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☆ University of California academic workers end weeks-long strike
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-24 | by ( Kanishka Singh | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

[1/2] Academic workers at UC San Diego walk out as thousands of employees at the University of California campuses have gone on strike in an effort to secure improved pay and working conditions in San Diego, California, U.S., November 14, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File PhotoDec 23 (Reuters) - University of California (UC) academic workers ended a nearly six-week strike on Friday that unions described as the biggest work stoppage ever at a U.S. institution of higher education. Thousands of academic workers went on strike at UC campuses throughout the state on Nov. 14, forming picket lines and staging noisy protests to demand better wages for teaching assistants and others. Some 48,000 academic workers represented by the United Auto Workers will return to work in January after the winter break, union leaders said, after ratification votes by large majorities of two fractious UAW bargaining units. The thousands of striking academic workers began voting this week on whether to ratify the deal with the University of California.

☆ Google tells employees more of them will be at risk for low performance ratings next year
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-22 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

CEO of Alphabet and Google Sundar Pichai during press conference at the Chancellery in Warsaw, Poland on March 29, 2022. More Google employees will be at risk for low performance ratings and fewer are expected to reach high marks under a new performance review system that starts next year, according to internal communications obtained by CNBC. In a recent Google all-hands meeting and in a separate presentation last week, executives presented more details of its new performance review process. Under the new system, Google estimates 6% of full-time employees will fall into a low-ranking category that puts them at higher risk for corrective action, versus 2% before. Some employees believe new performance review system might be a way for the company to reduce headcount.

☆ A couple who are financially independent from their real estate portfolio explain how they bought their first house for less than $2,000 and scaled up to 5 properties that bring in $30,000 a month in
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-21 | by ( Kathleen Elkins | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

Jervais, who started with worse credit than Natia, bumped his score up from 524 to the low- to mid-600s, he said. Plus, Natia started working in marketing in 2005 and went from an hourly wage plus tips to earning a salary. The way rental arbitrage works is, you sign a long-term lease and then rent out that property on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. Courtesy of Natia and Jervais SeegarsThey ended up raising about $500,000 from private lenders, they said, which financed their next three properties. They purchased them all within 45 days of each other in late 2021 and immediately listed them on the short-term rental market.

☆ University of California's striking academic workers begin vote on labor deal
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-20 | by ( Steve Gorman | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

The proposed contract agreement was hailed by union and university supporters as a landmark labor deal that would set a new national standard boosting wages and working conditions for graduate students employed at public universities. The walkout dragged on for weeks as the fall term drew to a close, disrupting final exams, study sessions and grading of papers throughout California's flagship university system. In terms of workers involved, it ranked as larger than any previous strike at a U.S. academic institution, union leaders said. Two other UAW locals negotiating on behalf of 12,000 post-doctoral scholars and researchers ratified a separate settlement and returned to work earlier this month. Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Muralikumar AnantharamanOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Covid, flu and RSV: What science shows about being contagious
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-18 | by ( Benjamin Ryan | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +8 min

People know when they have Covid symptoms, but do minor sniffles at the end of a coronavirus infection, for example, mean they’re still contagious? It’s a good time to brush up on what scientists know, and still don’t know, about how long people remain infectious with viral diseases — Covid, influenza, RSV — that are spreading across the U.S.How long am I contagious with Covid? If you’ve been exposed to someone who has tested positive for Covid, symptoms from any of the omicron subvariants generally appear two to four days later. How contagious you are is connected to how much of the virus, known as the viral load, is in your body. As far as relying on Covid tests to determine whether someone is still contagious, PCR tests are good at diagnosing Covid.

The deal, which includes significant raises for the employees, ends the grad students' five-week strike. Sarah Reingewirtz / Los Angeles Daily News via Getty ImagesOn Friday evening, United Auto Workers, the union representing the striking student workers, hailed the tentative agreement and praised Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg for helping accelerate negotiations. The University of California said it would make health care accessible to the dependents of student employees and enhance paid family leave benefits. System president Michael V. Drake was pleased with Friday's outcome and recognized the workers' role in the system's lauded education and research. "Our Academic Student Employees and Graduate Student Researchers are central to our academic enterprise and make incredible contributions to the University’s mission of research and education," he said in a statement.

☆ Donetsk: Ukraine launches 'most massive strike' on occupied region since 2014, Russia-installed mayor says
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-15 | by ( Olga Voitovych Anna Chernova Zahid Mahmood Josh Pennington Sana Noor Haq | Olga Voitovych | Anna Chernova | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

“At exactly 7 a.m. the (Ukrainians) subjected the center of Donetsk (city) to the most massive strike since 2014,” the Moscow-appointed mayor, Aleksey Kulemzin, posted on Telegram. “Forty rockets from BM-21 ‘Grad’ MLRS were fired at civilians in our city,” he said Thursday, adding that a key intersection in Donetsk city center had come under fire. A firefighter works inside a destroyed apartment of a residential building hit by shelling in Donetsk on December 15. Men insert wooden boards in the window of a bank next to the building of the State Administration of Kherson after a rocket attack in Kherson city on Wednesday. “And these realities indicate that the Russian Federation has new subjects,” he said, referring to four areas Russia has claimed to have annexed, Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia.

☆ A tense all-hands meeting at Google leaves employees worried about layoffs
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-12 | by ( Matt Weinberger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Oh, and Insider released its inaugural Cloudverse list of the 100 top leaders building the next generation of the Internet. Insider's Hugh Langley reports on a tense all-hands inside Google, where employees once again pushed CEO Sundar Pichai to comment on the possibility of layoffs. Google employees have been worried about layoffs for a while, especially while pretty much all of the search giant's peers in Big Tech have cut jobs in recent weeks and months. Notably, employees used the all-hands to raise concerns over a new performance tool named GRAD. Swapping Big Tech for climate tech.

CNN —Multiple explosions have been reported in the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol in southern Ukraine, in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and in annexed Crimea – including at a Russian military barracks. Federov last month said Russia had turned Melitopol into “one giant military base.”“The Russian military is settling in local houses they seized, schools and kindergartens. The Ukrainian military has not yet confirmed or commented on the attack. The unofficial Crimean media portal “Krymskyi veter” said an explosion at a Russian military barracks in Sovietske had set the barracks on fire and there were dead and wounded. “In total, Russian terrorists used 15 Shahed drones against Odesa,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during his daily address on Saturday.

☆ A product manager who posted a day-in-the-life video and survived Meta's layoffs symbolizes 'dead weight' at tech giants, say critics
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-11 | by ( Jyoti Mann | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

A Meta product manager has been criticized after posting a "day-in-the-life" video on TikTok. In the video Rojas shows herself working out before getting breakfast and coffee at a Meta office. According to her LinkedIn profile, Rojas has been a product manager at Meta since January 2021. The Gen-Z tech worker has since removed the TikTok video, but it got more than 3.4 million views after being posted by another user on Twitter. One user said: "The fact that a $META product manager is posting this on TikTok and isn't immediately fired speaks to the bloated carcass culture of Silicon Valley companies.

☆ Men without college degrees are dropping out of the workforce because they viewed their dead-end jobs as a threat to social status
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-11 | by ( Jason Lalljee | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Working-age men without degrees are exiting the workforce because it isn't helping their social status. For these men, jobs aren't just a source of income; they're a source of social status. That's especially true for white men, Wu writes, and younger men, who see a job with limited pay growth — which they believe could affect their marriage prospects and social status — as worse than no job. Why men without college degrees are leaving the workforce to save their social status, and what they can do insteadWu said marriage market anxiety for younger male workers is likely the prime reason for leaving the workforce when their social status declines. Studies show that stress and low-self-esteem linked to lower social status contribute to worse health and early death.

☆ Tech jobs: Recent grads send in hundreds of apps in unfamiliar, shrinking market
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( David Ingram | David Ingram Covers Tech For Nbc News. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +6 min

Now, though, they’re applying for tech jobs at possibly the worst time in years, as nearly every part of the sector from streaming services to robotics has laid off people or frozen hiring. He graduated with a computer science degree in December 2021, a time he now sees as “the beginning of the end” for the most recent tech boom. “My biggest chances of getting a job in the U.S. kind of tanked,” he said, because of the recent layoffs. At colleges and universities, interest in computer science soared during the most recent tech boom. Lam, who’s scheduled to graduate in December 2023, said he originally thought the layoffs in tech would hurt junior-level people the most.

☆ How to earn more money and increase your income through side hustles, according to 5 early retirees and entrepreneurs who have done it
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( Kathleen Elkins | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Insider spoke with entrepreneurs and early retirees about the lucrative side hustles they started. Below, Insider rounded up various side-hustle ideas from entrepreneurs and early retirees who found ways to diversify their income. Shan Shan Fu started selling face masks on Amazon and turned it into a robust e-commerce businessShan Shan Fu sells socks and tights (including the ones pictured) online. Courtesy of Shan Shan FuWhen the Covid-19 pandemic sent the US under lockdown in the spring of 2020, Shan Shan Fu had a lot of free time after work. She launched her e-commerce company, Millennials In Motion, in April 2020 and immediately started making money.

☆ Canceled lectures, no grades: University of California students face chaotic finals as academic workers strike
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-09 | by ( Https | Media-Cldnry.S-Nbcnews.Com Image Upload Newscms | Alicia Victoria Lozano | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +7 min

LOS ANGELES — Hundreds of thousands of undergraduate students at the University of California face a chaotic finish to their fall term as a strike by academic workers grinds through its fourth week. It’s definitely a weird situation.”University of California academic workers walk the picket line at the University of California, Los Angeles, on Nov. 28. Some campuses, including UCLA, have pushed back deadlines for submitting grades because faculty members rely so heavily on teaching assistants to assess student performance. Alicia Victoria Lozano / NBC NewsHernandez, a freshman, said teaching assistants help him with assignments and show him how to better tackle complicated subjects. Teaching assistants are integral to UCLA's "cluster" program that gives first-year students an opportunity to immerse themselves in smaller learning groups led by faculty and teaching assistants, he said.

☆ In a tense all-hands, Google's CEO said it's 'tough to predict the future' when asked whether the company would do layoffs
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-09 | by ( Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said it's "tough to predict the future" when asked about layoffs. The possibility of layoffs was top of mind for Google employees during a company all-hands Thursday, but CEO Sundar Pichai wouldn't rule out cuts. Some employees at Google have been nervous over the prospect of layoffs, which have hit other tech giants, such as Meta and Amazon. Employees also asked about Google's new performance rating system, known as GRAD, which the company introduced this year. Some employees have said GRAD, which this year replaced Google's previous performance tool, has had a rocky start.

☆ Russia installed rocket launchers at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Kyiv says; Moscow likely receiving more Iranian drones
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-09 | by ( Natasha Turak | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Residential homes were hit as Russian shelled the Kherson region 68 times in the last day, regional governor Yaroslav Yanushevych said. Kyiv is accusing Russia of installing rocket launchers at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, with Ukrainian nuclear company Energoatom saying that Grad rocket launchers have been placed close to one of the plant's six nuclear reactors. Energoatom said the move is "violating all conditions for nuclear and radiation safety." While all the nuclear reactors have been shut down, significantly reducing the risk of disaster, dangerous radiation leaks are still a threat. Meanwhile, the U.S. and U.K. are set to impose more sanctions on Russia.

☆ A Harvard Business School grad who now works at Google shares how she got into the top MBA program
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-07 | by ( Brina Patel | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

Olivia Melendez graduated from Harvard Business School in May and is a product manager at Google. Plus, I had always heard that MBA programs prefer that candidates have three to four years of work experience before starting a full-time program," Melendez said. In addition to HBS, she applied to several other top-tier programs, including the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Wharton Business School, and Kellogg School of Management, all of which she was admitted to. Melendez said she used the admissions essay as a chance to tie together pieces of her background that needed additional context. For anyone struggling with the admission essay, Melendez recommended an exercise she learned at MLT.

☆ I quit my healthcare job to become a chef after struggling with my mental health. I'm less stressed and love my work — and have even catered for the NBA.
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-06 | by ( Nasha Smith | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Lauren Gillon started cooking for fun to relieve her anxiety while in college. I was working, cooking, and catering for private clients who found me on social media or through word of mouth, and I ran a podcast with some friends about millennial life. I interviewed with the chef first and then did a cooking interview, where you work during the dinner service. I don't regret my decision to switch careersA post shared by girl meets stove🥂👩🏾‍🍳 (@elle.thefoodie)I started working at a hotel in March. I'm very happy with what's going on, and I'm just really excited and accepting whatever the universe brings my way.

☆ I was laid off from DoorDash and was depending on it for my H1B visa. I'm mentally struggling to process the shock of looking for a new job.
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-04 | by ( Jyoti Mann | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

DoorDash laid off 1,250 employees on Wednesday to help cut costs. Insider spoke to a worker who was let go and needed to find a new job before their visa expired. The email said DoorDash is reducing the size of its workforce and that my role was one of those being impacted by layoffs. I have an H1B visa and you can only hold that when you have a job. Because of the visa situation, I am under pressure to find a job quickly and it's a huge mental struggle.

My partner and I have already planned for what would happen if one of us lost our job. We started by getting rid of as much debt as possible and reducing our fixed expenses. Reducing our debt load, bills, and subscriptions meant there were fewer fixed expenses to worry about if our income levels dropped. The biggest shift for us was making our needs significantly less than our take-home pay. At the time, this represented 25% of our take-home pay and when it ended during the pandemic, it was a big hit to our finances.

☆ Russia 'planning something' in southern Ukraine, Kyiv warns; Russian forces could be advancing in Donetsk
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-30 | by ( Holly Ellyatt | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

Members of the Ukrainian army prepare BM-21 Grad rockets to be launched in Bakhmut, Donetsk, Ukraine, on Nov. 26, 2022. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the situation at the front as difficult, with intense fighting in the east, northeast and south of Ukraine. On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a $53 million assistance package to help repair Ukraine's electrical grid, which has been severely damaged by Russian shelling. Millions of Ukrainians remain without power, and many without water, as a result of Russian shelling. Temperatures have plunged in the country, making daily life even harder for civilians.

☆ Uber's polarizing surge pricing is coming for your food deliveries
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-24 | by ( Nancy Luna | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

The food-tech startup Sauce allows restaurants to use dynamic pricing to raise delivery prices. Piada, a fast-casual restaurant chain, is testing dynamic pricing using the tech startup Sauce. Novak, whose VC firm Rackhouse invested in Sauce last year, said price-lowering features are often overlooked when discussing dynamic pricing. Sherri Kimes, a professor emeritus at Cornell's Hotel School, echoed Novak, saying dynamic pricing can give consumers "some control" over how they spend their money. For restaurants, dynamic pricing is still worth a shot.

In an interview at her home Monday afternoon, Jessica Fierro described her husband's heroic efforts to prevent greater tragedy. Richard Fierro, 45, an Army veteran who completed four tours between Iraq and Afghanistan, yelled for someone to call the police, she said. Jessica Fierro said her two best friends were shot and her daughter broke her knee as she ran for cover. Richard Fierro earned his MBA from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs last year. Deon J. Hampton reported from Colorado Springs, Janelle Griffith and Melissa Chan reported from New York.

More than 10,000 Google employees could be set to receive bad performance reviews. More than 10,000 Google employees could be in line for low performance reviews, potentially giving the company an excuse to trim its headcount. Google introduced a new performance review tool earlier this year, named GRAD, which changes how employees are rated on their work. Under the new system, 6% of employees could receive a bad rating, up from 2% in the previous rating system. These low scores could give the company cause to put employees on performance review plans, before showing them the door.

☆ I got my big break as a Lionsgate screenwriter after I moved 2,000 miles from Hollywood. Here's how I made connections and worked my way up from security guard to my dream career.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( Ken Miyamoto | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +14 min

Ken Miyamoto was a security guard at Sony, and worked his way up to story analyst for the studio. In 1996, I took one University of Wisconsin screenwriting class, and that was the extent of my screenwriting education. I moved to California from Wisconsin with my wife in late 1999 to pursue a career in screenwriting. The apartment was way overpriced and much smaller than others we looked at, but we signed the lease that day. Lastly, don't write for free.

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