Black Women Are Leaning In And Getting Nowhere

Black women want a seat at the table. And yet they are close to invisible at the highest ranks of corporate America, reveals data released Tuesday morning by consulting firm McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org, the nonprofit women’s leadership organization founded by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. 

This is the second year the organization has released the data, among the most comprehensive looks at how women are faring in the business world.

Overall, it’s not going terribly well. Women drop out of the corporate pipeline at high rates: For every 100 women promoted to manager (the first step on the track up the ladder), 130 men are advanced, the study found. Women get more pushback when they negotiate for raises, and are more likely to get labeled pushy or bossy by the higher-ups and generally receive less support from senior colleagues.

But women of color have it particularly bad, the study found. 

Defined as black, Asian or Hispanic, women of color make up just 3 percent of executives in the C-suite at the 132 North American companies surveyed, which include JP Morgan Chase, Procter & Gamble, General Motors and Facebook. Yet, these women comprise 20 percent of the United States population.

White women were also nowhere near parity in those high-level offices, but at 17 percent are doing much better by comparison.

“When women are stuck, corporate America is stuck,” Sandberg said in a statement. “We know that diverse teams perform better and inclusive workplaces are better for all employees, so we all have strong incentives to get this right.”

LeanIn.org

Women of color are far less likely to make it to the top in corporate America.

“Women of color are the most underrepresented group in the corporate pipeline,” write the authors of the report, which also surveyed women within these companies.

This is the second year that LeanIn.org and McKinsey have done this landmark survey. Though last year some data on women of color was included, the report did not break out pipeline data on women of color. 

The latest study looked at promotion and attrition rates at the various companies, which together employ more than 4.6 million people. Additionally, more than 34,000 employees at the companies responded to a survey on gender biases, work-life issues and career opportunities at their companies.

Women of color who responded to the survey, especially black women, tended to perceive their offices as less fair. Only 29 percent of black women said the best opportunities at their company go to the most deserving employees, compared to 47 percent of white women, 43 percent of Asian women and 41 percent of Hispanic women.

“This study makes clear that while all women remain underrepresented in the corporate pipeline, women of color face the steepest drop-offs,” LeanIn.org president Rachel Thomas said. 

When Sandberg’s corporate feminist manifesto Lean In came out in 2013, one of the most potent criticisms of the best-seller involved race. Many said the book, which urges women to speak up and be more ambitious at work, was less relevant for women of color, who face different challenges at the office.

Sandberg famously wrote that many women were giving up on attaining leadership roles in corporate America before their careers even took off. Women “leave before they leave,” she wrote, echoing a widely viewed TED Talk she gave in 2010. Essentially, the argument goes, women anticipate that they won’t be able to have full-throttle careers because at some point marriage and children will intercede. So they deliberately hold themselves back.

This may be a specific problem of white women, however. Women of color, according to surveys and plenty of anecdotal evidence, are far more ambitious. Indeed, black women participate in the labor market at higher rates than any other group of women.

While white women seem to struggle with whether or not to seek advancement at work, black women are far less ambiguous, according to a 2014 survey from the Center for Talent Innovation.

“In our research, we find black women are nearly 3 times more likely than white women to say they aspire to a powerful job with a prestigious title,” Tai Wingfield, one of the report’s authors and senior vice president of communications for the Center for Talent Innovation and managing director at Hewlett Consulting Partner, told The Huffington Post. 

In this year’s LeanIn.org survey, 48 percent of women of color said they aspire to leadership positions at their company, compared with 37 percent of white women. The difference is most stark at the entry level, where only 27 percent of white women aspire to be a top executive, compared with 41 percent of women of color.

Yet it’s white women who are far more likely to land top roles. After Xerox chairman and CEO Ursula Burns leaves her post this year, there will be no black women CEOs in the Fortune 500, noted Melinda Marshall and Wingfield in a recent piece for Harvard Business Review.

“The problem is leadership isn’t seeing them ― those qualified, well educated black women who are vying for leadership but are being overlooked,” Wingfield told HuffPost.

“Black women are already ‘leaning in,’” Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, a psychology professor at Columbia University, wrote last year in a fascinating piece for Fortune on black female leadership.

Steve Marcus / Reuters

Xerox chairman and CEO Ursula Burns is seen at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 11, 2012. The company refers to Burns as "chairman" rather than "chairwoman."

Part of the problem is “invisibility,” Purdie-Vaughns writes. When the average person thinks of a “woman leader,” she argues, the image that comes to mind is a white woman ― like Sandberg. If you picture a black leader, you’re more likely to think of a black man than a black woman.

“Because black women are not seen as typical of the categories ‘black’ or ‘woman,’ people’s brains fail to include them in both categories,” Purdie-Vaughns writes. “Black women suffer from a ‘now you see them now you don’t’ effect in the workplace.”

In Wingfield’s study, black women tell painful stories of how this plays at the office. One woman, after asking her boss about new opportunities at her firm, was told to be happy with what she’s achieved. “You’ve reached a milestone you’ve probably never imagined,” he tells her. “Do we really need to talk about what you haven’t yet achieved?” 

Yvette Miley, a senior executive at MSNBC, describes her experiences in the 1990s speaking up at editorial meetings only to see her ideas get ignored until a male colleague repeated it and had the buy-in of the room.

What seems clear is that the managers and executives who make decisions about promotions and advancement may have unconsciously absorbed some of these stereotypes and are holding back women of color.

And to make things even tougher, many companies aren’t very focused on racial diversity to begin with. According to LeanIn.org’s numbers, 55 percent of companies say racial diversity is a top priority. Gender diversity gets far more attention, with 78 percent of companies saying they’ve made it a top goal.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that more than 34,000 women answered survey questions as part of LeanIn.org and McKinsey’s new report. In fact, both men and women participated in the survey. 

You Might Want To Check Your Washing Machine. It Could Explode.

First it was your cell phone battery, now your washing machine could be in danger of exploding. 

The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning this week to owners of certain top-loading Samsung washing machines, saying the appliances may pose safety issues.

The warning comes on the heels of a class-action lawsuit customers have filed against the company claiming that their washing machines exploded during use, according to CNN.

Samsung said in response to the CPSC warning on its website that it was in active discussions with the agency about safety issues affecting some top-loading washing machines made from March 2011 to April 2016. The website also includes a way for customers to check if their machine is one of the affected products.

“In rare cases, affected units may experience abnormal vibrations that could pose a risk of personal injury or property damage when washing bedding, bulky or water-resistant items,” the company wrote.  

Do not buy or use #Samsung top-load washer. They might explode like ours did this morning. No joke. @Samsungtweets pic.twitter.com/WpifAgrgAl

— Chris Potts (@ctpotts) July 10, 2015

The company recommends consumers with affected models use the lower speed delicate cycle while washing bulky materials, saying that no “abnormal vibrations” slash explosions have been reported when customers use this cycle.

On Wednesday, Consumer Reports suspended its recommended status for any Samsung top-loading washing machine that earned that designation. The publication did note that none of the Samsung top-loaders experienced this issue during its washing machine tests, though researchers did not wash bedding or bulky items.

Carolyn Forte, director of Home Appliances and Cleaning Products Lab at the Good Housekeeping Institute, pointed out that today’s washers have super-fast spin cycles compared to machines in decades past. While she couldn’t speak about the Samsung cases in particular, she did note that high-spin speeds might cause a machine to go “off balance or become unevenly distributed possibly causing the machine to vibrate even more than normal.”

Head over to Samsung’s website to check if your machine is affected.

My 2013 'Warning' Letter To Wells Fargo's CEO John Stumpf

It comes as no surprise to me that employees at Wells Fargo resorted to dishonesty in opening bogus accounts, just to keep their jobs. Why am I not surprised? Because in 2013, after six years of employment, my sister was about to lose her job at Wells Fargo because she could not meet her sales goals. I wrote this letter to CEO John Stumpf, advising him that the intense sales culture was damaging to employees and consumers. I received a startling response. But first, here is that letter:

March 27, 2013

Mr. John Stumpf,
Chairman and CEO
Wells Fargo & Company
420 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94104

Dear Mr. Stumpf:

Knowing how busy you are, I apologize for the length of this letter; but as a long-time customer, I ask that you please grab a cup of coffee or tea, sit back, and take the ten minutes you will need to read this letter through to its end.

I very recently became aware of Wells Fargo's Vision Statement through a graduate school paper my niece was writing for a course. I was reading it, and here is what stood out:

"Our vision has nothing to do with transactions, pushing products or getting bigger for the sake of bigness. It's about building lifelong relationships one customer at a time."

Ironically, my sister, who has worked as a teller for Wachovia/Wells Fargo for almost six years and is terrific with customers, is about to lose her job. This is not due to unprofessional behavior. It is not due to excess absences. It is not due to transactional errors. It is not due to lack of excellent customer service. What it is due to is her failure to continue to meet sales goals through pushing products.

She transferred from a large public branch to a Wells Fargo branch located on a military base in Xxxxxx, XX. It is a controlled location with limited opportunity for sales, since new customers cannot just walk in off the streets. That my sister is extremely reliable, has rarely missed a day of work, is well liked by customers and her manager, offers excellent customer service, and does a very good job as a teller, seemingly counts for nothing.

The fact is, she cannot meet Wells Fargo's designated product sales goals and is therefore on her final warning and expects to be unemployed within a month. It seems extraneous circumstances, like branch demographics or economic anomalies, are not taken into account by Wells Fargo when it comes to setting goals for evaluating employee productivity and determining job retention.

For example, when sequestration cuts occurred on March 1, 2013, I thought to myself, this is going to hurt military people in terms of jobs and pay. My sister will have even less opportunity to sell. Indeed, the military healthcare system is affected, and will be cut by $3 billion. Any expendable income that might have gone into a new account -- perhaps a Custodial College Savings Account -- will be diverted for basic necessities, like health care and food. Hiring freezes, smaller staffs, and furlough days... All of these things, I thought, will affect military families' finances, and consequently my sister's employment status.

My niece (this sister's daughter) worked for Wells Fargo for a year before going back to get her Master's at California State University. Since she and her mother have both been enmeshed in the Wells Fargo "sales culture," she found it contradictory that your Vision Statement cites customer retention and relationships, not the pushing of products. The fact is, on the front line, that vision does not hold true. There is so much emphasis on the sale of any product that a teller cannot realistically ascertain all of a customer's financial goals, as is also declared in your Vision Statement.

I was a banker in Miami, Florida in times when (besides location) great customer service was the most important inducement a bank had to offer. I have been a branch manager, a commercial lender, and a VP in charge of a private banking division. I "retired" at the age of 36, and I am now 58, so I have been out of banking for a very long time, it's true. But I experienced tremendous growth in my branches, in my lending portfolio, and in our private banking division. And I distinctly attribute that growth to excellent customer service, which led to customers entrusting me and my bank with all aspects of helping them reach their financial goals.

Now let's look at Wells Fargo's Values Statement, which was also in my niece's paper:

"When they're (employees) properly supported, incented, rewarded, encouraged and recognized, they're even more satisfied with their jobs, providing even better service for our customers."

This is a time unlike any other in Corporate America history, when production goals are very high, with fear and anxiety being the prevalent motivators. Yet Wells Fargo states that support, incentive, reward, encouragement, and recognition are its employees' motivators. In truth, neither my sister nor my niece ever felt this was a part of the Wells Fargo culture. Rather, all employees hear is that keeping their jobs depends on sales.

The motivators you tout are lost in the intense sales culture, and the job satisfaction asserted in the Values Statement is illusory. It seems to me that firing a very good employee of six years because she can no longer meet her sales goals, then hiring and training a new employee, with the expectation of that employee having a better, immediate and all-knowing grasp of customers' financial goals, is ideally and fiscally unsound.

I must tell you I learned of my sister's plight from her daughter (my niece referred to herein.) My sister has never voiced her concerns as complaints. She is grateful to have her job. So when I learn that she -- who would have been a valuable employee to me as a manager because of her work ethic and her customer relations skills -- is about to lose her job because she cannot meet rigid sales goals at her particular branch, I am saddened and distressed on her behalf. She needs her job, and so she works very loyally and diligently and does succeed in every aspect of her job over which she has direct control -- like great customer service and financial transactional skills.

My husband and I are long-time (Wachovia) Wells Fargo personal and corporate customers who still appreciate a banking relationship with the people of our local branch, though we do a great deal of our banking electronically. We recently had to obtain some information from our WF branch, via phone, regarding a wire transfer from Europe. While looking up the information, your employee made a sales pitch for a home equity line. While I admired the effort, I was once again reminded of the intense need to sell. I think this underscores my assertion that an employee cannot know a customer's financial goals when he makes a stab at selling just any product over the phone during an information-seeking call. It is all about sales, but then again, if he didn't ask, there is no chance at all for a sale! So that's good...But must keeping a job depend solely on sales? What about the good service he provided by getting me the information I needed? That matters, and that is what will keep me a lifelong customer.

So, Mr. Stumpf, I have addressed you from three perspectives: A relative to an employee, a former commercial banker, and a customer. I think all of these qualify me to give you an honest assessment of how your Values and Visions Statements fail to faithfully filter down to the front-line employees at the branch level.

That said, I am ending this letter with my thanks for your having read it, and with a wish for a more aware and benevolent Wells Fargo corporate culture--one that recognizes the value of excellent service in customer retention; and one that acknowledges dedicated, long-term, hard-working employees like my sister with the most coveted reward of all...Continued gainful employment.

Sincerely,

REBECCA WARNER

In just a matter of days, I received a letter from Claudia Tokarz, employee Customer Relations, saying that she was writing on behalf of Senior Management at Wells Fargo Bank, responding to my letter to Mr. Stumpf, Chairman and CEO. Did my sister keep her job? My next blog will answer that question.

GM Wants To Fill The Gap Volkswagen's Dieselgate Scandal Left

In June 2014, General Motors CEO Mary Barra stood stern-faced in front of her employees and a battalion of cameras and said: “I never want to put this behind us.”

The Detroit auto giant had admitted to selling cars with faulty ignition switches that caused the vehicles to turn off without warning in the middle of driving. At least 124 people died in accidents caused by the defect.

Since then, the company has taken pains to refurbish its image. GM invested $500 million in the ride-hailing startup Lyft ― the “nice guy” runner-up to industry goliath Uber ― and vowed to help it build a fleet of self-driving taxis. It committed last week to running 100 percent of its operations with renewable energy by 2050. It poured money into electric vehicles, enough to beat Tesla Motors at its own game, bringing the first affordable, mass-appeal all-electric car to market. 

Now, GM plans to tap a market left wide open after the biggest auto industry scandal since its own infamous ignition switch failure. Last week, the automaker announced plans to offer a diesel option with the 2018 model Chevrolet Equinox, its best-selling small sport utility vehicle. The move comes a year after Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker by sales, admitted to cheating on U.S. regulatory tests for its diesel cars, which spewed 40 times the legal limit of smog-causing emissions into the air.

The German auto giant agreed to pay a record $14.7 billion to settle with the U.S. government. Last month, the Department of Justice announced a plea deal with an engineer who designed the engine workaround. Unlike any executives involved in GM’s scandal two years ago, he may now face jail time.

Both incidents implicate companies that took fatal risks by sending to market products that weren’t quite ready. Volkswagen failed to design a diesel engine that could meet U.S. standards, so it cheated, causing, according one study, up to 60 premature deaths. GM, fearing an expensive recall, continued to sell faulty cars for nearly a decade after discovering the flaw. 

Popular in Europe, diesel ― which is roughly 30 percent more efficient than gasoline ― has struggled to catch on in the United States. Diesel-powered vehicles made up just 3 percent of total U.S. sales in 2014. Volkswagen made up about half of them, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation. 

As The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday:

GM hopes to fill a niche in the U.S. vacated by its German rival’s pullback. And Chevrolet last year added a diesel-engine option to its Colorado midsize pickup that has drawn favorable reviews from car critics, emboldening GM to expand its diesel offerings.

“It’s only been since the VW challenges that people have been sort of scratching their heads a little bit” about diesels, GM North America President Alan Batey said in an interview. “But we’ve been absolutely thrilled with how they’ve taken off for us.”

If GM can popularize diesel vehicles, the company can help reduce the overall carbon footprint of its fleet, which it’s aggressively pushing to modernize with electric, self-driving alternatives. Slashing, and ultimately finding ways to eliminate, carbon emissions from vehicles is critical to meeting goals set in last December’s historic 180-nation Paris climate agreement.

Last year, Barra, announcing the company’s better-than-expected third-quarter earnings, declared that GM was “a vastly different company today than just five years ago.”

Whether GM can succeed where Volkswagen failed may be the clearest test of that yet. 

GM did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. 

Wells Fargo Faces Proposed Class Action Lawsuit Over Bogus Account Scandal

Wells Fargo & Co, embroiled in a scandal over the opening of sham accounts, was sued on Friday by customers who accused the bank of fraud and recklessness for its behavior.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Utah, and seeks class-action status on behalf of hundreds of thousands of customers nationwide.

Wells Fargo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Last week, the San Francisco-based lender agreed to pay $190 million to settle regulatory charges that employees opened some 2 million accounts without customers’ knowledge, in order to meet sales targets.

Wells Fargo, the country’s third-largest bank by assets, has said it has fired 5,300 people over the matter and would eliminate sales goals in its retail banking on Jan. 1, 2017.

Federal prosecutors have begun examining Wells Fargo’s practices, and the bank’s Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf is scheduled to testify before Congress next week.

In the complaint, three plaintiffs said customers were hurt by “abusive and fraudulent tactics” used by employees who felt they had to “do whatever it takes,” including selling products they did not need or want, to meet sales quotas.

It was not immediately clear how the three named plaintiffs were specifically harmed by the bank’s alleged wrongdoing.

The case is Mitchell et al v. Wells Fargo Bank NA et al, U.S. District Court, District of Utah, No. 16-00966.

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld; additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Donald Trump Could Slow Clean Energy's Hard-Won Progress

On the face of it, a Donald Trump presidency would not be good for the renewable energy industry.

The infamously fact-averse Republican nominee has called climate change a “hoax” invented “by the Chinese.” He has pledged to revive the coal industry, dismantle the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and renege on commitments to the historic climate accord reached in Paris last year. He has complained that wind turbines are “killing all of the eagles,” and says solar power is “not working so good,” in part because it’s “very, very expensive.”

Yet SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive says he doesn’t fear the prospect of a Trump victory in November.

“It may slow down the advancement of our goal to accelerate clean energy,” Rive, whose company is the largest solar installer in the country, told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, one party may champion solar more than the other.”

But away from the spotlight of a bitter election, the partisan divide disappears, he said. 

“It’s not that way when you speak to voters, Democratic or Republican,” Rive said. “They are all very supportive.”

He may be right. Renewable energy enjoys broad public support. A majority of Trump voters believe that global warming exists and is caused by humans, according a poll released in May. More than half of homeowners listed solar as the energy source most important to the country, followed by wind power and natural gas, according to a survey of 1,400 homeowners conducted last year by the polling firm Zogby Analytics. (The results should be taken with a grain of salt ― SolarCity paid for the poll ― but the success of solar in traditionally Republican terrain makes the poll worth noting.)

Even Barry Goldwater Jr. ― son of the conservative icon and former Republican presidential nominee to whom Trump is sometimes compared ― has for the past three years waged an unlikely fight against utility companies in support of solar energy.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive is the cousin of billionaire Elon Musk, who serves as chairman of the solar company.

Perhaps more importantly, the industry is in a good position. Incentives for clean energy are expected to continue regardless of who ends up in the White House, as a budget deal reached last December extended a solar investment tax credit until the end of 2021 ― a 30 percent credit that helps the industry compete against the heavily subsidized oil and gas sectors. Meanwhile, the price of solar installations has plummeted 63 percent since 2011, and it’s expected to keep getting cheaper.

Rooftop solar grew by more than 1,000 percent since 2010, at one point propelling stocks like SolarCity to $86 per share. Since, then growth has slowed. Until Congress extended the investment tax credit, many in the industry expected demand for solar to slump by 71 percent next year. But now, it could instead climb by 5.5 percent, according to Bloomberg.

And the sun should keep shining on solar ― in part because of the dark horizon for coal.

The coal industry has imploded, battered by competition from cheaper natural gas and renewables. In just the past year, Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Patriot Coal all went bankrupt. The cost of energy from a new coal-fired power plant climbed to north of $50 per megawatt-hour, according to data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By contrast, the price of solar hit a new low of $29.1 per megawatt-hour at a new plant slated to come online in Chile in 2020. For natural gas, which likely topped coal last year as the United States’ biggest source of electricity, that figure averages out to about $53 per MWh. 

Rive isn’t alone in his assessment. Others in the industry are trying to stay positive about the possibility of a Trump presidency.

“The Clinton campaign has put forward detailed proposals that will promote the growth of solar in the U.S.,” Christopher Mansour, vice president of federal affairs at the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association, told HuffPost in a statement. “The Trump campaign has been less specific regarding solar development.”

“A Trump presidency would probably not be the worst disaster, given that support is grandfathered in at the federal level,” said Jenny Chase, head of global solar analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Chase says the fight has moved instead to the states, where solar companies navigate a patchwork of net metering policies ― rules that allow households or businesses with solar panels to sell excess electricity back to the grid during the day.

Trump could damage renewable energy development on the state level. He has threatened to discard President Barack Obama’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, which includes a $4 billion fund to provide state incentives to develop clean energy. A Trump presidency could also embolden utility companies already fighting back against state-level solar incentives.

“Assuming Trump follows through on the sort of policy statements he’s put out on energy, such as undoing the Obama administration’s climate rules and getting rid of the Clean Power Plan, that would definitely have an impact on solar development,” Molly Christian, a senior reporter at S&P Global Market Intelligence’s SNL Financial trade publication, told HuffPost. “It’d slow it down. It wouldn’t grow as quickly.”

The opposite may be true under Clinton, who has vowed to transform the U.S. into a “clean energy superpower.” Her ambitious climate plan, while lacking some key proposals, includes a $60 billion clean energy fund and a goal of increasing solar capacity by 700 percent by the end of the decade. 

In all, Trump still represents a profound threat to the U.S. economy, which could lose about $1 trillion by 2021 if he wins, according a forecast released this week from Oxford Economics.

“Apart from the whole U.S. descending into chaos, wouldn’t all U.S. companies take a hit?” Chase, who is British, said of a Trump victory, laughing. “I don’t think it will necessarily be a solar issue.”

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularlyincitespolitical violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe,racist, misogynist and birther who hasrepeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — fromentering the U.S.

Robert Scoble: Here's Why Virtual Reality Will Change Everything

Robert Scoble has been at the forefront of the technological trendlines in Silicon Valley his entire life. Now he’s dedicating all of his time to virtual and mixed reality. But why?

If you pinch the little Cirque du Soleil artist you can make her bigger and when you click on her she will start performing just for you. Right there in front of you by your desk. At the same time a zombie is coming through the wall while the CNN is on next to your work screen. Sounds like a fantasy come true. Well, it is.

Robert Scoble has seen it. Just like he has seen a lot of other stuff from the frontier of technology for the most part of his life growing up in Silicon Valley. And there has been some crazy things going on around him. Microsoft happened. Apple too. And then Facebook. Silicon Valley has been the center of technological innovation in a lot of industries. It’s been like a science fiction tv-series for the last 20 years with more breakthroughs and disruptions of industries than killings in Game of Thrones.

But you’ve seen nothing yet.

Now it’s time for something even more radical. It’s time for virtual reality and the even more immersive mixed reality as Robert Scoble favors.

“20 years ago one of my friends had a complete set up for VR games. And it worked. Only the computer running it cost a million dollars. Now you can get the same technology the size of a mobile device for just 2000 dollars.”

And that changes everything, says Scoble.

“Now we have low cost, small size and more bandwidth. But most importantly we have social systems. Like Facebook. And that’s why VR, AR and mixed reality will not only stay but change everything,” says Robert Scoble of UploadVR. And that’s when he starts to explain the six technologies that are fundamental to create all these new devices that will mix our reality with artificial experiences.

He’s fast paced. It’s about optics, sensors, high speed, dimension mapping, artificial intelligence as in deep learning. And audio. Audio will be tremendously important in the field of virtual and mixed realities.

It’s not that Robert Scoble is fast paced for the sake of speed. He is after all reclining horizontally in a sofa as we speak at the Trouble offices in Copenhagen. Like a missionary buddha of technology trendlines. But Robert Scoble is a storyteller with a lot of information. Just take a look at his social media appearances on Facebook and Twitter and his Scobleizer blog.

We’ll skip the technological explanation for now and go straight to consequences.

“We’re now in the fourth state of user interface of the personal computer era. The first was character mode as we saw in MS-DOS. The second was the GUI as in Graphical User Interface known from Macintosh and Windows. The third was touch as we know from the iPhone or Android. And here comes the fourth of spatial computing.”

It’s the most intuitive thing there ever was in computer interfaces. There almost is no interface. But to grasp the full potential of it you have to try it for yourself. You can design things in virtual reality and manufacture them in real life with the push of a button.

The article continues under the video.

So it’s three dimensions but this is not like 3D TV where it’s just an effect. This is actually a 3D replication of the world. Think about that. Or let Robert Scoble explain:

“We’re gonna put basketball games on the floor and I’m gonna be able to go on the court with Steven Curry and the Warriors and then I’m gonna stop the game and practice my three point shot right next to him. And I’m gonna hit play and see if he makes the shot the same way I did. He might even turn to me and give me some tips.”

And the thing that will tie all these new ideas together will be the social layer of the internet. If it’s gaming, everything is more fun when you play with someone else. In journalism it feels more real if you bring people virtually to a refugee camp in Syria instead of reading about it. Art will be extreme when you do anything you want. Medicine will change because you can better diagnose concussions. It is already happening.

“Everything about our world is going to change. And this means deep cultural change. The kind of change we saw in the 1960’s when the electric guitar brought us rock’n roll, when the pill brought us the sexual revolution and when the space race brought us to the Moon and gave us the internet.”

It feels promising. But will the feelings be real, virtual or mixed?

Let’s dive in.

...

For daily perspectives, rants, thoughts & ideas you should follow the Trouble people on Facebook. This post originally appeared on Trouble Stories.

America's Richest (And Poorest) States

The U.S. Census Bureau released on Wednesday new data from its 2015 nationwide population survey. According to the annual survey, the national median household income rose to $55,775 in 2015. No state reported income declines. While 39 states reported significant increases in household income, income levels in 11 states remained the same.

24/7 Wall St. ranked all 50 states according to the newly released median household income figures. Annual income levels range from $75,847 in Maryland to $40,593 in Mississippi.

High-income states typically share certain social and economic characteristics. For example, residents of states with the highest incomes also tend to have high education levels. In 17 of the states reporting higher than average household incomes, college attainment rates also exceed the national attainment rate of 30.1%.

Click here to see America's richest (and poorest) states. 

While it certainly does not make up the difference between a poverty wage and a six-figure salary, residents of low-income states enjoy cheaper goods and services than residents of high-income states. For example, goods and services cost 10.3% more in Maryland than they do across the nation. In Mississippi, meanwhile, goods and services cost 13.4% less than the national average.

Similarly, home values closely mirror household incomes. In 18 of the states with high household incomes median home values exceed the national median home value of $194,500. The opposite is the case in the nation’s poorest states.

To identify the richest and poorest states with the highest and lowest median household income, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed state data on income from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey (ACS). Median household income for all years is adjusted for inflation. Data on health insurance coverage, employment by industry, food stamp recipiency, poverty, and income inequality also came from the 2015 ACS. Income inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient, which is scaled from 0 to 1, with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing total inequality. We also reviewed annual average unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 2014 and 2015.

These are America’s richest and poorest states.

The Poorest States:

• 5. Kentucky
• Median household income: $45,215
• Population: 4,425,092 (25th lowest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 5.4% (20th highest)
• Poverty rate: 18.5% (5th highest)

Like most states, Kentucky’s median household income of $45,215 a year has increased since 2014, when the median income, adjusted for inflation, was $43,014 a year. Residents are still quite poor, however. Kentucky’s poverty rate of 18.5% is the fifth highest poverty rate of all states. While no guarantee, a college degree substantially improves the odds of finding a job with a good wage. In Kentucky, just 23.3% of adults have a bachelor's degree, considerably lower than the national college attainment rate of 30.6%.

• 4. Alabama
• Median household income: $44,765
• Population: 4,858,979 (24th highest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 6.1% (8th highest)
• Poverty rate: 18.5% (5th highest)

Alabama is one of the poorest states in the nation with a median household income of $44,765 a year. However, this figure is notably higher than in 2014, when the median income, adjusted for inflation, was $42,895.

Like in many of the poorest states, Alabama’s poverty rate of 18.5% is among the highest of all states. Other problems the state faces are a high jobless rate and a high proportion of households relying on food stamps. Last year, 6.1% of workers were unemployed, the eighth highest jobless rate of any state. With low incomes, home values are also low in Alabama. The median home is worth $134,100, or more than $60,000 below the national benchmark of $194,500.

• 3. West Virginia
• Median household income: $42,019
• Population: 1,844,128 (13th lowest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 6.7% (the highest)
• Poverty rate: 17.9% (7th highest)

The typical West Virginia household earns $42,019, compared to the national median income of $55,775. Individuals struggling to find work who live on little to no income contribute to low household incomes in West Virginia. Of workers in the state, 6.7% were unemployed in 2015, the highest annual unemployment rate of any state.

West Virginia’s population is one of the largest recipients of government assistance programs such as SNAP, which each year help millions of people cope with poverty. Of households in the state, 16.0% use food stamps, the ninth highest share.

• 2. Arkansas
• Median household income: $41,995
• Population: 2,978,204 (18th lowest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 5.2% (24th highest)
• Poverty rate: 19.1% (4th highest)

Goods and services in Arkansas cost less on average than almost anywhere else in the country. While the relative affordability certainly helps low income households, state residents are still quite poor. The typical household earns $41,995 a year, second lowest after Mississippi. Also, 19.1% of people live in poverty, the fourth highest poverty rate of any state. Homes tend to have relatively low values to match the low incomes. At just $120,700, the typical home in Arkansas is valued at more than $70,000 below the national benchmark of $194,500.

• 1. Mississippi
• Median household income: $40,593
• Population: 2,992,333 (19th lowest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 6.5% (4th highest)
• Poverty rate: 22.0% (the highest)

With 2015 median household income unchanged from 2014, Mississippi is once again the poorest state in the country.The typical Mississippi household earned $40,593 last year, well below the national median income of $55,775. Mississippi also has the highest poverty rate in the country, with 22.0% of residents living below the poverty line. A relatively large share of state households are very poor. Some 11.5% earn $10,000 or less annually, the highest extreme poverty rate of any state. Similarly, there are relatively few affluent households in the state. Only 2.1% of Mississippi households earn $200,000 or more a year, the lowest such share.

The Richest States:

• 5. Connecticut
• Median household income: $71,346
• Population: 3,590,886 (22nd lowest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 5.6% (18th highest)
• Poverty rate: 10.5% (6th lowest)

A typical Connecticut household earns $71,346 in a year, considerably higher than the national median income of $55,775. With such high incomes, residents are better able to afford more expensive homes. Connecticut’s median home value of $270,900 is among the highest nationwide. A portion of every state's population is extremely wealthy, and the share of such high earners is especially large in Connecticut. More than one in 10 households earn $200,000 or more a year. Connecticut's relatively high education attainment rate partially accounts for the high incomes in the area. More than 38.3% of adults have at least a bachelor's degree compared to 30.6% nationally.

• 4. New Jersey
• Median household income: $72,222
• Population: 8,958,013 (11th highest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 5.6% (18th highest)
• Poverty rate: 10.8% (8th lowest)

While New Jersey households report some of the highest incomes in the nation, living in the state is not cheap. Goods and services cost an average of 14.5% more in New Jersey than across the country. Housing is also very expensive in the state. The median home value of $322,600 in New Jersey is considerably higher than the national median home value of $194,500.

Few states have a higher proportion of high-income households than New Jersey, where 10.9% earn $200,000 or more a year. While certainly not a guarantee for such high wages, high college attainment among adults in New Jersey partially explains the high median income. More than 37.6% of adults have at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 30.6% nationally.

• 3. Alaska
• Median household income: $73,355
• Population: 738,432 (3rd lowest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 6.5% (4th highest)
• Poverty rate: 10.3% (5th lowest)

A typical Alaska household earns $73,355 annually, nearly $18,000 more than the typical American household. While the price of oil has fallen considerably in recent years, Alaska still relies heavily on its traditionally high-paying oil industry. Of workers in the state, 5.6% work in the agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, and mining sector -- which includes the oil industry -- the sixth highest such share of any state. State workers who are employed in the industry likely still earn relatively high wages.

Like the nation, the percentage of people without health insurance in Alaska dropped substantially in 2015. However, 14.9% of residents still do not have health insurance, the second highest rate in the nation.

• 2. Hawaii
• Median household income: $73,486
• Population: 1,431,603 (11th lowest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 3.6% (6th lowest)
• Poverty rate: 10.6% (7th lowest)

With its picturesque island scenery, Hawaii attracts some of the world’s wealthiest individuals. The state is also home to some of the more valuable real estate. Hawaii’s median household income trails only Maryland as the highest in the country, and the median home value of $566,900 is the highest of any state and several times greater than the national median home value of $194,500. Even the richest states do not necessarily have especially healthy job markets, but Hawaii’s unemployment rate of 3.6% in 2015 was one of the lowest in the country.

• 1. Maryland
• Median household income: $75,847
• Population: 6,006,401 (19th highest)
• 2015 Unemployment rate: 5.2% (24th highest)
• Poverty rate: 9.7% (2nd lowest)

Maryland leads the nation with a median annual household income of $75,847. The state’s poverty rate of less than 10% is also nearly the lowest of any state. The prosperity can be partially explained by high levels of education among state residents. More than 38% of adults have at least a college degree, many of whom are likely among the state’s high-income residents. The state also contains Washington D.C., home to some of the nation’s highest-paying government occupations. More than 10% of Maryland workers are employed in public administration, which represents only one portion of such government jobs.

Didn't see your state? Click here to see the full list.

Click here to see America's most segregated cities.

Click here to see the healthiest city in every state.

Click here to see America's most violent (and peaceful) states.

Meet Two Guys Who Are Changing The Fate Of Real Estate

In 2010, I was at a low point in my life. I had lost my job in the mortgage industry and had been blackballed from working in the profession again. I reached out to my longtime friend and referral partner, Michael Reese and we met up at the Gengis Grill in Frisco, Texas. On that particular day, Mike was amped up. Now, he's an excitable guy anyway, but this day he was over the top.

He didn't know it, but I was there to ask him for a job. I had always admired his work ethic and I wanted to be a part of his team. As fate would have it, the "working for you" conversation never took place. Instead, we talked about the Internet and the future of real estate.

During the time we were talking, I just nodded and agreed with Mike, having no idea in the world what he was going on about, chatting about how he and his partner Jay Kinder were working on a way to streamline the real estate process by pairing online and offline processes together. Again, it was all gibberish to me, but it sounded interesting.

Flash forward six years to the moment I witnessed firsthand, the operation Jay and Mike had been dreaming of. It was just a few days ago that I was able to tour the National Association of Expert Advisors (NAEA) facilities in Dallas, Texas.

To say my mind was blown is an understatement.

I've seen my fair share of real estate operations. I've helped launch and run ads for some of the biggest real estate firms on the planet. Yet, I've never seen anything like the partner program Jay and Mike have created.

Nothing even comes close to what they've birthed.

Mr. Reese and Mr. Kinder have taken the monotony out of real estate. Matter of fact, they have automated all the work agents hate. Cold calls, email marketing, pipeline follow up, CRM management--the "hard work" has been removed from the equation through the use of Jay and Mike's business strategies.

The Kinder Reese model allows agents to focus on what they do best: real estate. When members of the NAEA partner program get a lead, it's a real live lead. Matter of fact, it's more than a lead. It's basically the handoff of a new client to the agent and the agent getting to work for them immediately.

Most real estate agents will joke as they agree; the knowledge acquired in order to pass the board exam is rarely used in the field. Serious agents know sales and marketing drive real estate. Yet, they don't teach sales and marketing in real estate school. With the NAEA model, agents can focus on using their real estate knowledge and leave the sales and marketing to the automation side of the operation.

This partner program is so game-changing, Mike and Jay plan on teaching the model and fully launching it at their upcoming Exponential Growth Summit (EGS) from October 9-11 in Dallas, Texas. Each year, Mike and Jay go all out with an amazing line of speakers, and this year, you can expect more of the same.

The current roster of speakers is the best to date. Darren Hardy from Success Magazine will come by and impart knowledge in his own amazing way. Dustin Black, CEO of Black Tie Moving, will be speaking on how he grew an idea into a multi-million dollar moving company in a crowded market, and in less than five years. Josh Altman of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles will be discussing real estate investing and how to sell high-end properties. Several other top tier speakers are also on the schedule. I'm one of them! I'll be speaking on selling in the modern marketplace.

Jay and Mike are revolutionizing the fate of real estate by altering the course of how real estate is bought and sold.

Their vision is so far into the future, it will be years before the big brands catch on.

Keep your eyes and ears out for these guys. Mark my words, "They will change the game."

The 25 Big Cities Where Your Paycheck Will Go The Furthest

Finding a job with a decent salary is a goal for many people, but maybe even more important is finding a place to live where your entire paycheck won’t be eaten up by housing costs.

An analysis from jobs site Glassdoor looked at the 50 biggest metro areas to see where your paycheck will go the furthest. To do so, the team compared local median salaries to local median home prices to come up with a cost of living ratio for each city. The higher the ratio, the better off you’d be financially.

If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you should consider looking for jobs in the Detroit area, according to Glassdoor, and you won’t have any luck on the West Coast. Here are the other 24 metro areas where your paycheck goes the furthest:

Glassdoor’s analysis doesn’t account for other living costs, such as transportation ― definitely a big one in Detroit, which has the highest rates for car insurance in the country.

“Though there are certainly other financial factors to consider when taking into account total cost of living, this data reinforces that pay typically goes further in mid-sized cities versus big metropolitan areas where there is often tighter competition for housing,” Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor chief economist, said in a statement.  

Read More:

• Here's How Much $100 Is Worth In Each State
• Here's How Much Money You Need To Make To Buy A Home
• Here’s How Much Income You Need To Afford Rent In Every State

Glassdoor determined the typical salary from reports users shared on the website from April 2015 to April 2016 ― at least 1,000 for each metro area. The median home prices come from the Zillow Home Value Index.

Nationwide, the biggest expenditure for families is housing, the Glassdoor report notes. About a third of Americans spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Spending 30 percent or less of your income is the amount typically deemed affordable, meaning a third of the country is struggling to afford housing.

Now you know a few places where it might be less of a struggle.  

HECM Reverse Mortgages: A Strategy For Seniors

Many senior homeowners are attracted to the idea of using a reverse mortgage to draw additional funds, but are so fearful of making a costly mistake involving their house, or being taken advantage of by loan providers, that they are immobilized and do nothing. The 3-step strategy described below is directed to them. It is risk-free because all three steps can be done without contacting a lender, using the HECM calculator on my web site, which was recently redesigned for this purpose.

The Three-Step Strategy

1. Identify your financial needs that might be met by a HECM.
2. Determine whether the amounts you can draw with a HECM, immediately or in the future, justify the decline in your home equity.
3. Narrow the selection by comparing price quotes from different lenders, and different combinations of interest rate and origination fee.

If you take the three steps and decide a HECM is not for you, that is the end of it - you are under absolutely no obligation to deal with any lender. If you decide to proceed, you can contact a lender with the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what your options are, and which options you want.

Step 1: Defining Your Financial Objectives

In counseling seniors about HECM reverse mortgages, I have found that they fall into 5 groups that have different financial objectives. Each of these groups requires different information to make good decisions. This information includes financial projections of future HECM debt, unused credit lines, and other factors over periods that are relevant to each individual borrower. Because none of the HECM calculators available on the internet provided this capacity, my colleagues and I decided to build it into ours.

The different financial objectives are as follows:

• Draw the largest possible initial or future credit line, with or without a cash draw.
• Draw the largest possible monthly payment for as long as you live in the house.
• Draw as much cash as possible, at closing or after 12 months.
• Draw a smaller monthly payment plus the largest possible credit line.
• Purchase a house with the smallest possible cash outlay.

Steps 2 and 3 For a Borrower Looking For the Largest Credit Line

I am going to illustrate Steps 2 and 3 for a 65-year old named Smith who has a house worth $400,000, who wants the largest possible credit line and is looking ahead 10 years. The credit lines calculated at Step 2 are based on prices posted on my web site by the lender whose HECM generated the lowest debt after 10 years of any of the lenders who price HECMs on my site. With this HECM, Smith could have obtained an initial credit line of $210,000, which if unused would grow to $330,000 in 10 years at current interest rates, and to $496,000 at the maximum rate on the HECM. The cost, measured by how much Smith would owe after 10 years in the absence of any draws, is $11,000 at current rates, $17,000 at the maximum rate.

Steps 2 and 3 For a Borrower Looking For the Largest Monthly Payment

Jones is the same age as Smith and her property value is the same, but Jones wants to use her borrowing power to draw the largest possible monthly stipend starting immediately, and lasting as long as she lives in her house. This is called a "monthly tenure payment." Jones wants to measure the cost of a HECM over 15 years rather than 10.

On September 3, the monthly payment on a HECM that would have resulted in the lowest debt after 15 years was $939. At current rates, she would owe $253,000. Assuming that Jones considers this a good deal, she should proceed to Step 3 and see if there isn't another deal that would be more advantageous. Among the possibilities is a tenure payment of $1161 that would generate a debt of $364,000 over 15 years. It is for Jones to decide whether an additional $222 a month was worth an additional $111,000 of future debt.

Bottom Line

I am not covering the remaining three categories of financial need because this analysis would be heavily repetitious. The important points are, first, that no matter what financial need category a senior falls into, a decision to take a HECM reverse mortgage or not should be data-based and include information about what is likely to happen in the future. Second, seniors who elect to go ahead with a HECM have options, and the more lenders from whom they obtain price quotes, the more options they have. But again, to select wisely from among their options, borrowers need information about what is likely to happen in the future. To my knowledge, such information is available only on my HECM reverse mortgage calculator.

5 Strategies I Used to Pay Off $81,000 In Student Loans

By Melanie Lockert, Content Writer at Credit Karma

Two degrees, nine years and over $81,000 later, I did something I had been dreaming about for years. I made the very last payment on my student loans and became debt-free.

When I graduated with my bachelor’s degree and $23,000 worth of student loan debt, I didn’t think much of it. After all, I had been told that college was worth the cost. I treated my debt like a bill and paid the minimum for several years.

It wasn’t until I took on an additional $58,000 in student loans to go to my dream school that I woke up and realized that I didn’t want to be in debt forever.

After obtaining my master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University, I made a commitment to get out of debt as soon as possible so I could live freely ― not in the shadow of debt.

Getting out of over $81,000 in student loan debt, not including interest, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but it was well worth it.

In order to get out of debt, I employed various strategies to help me reach my goal. Here’s what I did to reach my goal of debt freedom.

1. I employed the debt avalanche method.

There are two common methods people employ to pay off debt: the debt snowball method and the debt avalanche method.

Using the debt snowball method, borrowers pay off accounts with the smallest balances first, while paying the minimum on the rest of their loans. People like this method because it provides the feeling of quick wins and long-lasting motivation to keep paying off more debt.

The debt avalanche method, on the other hand, involves paying off accounts with the highest-interest debts first, while paying the minimum on the rest of their accounts. Borrowers can generally save more money using this strategy.

I went with the debt avalanche method ― paying the minimums on my low-balance, low-interest undergraduate loans while aggressively exceeding the minimum payments on my high-balance, high-interest graduate loans ― first paying off the 7.9 percent loans, then the 6.8 percent loans.

2. I calculated my daily interest to stay motivated.

When I graduated with my M.A. in 2011, I still had $68,000 of debt, and a lot of my payments were going to interest. One day, I decided to figure out how much interest I was paying per day.

To calculate my daily interest, I used the following formula:

Interest rate x current principal balance ÷ number of days in the year = daily interest

When I calculated my daily interest, I realized that I was paying roughly $10 per day, or $300 in interest each month.

After feeling discouraged about the state of my debt, I got angry that I was spending so much money on interest. From that moment forward, I used my anger to fuel my debt repayment and committed to getting out of debt as soon as possible.

3. I mastered the art of the side hustle.

In my first few years of debt repayment, I cut my budget to the bone and lived on very little. There wasn’t any room to cut back further, and the progress on my debt plateaued. I knew that I had to earn more to really make the progress I wanted to on my debt, so I started side hustling every chance I got, taking gigs on nights, weekends and early mornings.

I did anything I could to make an extra buck. Over the past few years, I’ve worked as:

• A pet-sitter.

• A brand ambassador.

• A house cleaner.

• A mother’s helper.

• A greeter for an art show.

• A registration attendant for a marathon.

During those years, the extra income really helped me to make higher payments toward my loans.

4. I made multiple payments throughout the month.

One of the best ways I combatted my debt was by making multiple payments throughout the month. Instead of making one monthly payment, I began making biweekly payments. Any time I had cash to spare, I made another payment.

5. I made student loan repayment my number one priority.

For better or worse, I prioritized my student loan payments over everything else. Over the past five years, I’ve focused on paying off my student loans by earning more, streamlining my expenses and increasing my payments.

Going all in helped me reach debt freedom several years earlier than if I had just paid the minimum payments and saved me money on interest payments.

Bottom line

It took me a total of nine years to pay off all my student loan debt, but the turning point was when I got really serious about my debt five years ago. I realized I didn’t have to be in debt for what felt like forever, and that I could make changes to my priorities and repayment strategies to get out of debt.

The hardest part was making the necessary lifestyle and attitude shifts required to get out of debt. While getting out of debt is obviously about money, it’s about mindset as well. Once I started to believe I could do it, committed to it and made the changes to my repayment strategies, I made it happen.

 

 About the author: Melanie Lockert is a freelance writer and editor currently living in Portland, Oregon. She is passionate about education, financial literacy and empowering people to take control of their finances. Her work has been featured on Rockstar Finance, GoGirl Finance, The Globe and Mail and more.

 

 

 

Credit Karma Editorial Note: The opinions you read here come from the Credit Karma editorial team. While compensation may affect which companies we write about and products we review, our marketing partners don’t review, approve or endorse our editorial content. Our content is accurate (to the best of our knowledge) when we initially post it, but we don’t guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided. You can visit the company’s website to get complete details about a product. See an error in an article? Use this form to report it to our editorial team.

Big Companies Backing Obama's Climate Agenda Also Fund Its Enemies

Many of the corporate giants touting their support for President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda are also backing that agenda’s biggest opponents. 

Companies including DuPont, Google and PepsiCo donated to droves of U.S. lawmakers who refuse to accept the scientific consensus on humanity’s role in climate change, according to a new analysis of public records by Reuters.

The report, published Tuesday, sheds new light on what is often a disconnect between the policies that large companies advocate for and the candidates behind whom they put their money. 

Reuters reviewed donations made during the 2016 election cycle by political action committees of the 30 biggest publicly traded U.S. companies that signed Obama’s “American Business Action on Climate Change Pledge.” The 2015 commitment, signed by 154 companies, served as a public promise by large businesses to push for environmentally friendly policies and to support strong climate action like the historic accord reached in Paris last December.

During the period reviewed by Reuters, two companies ― PepsiCo and the chemical giant DuPont ― doled out half or more of their political spending to the campaigns of more than 130 congressional lawmakers listed as “climate deniers” by Organizing For Action, a Democratic-leaning nonprofit founded by former Obama staffers. 

Google, AT&T, General Electric, Verizon and Mondelez gave more than a third of their political donations to candidates, almost all of them Republicans, on that list, Reuters found. (Verizon owns AOL, The Huffington Post’s parent company.)

A GE spokeswoman said in a statement that the company backs “elected officials based on a wide range of issues, but we have consistently been outspoken about the need to address climate change and have invested over $17 billion in cleaner technology R&D over the last 11 years.”

None of the other companies named above responded immediately to The Huffington Post’s requests for comment.

The Republican Party has long been the more business-friendly of America’s two parties, advocating for tax and employment policies that are favorable to companies’ bottom lines. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, members of the party ― particularly those with backing from the fossil fuel industries, like coal and oil ― have denied the role of human activity in causing global temperatures to rise. Obama has slammed Republicans for being “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change.” 

That has produced a schism between some big businesses and the party that claims to represent their interests.

Last September, an unlikely coalition of companies ― including Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, Johnson & Johnson and Walmart ― committed to using 100 percent renewable energy within a decade.

Corporate purchases of clean energy skyrocketed last year ahead of the Paris treaty, which was formally ratified last week by China’s parliament. This was particularly true among companies that had never bought renewable power before. Of the more than 20 corporate giants that inked major renewable energy deals last year, 15 of them were first-time buyers, accounting for 67 percent of the market, according to a report by the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute.

Rocky Mountain Institute

First-time corporate purchases of renewable energy for this year already top those in 2011 and 2012 combined.

Still, the tension between certain companies’ political spending and their stated environmental values is sometimes hard to ignore. In June, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wrote an op-ed lambasting companies for failing to lobby on behalf of climate-friendly policies. He criticized firms like PepsiCo for remaining part of trade associations that fail to acknowledge climate change, or that even deny its risks outright.

“Washington’s dirty secret is that even the American companies that are really good on sustainability put net zero effort into lobbying Congress on climate change,” he wrote in Forbes. “We are far closer to getting something big done on climate in Congress than most people think, but the good guys in the corporate sector have to start showing up.”

But there may be cause for optimism, according to Anne Kelly, a senior program director at the nonprofit Ceres, which pushes investors and companies to take environmental risk and sustainability seriously.

By backing candidates who question the science behind climate change, some companies could gain influence over those candidates and sway them to more climate-friendly positions, Kelly said.

“Our hope is that by funding certain lawmakers whose positions on climate and energy do not match the companies’ positions, they’re actually encouraging those lawmakers to evolve and giving them cover,” Kelly told HuffPost on Tuesday. “We understand that lawmaking is complicated and [companies] may need the support of those people for other issues that may have nothing to do with climate or energy, though that’s not an excuse.”

When to Jump, an independent media partner of The Huffington Post, is a curated community featuring the ideas and stories of people who have made the decision to leave something comfortable and chase a passion.

Break-Ups to Boss Babes

I owe it all to the ex-boyfriends. Shout out to them all.

If I hadn’t had failed so many times in my relationships, I never would’ve started a blog in college venting about my dating woes. If I never started that blog, I wouldn’t have written over 10,000 hours for it - learning the ins and outs of what to post, when to post, blog imagery, captions, template styles and personal branding.

The blog took a back seat in the priority bus when I was hired to takeover the marketing and branding strategy for a luxury goods store in Greenville, South Carolina. The job required me to have a public role in the community and attend networking events, luncheons and dinners with decision makers. I loved every second of it. I was living in the literal lap of luxury. Surrounded by glamour, working with brands big and influential - I was totally enraptured by the lobster dinners and fancy wines.

Then an event happened that changed me. I flew up North to fall in love — but it was unreciprocated. In retrospect, that was the best thing that happened to me. I remember my snotty, tear-stained face pressed to the window as I flew home. I knew I couldn’t be the same person who flew up 700 miles trying to make meaning of her life with a stranger she barely knew. I had gotten so off-track spiritually — I needed to find a purpose for my beating heart.

So, I moved home, regrouped financially, and took a moment to strategize.

Two months later I launched a new blog, www.ashleybrownwriting.com, that focused its attentions on telling diverse stories. For six months I balanced my full-time job with my blog, writing about new businesses, minorities, and the under-represented. The more I wrote, the more I noticed the difference some of the stories were making in my community. My hits skyrocketed when I covered Latinos making a difference. I did a 10 Most Eligible Bachelors of Greenville, South Carolina, that helped the hidden nice guys get the female attention they deserve.

After six months I hit 100,000 views and decided to leave my full-time job to start a marketing strategy company. My employer became one of my clients and within two weeks I had a full plate for the next six months. It’s kind of unreal how quick everything has happened and I feel very blessed. Whenever my head gets too big, God knocks it back down with a dose of reality. I’ve started to develop a niche in my market working with female entrepreneurs and female-owned businesses. Women own one out of every four businesses in Greenville, South Carolina. I’d like to see that number rise.

Writing is where my heart lies. I’m working on pieces about addiction in marriage, homelessness in Greenville and women’s sexual health. I also write about young business owners as they launch their businesses and need press. When I saw how many people actually read this thing, I woke up and realized that I have to hold my business and myself accountable to making a difference. It’s not about me or my legacy, but about using this platform to help people connect, grow and heal together.

The blog pulls about 10–15 story requests daily and I’ve had to learn the hard way how to balance that with the commitments of running a business. 80 hour weeks don’t feel like 80 hour weeks when you’re working for yourself though — I think a lot of entrepreneurs say that.

I decided to take the jump when my heart screamed for me to listen. The more I listen to my heart, the more alive I feel. Naturally I was terrified, but the thought of not listening to my heart and never growing scared me even more. I jumped as quickly as I could, full force.

Initially, I was so afraid of what people would say that I didn’t tell friends or family until after I had already lined up the office space, done the paperwork, met with the lawyers, accountants and given my notice at work. My heart was pushing me to take this risk and I was afraid that someone might sit me down and encourage me to table the idea until later down the road.

I greeted my own fears as old friends and began to welcome them instead of pretending I was some fearless maverick. When I announced my decision and some people were skeptical I laughed with them instead of taking their fears of my failure to heart.

I think the key to success is learning to love failure. I’ve failed 1,000 times. The first 999 times I failed were scary. But by the 1000th time I started to laugh at myself and my astounding ability to fail on such a grand level. In retrospect, I’m grateful for all my dating and career mishaps now. Every single one of them pushed me to believe in myself and to encourage other women to take the jump and follow their passions.

As my Queen Beyonce says, if someone tells you that your dreams are too big, “Tell them boy, bye.”

Boy, bye.

When to Jump, an independent media partner of The Huffington Post, is a curated community featuring the ideas and stories of people who have made the decision to leave something comfortable and chase a passion. You can follow When to Jump on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For more stories like this one, sign up for the When to Jump newsletter here. (Note: The When to Jump newsletter is not managed by The Huffington Post.)

The Battle For The Future Of Transportation Seems Imminent

Pay no attention to the cordial press releases. Google ― sorry, Alphabet ― sure looks like it’s thinking about taking on Uber.

Earlier this week, Google announced that its popular Waze app, which offers crowd-sourced navigation and has 65 million active users, plans to explore a carpooling feature in the Bay Area sometime this fall.

At around the same time, David Drummond ― chief legal officer at Alphabet, the parent company of Google ― announced his resignation from Uber’s board of directors. Drummond’s departure ends a three-year stint with the company that began in 2013, when Google invested $360 million in Uber.

Both companies released statements attesting to their continued collaborative spirit. “I wish David and Alphabet the best, and look forward to continued cooperation and partnership,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said. Drummond said that Google Ventures “remains an enthusiastic investor and Google will continue to partner with Uber.”

Still, it’s hard not to read this week’s events as signs that Google is planning to get into the ride-hailing game in a big way.

Not mentioned in the official company statements: Uber had intentionally shut both Drummond and Google Ventures CEO David Krane out of board meetings for “a significant amount of time” prior, reports The Information.

Also not mentioned: Earlier this month, Uber announced that it had acquired Otto, a self-driving truck company that counts among its co-founders ― who else? ― Anthony Levandowski, one of the minds behind Google’s self-driving research, and Lior Ron, an alumnus of Google Maps.

With the announcement of the new Waze carpooling feature, charmingly called “WazeRider,” it seems things are coming to a head.

“Considering that Waze reportedly has more than 50 million users, Google is arguably more knowledgeable — and has more insight — towards driving habits than any other company on the planet,” Kelley Blue Book analyst Michael Harley told NBC, adding that this is likely just “the tip of this emerging iceberg [in the] rapidly evolving ride-sharing wave.”

From a financial perspective, if Google is indeed planning to storm the ride-hailing world, it’s doing so at an opportune time. Uber announced last week that it’s already lost over $1 billion this year in its unsuccessful battle for Chinese market share, and it needs to clean up its balance sheet ahead of a potential IPO. And rumors persist that Lyft is shopping itself around for a corporate buyer (Lyft denies these.)

Google’s pockets are sufficiently deep to make a grand entrance into this space if it wants. Perhaps even more importantly, it has the detailed mapping data necessary to actually put self-driving cars on the road ― an ultimate goal for Uber, Lyft and many other companies.

“Nominally, you can do autonomous driving without high-definition maps,” Sam Abuelsamid, senior research analyst at Navigant Research, told Popular Mechanics earlier this summer. “But if you get into challenging situations like rainy or snowy conditions, or can’t see the curbs or lane markings, it’s almost like putting a blind person behind the wheel.”

WordPress Is Great, But It's Not Always The Best Solution

Before I dive into this slightly controversial topic, I want to make something readily clear:

This post is not an attack against WordPress. I use it. I know it. It's great!

With that being said, even though WordPress is one of the most beloved website building systems out there and powers 25% of the internet, that doesn't mean it's the best choice for everyone in the world who wants to build one.

Why not? Here are some reasons why.

Four Reasons WordPress May Not Be For You

It's Free, and That Get's Costly

Say what? How can something free get costly?

Well, think about it. Let's say you're planning to start a blog for your business.

There are many things that you need for a WordPress blog to work for your marketing purposes. Aside from spending time creating content, there is a lot of other expenses that you will incur:

• Hosting
• An SSL certificate
• WordPress Themes
• WordPress Plugins
• Paying for Support when things go wrong (and they do go wrong)

It may not seem like this stuff adds up, but over time and depending on what you need, it can get very expensive.

The Elegant Themes blog, an authority blog on all things WordPress, had this to say about it costs:

"After everything is added together, it can cost as little as $72.99 per year and as much as $33,162.18 per year to run a WordPress site."

That's a big price range. Now, chances are you're not going to be that person who is dropping $33K a year on a website. But realistically, you should expect to spend around $800 a year on it.

Need a visual? Here's the how that adds up.

The WordPress.org CMS software (that's the one we're talking about here) is free, but you need to pay for hosting.

To be clear, prices and features of some of the top WordPress hosting providers all vary, but let's just say you choose a hosting platform like Siteground.

Using them will run you an initial cost at $59.40 for that first year including the domain and domain privacy.

Keep in mind that this is only for the first year. Next year, the price will go up.

And now that you have hosting and WordPress installed, you need a theme. You could go the cheap route and only use a free theme. But eventually, you're going to want a new theme with more features that suit you.

You could find a popular theme like the ones on FancyThemes or CreativeMarket which will run you a cost between $35-$100+ or you may decide to choose a popular framework like Genesis which will cost you around $129 for both the Genesis Theme and a Child Theme.

After this, you need to spend time setting up the theme. And if you've never done this before and have no idea how to use WordPress, then you can count on a weekend full of troubleshooting. (More on this in a bit.)

But even after you have that done, you still need premium plugins like SumoMe to do things like collect emails, and you'll want a good email marketing platform like MailChimp or ConvertKit that allows for easier email automation.

And let's not forget the SSL Certificate.

Google has recently released that HTTPS (using an SSL Certificate which gives that little green security as seen above) would be a new ranking signal and if you're thinking that it's something you'll ignore for now, don't.

Google has stated that "over time, we may decide to strengthen it because we'd like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web."

WordPress.org sites and most hosting don't come with SSL, but you have a few options when adding it to your site:

• Try to add a free SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt to your site.
• Buy an SSL certificate through your host provider and have them install it.

The first option will save you money since it's free, but it's an absolute nightmare to try and do it yourself so I wouldn't advise it.

The best option is to have you host provider install it, but that also means that you'll be out a bit more money. Most hosts sell SSL certificates from anywhere between $80 to $150 depending on your needs -- and that's an annual rate.

While it can be costly, it's something that Google is pushing, so you should really consider this move now before they push it harder.

Now, let's add that up the cost:

• $59.40 for hosting (first year's price)
• $82 SSL Certificate (annual cost)
• $129 for Genesis Framework (one-time fee)
• $240 for SumoMe (annual cost)
• $348 for ConvertKit (annual cost)

Rough total = $858.40 for first-year costs

Obviously, you could shop this down, but these aren't the sort of things to scrimp on when you're trying to run an online business.

WordPress Is Free, And That Means Support Is Hard To Come By

Like anything tech related, WordPress is going to have its glitches. Something as simple as updating WordPress, or themes and plugins, can wipe an entire site or end in what we in the WP community call "The White Screen of Death."

When that happens, you're going to want help fixing it 'cause that ain't easy to do alone.

But since WordPress is free, you won't find much support for fixing these issues except via the online forum. For real help, you'll need either really good hosting support or to go in search of someone who can fix the issue for you, and those people are even harder to find if you don't know where to look.

It's frustrating and has left many people with no choice but to start from scratch again.

Comes With A Learning Curve

While those who are considered more tech savvy can pick up WordPress rather quickly, there are some of us out there who just don't get it right away. If you've hit a little snag when trying to learn how to use it, don't feel bad.

There is a lot to learn when you've never touched it before. And I'm not just talking about how to create a new page or blog post, but the other things that go into it like:

• How to care and maintain a site that runs on WordPress
• If and when to update Plugins and Themes so that you don't break something
• Learning and using features within a Theme, and so on

Whether we like it or not, WordPress does come with a learning curve and it may take you quite a bit longer to learn how to use it than you previously thought.

Designing A Website Is Not That Easy

Learning curve aside, the biggest issue that most people gripe about with WordPress is that designing a site with it is tough.

And while there are page builders out there that make this easier, if you're not a web designer, adding those little touches that take a website to the next level is not going to be easy.

If you do decide to go the route of using a page-builder, just know that these also come with a learning curve. So no matter what, you'll have to learn a lot before you can design anything.

Wrapping It Up

These are just four of the main reasons why WordPress may not be the right choice for you. There are a lot of other choices out there that could be an even better fit. And if you're worried that WordPress is the only platform you can build a business on, don't fret.

There are a ton of people out there who have million dollar businesses on platforms other than WordPress and reaped the benefits.

For example, rockstar blogger Mariah Coz runs a $100K a month blog and has done six figure course launches with her SquareSpace powered site. Millionaire blogger Chris Ducker runs his blog on the RainMaker Platform as it offers a lot of marketing tools that suit him.

And the digital agency, WebAct uses the responsive website builder by Duda to create small business sites and high converting landing pages all the time. This list is obviously not exhaustive, but the point I want to drive home is this:

You don't need WordPress to run a profitable website or business.

There are a lot of great choices out there for building a website. And while many decide that WordPress is the way to go, others may want and need something else, and that's okay.

WordPress is just a tool for your business, and sometimes, it's the wrong tool for the job at hand.

Now it's just up to your own due diligence in figuring out if you should hop on the WordPress wagon or not. Either way, you know your business and goals best so whatever choice you make is the one you can rest easy with.

How To Know Whether Mortgage Refinancing Pays

If you took out a 7.5% mortgage in 1994 and still have it, refinancing it in a 3.5% market is a no-brainer; you don't need much analysis to know that refinancing into today's rates will pay. The only possible reason that such mortgages still exist is a marked deterioration in the borrowers' credit, in the value of the home, or in the borrower's mental capacity.

If you took out a 5.5% mortgage in 2004, the case for refinancing is not as strong but, barring deterioration of the types indicated above, it is strong enough to move with confidence.

The challenging case is when your mortgage is at 4% from 2014. This is a situation where the rate reduction might or might not be large enough to offset the costs of the refinance. This article will explain the valid approach to answering the question, and an invalid approach used by loan officers that is all too common .

Factors That Affect the Profitability of a Refinance

A refinance pays if the sum of all the costs arising from the refinance during the period you expect to have it is less than the sum of the costs of the old mortgage over the same period. Costs on only the new loan include points and other origination charges paid at closing. Costs on both the new and existing mortgage include monthly payments of principal and interest, mortgage insurance premiums if any, and lost interest on upfront and monthly costs. In both cases, tax savings and the reduction in loan balance are benefits that must be deducted from total costs.

Yes, this is a formidable list but I have made it easy for you with my refinance calculator Refinancing One FRM Into Another to Lower Net Cost. The calculator will prompt you for all the required inputs and indicate why they are needed. This calculator assumes that you have only one fixed-rate mortgage that is refinanced into another, and that you don't take any cash out of the transaction. Other refinance calculators are available for borrowers who have an adjustable rate mortgage, or a second mortgage, or want cash from the transaction. See Find a Refinance Calculator.

The calculator indicates that a borrower with a 4% 30-year mortgage that is 3 years old would benefit by refinancing it into a new 3.25% loan, and benefit even more by selecting a 15-year mortgage at 2.5%. With a loan balance of $360,000, the savings over 10 years would be about $17,000 on refinancing into a new 30-year, and about $49,000 when the new loan is for 15 years.

Don't Be Led Astray by a Spurious "Break-Even Period"

Another approach to whether or not you will save on a refinance is to calculate a break-even period - the period over which costs of the old loan and the new loan are equal. The larger the spread between the new interest rate and the rate on your existing loan, and the smaller the cost of the new loan, the shorter the break-even period. If you are confident that you will have the new mortgage longer than the break-even period, you will benefit from the refinance. My calculator shows the breakeven period, in addition to the cost comparison over the period you specify.

But beware! The break-even period is not the cost of the new loan divided by the reduction in the monthly mortgage payment. Many loan officers use this rule of thumb, which completely ignores how rapidly you pay off the new loan as opposed to the old one. Borrowers following this rule would never refinance into a shorter term loan because of the increase in payment, although the total benefit including the pay-down of the loan balance is substantially greater on refinancing into a 15-year loan, as indicated above. The rule of thumb does not work for any borrower who is concerned with how long they have to pay, which should be every borrower.

Combining the Refinance Analysis With Mortgage Shopping

The answers generated by refinance calculators are no better than the current mortgage prices the user must enter to make the calculators work. The calculators on my web site were developed at a time when users were on their own in finding the prices at which they could borrow in the current market. But that is no longer the case. You can now price shop and assess whether a refinance will pay in a single operation on my site.

The "Refinance Mortgage Shoppers" calculator gives you an input form that includes all the factors that affect your mortgage price in today's market, and also includes information about your current mortgage. The calculator will show the costs over the period you stipulate, using the best prices quoted by the lenders who report their prices to my site, on all the new loans for which you qualify, and also for your existing mortgage if you retain it. You can thus shop for the best terms on a new loan, and you can select the new loan type that generates the largest saving over your current loan.

For more information on refinancing or paying off your mortgage faster, visit my website The Mortgage Professor.

Here's How America Can Solve Its Steel Crisis

China is gorging itself on steelmaking. It is forging so much steel that the entire world doesn’t need that much steel.

Companies in the United States and Europe, and unions like mine, the United Steelworkers, have spent untold millions of dollars to secure tariffs on imports of this improperly government-subsidized steel. Still China won’t stop. Diplomats have elicited promises from Chinese officials that no new mills will be constructed. Still they are. Chinese federal officials have written repeated five-year plans in which new mills are banned. Yet they are built.

All of the dog-eared methods for dealing with this global crisis in steel have failed. So American steel executives and steelworkers and hundreds of thousands of other workers whose jobs depend on steel must hope that President Barack Obama used his private meeting with China’s President XI Jinping Saturday to press for a novel solution. Because on this Labor Day, 14,500 American steelworkers and approximately 91,000 workers whose jobs depend on steel are out of work because China won’t stop making too much steel. 

A new report on the crisis, titled “Overcapacity in Steel, China’s Role in a Global Problem,” by the Duke University Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness flatly concludes that existing policies to stop China from building excessive steel capacity have failed.

Since 2007, China has added 552 million metric tons of steel capacity – an amount that is equivalent to seven times the total U.S. steel production in 2015. China did this while repeatedly promising to cut production. China did this while the United States actually did cut production, partly because China exported to the United States illegitimately subsidized, and therefore underpriced, steel.

That forced the closure or partial closure of U.S. mills, the layoffs of thousands of skilled American workers, the destruction of communities’ tax bases and the threat to national security as U.S. steelmaking capacity contracted.

Although China, the world’s largest net exporter of steel, knows it makes too much steel and has repeatedly pledged to cut back, it plans to add another 41 million metric tons of capacity by 2017, with mills that will provide 28 million metric tons already under construction.

None of this would make sense in a capitalist, market-driven system. But that’s not the system Chinese steel companies operate in. Chinese mills don’t have to make a profit. Many are small, inefficient and highly polluting. They receive massive subsidies from the federal and local governments in the form of low or no-interest loans, free land, cash grants, tax reductions and exemptions and preferential access to raw materials including below market prices.

That’s all fine if the steel is sold within China. But those subsidies violate international trade rules when the steel is exported. 

These are the kinds of improper subsidies that enable American and European companies to get tariffs imposed. But securing those penalties requires companies and unions to pay millions to trade law experts and to provide proof that companies have lost profits and workers have lost jobs. So Americans must bleed both red and green before they might see limited relief.

The Duke report suggests that part of the problem is that market economies like those in the United States and Europe are dealing with a massive non-market economy like China and expecting the rules to be the same. They just aren’t.

Simply declaring that China is a market economy, which is what China wants, would weaken America’s and Europe’s ability to combat the problems of overcapacity.  For example, the declaration would complicate securing tariffs, the tool American steel companies need to continue to compete when Chinese companies receive improper subsidies.

The Duke report authors recommend instead delaying action on China’s request for market economy status until China’s economic behavior is demonstrably consistent with market principles.

The authors of the Duke report also suggest international trade officials consider new tools for dealing with trade disputes because the old ones have proved futile in resolving the global conflict with China over its unrelenting overcapacity in steel, aluminum and other commodities.

For example, under the current regime, steel companies or unions must prove serious injury to receive relief. The report suggests: “changing the burden of proof upon a finding by the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement panel of a prohibited trade-related practice, or non-compliance with previous rulings by the WTO.”

It also proposes multilateral environmental agreements with strict pollution limits. Under these deals, companies in places like the United States and Europe that must comply with strong pollution standards would not be placed at an international disadvantage as a result, and the environment would benefit as well. 

In addition to the family-supporting steelworker jobs across this country that would be saved by innovative intervention to solve this crisis, at stake as well are many other jobs and the quality of jobs.

The Congressional Steel Caucus wrote President Obama before he left last week on his trip to Hangzhou for the G-20 Summit asking that he secure the cooperation of China and pointing out the large number of downstream jobs that are dependent on steel.

Also last week, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report titled “Union Decline Lowers Wages of Nonunion Workers.” It explained that the ability of union workers to boost nonunion workers’ pay weakened as the percentage of private-sector workers in unions fell from about 33 percent in the 1950s to about 5 percent today.

The EPI researchers found that nonunion private sector men with a high school diploma or less education would receive weekly wages approximately 9 percent higher if union density had remained at 1979 levels. That’s an extra $3,172 a year.

Many steelworkers are union workers. If those jobs disappear, that would mean fewer family-supporting private sector union jobs. And that would mean an even weaker lift to everyone else’s wages.

America has always been innovative. Now it must innovate on trade rules to save its steel industry, its steel jobs and all those jobs that are dependent on steel jobs.