I once wrote a story about a man who, crushed under student loan debt, said he wish he’d gone to prison rather than college. “(College) was the biggest mistake of my life,” Hernan Castillo told me. “At least I would have learned a trade or two and started being independent [Keep reading]
You can probably rattle off the risk factors for heart attacks, stroke, cancer, and other causes of premature death with ease: smoking, poor diets, lack of exercise, and so on. Here’s one you probably haven’t considered: Loneliness. I’ve been discussing restlessness and American culture for a few months now in [Keep reading]
Facebook took a step today towards addressing perhaps the most common gripe its users have — control of the “news feed” that users see when they log in. Users choose which friends and pages are eligible to be in the news feed, but Facebook’s algorithm decides what actually appears there. [Keep reading]
Watch your inbox for emails from Home Depot. And treat them as potentially radioactive. Home Depot on Thursday disclosed that the massive hack it attack it discovered earlier this year is even bigger than previously thought. Computer criminals who stole 50-million-plus credit card account numbers also managed to take 53 [Keep reading]
Election day this year made clear that most Americans, even Red and Blue Americans, agree on one thing. No, it’s not that Obama is bad (or good). It’s not “change.” Or even mistrust of Washington. It’s this: American workers aren’t paid enough. Worker pay wasn’t on the ballot, exactly. But [Keep reading]
Americans say they are worried about getting hacked, but many of them don’t take even the most basic steps to protect themselves, according to a study released Wednesday by Bitdefender. The firm’s research says that one-third of U.S. consumers don’t use anti-virus software, and 30 percent use the same [Keep reading]
If I hear one more analyst say this is a golden age of journalism, my head will explode. That’s a terrible disservice to the thousands of former journalists who have been forced out of this noble profession in recent years. If you aren’t scared about the future of journalism, and [Keep reading]
“How often should you change your password?” Sounds like it should be a pretty easy question, right? After all, it gets right to the heart of most security issues that people face. Turns out, it’s a really hard question to answer. And that’s a problem, because as I spend more [Keep reading]
Tis the season of haunting zombies, and being scared by something you thought was dead. That can be a pretty good description of how the debt collection business works sometimes. You might think an old checking account is long dead, but there are ghoulish ways those accounts can come back [Keep reading]
“Americans don’t have a debt problem, they have a spending problem.” That conventional wisdom has been repeated so often that many folks will believe it uncontested. It doesn’t stand up to examination, however. What Americans have, quite clearly, is an income problem. Median adjusted household income has hovered between $50,000 [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan