Can you take advantage of a suffering economy before your 401k dries up? Can you snatch up enough foreclosed real estate before your rivals own all of the marbles? Well, the few marbles left that is.
Thus is the challenge you face playing Monopoly: Recession Edition. This fully-fictional board game allows for a modernly accurate gameplay experience. What other chance might you have to own Bank of America? Just watch out for collections!
You don’t need a degree in economic theory to feel the strain of the economy. Just check your mutual funds. Check your stocks. Hell, check your damn wallet. The strain is bound to make our hair fallout.
Seems like our currency has felt it the most. Even the images of our forefathers are looking a little stressed out. Need some help guys? Hit the jump for tons more bald action.
Oh yes. The United States is most certainly in a recession right now. Times are tough and everyone is going broke. Teachers, in particular, are feeling the heat as they look for a way to offset the cost of items for their students. School budgets can’t cover everything, after all.
In comes San Diego, CA-based teacher Tom Farber. He teaches calculus at Rancho Bernardo High School and needed more paper for his students’ practice exams and tests. Instead of bitching about costs, Tom decided he’d be better off selling ad space on his tests. 75 people have emailed him about ads already and he’s made $300 on it so far. Costs range from $10 for a quiz to $20 for a chapter test, all the way up to $30 for the final exam of the semester. All the sponsors are companies that want to target children, so there’s no ad for a Big Mac on the bottom of a test. I think it’s a fine idea and a great way to generate money for a school that seems way overstretched. Nice work, Tom.
I really don’t see much of a future for Circuit City. If it’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, replacing CEOs, closing stores and losing cash, explain to me how the company is supposed to survive. Says Bloomberg:
On Sept. 29, Circuit City reported a loss of $239.2 million that was more than triple from a year earlier after sales fell for the sixth straight quarter.
The end is near for Circuit City. I’m guessing that by 2010, the company will fold completely and this part of our lives will be over and several thousand people will be out of jobs. Blame the economy and shitty customer service is what I thinks.
This plant is no ordinary house plant. It’s called Spore 1.1 and it’s a reflection of how Home Depot is faring in the current economy. It’s rigged so that if Home Depot’s stock falls, the plant isn’t watered and it dies. Should stock soar, the plant gets a healthy dose of water. Cruel? A bit, but we’re guessing that given the current state of the economy, this plant was dead a long time ago.
Right now, in a time where the economy is complete shit and corporate raiding is nothing new, Samsung is trying to buy SanDisk, one of the largest manufacturers of flash memory. SanDisk is being resistant, so what’s a troubled company to do? In this case, SanDisk decided to launch SlotMusic, a microSD card equipped with a full album’s worth of songs from a major label recording artist. These “albums” will be available in stores like Best Buy and WalMart, ensuring they’ll collect dust for years to come.
You must remember, dear reader, that no one buys CDs anymore, let alone some fucked up microSD format. Only 29 albums will be launching with SlotMusic, making selection very limited. Om Malik has a hell of a point when he brings up that this is exactly like MiniDisk. Except that was the 1990s and everything was cool in the ’90s.
I love the above image from the SlotMusic website. I had no idea the iPod/Zune had microSD slots! Oh wait…
The abandoned gas station is becoming more and more commonplace these days as fuel prices continue to climb. Rather than have her local abandoned Citgo look like crap, artist Jennifer Marsh instead decided to decorate the building. With the help of more than 2500 students in 29 states, Marsh covered the entire station with fabrics and connected everything together. Now there’s a colorful landscape on the side of the road instead of a reminder of how much the economy currently sucks.
For those not familiar with the term “salaryman,” it’s the Japanese term for male office workers who bend over backwards for their job and work overtime on a daily basis. After this, they crawl their way home on all fours, bickering about how much they hate their own lives. Artist Momoyo Torimitsu, in an effort to address the issue of recent economic crashes in various countries, has created a crawling robot resembling a salaryman.
The video shoes the robot crawling through Sydney, Australia in an effortless attempt to bite ankles. Torimitsu follows it, dressed as a nurse while maintaining its insides by way of an ass-panel opening. She says, “Crawling is the soldier’s motion in the battlefield. I would say this is the business soldier.” So, that’s why she follows it around dressed as a nurse. Now I get it, but it’s still awkward.
