Wendy’s (WEN) said that self-service ordering kiosks will be made available across its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year as minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market push up wages.
So it came as something of a surprise when Chamath Palihapitiya — Sri Lankan war refugee, early Facebook employee, investor in Slack and Box, part owner of the Golden State Warriors — told Vanity Fair in March that if we are in fact in the early stages of a second tech collapse, venture capitalists have only their own mediocre, clubby selves to blame. They should, he said, “focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious. Right now we haven’t done enough of that, and the result is that most of the things we’ve funded are mostly crap and largely worthless.”
It is now certain that President Obama will be the only U.S. president in history that did not deliver a single calendar year of 3.0%+ economic growth, and the fourth-worst in history in terms of average RGDP growth while in office.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 160,000 in April, the weakest gain since September, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate held steady at 5%, but the share of Americans participating in the labor force dipped after earlier signs of stabilization.
What happened? Technology happened, and we need come to grips with the reality that new technologies and new skill requirements are demanding new ways to prepare our future workforce. By 2025, 65 percent of all job openings in California will require some form of postsecondary education, according to Dr. Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. California — of all states – should be leading the nation on delivering this, but unfortunately, we’re not keeping up.
But for reasons that defy common sense, many of our larger school districts assume that all students are bound for four-year colleges, even though a relatively small number of those who make it through high school will, in fact, earn bachelor degrees.
“If the parent screwed up things, and if the principal’s no good, if the principal can’t lead, if the superintendent isn’t very good, if the local school board isn’t so good, what makes you think that the Legislature can fix it,” Brown told the invitation-only audience.
However, America’s prolonged period of economic growth and fiscal stasis has been eroding. From 2001 through 2008, annual real GDP growth averaged just 2.1 percent. Over the last seven years, it has fallen another third – averaging just 1.4 percent from 2009 through 2016. Combined over the last 15 years, America’s economy has averaged an anemic 1.8 percent real annual growth – just over half its average from 1946 through 2000.
State auditor Elaine Howle said the findings undercut an argument UC has been making for years that supplemental fees paid by nonresident students have subsidized slots for thousands of Californians no longer supported by taxpayer funds. She said the university provided no correlation between out-of-state and resident enrollment.
Now a recently released report from the state demographer charts how the steady stream of new business may be prodding along major demographic shifts, as the state’s population skyrockets — largely the result of record-breaking migration from elsewhere in the United States.
More than half of Bay Area residents think the region will experience a significant economic downturn within the next five years, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Bay Area Council.
Travelers in the Bay Area spent more than $33 billion in 2015, which supported 248,300 jobs for residents and provided $2.8 billion in state and local tax revenue, according to Visit California’s annual economic impact report. The Bay Area was the largest regional contributor to a statewide tourism economy that topped $122 billion, sustained 1,064,000 jobs and generated $9.9 billion in state and local tax revenue – all record figures.
In the first three months of 2016, Los Angeles and Long Beach took in 37% of all imports to the country arriving in containers, down from 43% during the same period in 2007.
Only 37% of American 12th-graders were academically prepared for college math and reading in 2015, a slight dip from two years earlier, according to test scores released Wednesday.
