Tag: 21st Century

Only in California: This $1.5 million home is a fixer — because of the the meth lab inside

HOUSING IS A BIG PROBLEM here in the People’s Republic of California. There are many reasons why, but as the website CalMatters explains, “it’s complicated.” Years and years of regulations and restrictions have made building new housing a lot more expensive. The result? As Cal Matters reports, “the median price of an existing single family

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Funeral for a Friend: What do you say when you have to toast a dear friend goodbye?

ONE OF MY FAVORITE Elton John songs is Funeral for a Friend. It kicks off Sir Elton’s 1973 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album that has sold more than 20 million copies and “is widely regarded as John’s magnum opus,” according to Wikipedia. The interesting thing about Funeral for a Friend is that it is an “instrumental

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Deloitte’s Gen Z/Millennial Survey: Young Workers Feel How Older Ones Once Did

EVER WONDER ABOUT the impact the last few years have had on the younger generations? Well, here’s new research with some intriguing insights. Deloitte’s 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey explores how the disruptive events of the last three years have shaped respondents’ lives and views. As the COVID-19 pandemic recedes (despite attempts to bring it back),

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Social Media’s saving grace: Preserving people you knew long after they’re gone

Editor’s Note: I’ve been republishing some classic Skeptical Guy posts throughout the summer. This one is my original Skeptical Guy post from July 2017. SOMETIMES WHEN I’M ON social media, I see dead people. Just yesterday, when I was scrolling through my LinkedIn contacts, I was struck by two things: one, that these contacts represent the

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Even if you know this famous author, his best book is one very few have heard of

Editor’s Note: I’m occasionally republishing some classic Skeptical Guy posts throughout the summer. This one is from August 2018. EVERYBODY SEEMS TO HAVE their favorite book by the late, great Dr. Seuss.  But picking the “best” Dr. Seuss book isn’t easy. According to The Washington Post, Dr. Seuss’s books have been translated into 17 languages

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Attending the wedding? Make sure you make time to dodge all the protests

Editor’s Note: I’m occasionally republishing some classic Skeptical Guy posts throughout the summer. This one is from September 2017. I WAS IN OUR NATION’S CAPITAL this past weekend to attend the wedding of a good friend and former colleague who got married for the first time at the ripe old age of 48. Just that one

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A nutty principle I never learned in biz school: Teams that swear more win more

IT’S BEEN A FEW YEARS since I went to business school, but I thought I had learned just about every basic principle of business that really mattered — until now. Yes, here’s one business basic that my grad school professors never spent much time on, and I’m sure I would have remembered it if they

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It never ends — yet another use for AI and ChatGPT: Getting out of a parking ticket

THERE SEEMS TO BE NO END to the creative (some might say strange) uses for Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT. Here’s a new one I had not heard of before: appealing a New York City parking ticket. Wilfred Chan, writing in Fast Company, told his tale in a story titled I asked ChatGPT to contest my parking ticket. What followed

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What a cartoon from 1962 got right — and wrong — about today’s workplace 

IF YOU’RE A BABY BOOMER, there’s a good chance you remember the animated TV show The Jetsons that was originally broadcast between September 1962 and March 1963. This popped up in a Fast Company story titled What The Jetsons got right, and very wrong, about the future of work. As Fast Company describes it, “The Jetsons was created by the Hanna-Barbera animation studio in Los Angeles as

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Heres’s a Reminder Why You Shouldn’t Listen Too Closely to What Critics Say

BACK WHEN I TAUGHT college part-time, I told my opinion writing students about the struggle I had with movie and television reviews. I was usually disappointed when I watched something after reading a positive review because it seemed whatever the critic praised was never quite as good as they said it was. Bad reviews just

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