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Is there any wonder why metal detectors are so popular in the UK? This list of six found treasures are all from the British Isles. Shown here is the treasure called the Hoxne Hoard, uncovered in Suffolk and valued at £1,750,000! Peter Whatling and Eric Lawes found it while searching for a lost tool in 1992. Link -Thanks, Danny!
(Image credit: Mike Peel)
Certain subsidies and tax breaks for married couples and families were enacted to encourage marriage and keep children from falling into poverty. But is this fair to people who aren’t married? Fewer U.S. households are headed by married couples every year. And all those single people aren’t happy about paying more and getting less.
Activists say that unmarried people are systematically discriminated against. They pay more for health and car insurance than married people do. They don’t get the same kind of tax breaks. Co-op boards, mortgage brokers, and landlords often pass them over. So do the employers with the power to promote them. “Single-ism—stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single—is largely unrecognized and unchallenged,” says activist Bella DePaulo, the author of Singled Out.
There are justifications for every one of these, but that doesn’t mean much to individuals who don’t like being lumped into a group. But the differences swing both ways, depending on a person’s circumstances. I personally know people who choose to cohabit instead of marrying because of economic reasons. Low income people can lose Medicaid and other benefits if they marry, and elderly widows can lose pensions by remarrying. And we’ve all heard stories of married women being passed over for promotions because they might get pregnant. So is there really any way to achieve equity between those who are married and those who aren’t? Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Alan Cleaver)
You may not know the name News Media Animation, but I’m sure the video they’ve created to discuss Nintendo’s 2011 economic fiasco will look familiar to you, as their wacky animated shorts have been showcased on TV shows and the interwebs many times before, mostly because their videos have some serious WTF factor going on in them.
Product of Taiwanese news animators with less than reliable sources of information, and a surreal sense of humor, the slapstick cartoon strangeness in these “news” vids never fail to crack me up.
–via Kotaku
When Larry Met Sergey is the highly condensed story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the company they named Google. Scroll down for each chapter (slowly, because the graphics are in layers) and watch the men’s hairstyles and clothing change over the years. Link -via the Presurfer
Dan had $125 in small bills. He said little brother Jack could keep whatever he caught when Dan threw it in the air. Jack caught $57! He was so happy, his “victory dance” was also uploaded to YouTube. Dan says he should have thought this through a little more. -via reddit
Bruce Wayne is incredibly successful, as a millionaire businessman and an anonymous crime fighter in his spare time even without the benefit of super powers. Unreality magazine has some lessons in how to be a success, as demonstrated by Bruce Wayne in comics, TV, and the movies. For example:
Bruce Wayne is incredibly focused on wearing the perfect suit for the occasion (he’s ordered more than 20,000 hats according to the movies), and while your work-wear won’t be stab-proof or taser-resistant, it also has the advantage of not needing to be stab-proof or taser-resistant. One of many advantages of a business degree is the idea of getting a job where you don’t need to offer fries with that, help people carry things, or outwit a demented madman determined to poison the city’s water supply.
Read the rest and put it to good use. Link
Eighteen-year-old Daniel Ganziano had a savings account at TCF Bank, but he spent his money. The account eventually only had $4.85 cents left, so Ganziano quit making withdrawals. But the bank didn’t.
He had all but forgotten about the account until he received a letter from TCF on Oct. 12 saying six days earlier, it had charged him a $9.95 “monthly maintenance fee” because his account had too little money in it.
The $9.95 charge made his account overdrawn by $5.10, which triggered another fee. At TCF, any account overdrawn by more than $5 is charged a $28-a-day overdraft fee. The net result: Ganziano was $33.10 in the hole.
By then, his nascent savings account was in a downward spiral. At $28 a day, the charges were adding up quickly.
When he and his mother went to the nearest branch that weekend to close the account, they were told they would first have to pay the accumulated fees, which totaled $229.10.
Ganziano’s mother tried to get the fees waived, with no luck. So she paid it and asked for a bank supervisor to contact her. A few weeks later, with no call from a supervisor, she told the story to a consumer columnist at the Chicago Tribune. That same day, the bank agreed to refund all the fees. Daniel Ganziano said he learned something from the experience: don’t trust banks. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Flickr user Alan Cleaver)
Randall Munroe at xkcd put together a chart about money, so massive that you’ll have to enlarge a few times just to read it. The statistics cover what things cost, what people earn, business profits, taxes, government spending, utilities, war, and more. The amounts of money for each are laid out in blocks for comparison. That’s a lot of blocks. What is shown here, as compressed as it is, is just a portion. Link -via Boing Boing
The Bank of Canada will begin issuing new, plastic, $100 bills.
In a statement, the Bank of Canada said that the new notes will last twice as long as paper money and will also be recycled, which makes them generally greener… There are also two transparent windows on the note — one small one depicts a frosted maple leaf, the other extends the height of the bill, and has a copy of the portrait toward the top of the window, and an image of a building at the bottom. If you move the bill the colors of the building will change a lot, while the color changes on the portrait are more subtle.
The video highlights the relevant features , which were all created in an attempt to make the bills impossible to counterfeit. The degree to which they will be foldable, stackable, washable etc. remains to be determined.
Link.
Paying with plastic? That doesn't mean putting the bill on a credit card anymore. You see, with the new Canadian polymer bills, paying with cash IS paying with plastic.
The Globe and Mail reports what a focus group said about Canada's new $100 bill. I'm tickled with the bit about Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden's mustache:
7. Some respondents felt that Mr. Borden's moustache was poorly groomed. Some of the former prime minister's whiskers fall well below his upper lip in the Bank of Canada's final version of the $100 polymer bill.
8. One focus group in Vancouver thought the double-helix DNA strand on the new $100 bill looked like sex beads, while others saw the Big Dipper.
9. Some groups compared the bills to "Monopoly money," noting the polymer they're made out of felt less real than paper money.
Canada is not the first, actually - polymer notes have been around since the 1990s (Australia was the first country)
Bill Gates is only 56 years old, but he stepped down as the CEO of Microsoft a decade ago. He’d still be the richest man in America if he and his wife Melinda hadn’t been so busy giving money away. And instead of just donating, they did the research to determine how they would get the most bang for the buck. As it turns out, those bucks get a lot of bang when you use them to buy simple vaccines. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has gone through 25 billion dollars to not only get vaccines to children who need them, but to change the way that vaccines are developed, manufactured, and distributed globally.
The results have been equally massive: 3.4 million lives saved from hepatitis B, which causes liver cancer, 1.2 million lives from measles, 560,000 from the Hib bacteria, 474,000 from whooping cough, 140,000 from yellow fever and 30,000 from polio. In the past year the new initiatives have prevented another 8,000 deaths from pneumonia and 1,000 from diarrhea.
“I’ve met mothers who walked eight hours to get their child a vaccine and hoped that it’s there on that day,” Melinda says. On a trip in January to a rural clinic in Kenya she saw four children with pneumonia sharing a single oxygen tube. “They were just sucking breath,” she recalls. But across the clinic the Gates Foundation work showcased a different future: Children lined up to get the new vaccine that would dramatically reduce the risk they would ever get pneumonia.
Read about how they did it at Forbes. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
The LA Times has a three-part series on used car dealers who make a great profit on old cars sold at high interest rates to people who can’t afford them, but have little choice.
In this little-known but fast-growing corner of the auto market, dealers command premium prices for road-worn vehicles and finance the sales at interest rates that can top 30%.
In a kind of financial alchemy, they have found a way to turn clunkers into cash cows and make money off the least creditworthy customers: the millions of Americans who are stuck in low-paying jobs, saddled with debt and unable to qualify for conventional auto loans.
For most of those people, having a car is the only way to stay employed, and they’ll accept almost any terms to get one.
Buy Here Pay Here lots sold nearly 2.4 million cars nationwide last year, up from 1.3 million a decade ago, according to CNW Marketing Research.
The mechanics of the business are laid out in the first part, and there is a link to today’s followup, with the conclusion to be posted on Thursday. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Lorena Iñiguez Elebee)
It seems an odd problem to have, this “too much cash” thing. I don’t know that most of us can relate. But it seems that in times of economic insecurity, those who used to invest in stocks are simply holding their money in banks, and now bankers are inundated with money. So what’s the solution? Charge people to deposit. Or, at least some of the people, at some banks anyway:
Though financial institutions are not yet turning away customers at the door, they are trying to discourage some depositors from parking that cash with them. With fewer attractive lending and investment options for that money, it is harder for the banks to turn it around for a healthy profit.
In August, Bank of New York Mellon warned that it would impose a 0.13 percentage point fee on the deposits of certain clients who were moving huge piles of cash in and out of their accounts.
Others are finding more subtle ways to stem the flow. Besides paying next to nothing on consumer checking accounts and certificates of deposit, some giants — like JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo — are passing along part of the cost of federal deposit insurance to some of their small-business customers.
Even some community banks, vaunted for their little-guy orientation, no longer seem to mind if you take your money somewhere else.
“We just don’t need it anymore,” said Don Sturm, the owner of American National Bank and Premier Bank, community lenders with 43 branches in Colorado and three other states. “If you had more money than you knew what to do with, would you want more?”
Well, Neatoramanauts? What say you? Does charging money to hold your money seem counter-intuitive, or is this a good tactic for discouraging large-sum depositors from parking away their millions in a vault?
Ten years ago, America suffered the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history. For most people, the memories inspire both pain and patriotism, but for some, they inspire thoughts of cold hard cash. Cracked has a collection of the most shameless attempts to cash in on the day of suffering, from video games to wine to cartoons, the money-making schemes are so tasteless they are simply depressing.
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You probably already know that a lot of celebrities are vain, but it’s hard to tell just how self-obsessed some people are until you learn how much they are willing to insure their own bod parts for. Mariah Carey, for example, has her legs insured for $1 billion dollars.
I’ve always wondered though if an insured celebrity gets fat, does that enable them to collect insurance money?
Have you ever wondered how your city’s economy would compare to a small country? Well, if you happen to live in one of America’s larger cities, you can now find out thanks to this fascinating article on The Atlantic. Take LA for example:
With a gross metropolitan product (GMP) of $737.9 billion, the LA metro’s economy is bigger than Turkey’s ($732.2) and slightly smaller than the Netherlands’ ($782.3) — the equivalent of the 18th largest nation in the world.
If your city isn’t listed, where do you think it might fit in?
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Usually, clerk errors are not good things. Even if it is an error in our favor, the best we can hope for is a free grocery item turning up in our bag. But for one woman in Georgia, a clerk’s error ended up resulting in a $25 million winning lottery ticket. That’s because she asked for a Mega Millions ticket, but the clerk gave her a Powerball ticket with the same numbers. Luckily, the woman decided not to return the ticket and ended up becoming the state’s newest millionaire.
Link Via Consumerist Image Via doncav [Flickr]
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Don’t think for a second that Google’s business is limited to internet services. Indeed, they have their hands in a variety of industries, most recently, they’ve been testing out the beer-making business. That’s right, Google has paired with Dogfish Head beer to make their own Belgian Dubbel beer called Urkontinent.
The final brew included some impressive ingredients sourced around the world: Wattleseed from Australia, toasted amaranth from South America, green rooibos from Africa, myrica gale from Europe, and Hive Plex Honey from Google’s own California beehives. Taken all together, the beer is described by Dogfish as being hearty, with notes of coffee and chocolate covered cherries. Also, it packs more than double the average alcohol content of average beer.
To be fair, Google’s not making any money from the venture, they just want to see how the process works and to use the beer’s creation as a marketing tool. If you saw some Google beer, would you try it?
Link Via Geekosystem
I don’t know about you guys, but I can never seem to find anything worthwhile at garage sales. But maybe that’s just because I wouldn’t be able to recognize original Ansel Adams negatives or the original panels artpanels for the first Avengers comic book.
After all, these items are certainly out there as this great article on Mental Floss points out.
Can
you teach a monkey the basics of market economy?
In this article over at our pal mental_floss, Allen St. John wrote about an intriguing research by Laurie Santos and Keith Chen of Yale University to see if they can teach monkeys to spend money:
A video of one of these early experiments shows that when Felix, the group’s alpha male, entered, he received a “wallet” with 12 of those round aluminum tokens. Two student researchers, one wearing a pink T-shirt, the other blue, stood on either side of that 3-foot cubic enclosure, each holding a different tray of food. The premise at this stage was pretty basic: Felix could swap his tokens for food with either of the two researchers. He didn’t seem to care much about the students. But he did care profoundly about what the researchers would sell him in exchange for that little metal token.
Felix and the others were cautious, observant shoppers. As the video shows, Felix would head first to the researcher holding out pieces of orange, examining them carefully; before leaving, he stopped to smell them. He went to the other researcher and did exactly the same thing—looking, sniffing, shopping. He then headed back to the first researcher and handed over a token to complete the transaction. Oranges, please.
“When you watch it, it looks like they’re contemplating, thinking about what they’re going to buy,” says Santos. What separates these capuchins from the scores of animals who have been trained to perform complex behaviors in exchange for food is the option presented by that second researcher.
“The critical aspect of money is that it’s fungible. It represents a choice,” explains Chen. “A coin is fundamentally different than, say, pressing a lever.” Santos and Chen had not only achieved their preliminary goal, they had made history: The monkeys were using cash. The capuchins were now operating in a sphere where humans had been dwelling alone.
We
all hope to be rich one day, but Americans - who are very optimistic people
- *expect* to be rich. Heck, according to a
new poll, 1 out of 5 Americans expect to be millionaires in just a
few years:
Even with a turbulent economy, 20% of Americans expect to become millionaires in the next decade.
But the majority –- 62% -- still believe it’s “very unlikely” that they’ll reach the threshold by 2020, according to a new poll from the Associated Press and CNBC. Just 8% of U.K. residents believe they’re on the millionaire track.
And last year, only 5% of Americans reached the million-dollar mark -– which two in ten believe is the minimum amount of money for a comfortable retirement.
Canada’s Royal Mint has introduced a line of quarter dollar coins with native cryptids on them. One one side, you can find Queen Elizabeth II. On the other, you’ll see variously Memphré, which is a reptilian monster that inhabits a lake in Quebec, Mishepishu, which is a water panther of Lake Superior, or the more internationally famous Sasquatch.
Link -via Geekosystem
Kiva, the microfinance organization that lets people loan money through the Internet to small businesses and individuals from around the world, started with 7 loans back in 2005. Since then, they've funded over 309,000 loans totaling over $233 million.
This nifty Vimeo clip visualizes the streams of lending and loan repayment that looks very much like exchanges of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] - via Floating Sheep
Did you know the Star Wars films still haven’t made a profit? That’s because the studio distributes the film although the distribution branch is considered a separate company. The distributor charges the studio (itself) whatever fees it wants, so even after the film earns billions of dollars, it might still be billions of dollars more away from turning a profit.
And that’s just one of the dirty little movie-making secrets the industry doesn’t want you to know about. Find out more over at Film School Rejects.
Plenty of people are irritated with the banking system right now, but you know people are angry when people are willing to pay $25,000 for a painting of a Chase bank burning up:
Tapping into popular sentiment, Alex Schaefer’s painting of a Chase bank on fire just sold on eBay for $25,200. Part of what drove up the price was online buzz after police questioned him while he was painting it, asking him if he planned to do what the painting depicted.
While I wouldn’t pay that much for one of these paintings, I certainly support the sentiment Mr. Schaefer is expressing.
Link Via Consumerist
Twenty
years ago, Brazil found itself in the grips of hyperinflation. Its inflation
rate hit 80% a month, and the country was in financial free fall.
Economists at the Catholic University in Rio came up with an unlikely - but ultimately successful - plan to rescue the country. And would you believe it, the plan calls for fake money:
Read the fascinating story over at NPR's Planet Money blog: Link - via Just UrbanismThe four friends set about explaining their idea. You have to slow down the creation of money, they explained. But, just as important, you have to stabilize people's faith in money itself. People have to be tricked into thinking money will hold its value.
The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable and trustworthy. The only catch: This currency would not be real. No coins, no bills. It was fake.
"We called it a Unit of Real Value — URV," Bacha says. "It was virtual; it didn't exist in fact."
If you thought that diamonds are rare or that halitosis is a real disease, then congratulations, you’ve bought in to some of the most manipulative business practices of the last hundred years. Cracked has even more on these practices and the companies that instituted them and the article is simply fascinating.
We’ve all seen the occasional origami made from dollar bills, but those have nothing on these 32 amazing artworks made from currencies around the world. Personally, I like the carved sculptures like the one in the top center of the photo montage above.
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The August deadline for lifting the debt ceiling is looming. Will the US government default on its loans? Has that ever happened before? Yes it has -in 1979.
In the spring of 1979, Congress was in the midst of a similarly heated debate about raising the debt ceiling, Legislators eventually reached a last-minute deal to raise the debt ceiling and (they thought) save the day, but something went wrong. The Treasury didn’t redeem $120 million worth of securities that matured in April and May.
In other words, the U.S. Treasury defaulted on its securities even though Congress settled the debt-ceiling issue. What happened? It’s not totally clear.
Here’s the short answer: When all else fails, blame the computers. Read a more thorough explanation at mental_floss. Link
Comments Off Properly managing one’s finances seems like it should be a prerequisite for running a country. But these U.S. leaders could have used more dead presidents in their wallets.
HARRY TRUMAN -THE BUCK STOPPED THERE
Prior to becoming president, Harry Truman’s ventures in private business earned him more trouble than profit. He lost several thousand dollars investing in a fruitless zinc mine, and even more money funding a short-lived haberdashery in Kansas City. Eventually he began to view politics as a more stable career than business. Even as a senator, Truman was forced to borrow money and live more modestly, as he sent much of his income home to support his farm in Missouri.
Upon leaving the White House in 1953, Truman refused to exploit his former office as a stepping stone into the business world. This left him with just a small plot of land off which to live. He hoped that his memoirs would bring in extra cash, but between paying the ghostwriters and the taxes, Truman netted just $37,000 from the book. His insolvency grew so pathetic that President Eisenhower passed the Former Presidents Act in 1958, which created a pension for Truman. The former president made use of every last bit of it, leading an active life until his death at the age of 88.
THOMAS JEFFERSON -LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF MONEYLENDERS
During the 1700s, tobacco rarely turned a consistent profit. So Thomas Jefferson, like many plantation owners of his time, lived in perpetual debt. Eager to look the part of a Virginia gentleman, Jefferson borrowed money for expensive clothes, furniture, and wine. He continued to indulge in this lifestyle through his presidency and into retirement. Jefferson’s beloved country estate of Monticello was especially draining on his finances. Its high ceilings and large windows led to excessive heating costs, and its flat roof and cavernous skylights leaked with every rainfall. by the time Jefferson was in his late seventies, the neglected bills had piled up and doubled with interest.
To lessen his financial woes, Jefferson started selling off the things he loved. He sold his entire collection of books to a Congressional library and even hatched a plot to give away a large parcel of land in a statewide lottery. When news of the lottery (and its purpose) reached his former colleagues, generous donations poured in. Despite these efforts, Jefferson died in debt. Two decades later, his grandson finally paid off the founding father’s tab.
ULYSSES S. GRANT -THE BOOK DEAL OF THE CENTURY
In 1881, former president Ulysses S. Grant settled into his retirement with what seemed like a prudent investment in his son’s Wall Street firm, Grant & Ward. But when the younger Grant’s partner, Ferdinand Ward, absconded to Canada with all the money, Grant found himself short $150,000.
Grant considered it a matter of personal honor to pay back the debt in full and rejected any financial assistance. He sold off much of his land, but it wasn’t enough to cover his losses. To generate more income, the former general wrote a series of articles about his Civil War exploits, which the ever-humble Grant doubted anyone would read. Surprisingly, the articles were a huge success, and Grant’s longtime friend Mark Twain convinced him to pen his personal memoirs. Completed just before his death in 1885, Grant’s autobiography became one of the best-selling books of its time -earning more than half a million dollars.
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The article above, written by Brian McMahon, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the May-June 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
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