Roger Pasquier hunts for coins on NYC sidewalks and keeps track of how much he finds. He discovered an odd consequence of everyone having a smartphone: people don’t pick up change on the sidewalk anymore. From 1987 to 2006, he averaged about fifty-eight dollars a year. Then Apple introduced the iPhone, and millions of potential competitors started to stare at […]
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■ When Aaron Collins of Lexington, Ky., died suddenly last year at the age of 30, he left his family instructions in his will to leave an “awesome tip” for an unsuspecting server. “I mean $500 on a f—ing pizza for a waiter or waitress,” he wrote. His family did as Aaron had requested —but his brother, Seth, didn’t want […]
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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its […]
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How did the U.S. debt get so high? The crucial turning point came back in 2001, said Lori Montgomery. At the time, Uncle Sam was actually running surpluses, and “the outlook was so rosy” that forecasters were predicting the U.S. could pay back every dime it had ever borrowed. That’s when President George W. Bush made a pivotal decision: Rather […]
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“Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it.” – Fannie Hurst
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“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t […]
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For many Americans, collecting disability has become a career, said Michael Barone. Over the past 50 years, the number of people receiving benefits from the Social Security disability program created to help Americans who are too sick to work—has rocketed from 455,000 to 8.6 million. An incredible 5.6 percent of adults are now getting disability checks, with a cost to […]
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“Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.” – Hannah Arendt
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