Tuesday morning news drop
The Big Soak As floodwaters engulfed Abbotsford’s Sumas Prairie, I went there to gather images and hear from people affected. (Tyee)
How to build back B.C.’s flood infrastructure better Ninety-six per cent of dikes in the Lower Mainland are not high enough to block extreme floods. Some experts say we have to think beyond concrete. (Narwhal)
Before-and-after satellite images show flood devastation in B.C.'s Sumas Prairie Historic rainfall flooded farm fields, forced evacuations and killed livestock (CBC)
The Tamagotchi Was Tiny, but Its Impact Was Huge It’s been 25 years since the little device first hit store shelves, but its simple brilliance lives on in today’s most popular games. (Wired)
This Is Jerome Powell’s Shot at a Volcker Moment—in Reverse It took courage to lift rates in 1979 to kill inflation. The gutsy move for today may be to stand fast until we have more jobs. (BusinessWeek)
Two Things That Are Both True: (1) The U.S. consumer is in excellent shape considering we went through the worst quarterly GDP contraction on record last year. Wages are rising, net worth is at all-time highs, credit card debt is down, home equity has skyrocketed and 401k balances are as high as they’ve ever been. (2) Inflation is higher than it’s been in more than 30 years. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
The Great Resignation Is Great for Low-Paid Workers Despite all the talk about burnout and reevaluating priorities, the soaring quits rate has little to do with white-collar jobs. It’s more about lower-income people getting the chance to move up. (Bloomberg)
How Twitter got research right: While other tech giants hide from their researchers It’s always of note when a tech platform takes one of those unflattering findings and publishes it for the world to see. At the end of October, Twitter did just that. (Verge)
The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere The joys—and absurdities—of finding oneself abandoned in a desolate landscape. (New Yorker)
How the Real Estate Boom Left Black Neighborhoods Behind While homeownership has been an engine of prosperity for white Americans, home values in places like Orange Mound in southeast Memphis have languished. What would it take to catch up? (New York Times)
Do property assessments have a bias? I recently read an article about the atrocious inequity and potential corruption embedded in property assessments in New York. In short, due to the way property assessments are done there, some luxury condos ended up with very low property taxes while regular homes paid more than their fair share. The Bloomberg news investigation showed that tax assessments systematically favored higher end properties by valuing them lower than their market value. (House Hunt Victoria)