people

How a remote work boom will affect salaries, jobs, and where people live

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

For office workers who still have jobs during the coronavirus crisis, the Great WFH experiment of 2020 seems to be angling toward a success, albeit one with caveats.

Coronavirus won’t kill the office permanently. Eventually, when risks of gathering ebb to a trickle, some people, longing to wear something other than sweatpants, will be happy to work alongside their coworkers, resuming water cooler discussions and the occasional happy hour. 

But after being home on Zoom, Hangouts, Meet, FaceTime, Skype, and Slack, workers and companies alike are second-guessing the need to return. 

Already, companies like Twitter (TWTR) and Square (SQ), both founded and run by Jack Dorsey, have implemented a permanent work-from-home option. Facebook (FB) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that in the next decade, 50% of the company’s workforce might be remote, and that it would “localize” salaries to wherever its employees choose to be on Jan. 1

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Fighting misinformation online is ‘easier than people think’: Steve Ballmer

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

When Twitter (TWTR) took the unprecedented step last month of labeling false messages posted by President Donald Trump, the move prompted an executive order and renewed debate over whether social media platforms should confront misinformation or refrain from regulating speech.

In a newly released interview, taped on May 28, Los Angeles Clippers Chairman and former Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer said the spread of misinformation on social media requires additional action, calling on government regulators and tech companies to negotiate a fix and urging a dramatic push for innovative solutions equivalent to the pharmaceutical industry’s focus on coronavirus therapies.

“If there can be a negotiation between the industry and the government, I think it’s better done that way than through legislation,” says Ballmer, who led Microsoft from 2000 to 2014, overseeing the launch of search engine Bing but departing two years before the company acquired job posting and social media

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LL Cool J says it’s about time Juneteenth is recognized by people and corporations

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

A nation still in mourning over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police — and more recently the tragic shooting death of Rayshard Brooks by police in Atlanta — enters Juneteenth with a heavy heart, but there is a glimmer of hope that race relations in the country will be better in the future.

Music icon LL Cool J tells Yahoo Finance it’s about time Juneteenth gets the recognition it deserves by individuals and big corporations.

“I don’t know exactly where I will do something, of course it’s about time that people recognize the day worldwide. And let me tell you something man, you know blacks in America have come a long way. But still got a long way to go. And there’s a lot of remnants of, you know, systemic issues that still exist that try to exclude us from participating in certain things,” LL Cool J —

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‘Those are not real people

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

Black ownership of the products African Americans consume would go a long way in fighting injustice, says music mogul and entrepreneur Master P.

“When you look at Aunt Jemima, and you look at Uncle Ben, we don’t own those products, we never did,” Master P said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “We need to understand that we’re not going to be able to put money back in our [black] community because we don’t own those brands. Our grandparents [have] been having us buy those products because they think it’s people that look like us.”

The Aunt Jemima syrup and pancake mix brand has been around since 1889, but the portrayal of Aunt Jemima over the years was “based on a racial stereotype,” according to parent company Quaker Oats, which is owned by PepsiCo (PEP). It was the image of former slave Nancy Green that was used to create the

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More people are paying rent despite the coronavirus pandemic

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

It looks like landlords’ fears that tenants would not pay rent during the COVID-19 pandemic may have been overblown.

At the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic in mid-March, mass layoffs caused tenants to worry whether they could pay rent. But three months later, rent payments have stabilized, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) survey of over 11 million apartments in the U.S., released June 16.

“For the first time since this research for the National Multifamily Housing Council was initiated, there’s an annual bump in rent payments across a significant block of metros,” wrote Greg Willett, Chief Economist of RealPage, a Texas-based property management software company that contributed to NMHC research.

By June 13, some 89% of tenants had made partial or full rent payments, slightly up from 88.9% payment on the same date last year. June marks the first month since the beginning of the

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