Coronavirus – Page 9

Coronavirus, Finance, Human Behavior, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

Coronavirus has turned America into a nation of savers. But how long will it last?

July 8, 2020

With a busy life in Los Angeles, Anna McKitrick has trouble saving. The 25-year-old waitress and aspiring actress estimates she spends $200 a month on coffee, snacks, on-the-go meals, and other purchases she could live without.

Now thanks to the coronavirus, McKitrick is stuck in her childhood home in New Jersey, living rent-free for the foreseeable future — and using the opportunity to permanently kick her impulse spending habit.

Without bills to pay and thanks to a surprisingly large tax refund, she’s already saved several thousand dollars. She says she’s also reevaluated what is actually important to her. “I just realized how much money I was wasting instead of putting it towards my priorities, like building a bigger emergency fund and paying for experiences I want to have,” says McKitrick.

It’s no secret that Americans struggle to save for the future. A study from JPMorgan Chase found that about two-thirds of us do not have the recommended six weeks of take home pay set aside for an emergency. And a recent Money/Synchrony Bank study revealed that 36% of people earning between $75,000 and $100,000 still worry about unexpected expenses. But now the coronavirus is forcing millions of people to cut down on unnecessary spending in a way that they’ve never been able to before.

Continue reading… “Coronavirus has turned America into a nation of savers. But how long will it last?”

Business, Coronavirus, Future, Science & Technology News, Trending

The future of commerce belongs to the frictionless

July 8, 2020

Striving for a frictionless experience for your customers, employees, suppliers, or other stakeholders isn’t just something that the digital era has enabled you to do. At this point, it’s a requirement.

The businesses that will survive after the pandemic are the ones who give us back our time.

FOR A MINUTE there, at the start of the global lockdown, it seemed to be an open question: Would we all be able to get everything we needed delivered? Three months in, while nobody’s getting two-day deliveries anymore, it does seem as if Amazon alone might be able to provide almost all of us with our commodity needs.

Way back before Jeff Bezos began delivering almost everything to everyone, there was another open question: Was ordering just a few things at a time from Amazon bad for the environment? The answer is a little surprising. While it’s obviously more wasteful and damaging to place several small orders as opposed to fewer larger ones, it’s also obvious that having Amazon deliver everything to everyone is a more sustainable option than going to the store ourselves.

Continue reading… “The future of commerce belongs to the frictionless”

Coronavirus, Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine, Science & Technology News

“No one needs to die from Covid any more.”

July 7, 2020

Houston medical team credits 96% Covid cure rate to novel “MATH+” protocol: IV steroids, blood thinner, IV vitamins, maybe some Pepcid.

The most widely accepted (and plausible) explanation for the apparent disconnect between coronavirus cases and coronavirus deaths over past weeks, in Texas, Arizona, Florida, California, is a temporal lag; that is, deaths typically show up a month or so after hospital admission is required. A few weeks from now the numbers will catch up with each other, the experts say.

Continue reading… ““No one needs to die from Covid any more.””

Beer, Coronavirus, Food, Science & Technology News, Trending

The beer barometer and the reopening of America

July 7, 2020

Microbrews are providing us with macro clues about the state of the U.S. economy — and how confident Americans actually feel about reopening amid the pandemic.

The big picture: The national trend shows that more watering holes are opening up, with 85% of locations open and pouring beer last weekend. And if the bars are open, it’s a good sign that those communities have opened up, too.

But the glass is half full: In open establishments, only 49% taps are open, compared to 96% last June.

Continue reading… “The beer barometer and the reopening of America”

Coronavirus, Money Talk, Science & Technology News, Shopping

The pandemic is doing to credit cards what iTunes did to CDs

July 7, 2020

Mastercard’s head of digital solutions says the pandemic has forced many consumers to reconsider how they think about paying for things, and thinks many of those changes will last.

Mastercard’s head of digital solutions explains how the pandemic has upended the way we buy.

How many times have you used your credit card since the pandemic started?

In just a few months, the pandemic has upended the way that many people are paying for things. People who rarely bought things online are now ordering all their groceries via Instacart, and the few times they’ve gone outside they’ve likely also turned to digital and contactless payment methods. Much of that behavior is likely to stick around once life returns to normal, according to Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s EVP of digital solutions.

Continue reading… “The pandemic is doing to credit cards what iTunes did to CDs”

Coronavirus, Higher Education, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

Is an MBA worth it ? After Covid-19, absolutely not.

July 6, 2020

For my parents’ generation, the default option for career development was getting an MBA. At one point in the late 2010s, I considered the degree, too. But as much as the brand glittered, a price tag of $200,000 plus two years of lost wages just didn’t seem worth it. And now?

Is an MBA worth it in 2020? It’s becoming more and more clear that an MBA degree is not just a questionable investment—it’s a risk that’s simply not worth it.

Let’s step back: The value of business school has been diminishing for a while. (Just ask Elon Musk, Sheryl Sandberg, or Mark Cuban for their opinion of the MBA or take a look at the declining application rates, even at the top schools.) The model of taking students out of the workforce to study decades-old cases was designed for a different era, when technology didn’t shift entire industries at such a breakneck speed.

Covid-19 has shone a glaring spotlight on just how archaic this type of education is. Almost overnight, business plans have been torn up, the rules we’ve played by scrapped. Executives can’t lean on the tactics they learned from outdated case studies—all of us are learning about our new world in real time.

Continue reading… “Is an MBA worth it ? After Covid-19, absolutely not.”

Breakthrough Thinking, Cinema, Coronavirus, Entertainment, Films, Science & Technology News

Walmart’s movie plan will transform parking lots into drive-in theaters

July 6, 2020

Walmart just made a surprising announcement: it will turn some of its store parking lots into drive-in movie theaters, using its existing real estate to revive a largely defunct way to view movies. The drive-in theaters will start going live in early August, according to the company, but they won’t be available at every Walmart destination. In case you’re wondering: yes, there will be popcorn.

Walmart announced the new plan on Twitter and has already launched a website dedicated to the new move. The drive-in theaters will arrive in partnership with Tribeca, according to Walmart, which says that its new plan will help the public watch movies while maintaining social distancing.

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Beer, Coronavirus, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Americans are actually drinking less during the pandemic

July 3, 2020

During the coronavirus pandemic, people are drinking less. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

While the masses are buying more booze from grocers and liquor stores to drink at home, that hasn’t been enough to fill the gaping hole created by declines in shipments to restaurants, bars and sporting venues that were closed to slow the virus. Global alcohol consumption isn’t expected to return to pre-Covid-19 levels until 2024, and the U.S. recovery will take even longer, according to researcher IWSR said.

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Big Problems, Coronavirus, government, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Data fog: Why some countries’ coronavirus numbers do not add up

July 3, 2020

Reported numbers of confirmed cases have become fodder for the political gristmill. Here is what non-politicians think.

Have you heard the axiom “In war, truth is the first casualty”?

As healthcare providers around the world wage war against the COVID-19 pandemic, national governments have taken to brawling with researchers, the media and each other over the veracity of the data used to monitor and track the disease’s march across the globe.

Allegations of deliberate data tampering carry profound public health implications. If a country knowingly misleads the World Health Organization (WHO) about the emergence of an epidemic or conceals the severity of an outbreak within its borders, precious time is lost. Time that could be spent mobilising resources around the globe to contain the spread of the disease. Time to prepare health systems for a coming tsunami of infections. Time to save more lives.

No one country has claimed that their science or data is perfect: French and US authorities confirmed they had their first coronavirus cases weeks earlier than previously thought.

Still, coronavirus – and the data used to benchmark it – has become grist for the political mill. But if we tune out the voices of politicians and pundits, and listen to those of good governance experts, data scientists and epidemiological specialists, what does the most basic but consequential data – the number of confirmed cases per country – tell us about how various governments around the globe are crunching coronavirus numbers and spinning corona-narratives?

Continue reading… “Data fog: Why some countries’ coronavirus numbers do not add up”

2020 Predictions, Big Problems, Business, Coronavirus, Science & Technology News

Which jobs are coming back first? Which may never return?

June 29, 2020

Job postings in the beauty and wellness category rebounded at the job-listing behemoth Indeed.

A snapshot of who’s hiring now, plus a warning about employment predictions in an unknown COVID-19 recovery.

America’s job market added 2.5 million new jobs in May, as the economy began to wake up from what one economist called a “medically induced coma.” The new jobs are clustered in people-facing companies that have started to hire back workers they’d furloughed, so in reality many aren’t so new. We’re talking about places like bars and restaurants, hair salons, medical offices and car dealerships.

Spot a trend? Yep, it’s the service sector, the heart of the modern American economy and the epicenter of the recent jobs earthquake. A record 20.5 million jobs evaporated in April, some losses coming in surprising areas like nursing. We’re in a unique recession, prompted not by a housing bust or a market crash, but a virus with an unpredictable course. Sure, we have data from the 1918 flu pandemic, but it’s of limited utility for projecting jobs in e-sports or Starbucks. To be sure, jobs are growing right now in key spots we highlight below, but beware of forecasting too far out. As one economic expert warns us, don’t rely on economic experts. “The leading economic indicator is the virus,” energy scholar Sarah Ladislaw told us weeks ago.

Continue reading… “Which jobs are coming back first? Which may never return?”

Business, Coronavirus, Employment, Science & Technology News

The work-from-anywhere era changes everything about compensation

June 28, 2020

The work-from-anywhere era changes everything about compensation

Companies that say they’ll let people work where they want have yet to figure out what that means for pay. Here are the questions that need answering.

Some of the tech industry’s giants have been dealt a giant blow by the COVID-19 crisis, laying off thousands of employees in San Francisco in recent weeks. These companies—and many others—are now looking at a future that includes moving entirely remote, or shifting to a hybrid policy in which employees are in the office only on certain days.

Employee compensation is a company’s largest operational expense. Yet those announcing new remote work policies have yet to reconcile how the new rules impact compensation in the long term. Though some companies, such as Facebook, have already announced their intention to pay different rates for employees working outside an office, most have been holding back on making that decision. But once the dust settles and many or most employees have moved off-site, employers will be looking at shifting pay policies while employees reconcile how this affects their paychecks and plans.

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Coronavirus, Higher Education, Hot Issues, Science & Technology News

More than 60 colleges hit with lawsuits as students demand tuition refunds

June 27, 2020

Georgetown University, whose nearly empty campus in Washington, DC, is seen here on May 7, 2020—is one of more than 60 schools being sued by students, who are demanding a partial tuition refund after classes moved online due to the coronavirus outbreak.

At least 60 colleges and universities across the country, and perhaps as many as 100 or more, are now being sued by students who believe they were short-changed when their in-person college experience was replaced by an online one as schools shut down campuses this spring due to the coronavirus pandemic. The students are demanding a refund on tuition and fees equal to the difference between what they paid for in advance and the instruction and educational services they actually received.

The unprecedented number of class action lawsuits began as a trickle in April, picked up momentum in May, and have continued to expand throughout June, with experts saying there are likely many more to come.

The schools currently facing student lawsuits include elite universities like Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and Georgetown as well as major public university systems like Rutgers in New Jersey and the University of North Carolina.

Continue reading… “More than 60 colleges hit with lawsuits as students demand tuition refunds”