"Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well."
THE FAILURE OF THE 401(K)
Topic: Movies
2:35 pm EST, Nov 26, 2010
The retirement security of American families has crumbled in the past generation. Workers retiring in the next 20 years can expect to receive only 65 percent during retirement of what they made during their working years, a drop of 16 percent from their parents.
Foreboding economic forecasts for flat wages, high unemployment, and rising costs of big-ticket necessities such as education and medical care suggest that young workers today could be on even shakier ground. Only 59 percent of full time workers have access to retirement plans at work, leaving a large part of the workforce to rely solely on Social Security benefits that are inadequate for a comfortable retirement and are under further attack by political opponents.
Much of the decline in retirement security is due to the shift in the private sector from providing retirement benefits through traditional pensions, which guaranteed a lifetime stream of income at retirement, to less secure individual retirement accounts, whose benefits vary with the size of employer and employee contributions, and the volatile swings of the stock market.
St. Petersburg, Russia - China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.
Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies. "About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies," Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg.
The two countries were accustomed to using other currencies, especially the dollar, for bilateral trade. Since the financial crisis, however, high-ranking officials on both sides began to explore other possibilities.
The yuan has now started trading against the Russian rouble in the Chinese interbank market, while the renminbi will soon be allowed to trade against the rouble in Russia, Putin said.
St. Petersburg, Russia - China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.
Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies. "About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies," Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg.
The two countries were accustomed to using other currencies, especially the dollar, for bilateral trade. Since the financial crisis, however, high-ranking officials on both sides began to explore other possibilities.
The yuan has now started trading against the Russian rouble in the Chinese interbank market, while the renminbi will soon be allowed to trade against the rouble in Russia, Putin said.
Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA processor. Billed as 'the first configurable Intel Atom-based processor,' the Atom E600C series combines an Intel Atom 'Tunnel Creek' chip with an Altera Field Programmable Gate Array — offering, the company claims, significantly more flexibility for ODMs and OEMs.
By adding in the FPGA, customers are able to make fundamental changes at a hardware level without having to go through a hardware revision cycle - which means lowered development costs and faster time to market.
WASHINGTON—Government agents hired to drive nuclear weapons and components in trucks sometimes got drunk on the job, including an incident last year when two agents were detained by police at a local bar during a convoy mission, according to a report Monday by the U.S. Energy Department's watchdog.
The department's assistant inspector general, Sandra D. Bruce, said her office reviewed 16 alcohol-related incidents involving agents, candidate-agents and others from the government's Office of Secure Transportation between 2007 through 2009. There are nearly 600 federal agents who ship nuclear weapons, weapon components and special nuclear material across the U.S.
The report said two incidents in particular raised red flags because they happened during "secure transportation missions,'' with agents checked into local hotels and vehicles in "safe harbor," or secure conditions.
One of those occurred in 2007, when an agent was arrested for public intoxication; the other happened last year, when police handcuffed and temporarily detained two agents after an incident at a local bar.
Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, accused Republicans on Monday of siding with Chinese central bankers in their attacks on the U.S. Federal Reserve.
“The Republicans are joining the Central Bank of China in criticizing [Fed Chairman] Ben Bernanke,” Mr. Frank said Monday during an interview on Bloomberg Television. “This is really distressing to me.”
Despite entering a robust economy that seemed to weather the financial crisis as if were it a middling squall, China’s college graduates on average make only 300 yuan, or roughly $45, more per month than the average Chinese migrant worker, according to statistics cited over the weekend by a top Chinese labor researcher and reported today by the Beijing Times (in Chinese).
“It’s the first time China has faced such a situation,” the paper quoted Cai Fang, head of the Chinese Academy of Social Science’s Institute of Population and Labor Economics, as saying Saturday at a conference on Chinese youth. “It’s hard to say how long this situation will last.”
By Mr. Cai’s calculations, college graduates have consistently earned around 1,500 yuan a month since 2003. Migrant workers, meanwhile, have seen their monthly wages rise from an average of 700 yuan to 1,200 yuan over roughly the same time period, MR. Cai said, according to the Beijing Times.
Here are few data points that the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, offered in a Nov. 4 speech: “One-quarter of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time. Almost one million students leave our schools for the streets each year. ... One of the more unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report by a group of top retired generals and admirals. Here was the stunning conclusion of their report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.” America’s youth are now tied for ninth in the world in college attainment. ...
Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
We've seen some pretty bizarre automotive trends on the web over the past few years, but this one, friends, takes the cake. Celebrities are suddenly no longer content to flash their wealth with expensive, ultra-rare cars. Nope. Now they have to stuff them with cash. Rapper 50 Cent is the latest to hop on this bandwagon by shoving stacks of cash into the nose of his Lamborghini Murcielago. We think that we can pretty fairly say that the hero of the film after the jump has successfully gotten rich without dying while trying.
