Business

There may never be a better time for sellers to put their homes on the market. “If you need to sell because of marriage, divorce, having a baby, aging, or relocating, it’s a great time to take advantage of this seller’s market,” says Alan Smith, broker-owner and one of three partners at RE/MAX Professionals. But for buyers, it’s a different story. With limited supply and some buyers who have deep enough pockets to offer thousands over the list price, many average buyers feel squeezed out. Denver area real estate…

By Shira Ovide, The New York Times Company Perhaps you have an image in your mind of people who get brainwashed by YouTube. You might picture your cousin who loves to watch videos of cuddly animals. Then out of the blue, YouTube’s algorithm plops a terrorist recruitment video at the top of the app and continues to suggest ever more extreme videos until he is persuaded to take up arms. A new analysis adds nuance to our understanding of YouTube’s role in spreading beliefs that are far outside the mainstream. A group of…

By Tara Siegel Bernard, The New York Times Company The women logged on from Alaska, Florida and points in between, excited and nervous. The energy was palpable in the chat stream, which bubbled with the kind of quick and candid confessions that emerge in a room of virtual strangers. One said she was so teary-eyed with happiness that someone must be cutting onions. Another said she was so wound up that she could vomit. Encouragement and expletives flowed freely. But one user’s request to Tori Dunlap got directly to the…

By Cade Metz, The New York Times Company SAN FRANCISCO — At OpenAI, one of the world’s most ambitious artificial intelligence labs, researchers are building technology that lets you create digital images simply by describing what you want to see. They call it DALL-E in a nod to both “WALL-E,” the 2008 animated movie about an autonomous robot, and Salvador Dalí, the surrealist painter. OpenAI, backed by $1 billion in funding from Microsoft, is not yet sharing the technology with the general public. But on a recent…

Money is a touchy subject in relationships — even in friendships. If you make less than your friends, you may feel less-than; make more and you risk taking on too many financial favors or coming across as out of touch. Nearly half of millennial and Gen Z respondents in a 2017 PayPal survey cited money as impacting a friendship. A 2018 Credit Karma/Qualtrics survey found nearly 40 percent of millennials spent money they didn’t have and went into debt to keep up with peers. According to a 2021 survey from Insider, people…

In times of crisis, there is no good; there’s only a best course of action, given the circumstances. Is crypto good in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Is it bad? Neutral? It’s a hard question to answer. Cryptocurrency is now a more mainstream part of the global financial system, which means that — for better or for worse — it’s inevitably a part of international conflict, too. This is on full display as Russian forces invade Ukraine. Some Ukrainians are also turning to crypto as an alternative to…

In April 2020, we reached out to screenwriters Ryan and Julie (not their real names) to learn how the entertainment industry was dealing with the still-nascent pandemic. Ryan was earning $18 an hour prior to being laid off; Julie was earning $16.50 in a union-protected job. Now that Hollywood is effectively back in business, we got back in touch with Ryan and Julie, now aged 41 and 34, to learn how Covid-19 changed the industry — and how these changes have affected their lives and finances. Ryan: I was on unemployment…

Some of the angriest emails I’ve ever gotten from readers were over a story about credit card points. The long and short of it is that the fancier the credit card rewards, the higher the swipe fees for merchants. Those merchants often pass along the costs of those swipe fees to all customers, whatever the payment mechanism. People who pay with rewards cards tend to be more well-off, financially, and their hotel points or flight miles are being, in part, subsidized by people paying in cash or debit who tend to be…

Let’s get this out of the way first: I was wrong about inflation. When prices began ticking up a little faster than normal early last year, I wasn’t overly concerned. I’d been covering economic policy since 2008, and in that whole time (in fact, in my whole lifetime!), the US had never had a problem with excess inflation. In fact, our main inflation problem was that we had too little of it. The Federal Reserve, which is tasked with managing the money supply to keep inflation steady and unemployment low, set a low…

At the end of 2021, Food52, a company that sells cookware and gives away recipes, announced it had received a fresh $80 million in investment money from its owner, the Chernin Group. “The company is performing extremely well — way ahead of where we had anticipated,” a Chernin executive explained at the time. Fast-forward to April 2022: Food52 has laid off 20 people — 5 percent of its staff. A PR rep for the company described the cuts as a “realignment” — moving resources from one part of the company to another. But…