Tick, tick, tick — March 31 is the new deadline to get health insurance coverage. This time, the government is digging in its heels. There will be no extension. Some say the government will cave in (again) and move the deadline, but that’s by no means a certainty. The April Fool’s joke might be on you […]
Social media has changed our lives in many ways, but here’s one nobody probably foresaw: criminals brazenly boasting about their deeds on Facebook. Some misdeeds are probably more humorous than deadly, like Michael Baker, who siphoned gas from a Jenkins, KY police cruiser, and then posted a video on the site with many eyes, complete with […]
In his State of the Union address, President Obama introduced the myRA account. It stands for “My Retirement Account.” WHAT IS IT? The myRA is a new variant of the Roth IRA, with the following features: 1. Contributions are after-tax, like a regular Roth IRA, not pretax like a regular IRA or 401(k) fund. 2. […]
…And What You Can Do About It We live in a complex world where many things happen around us that we’re at a loss to understand or explain. High CEO compensation, soaring health care costs, a biased media and politicians being bribed are but a few of the things we see wrong with the world. […]
SUPER BOWL! Everyone knows the Super Bowl will be upon us in little more than a week. In many ways, the event has become the new Thanksgiving, hasn’t it? That’s because the people you invite to a Super Bowl party are chosen. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, and the […]
Twenty-thirteen is the year the Haves and the Have Nots came to prominence, dressed up as a new TV series which opened on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). The title of the show alludes, of course, to the notion that there is a distinction between those with high incomes and/or a high net worth, and, […]
The odds are astounding, really. Someone won the big Megamillions lottery jackpot of over $600 million last week. Millions of tickets were bought — No, make that hundreds of millions. Did you buy one? Why? Why would you, or any other rational person, buy a lottery ticket? The odds of winning are incomprehensibly small. And […]
Nelson Mandela is one of the few individuals who single-handedly changed the course of human history in a profound way. Unlike other famous leaders, such as Genghis Khan, Hitler or Napoleon, he altered the course of our nation (I’m South African) by eschewing all the traditional political weapons of mass destruction: revolt, violence and revenge. […]
A Long Life Nobody knows for sure exactly when Black Friday began as an American tradition. Know-it-all site TIFO (Today I Found Out) credits the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as something the retailer did to draw shoppers to its store almost a century ago. However, the parade was (and still is) on Thanksgiving Day, when the […]
Unless you live under a rock, you probably heard that Twitter just had its IPO. In English, that means you can now, for the first time, buy its stock on a stock exchange. Mere mortals (those without the insider connections to get the stock at its $26 official listing price) had to buy at an […]