| At its core, RecycleBank is a program that motivates people to recycle through rewards points—an average household can earn up to $400/year. RFID chips in recycling carts, GPS technology, and proprietary software largely automate the process of awarding points based on consumer’s recycling volume. |
| Advertisements from the online store where customers go to redeem points provide a secondary revenue stream. |
| With 50 U.S. cities under contract, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and Philadelphia, and service beginning in the U.K., Gonen is moving fast to capitalize on this first mover advantage. |
I would hate to see a future where virtual activities, especially those involving the gratifying use of virtual currencies, could have very real legal consequences. But as information technologies converge, the lines of legality will become increasingly blurred and all too easily crossed. | “Although virtual currency systems are often used to sell digital content, they continue to become more complex — approximating real world currency as they allow purchase of physical goods and services from multiple merchants, offer cash redemption options, and facilitate P2P payments.” |
But new laws like the Credit Card Act of 2009 and existing state gift laws may provide some obstacles.
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State laws governing unclaimed property, says Hansen, require that the property gets turned over to the state. While larger developers tend to have thought about how to deal with abandoned virtual assets, smaller ones often have not done so, opening up the possibility of legal liability.
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And given the current pressure on state budgets, Hansen expects states to pay more attention to unclaimed virtual property as a source of revenue.
Read more at www.informationweek.com |
What is disturbing is that the outlook for wages and incomes over the short and long term looks bleak even when the recovery is in full swing. The pay rewards for work have been severely lacking for a majority of workers over the past three decades. Whether the measure is wages, earnings, or total compensation, the inflation-adjusted pay narrative remains the same: Workers have seen their inflation-adjusted pay go up only a little during the past four business cycle expansions while most of the gains have been captured by the top 10% to 15% of workers. A major lesson of the Great Recession is how financially vulnerable workers are with jobs and incomes less secure than ever. “It isn’t a healthy economy,” says Paul Osterman, professor of human resources and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “There is a broad sense that it’s a precarious labor market.” |
And yet another distraction from the world’s real difficulties.
Director Roland Emmerich’s latest dose of apocalyptic cinema is a case of nice
special effects, shame about the movie. Rating: * *
|
This is the way the world ends: certainly not with a whimper, and why stop at
one bang when you can have a Blitzkrieg of apocalyptic digital effects?
Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk |
But this program, too, has had an unintended consequence: large-scale fraud. According to the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, at least 19,000 people who claimed the credit didn’t actually purchase a home. Here’s how: because the credit is “fully refundable,” it is available to even those who don’t pay any taxes or have any income at all. Thus people are buying homes under the names of their children — including at least one 4-year-old — to qualify as first-time homebuyers. |
| because homebuyers can recoup up to $8,000 from the tax credit and apply it to the down payment, they can buy a home worth up to $228,000 without spending a dime. |
| The tax credit for new home buyers, now worth up to $8,000 per sale, can be credited with giving a boost to the housing market. Investment in housing rose almost 24 percent last quarter. Mr. Dodd would extend the program into next year, perhaps raising the $8,000 cap or allowing it to apply to those not purchasing homes for the first timeRead more at www.nytimes.com |
World oil reserves are far lower than officially reported, the situation far more serious than publicly admitted, and we’re already past peak oil. That’s the word from two anonymous IEA whistleblowers, The Guardian reports. To add insult to industry, the figures were deliberately massaged, at least in part, to appease the United States: |
Apparently the IEA was concerned that reporting the true reserve numbers — and keep in mind that determining oil reserves is as much art as science — it would trigger a buying panic. |
So, more than anything, this illustrates the same head in the sand thinking that dogs climate change negotiations. Out of fear of disrupting current activity, profit, lifestyles, what have you, you put off action for the future, even though it’s inevitable that those have to change. Read more at www.alternet.org |
Watch out for the ‘Double Bubble’. All hands are still pumping. How far can it go this time before it pops?
British unemployment is rising at a far slower rate than expected, official
figures revealed today.
|
The number of people out of work increased by 30,000 to 2.46 million in the
three months to September while the number of people in work rose for the
first time in more than a year.
|
| The jobless rate is 7.8 per cent, confounding expectations for an increase to
8 per cent. |
| The number of people in work rose by 6,000 in the three months to September,
the first increase since the three months to July 2008. |
The figures will raise hopes that the worst of the recession has passed and
that unemployment will peak at a lower level than the three million
previously feared.
|
The scene in the White House these days must be a sort of Opera Bouffe, in which an earnest and rather grave young man moves from one roomful of lesser officials to another in which all agree to pretend that they have prevented the nation from falling into something they call “the abyss.” At the end of Act I, a young deputy FDIC commissioner in the Little Mary Sunshine mold gets down on one knee, belts out a show-stopper about the glories of a bright and shining “tomorrow,” and the audience goes out for intermission to discover that the city has been burning down around the theater all night. |
| I’d like to know what folks imagine we are recovering to. To a renewed orgy of credit-card spending? To yet another round of suburban expansion, with the boys in the yellow hard-hats driving stakes out in the sagebrush for another new thousand-unit pop-up “community?” For a next generation of super-cars built to look like medieval war wagons? That’s the “hope” Read more at kunstler.com |
| I would like to suggest
that, starting in the 1 500’s, Western history has witnessed the
slow militarisation of civilian society, a process in which schools,
hospitals and prisons slowly came to adopt a form first pioneered
in military camps and barracks, and factories came to share a
common destiny with arsenals and armories. |
| military engineers first realized
that in practice, standardization went hand in hand with replacement
of flexible individual skills with rigid collective routines,
enforced through constant discipline and monitoring. |
| while the soldiers increased their efficiency tremendously
as a collective whole, each individual soldier completely lost
control of his actions in the battlefield. And a similar point
applies to the application of this idea to factory workers, before
and after Taylorism. |
| The “management science” which is today
taught in business schools is a development of military “operations
research”, a discipline created during World War 11Read more at www.t0.or.at |
| For yet another in the litany of signs pointing in the direction of
social change towards thrift, have a look at what is transpiring at the
upper echelons of the income strata |
| Women are apparently opting for the ‘natural look’ – “some people are
selectively replacing higher-priced items with cheaper products |
And here’s the CEO of Pepsico: |
| “The age of thrift is here.” |
Even solvent homeowners who aren’t forced into foreclosure still find it beneficial to walk away from their houses. “Strategic defaults,’ says The Los Angeles Times, are becoming a problem for mortgage lenders. |
|
The Telegraph reports:
“Crucially, China and rising Asia have reached the point where they
can no longer keep holding down their currencies to boost exports
because this is causing mayhem to their own economies, stoking asset bubbles.
Asia’s ‘mercantilist mindset’ of recent decades is about to be broken by the
spectre of an inflation spiral. Read more at dailyreckoning.com |
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RecycleBank: A Brilliant Green Business Idea
