Gen Plus

There are two aspects to the LA Auto Show that have captured my attention this year.  The first is the innovation that is emerging in sustainable energy (and I’ll have a post just on the green cars I enjoyed test driving.)  The second is the continual shakeup in the auto industy — this time at GM. 
By now, everyone knows [...]

When I was a kid, it was considered a very bad practice to incur any kind of credit.  If you couldn’t pay, you couldn’t buy.  Even when I was in university, there were no credit card companies vying for our business…if you didn’t have the money, you were out of luck.  We scoured second hand [...]

Right now, people who run their own businesses are very, very busy.  They are either experiencing a little surge because so many of their competitors have gone belly-up (think about 10 printing companies going down…the one that is left will possibly have more business than it can handle), or they are working very hard to [...]

By now, the news of  Republican Senator Jim DeMint’s comments to the GOP that defeating healthcare reform would “break” Obama is old news.  That conference call comment struck such a sad, sad chord in my heart.  The polarization of politics has absolutley trumped the welfare of the American people.  Isn’t this country supposed to be about [...]

It is amazing what one can do without.  After decades of conspicuous consumption, most of us are cutting back even further than we ever thought we’d have to.  When you are without a job, it isn’t a question of just becoming more budget-conscious, but in this economy, where every day even MORE jobs are being [...]

Some days I feel like I’m a character in a 1945 black and white depression story, where there are food bank lineups, girls with holes in their socks and boys with holes in the toes of their shoes.  Characters meet on the streets and rather than greeting each other with the typical LA style, “Hey, [...]

I subscribe to the newsletter put out by Weddle’s (a career consulting, research, and publishing firm), and today, a very good article caught my eye.  This one is all about micro-careers.  I’ve referred to the shiftin the past as “career-chunking”, but I like the term “micro-career” very much.  The concept is simple — we will have many careers [...]

I was so sad to hear the final toll on what the world had come to know as a mainstay of the American economy.  I realize it isn’t truly a final bell.  The company will restructure/reorg into a leaner, meaner, more competitive entity.  But in the meantime thousands and thousands of workers, who know no [...]

When I first moved to Los Angeles in 1996 there was nothing that impressed or distressed me as much as trying to navigate the freeways.  I had never experienced so many cars, in so many lanes, so close together, and sometimes driving so fast…others not moving at all….
But everywhere you looked — ahead, behind, to [...]

Every political pundit, economist and writer is trying to capitalize on the economic challenges that the majority of Americans are facing today. There are articles and books on how to mitigate your risk, how to recapture your market losses, how to market yourself in one of the toughest employment periods in recent history. You want [...]