This recent article in the New York Times details the likely rise in customer cable bills that will result from the various battles over subscriber fees going on between content providers and cable companies (like the just-settled News Corp.-Time Warner Cable dispute, for instance).

The last thing anyone needs these days is to pay more per “SpongeBob SquarePants” episode. But what can ya do? Go without “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”? Unlikely. They got you by the proverbial short hairs.

Unless…you ask them for a lower rate. That’s right. Perhaps you don’t know that just as they do with credit card rates, a lot of people get their bill reduced by playing a little poker with their cable provider. There are many blogs and web sites out there that outline the process…

It’s a different type of “bail-out.” The Huffington Post and friends are spearheading a nascent movement to move your money from the big financial giants to community banks. From a column by Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson: The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record [...]

When I was a kid, 2010 sounded like a year beyond science fiction, a time when anything might be possible. But now that that impossibly futuristic date has finally made its way to the front of the line, all I can think of is my disappointment in the lack of flying cars.

One thing that never occurred to me in those decades leading up to the latter part of the Big Zeros is that America would experience an economic crisis so profound as to spawn a blog like this. If you had told me, say, 25 years ago that one day I’d be blogging about a near-depression, I would have said “No way!” (I wasn’t so articulate back then.) I also might have said, “What’s a blog?”

But here we are…

One item to catch up on, if you missed it the first time. Christmas week, EconomyStory wrote about Laredo Reads, a campaign to bring a new bookstore to the Texas border city that is losing its only bookstore, a B. Dalton, this year. Book sales, like sales of many things, were down in 2009, and the growing acceptance of e-books only added to retailers’ woes.

Ho ho ho, made ya click! (Sorry, traffic’s way down during Christmas week.) Spotted on Flickr.

Tough economic times can engender moral and ethical quandaries (for a cinematic illustration, see The Bicycle Thief.) If the recession has caused you to somehow stray from the scrupulous high ground, not to worry. Now, be forgiven online at the Apology Center, “where you can share the many, many, many things you’ve done wrong in [...]

Where does the thinking of some progressives and some evangelicals overlap? Perhaps in their mutual dismay at the ubiquitous commercialism surrounding Christmas. For instance, take this chat between filmmaking muckraker Morgan Spurlock (”Supersize Me“) and Portland Pastor Rick McKinley, a co-founder of The Advent Conspiracy, a movement to put the focus of Christmas back on Jesus Christ as opposed to shopping for gifts. Time magazine writes this week:
…to a growing group of Christians, the focus on the commercial aspect of Christmas is the greatest threat to one of Christianity’s holiest days. “It’s the shopping, the going into debt, the worrying that ‘If I don’t spend enough money, someone will think I don’t love them,’ ” says Portland, Ore., pastor Rick McKinley. “Christians get all bent out of shape over the fact that someone didn’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ when I walked into the store. But why are we expecting the store to tell our story? That’s just ridiculous.”

From the Empty buildings for economic reasons photo pool: Click on an image to see it full size. More photos here.

You know what might get me to cut down on my purchases and stay within a budget? Making a rule that I actually had to draw what I bought. Artist Kate Bingaman-Burt has been doing just that since 2002. She posts and archives illustrations of everything she buys on Obsessive Consumption. One commenter on the [...]

Nothing says “I couldn’t afford to buy you a present” like a Merry Recession Christmas card.

So here’s something I just learned. Frequent flyers and miles junkies have their own online community, consisting of web sites littered with ticket-buying lingo. If earning frequent flyer points or scoring the absolute best deal from the airlines lifts your inner 747, then click yourself on over to forums like FlyerTalk, FlyerGuide.com, and View From the Wing, written by Gary Leff, a university chief financial officer with a “miles and points obsession.”