[Bloomberg] $70,000 per minute. That’s how much money the Walmart-owning Walton family has made in the year since Bloomberg’s previous list of the world’s richest families. The Waltons top that list this year, with wealth of $190.5 billion. The Mars, Koch, Al Saud and Wertheimer (of the Chanel fashion house) families round out a top five. The 25 richest families in the world control $1.4 trillion, a figure which is up nearly a quarter from last year.
[Endangered Species Coalition] The Trump Administration put rules in place today that will put many more species on a path to extinction.
- The Trump Extinction Plan removes protections for plants, fish, and wildlife designated as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.
- The Trump Extinction Plan encourages policy makers to calculate the perceived economic costs (but not the benefits) of Endangered Species Act protections to plants, fish, and wildlife . Under the Act, economic factors were intentionally not considered in listing decisions. Listing decisions should be based on science, not on money. This rule upends that.
- The Trump Extinction Plan makes protecting habitat much more burdensome despite habitat loss being a leading cause of extinction.
In finalizing their changes, the Trump Administration ignored more than one million activists that submitted public comments and rejected the advice of hundreds of scientists, biologists, and wildlife experts who oppose the changes.
[CityLab] The Online Gig Economy’s ‘Race to the Bottom.’ On digital work platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com, you can also buy nearly any service—often from someone halfway around the world, sometimes for just a few bucks. On Fiverr, one of the most popular of these platforms, you’ll find offers for someone who will write an e-book “on any topic”; a person who will perform “a Voiceover as Bernie Sanders”; someone who will write your Tinder profile for you, and someone who will design a logo for your real-estate company. The people selling this labor live in Nigeria, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Bangladesh, respectively. Each of them charges $5 for these tasks.
There are members of mariner’s family who are at-home contractors (AKA gig workers). Will other nations drive down living wages for US citizens as these ‘gig’ services expand?
[Atlantic] And Then Job Said Unto the Lord: You Can’t Be Serious. God says to Satan, “You there, what have you been up to?” And Satan says, “Oh, you know, just hanging around, minding my own business.” And God says, “Well, take a look at my man Job over there. He worships me. He does exactly what I tell him. He thinks I’m the greatest.” “Job?” says Satan. “The rich, happy, healthy guy? The guy with 3,000 camels? Of course he does. You’ve given him everything. Take it all away from him, and I bet you he’ll curse you to your face.” And God says, “You’re on.”
That—give or take a couple of verses—is how it starts, the Book of Job. What a setup. The Trumplike deity; the shrewd and loitering adversary; the cruelly flippant wager; and the stooge, the cosmic straight man, Job, upon whose oblivious head the sky is about to fall.
Purchase the book – a rewrite of Job (Job: A New Translation by Edward L. Greenstein, Yale University Press) or see the article in the September Atlantic Magazine or check out:
Ancient Mariner