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Yes: Italy, Spain and Greece still have massive unemployment. But the Euro Zone picture isn’t awful when compared to the United States.

You’ve probably been hearing about the insanely high unemployment numbers for some European countries for the last several years — the number I most hear associated with Spain is 27 percent, and over 50 percent of youth, while similarly horrible… Continue Reading

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Wall Theory: Are American relationships more superficial?

Taking a cross-cultural class right now, and one recent discussion was on perceptions of America from two angles — those who have lived in America their whole lives, and those who had come in the last 10 years. It was… Continue Reading

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Big data is the future, but no one seems to understand it and we’re not teaching it enough. Can this end well?

Let’s follow the bouncing ball here: 1. The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) released the top 10 office trends of 2014 recently; admittedly it reads a little bit like a press release from someone in their 50s who’s nervous… Continue Reading

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Dov Charney and the moving target of cheap labor

Dov Charney is the CEO of American Apparel and, for what it’s worth, he once masturbated in front of a reporter. (Just thought we’d get that out of the way quickly.) Right now, American Apparel’s stock is trading under $1, so suffice… Continue Reading

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Grades seem to matter more than content and learning these days to most students. Can something like Udacity or a MOOC fix that?

This is a pretty nuanced topic, and I’m not an extremely nuanced person, so we’ll tread lightly (gawd, I miss Walter White) for a second here. I’m in school right now, and I happen to be about six to eight… Continue Reading

You can thank Israel Zangwill and 1782’s Letters from an American Farmer for your next over-wrought immigration discussion

I’m taking a class right now on international business and cross-cultural misunderstandings — so stuff like Malcolm Gladwell’s “ethnic theory of plane crashes” and Wal-Mart’s failures in Germany — and inevitably, every discussion comes back to the melting pot idea when someone tries… Continue Reading

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The base issue with long-term unemployment, and the job search, really just comes back to caring

Americans live in a very partisan world right now, so anyone deemed “a national emergency” — as long-term unemployment has been called — needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because what conservatives and what liberals deem as… Continue Reading

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Ultimately, does China or Russia (or the USA or Chile or someone else) stand to benefit the most from Antarctica?

Everyone is staking their claim to Antarctica these days; China just built its fourth research base there, which is shaped like a lantern. China’s now spending about $55 million per year on the Antarctic; 15-20 years ago, they were spending $20… Continue Reading