More money makes people less human: Study

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Psychology has only recently begun seriously investigating how having money, that major marker of status in the modern world, ­affects psychosocial behavior.

At the University of California, Berkeley two undergraduate students are playing a Monopoly game that one of them has no chance of winning. A team of psychologists has rigged it so that skill, brains, savvy, and luck—those ingredients that ineffably combine to create success in games as in life—have been made immaterial. Here, the only thing that matters is money.

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The Disruptive Underground Vs. the Banking Industry

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Futurist Thomas Frey: In 1997 Reed Hasting returned his copy of “Apollo 13” to the video store and was hit with a late fee so big that he was embarrassed to tell his wife about it. Out of this moment of humiliation the idea for Netflix was born, a business that would eventually take down the entire video rental industry, and its excessive fee-charging practices in the process.

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Girl cuts hair to buy house

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It took four hours every week to wash her hair and an hour and a half to brush every day

There are certain drawbacks to having a five-foot-long mane of hair. Twelve-year-old Natasha Moraes de Andrade of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was proud of her hair, but it took hours to wash and comb it. Her family couldn’t turn on fans for fear of getting it caught. And riding a bicycle was out of the question. Still, getting her hair cut was a difficult decision.

‘I cried at first when I was at the hairdressers to get it cut,’ she says.

‘I was afraid I wouldn’t like it, and I was also scared I might not get the money I wanted for it…

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U.S. on track to stop funding clean tech

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Sucks for American clean tech. Never mind that the industry is pretty universally regarded as one of tomorrow’s most important drivers of job growth and innovation—the already too-meager, maddeningly scattershot government support for clean energy is about to dry up altogether. So, goodbye ARPA-E?

David Roberts points us to this graph from a newish report from the Breakthrough Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Brookings Institution, and, as you can see, it’s not pretty. And that sad-looking $11 billion stump too will disappear unless there’s a shift in policy.

Here’s Roberts…

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Canada kills the Penny

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Will all coins go away now?

Finally, after years of talking, the Canadian government killed the penny in its recent budget. Finance Minister Flaherty was clearly thinking of decluttering and interior design, noting “Pennies take up too much space on our dressers at home.”

There is also a real green side to this; the weight of all those pennies adds up, as does the cost and footprint of shipping them.

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Bump Pay – an app that lets you pay your friends by bumping iPhones

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If your friend owes you money, lacking cash is no excuse if he’s got an iPhone.  Just like sending contact information with the Bump app, you can now transfer money the same way with Bump Pay. The free app asks for your email address when it’s initially opened. You and your iPhone-wielding friend bump hands; when you feel the vibration, the money’s a-moving.

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