I've become very interested in the movements around green jobs and a green economy. This video is a (very) brief intro to Van's thinking; i'll review his book when i'm done reading it. Curious to hear other recommended reading on the subject...
Watching last week’s Presidential debate got me thinking about the economy, more so than just my empty checkbook. I started to wonder about the wealthiest of wealthy and how they were coping under the strains of Wall Street’s latest meltdown.
This led me to the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list from September 17th. I was very interested in two Jews on the list, numbers #13 and #14, Google's co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who, at $15.9 billion and $15.8 billion, are separated by a mere $100,000,000…
Surely this must have been a mistake. I always thought Brin and Page were equal partners in Google, so I did some investigating into the lives of these two titans to discover where this money came from (or went, depending on which way you look at it).
On the surface Sergey and Larry have just about everything in common. They're both married (and recently, too), they're both 35, they both went to Stanford for their Master's degree, and they were in the same Ph.D. program when they dropped out to start Google.
The plot thickens however when we look at their pre-Stanford lives. Sergey, born in Moscow, emigrated to the U.S. as a boy, ended up in Maryland, later to attend the University of Maryland. Larry on the other hand is from the Mid-West, Michigan to be exact, attending the University of Michigan.
So there I was, ready to pounce on the biggest (humor me) story of the year, when something completely unexpected struck me…
Is it just me, or does Sergey Brin bare more than a passing resemblance to Linguini from Pixar's "Ratatouille"?
The first economic stimulus checks, of up to $600 for an individual and $1200 for a couple, are in the mail, and George W. is hoping that we'll all take these checks shopping.
So what should we be doing with this free money? Should we follow the government's advice and do a little stimulus at the mall? Should we give the money to tzedakah on the assumption that social service programs will probably be the first thing cut when we find out that we can't afford a multi-billion dollar stimulus plan? Should we save the money for the coming recession? Pay back debts so that the credit card companies and banks can't extract any more free money from us?
Jspot contributer (and JFSJ President) Simon Greer has an op-ed, "Sharing Hardship and Prosperity," in the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" section. In it, Simon examines a piece of the Exodus story in light of the current economic problems facing the U.S. He writes, in part:
