Category: Business/Technology

Quoted: The Karles represent a group of individuals and families who have made a change and are now dealing with the financial consequences, for better or worse. “The pandemic made people really think and take stock of their living situations,” said Cliff Robb, an associate professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We saw so many different employment opportunities become flexible in their structures, so people started to reassess it all.”

Quoted: “We’re seeing an increase in activity and I don’t think it’s a blip,” said Alexia Kulwiec, professor and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers – Department of Labor Education.

“I think that it is forward movement and traction toward improving working conditions. Whether it will be truly transformational and create the kind of economy that we would rather see, I’m not convinced of, but it’s certainly possible.”

Quoted: The timing of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund and other government grants is good for companies like Charter as they transition from legacy cable television service to broadband, according to Barry Orton, professor emeritus of telecommunications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Cable television isn’t going to last forever. People are cutting the cord like crazy,” Orton said. “But what they’re not cutting is their broadband connection.”

Quoted: “As we talk about inflation, I think sometimes we hear about the price of houses or the price of big things, but little stuff that really hurts low-income families,” said J. Michael Collins, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs who studies consumer decision making. “If you think about an extra $2.50 for a gallon of gas or an extra dollar for a gallon of milk, those things just start to add up because you buy them so frequently.”

Quoted: “The first place you should look is the human resources department of the prior employer,” says Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business. “There, they should have all of the information as to the whereabouts of the 401(k) account you had with them.”

On Friday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order seeking to firm up some abortion protections, including data privacy. According to data experts, the reversal of Roe v. Wade opened up more cracks for sensitive information to fall through.

“The reversal of Roe, the Dobbs decision, just again brought lots and lots of new people to the realization that we don’t actually have much data privacy and that can be a problem,” said Dorothea Salo.

It’s been on the mind of Salo, Distinguished Faculty III at UW Madison’s Information School, before the Roe decision.

“Right now the legal landscape really doesn’t control this,” she said. “Here in Wisconsin, there have been a couple of bipartisan data protection bills in the Senate and the Assembly and they just haven’t gone anywhere.”

Quoted: Peter Carstensen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, who specializes in antitrust law and energy law, predicts the situation will improve but change will be slow.

“My expectation is prices are going to stabilize in a downward trend,” he said. “It’s not going to be a huge drop, but it’s going to continue to go down.”

Carstensen said that’s because domestic production is increasing and drivers will likely decrease their miles, slowing demand. Despite that, he said other problems will keep costs high.

“The capacity to do things inexpensively is just not there,” he said. According to Carstensen, supply chain issues, the need for new wells, limited refinery capacity and the crisis in Ukraine will be roadblocks to easing the burden on drivers.

A Supreme Court ruling will limit the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. We learn more about the legal and environmental impacts.

Interview with Steph Tai, law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Peter Carstensen, an emeritus law professor at the University of Wisconsin, said he was skeptical that the drivers would get traction with their claims that Uber and Lyft were illegally setting the price drivers could charge.

Quoted: “We’ve built a supply chain system that includes factories, that includes distribution centers, that includes transportation methods and all that stuff. We’ve built that to handle a certain capacity that we thought was coming at us,” said Jake Dean, director of the Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management at the University of Wisconsin School of Business.

Quoted: Our reliance on the internet quadrupled during the pandemic, said Barry Orton, professor emeritus of telecommunications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The bar keeps getting raised higher,” Orton said, with increased demands for faster speeds, especially in uploads.

Noted: On May 24, the Wisconsin Technology Council is hosting a luncheon at the Sheraton Hotel, on John Nolen Drive in Madison, to learn more about the Dairyland project and the larger debate over nuclear power. Panelists will include Ridge, who’s also the CEO of the cooperative; Jeffrey Keebler, chairman, president and CEO of Madison Gas & Electric; and Paul Wilson, Grainger Professor of Nuclear Engineering, and chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of engineering physics.

Quoted: Steven Deller, who studies rural economies at the University of Wisconsin, says many smaller cities and towns have moved away from the traditional methods of marketing to outsiders.

“Rather than focus on promoting businesses they’re looking at making their communities a better place to live, to attract people,” he said.

Quoted: “I do believe the U.S. has one of the more convoluted structures and also requires a lot more effort to understand,” says Cliff Robb, who teaches about personal finance and human behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.. “It forces individuals to engage much more directly with the tax system than other industrialized countries.”

Even for people who don’t pay fees to a tax preparer or for tax prep software, there’s a significant “opportunity cost” to filing, he says.

“Most people are going to take a weekend or a couple of days,” says Robb. And it’s not just time. “It creates more stress than is necessary, I believe.”

Quoted: “It’s a very limited stopgap,” said Barry Orton, professor emeritus of telecommunications at University of Wisconsin-Madison.