as quickly as we could, but almost by definition we were always going to be too late.

“Here we’ve warnings for the last few months. Here we are working to try to stop it from getting worse. Some day there will be no excuse for looking back and saying why did we not do more, more quickly,” said Mr. Lake.

Apr 11 2012

Africa: U.S. Congress Bill Calls On Obama to Engage African Markets

Africa: U.S. Congress Bill Calls On Obama to Engage African Markets – http://pulse.me/s/83hKH

GOA was intended to contribute to poverty reduction in Africa by promoting light manufacturing and trade with the U.S.

President George W. Bush strengthened the legislation three times during his time in office. Under the legislation, 40 African countries are eligible to export up to 6,500 products to the U.S. duty and quota free, based on their commitment to economic and political reforms.

With the

legislation’s enactment, some Americans began for the first time to look at African nations more for their commercial and partnership potential than as charity projects.

But 10 years later, AGOA is still a work in progress. Total two-way trade with Africa has more than doubled to U.S. $73 billion and Africa’s non-energy exports to the U.S. under AGOA, largely apparel but also machinery and automobiles, have tripled to $3.8 billion. AGOA has created an estimated 300,000 new jobs which are largely filled by women, a genuine and cost-effective contribution to poverty reduction.

That’s the good news.

The disconcerting reality is that the U.S. seems to have turned its attention away from Africa’s commercial potential at a time when many other countries have undertaken significant efforts to capture a share of that market. This lack of interest comes at a time when sub-Saharan Africa, next to East Asia, is the fastest-growing region in the global economy, the number of democracies has increased from three in 1998 to 23 in 2008 and a consumer class the size of India’s has emerged on the continent.

Other countries are paying attention to these positive changes and, not surprisingly, China is at the forefront. Its two-way trade with Africa increased from $10 billion in 2000 to $160 billion in 2011. China is not alone in these endeavors. Brazil’s trade with Africa has quadrupled between 2002 and 2010, and earlier this year, India increased its trade target to $90 billion by 2015. Turkey, Russia and Iran are increasing their commercial activity on the continent as well.

Apr 10 2012

Pell grants to cover lowest amount in history: think progress

Pell Grants Next Year Will Cover Smallest Percentage Of College Costs In Their History

http://thinkprogress.org/education/2012/04/09/461078/pell-grants-smallest-percentage-cost/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews&mobile=nc

By Pat Garofalo on Apr 9, 2012 at 6:50 pm

Since 1985, the combined cost of college tuition and fees has gone up by about 559 percent,leading to outstanding student loan debt that, by some estimates, has cleared $1 trillion. As colleges have kept on increasing their costs, financial aid has failed to keep up.

Case in point, according to the Institute for College Access and Success, a non-profit organization aiming to expand higher education accessibility, Pell Grants next year will cover the smallest percentage of overall college costs since the creation of the program:

The program has not been able to keep up with ever-escalating college prices: Since 2008, annual spending on the Pell Grant program has more than doubled, to nearly $40 billion, and thanks to the Obama administration and Congress, the maximum grant has jumped from $4,731 to $5,550 (and is scheduled to rise again to $5,635 in fiscal year 2013). Despite these increases, the maximum Pell Grant is expected to cover less than one-third of the average cost of attendance at public four-year colleges next year –a level that would be, according to the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS), “the lowest in history.”

Just 30 years ago, Pell Grants covered nearly 70 percent of the cost of college:

Over those 30 years, the U.S. has made exactly zero progress in terms of increasing its college graduation rate. Instead of doing anything to address this, House Republicans approved a budget that eliminates Pell Grants for up to one million students.

Apr 10 2012

A New Kind of Toilet Paper

A New Kind of Toilet Paper – http://pulse.me/s/7Z1mT

“The Power of Poop” explored a variety of uses of human waste, including fecal bacteriotherapy (or a “transpoosion”), a poop-powered car, and homes heated with human waste.

Now there’s another use. From Israel’s Ynetnews:

Dr. Refael Aharon of Applied CleanTech has developed a system capable of turning stinking sewage into a renewable and profitable source of energy. How?

About 99.9% of the drainage which comes out of our homes and flows through pipes is water. The remaining 10% are comprised of solid substances which can be used for the production of cellulose, which is used to produce paper.

These substances include food leftovers, used toilet paper and fiber from clothes which flow into the sewage with the laundry water. So far, these solid substances have been a difficult and expensive nuisance. The process of cleaning the large amounts of processed waste remaining after the wastewater filtration require a lot of money, which pushes up our water tariffs.

Aharon says the process he developed reduces half of the solid substances in the sewage. As a result, the factory needs less electricity and chemicals to purify water – and the money saved may eventually reduce our water bills. So how does one turn drain water into paper? After the solid substances are filtered and separated from the wastewater, they undergo a drying and purification process to remove bacteria.

The remaining substance, which includes large amounts of cellulose, can be sold to paper manufacturers. Thanks to the system, which has already been installed in one of the sewage purification facilities in southern Israel, paper has already been produced at much lower costs than regular recycled paper.

Apr 10 2012

The Science of Fox News: Why Its Viewers are the Most Misinformed: via Alternet

In other words Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. First, its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.

But at the same time, it’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion towards allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.

And thus we find, at the root of our political dysfunction, a classic nurture-nature mélange. The penchant for selective exposure is rooted in our psychology and our brains. Closed-mindedness and authoritarianism—running stronger in some of us than in others—likely are as well.

But nevertheless, it took the emergence of a station like Fox News before these tendencies could be fully activated—polarizing America not only over politics, but over reality itself.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including “The Republican War on Science” (2005). His new book is “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality”.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154875/

via AlterNet: The Science of Fox News: Why Its Viewers are the Most Misinformed.