Serving Franklin County, WA
Serving Franklin County, WA
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Gen Z, also known as the zombie generation, worries about a stagnating economy. In addition to inflation, the job market, growing student loan debt, housing insecurity — the list goes on. According to a study by BestColleges, more than three-quarters of the U.S. college students who responded say that inflation is bad or very bad. Nearly half say that high-paying jobs are hard to find. And many respondents say they will consider a job outside their chosen field if it offers h...
The Major League Baseball draft is unique among professional sports drafts. The 30 organizations pick teenagers and college students who will not join their big league clubs for years—if ever. These athletes will spend that time honing their craft in the minor leagues, where long bus rides and minuscule paychecks are the norm. A few will move quickly up the ranks, seizing playing time opportunities to advance their careers and making their names known to scouts, fans, and o...
It can be hard to visualize the amount of water it takes to produce a single pound of almonds or the meat used to make a cheeseburger. Every food product goes through a long life cycle before ending up on grocery store shelves. Livestock products start at the farms that grow alfalfa, hay, and other types of feed. Tree fruits and nuts begin with the young saplings that take years to mature and produce fruit. Meanwhile, products such as radishes mature from seed as quickly as...
Humans have been looking to the sky to make sense of the world around us for thousands of years. Ancient cave paintings seem to show humans began using the position of the stars to keep track of time as early as 40,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence also indicates astronomy was one of the first natural sciences developed by many ancient civilizations. Based on the earliest recorded history, humans have long tried to assign scientific, philosophical, and spiritual meaning...
You may have seen them precariously parked alongside highway ramps or clustered in big-box store parking lots. There are millions of big-rig trucks on United States roadways daily, and often, there is nowhere to park them overnight or during mandated driver breaks. In a Federal Highway Administration survey of more than 11,000 drivers, almost every (98%) driver responded that they have problems finding safe parking, with nearly 3 in 4 drivers reporting it is a regular problem...
People have always been stymied about the origins of April Fools' Day, dating all the way back to the late Middle Ages (as far as academics could confidently say). In 1760, the parody periodical Poor Robin's Almanac astutely asked a question on everyone's mind, including the line: "The First of April some do say/ Is set apart for all Fool's Day/ But why the people call it so/ Nor I nor they themselves do know." From its origins—whether in Ancient Rome, medieval England, or Ren...
The 2024 presidential election is underway, and voters are getting ready to choose between two familiar candidates. President Joe Biden is once again set to face former president Donald J. Trump, and both teams are fighting for every available vote—and every campaign dollar. So far this year, Trump has raised $403,415 from individual donors. The amount is a far cry from the more than $75 million he received before the 2016 general election; however, that's mostly due to the l...
Job openings are at some of their lowest levels nationally since April 2021, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. In January 2024, there were 8.9 million open jobs by the end of the month. A year prior, that number was at 10.4 million. While Americans still find themselves largely employed, their capacity to job-hop is quickly falling to levels predating the Great Resignation. Employers continued adding jobs, upping employment by 275,000 in February. The unemployment rate...
Chances are, you have yet to pick up the phone today to call someone, but you've likely messaged someone. Texting tops the list of the most popular forms of communication, with over 3 billion people worldwide using messaging apps as of 2021. Meanwhile, phone calls are on the decline. In the U.K. alone, in 2022, the volume of outgoing calls from fixed and mobile phones decreased by 24.5 billion minutes from the previous year, continuing a yearslong downward trend. As the...
The new year kicked off with a slew of layoff announcements from major employers across the country. People placed a heightened focus on layoff news, rooted in fear of an uncertain economy—although despite the headlines, layoffs remain well below pre-pandemic levels. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates show that there were about 19.6 million layoffs throughout 2023, compared to 21.8 million in 2019. In January the layoff rate was 1%, a figure that remained relatively s...
Gold has historically played an essential role as a store of value in economies worldwide. The U.S. dollar used to be backed by gold, meaning money was exchangeable for an amount of the metal. This is known as the gold standard, which the U.S. started to abandon in 1933 during the Great Depression. With the rise of modern monetary policy, other countries followed suit and switched to the fiat currency used now, which is money backed by a government, not a physical asset....
How to pick the best toy for 5 different types of dogs Playing with your pooch offers them a laundry list of benefits. It can help prevent premature aging, reverse obesity, maintain healthy bones, ease arthritis, help remove toxins, and improve metabolism and insulin health. It helps puppies develop motor skills and can cause hormone and brain changes that teach them how to handle stressors and unexpected situations. Play also encourages mental stimulation and can help combat...
In 2023, a Greyhound bus exiting an Illinois highway collided with three semi-trucks parked along an exit ramp, killing three bus passengers. That same year, a woman in Modesto, California, crashed into a parked truck and subsequently died. In 2021, a man in North Carolina was hospitalized after hitting a trailer while swerving to miss a parked semi-truck. His car then caught fire. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there is only one truck parking space for ev...
The Small Business Administration backed loans worth $27.5 billion through its primary lending program in 2023—rising well above pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels as government officials aim to stabilize the economy. Many small businesses get their start and scale up with SBA loans, which increased lending to Black, Latino, and women entrepreneurs in the past few years in step with efforts to become more equitable. Flippa found the county within each state where applicants were a...
As the Trump campaign actively courts deep-pocketed donors, it's worth looking at which groups and industries have donated most heavily to him during the current election cycle. Stacker examined Federal Election Commission data compiled by OpenSecrets to find the 19 industries that contributed the most to Trump's 2024 campaign committee, as well as any super PACs or hybrid PACs working on his behalf, as of Feb. 2. The list is ranked based on the portion of that industry's...
Since the public launch of Open AI's ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence tools have become widely used by the general public. But one group was particularly quick to embrace the burgeoning technology: teenagers. According to a December 2023 report by ACT Inc., the creator and administrator of the standardized test for college-bound students, nearly half of the surveyed high school students (46%) reported using AI tools, especially ChatGPT, to help them with...
Picture the scene: Your alarm wakes you at the crack of dawn. The suitcase you packed the night before stands accusingly in the corner. You brace yourself for the long ride to the airport and the even longer queue of security checks. To make matters worse, after dashing to the airport and getting through TSA, you discover your flight has been delayed. There are many reasons delays happen: maintenance or crew problems, extreme weather, air traffic, etc. But, according to data...
The 2024 primary elections are underway, and residents in some states have already chosen who they want to see on the ballot in November. But before heading to the polls, Americans showed support for their preferred candidate in 2023 by giving them their hard-earned cash. Presidential hopefuls raised more than $119 million from individual donors last year, according to the latest data from the Federal Election Commission. Individuals can donate up to $3,300 to a primary...
Low pay, minimal opportunities for growth, and disrespectful work environments are just a handful of the top reasons employees quit their jobs, according to a Pew Research Center survey from 2021. Of course, there are myriad reasons workers might put in their notices, ranging from the mundane, such as moving to a new state, to the dramatic, like having blow-up arguments with a supervisor. Quits are down from the recent span of historically high rates during the Great...
In January 2024, thousands of people earnestly responded to Elmo when the "Sesame Street" puppet prompted a mental health check-in on social media, asking, "How is everybody doing?" The same week, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the harms of social media to children, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham accused Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—and CEOs of other social media sites—of having "blood on [their] hands" for a "product that's killing people." Zuckerberg sai...
There's a reason it's called March Madness. Besides the mad enthusiasm (and heavy betting) of partisan fans, the madness of underdog teams posting upset after upset to advance as far as the Final Four or even the championship game makes for compelling theater. Who doesn't love an underdog or, in March Madness parlance, a Cinderella? ATS.io compiled a ranking of the most surprising men's March Madness champions since 1982 (when "March Madness" was coined) using Sports...
The year may have just gotten started, but 2024 is already looking to be an exciting year in film if the following list is any indication. As a result of the monthslong Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strikes last year, industry experts, like those at Deadline, are expecting to see a huge drop in the number of major films set to premiere by the end of the year. Although last year saw 124 wide releases, 2024...
Regulations have been proposed by a presidential administration committed to a responsible rollout of one of the most consequential technologies since the advent of the internet. The adoption of AI products accelerated rapidly over the past year since OpenAI released its large language model-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. Today, the generative AI platform boasts more than 100 million weekly users worldwide and is used by developers at 9 in 10 Fortune 500 companies. In that time,...