Marketplace - American Public Media

Zhang Yimou is famous for directing the films “Hero” and “Raise the Red Lantern.” Did you catch the extravagant opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing?

He directed that, too.

Mr. Zhang is also a prolific father, according to state media.

At least seven children with up to four women, a big no-no in a country that’s restricted most urban couples to one child for the past three decades. Yet in this scandal, Chinese social media sites are lighting up not about the one-child policy, but about what this says about the gap between China’s rich and poor.

"This is stirring up a lot of discontent among Chinese people," says Chinese cultural critic Zhu Da Ke, professor at Shanghai’s Tongji University. "It reflects an opinion many share, that in Chinese society people with power can do whatever they want and have as many kids as they wish, while poor people are deprived of all their rights."

The first indication that Zhang had broken China’s one-child policy reportedly came last year, when an actress who failed an audition for Zhang’s last film posted the information on the Internet. Chinese social media observer Jeremy Goldkorn says turning to the Internet for justice -- or revenge -- has become common in China.

"The Internet generally is really the only place that Chinese people can turn to if they feel they were victims of an injustice or if they feel the government is doing something wrong," says Goldkorn, "but there is a negative side to it. There is a sort of vigilantism that can be very nasty. It’s a kind of Kangaroo Court mentality.”

What’s left now of the Zhang Yimou scandal are Chinese internet users have taken to Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, to vent. A comment from one user echoed thousands of other comments on Zhang’s transgressions: “Rich people are above the law,” the user ranted. “The fact that Zhang Yimou had seven children is the epitome of China valuing money above everything else.”

The federal budget cuts known as sequestration are taking about $13 billion out of the Air Force’s budget for this fiscal year, so, the Air Force brass at the Pentagon are scrounging around for extra change, asking rank and file airmen for money-saving ideas.

The Air Force calls its new cost-cutting initiative “Every Dollar Counts.” It’s designed to be easy and direct. Ideas can be submitted through smart phones. The best ones make their way to General Larry Spencer, who has already implemented some of the suggestions -- like this one from an Air Force officer who slashed the Pentagon’s phone bill.    

“He found over a thousand phone lines that were plugged in that we were paying for, that no one was using,” General Spencer says.

The phones were unplugged, saving more than $300,000. This kind of cost cutting may be new at the Pentagon, but Wendy Werner does it all time. She’s president of Carpet Town, a flooring business just outside Milwaukee. Werner first turned to her 23 workers for cost-cutting ideas in 2008, when the housing crisis was battering sales. Werner got some good suggestions. She used to have professional cleaners in twice a week, but one employee said, cut that down to once a week, and let them clean up.

“We took turns," she says. "We had a chart made up and everyone would trade off a position of what they were cleaning -- including me -- and we cut our cleaning costs in half."

That measure saved more than $600 a month. Werner saved another $2,500 after an employee suggested energy-efficient light bulbs. But she says there’s another benefit-- her workers are now more engaged.

“The best way to say it is, they care," she explains. "You know, they took on the responsibility of getting through these more difficult times, together.”

Management consultant John Bernard says Werner is onto something. Of course, sometimes you get half-baked suggestions from workers. But Bernard says you can cut down on that by letting them try out their ideas, before bringing them to management.

“You flip it upside down and you say, no, the ideas are yours," he says. "You go implement them.”

Bernard says that might be hard for the Air Force, with its top-down culture of following orders.  But General Spencer told me he’s ready to try anything -- even loosening up the chain of command.

Ten years ago Monday, the U.S. government unveiled a new $20 bill, loaded with high-tech features to make it harder to counterfeit. A new $100 bill is on the way later this year, promising still more technological advances. When it came out, the $20 bill was something of a game changer in the constant battle with forgers.

“They were a very big deal,” says Dennis Forgue, who heads the currency department at the numismatic firm Harlan J. Berk in Chicago.

A key step for the 20 was its unique pigment. Look past the green and you’ll see subtle peach and blue colors, different from other bills.

“Color has had a large impact on the counterfeiters,” says currency expert Brendan Burge.

That means counterfeiters can’t just bleach ink off singles and reprint them as 20s. To keep up with printing technology thieves can get, the government is designing more complicated bills more often.

“They keep just throwing more stuff onto the bill to make it that much harder to replicate,” says Jason Kersten, author of "The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter." “Bills are getting pretty crowded now. There’s a lot of signage on the bills.”

Asked for the hottest new trend in secure money, Burge’s answer mirrored the one Dustin Hoffman got in “The Graduate.”

“It’s plastic,” Burge says. “Pure and simple, it’s plastic.”

The industry phrase is polymer substrate. Canada and Australia already make their paper money out of plastic.

We don't just waste money on little things. We throw money away on big ticket items, too. Take education. This week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published a report that identified student loan debt as a roadblock to what it calls "a full financial life for consumers." It seems the burden of paying for college is preventing a whole generation of educated, young people from owning homes, saving for retirement and becoming entrepreneurs.

With all that in mind, we asked you to tell us whether you've ever thought your costly college education wasn't worth it. And plenty of you were quick to tell us that you considered your degrees a waste of money.

Our Facebook friend Kat Gregor has thought a lot about the value of her degree. She went to art school in New York City and graduated in 2008. But today, she's still trying to pay off over $200,000 in student debt.

"It was one of the greatest periods of my life," says Gregor. But from a monetary standpoint she has her doubts. 

So how much is too much to spend on an education? And what choices are out there for people who think a traditional expensive education is a waste of money?

Kio Stark has some ideas about this -- she interviewed scores of people wrestling with these questions for her new book, "Don't Go Back to School," and they came up with lots of alternatives.

"A lot of people think that they need to have the structure of school in order to learn," says Stark, "and one of the things that was important to me in writing the book was to give people a sense of how you can accomplish that without the structure of school to give models and techniques." 

Stark says it isn't easy, but it is definitely cheaper. And she's found that alternative education pays off in the long run too. 

"I think people always worry about, 'will I be able to get a job if I learn outside of school, if I don't have a degree.' And all the stories that I collected show that people have every opportunity to find work without having a degree," says Stark. "So I think five years from now, given the economic situation we're in, employers are going to have to respect people who have learned outside of school and their credentials are their experience."

Do you agree that education is a waste?

If you buy online, you might have noticed sometimes you don't pay sales tax. Soon that might not be the case. This week the Senate passed a bill designed to make it easier for online retailers to charge the tax.

So how will this change the way online retailers do business and what will it mean for consumers?

Diane Yetter, president of Yetter Tax Consulting and founder of the Sales Tax Institute, explains how the current online sales tax system works.

"Today, retailers or any seller that maintains a physical presence in a state is required to collect tax when it makes sales to customers in those states regardless of the method of ordering... whether you go into a store, you order through a catalog or -- as most people do today -- order online. So if the retailer has a retail store, somebody like Walmart, who has stores all over the place, then they are required to collect sales tax whenever they ship to costumers in states where they have stores," says Yetter.

Stores that have a warehouse in the state are also liable. That's why "Amazon and other more traditional online retailers without retail stores have to collect tax in the states where they currently maintain warehouses or maybe even employees that are working on their behalf," she adds.

But this isn't the first time the federal government has tried to implement a more universal online tax. The Supreme Court first addressed the issue in the early '90s.

"In the decision, back in 1992, which was the Quill corporation case, the Supreme Court actually asked Congress to deal with this," says Yetter. "So we've been waiting for Congress to deal with this since 1992 and there have been bills that have been proposed virtually every year since then."

So why is it resurfacing now?

"At this point, I think what's really triggering this is a couple of things. The first is the sheer explosion of online business, and then also just the economic conditions of the states, that they are really hurting for money," says Yetter. "This is a way that the states can collect revenue that is actually due. So this is not a new tax at all -- these are taxes that have been due. It's just that the consumers either are not aware of it or just take the position that, let the state come find me. And the retailers right now are not obligated or have the requirement to collect the tax today."

If the bill does go forward -- and businesses have to retool departments or hire more personnel to deal with the complicated new state tax regulations -- will that mean even higher prices for online consumers, in addition to the new taxes?

"There will be some additional costs that the retailer will incur, but at the same time, there's competition in the marketplace," says Yetter. "Certainly a lot of consumers are saying they don't want new taxes to be imposed on them, but this really isn't a new tax -- this is a tax that has been out there. In terms of consumer behavior, a lot of the studies that I've seen say that consumers are likely to still continue buying online for the convenience of it."

There's at least one group that could see some positive change if the new laws are adapted though -- old-fashioned brick-and-mortar stores. "Certainly, what it might do is curb some of the activities where people are going into store, checking out the merchandise and going home and buying it online," says Yetter. "It might be that they will actually just start buying from the merchant directly."

One day late last year, Katrina Sutton stood at a gas pump outside Atlanta and swiped her debit card. Insufficient funds. But that couldn't be. She'd been careful to wait until her $270 paycheck from Walmart had hit her account. The money wasn't there? It was all she had. And without gas, she couldn't get to work.

She tried not to panic, but after she called her card company, she couldn't help it. Her funds had been frozen, she was told, by World Finance.

Sutton lives in Georgia, a state that has banned payday loans. But World Finance, a billion-dollar company, peddles installment loans, a product that often drives borrowers into a similar quagmire of debt.

Katrina Sutton on getting her loan:

Katrina Sutton on renewing her loan:

Katrina Sutton on what happened when she couldn't pay:

Read the rest of the story from Propublica.

 Read other stories from the Marketplace and Propublica joint investigation "Beyond payday loans: Installment lending and the cycle of debt." Explore the whole series here.

A lot of us like our television on demand. But when you're also an avid Twitter user, that can reveal a whole boatload of spoilers about your favorite shows. 

Enter Jennie Lamere. She loves shows like "Dance Moms" and "Pretty Little Liars," but couldn't always watch live. And people she followed on Twitter kept spoiling key plot points. So the 18-year-old high school senior did something about it. After a brainstorm and a hackathon, she came up with 150 or so lines of code, an app, called Twivo.

The aim is two-fold: block spoilers, and recreate the live tweet experience when you watch the show later. Let's say you love the ABC drama, "Scandal," starring Kerry Washington as political fixer Olivia Pope. 

"If you were on Twitter, into the bar I add onto Twitter, you would just type in 'Scandal,'" Lamere said. "It would block out all tweets that were talking about 'Scandal.'"

A green bar blocks out the tweets, so you know they're there, among all the other links and personal updates, but not visible. Once you're ready to watch, you'd hit play on Twivo, like you would on a DVR. 

"And the tweets would stream down. So you would get the experience of live tweeting without being live," Lamere said. 

She's developed other programs, but this is her first solo project. What's the appeal of coding? 

"The cool thing is if I think, 'Oh man, I really wish someone made an app that, say, blocks spoilers on Twitter,' I just could be like, 'Oh, I could do that. I'll make it myself.'"

Lamere expects that Twivo will be ready for the general public in a couple of weeks. And will be free to download. 

"I just want to get the app out there. I want people to get to use the product," said Lamere. "I think one of the main markets will be teens, and like, I wouldn't want to pay for it."

Look, we know it's a Hallmark fabricated holiday and all that, but the numbers don't lie -- plenty of you are celebrating Mother's Day this weekend. The National Retail Federation says consumers will spend $20.7 billion on Mother's Day gifts this year, an average of $169 per mom.

iCharts

That makes Mother's Day one of top spending holidays of the year -- it's tied with Valentine's Day for third place.

iCharts

We asked you what sort of mother's day gifts all that money buys, and you said everything from a vacuum to a chainsaw and an iPad.

Terri Mead from Redwood City, Calif., wrote in to say she's giving her mom a helicopter ride for Mother's Day. She owns an IT consulting company and is a licensed helicopter pilot. She says the hour-long flight will probably cost around $275, but says for her family, it isn't really about the money. "We're not big on exchanging gifts on these holidays that you go and purchase. It's really all about spending time," she says.

Paula Poundstone, comedian and mom of three, agrees. Poundstone joined in our studios to discuss the value of Mother's Day.

She said her family isn't big on exchanging gifts either, but she did like the idea of taking your mom for a ride to show your appreciation. "None of my kids drive, but if they did, I think they would gladly drag me behind the car," she joked.

When we asked her to share any motherly advice she's given her children about finances, she was a bit more serious.

"I've encouraged them to work for their money, to save their money and to save the rewards for after the basics are paid," said Poundstone. "I've also encouraged them to wait to start a family until they've enjoyed those years when you can sleep on anyone's couch and it doesn't matter, because you don't have to get up and rush home to take care of someone."

To hear more of Poundstone's interview, click the audio player above. Plus, follow her on Twitter, like her on Facebook, visit her website, and check out her latest CD.

See financial tips from other moms out there:

[View the story "Your mom's money advice" on Storify]

Rep. Frank Lucas, (R-OK) chairman of the House Agriculture Committee says the House bill seeks to eliminate a policy called "broad-based categorical eligibility," which has been in place since the mid-1990s. The policy is designed to make eligible for food stamps some who might otherwise not have been, due to savings or income exceeding the poverty line.

"The idea is to make sure that people are relying on what they have first, before turning to government assistance," said Rachel Sheffield, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research think tank.

Supporters of the policy say it benefits low-income individuals and families.

"At the state level, there's no ideology involved in this," said Jim Weill, President of the non-profit Food Research and Action Center. "Almost everybody recognizes that this is an important way to meet the basic needs of struggling families."

 

Saturday is graduation day at Georgia State University. And more than half the students who came in as freshmen will walk the stage for their diplomas.  

A decade ago, that number would have been about one student out of three.

Here’s the thing about graduation rates. The calculation starts the second a student steps foot in class. And it doesn’t matter if that student drops out on day one, or one day before graduation.

When you’re talking numbers, it’s all the same.

“I am the definition of a non-traditional student, from age to being a mother,” says Lucille McGee, a GSU student who was on the fast-track to becoming  a drop-out statistic

Two years ago, Lucille moved from New Jersey to Atlanta to attend Georgia State.

She was 24, the first in her family to go to college, and she had a new baby. But when she showed up on campus, the tuition money she thought would be there wasn’t. Lucille was about $3,000 short with no way to pay.

“I am older, so maybe I’ll just have to go back to work and save my money,” she told herself.

But, really, Lucille knew better.

“I knew in the back of my mind I wouldn’t be returning,” she says.

Georgia State saw this pattern over and over: bright, capable students walking away because they just didn’t have the money.

“A number of the students we were dropping were short by $300, by $400,” says Tim Renick, Vice Provost and Chief Enrollment Officer at Georgia State.

“When I sometimes present this account to outside audiences, they say ‘Well, why didn’t they go to their parents to get the money, why didn’t they get a loan from a bank to get that money or some other kind of loan,’” he says. “And the reality is a lot of these students are maxed out.”

So a few years ago, the university instituted what’s called a bridge grant.

The administration flagged students who were automatically dropped for non-payment. Those who owed the least got their grants first, and it went on down the line until the pot ran out.

Georgia State University president Mark Becker provided the initial seed money out of his own pocket -- about $40,000.  

 “Higher education was transformational in my life,” says Becker. “I was a first-generation college student, and saw the life I was able to live because of a college education.”

The bridge fund is now worth a couple million dollars.

But it’s just one way the school keeps students on track to graduate from the minute they arrive on campus.

Another is data.

GSU found that students often get  derailed because they take classes that don’t count toward graduation. With 32,000 students, it’s not like staffers can check every registration.

But a computer can.  

Now the school “flags” students if they’re  headed for trouble.

“I think it’s definitely a notable increase,” says the Brooking Institution’s Matthew Chingos of GSU’s progress.  

Chingos says colleges often pour tons of money into improving graduation percentages.  

“Colleges spend money on lots of different things -- on research, on teaching, on student support,” he says. 

Chingos adds more money isn’t necessarily better.

“And in general, there isn’t that much of a correlation once you take into account student characteristics,” he says.  

In other words, things like SAT scores and socioeconomic status play a bigger role in getting students across the finish line than the amount of cash a school throws at the problem.

But studies show a little help can go a long way in creating success stories like Lucille McGee’s.

“I plan to go to medical school upon graduation,” she says, adding that she has just two semesters to go.

As far as Saturday’s graduation, Georgia State will hand out a record 4,000 diplomas. That includes to some 300 to students who might not have made it a decade ago.

You’ve been there, right? Streaming music or video on your smartphone when you realize that is using up a lot of data and your phone bill is going to be huge.

Except for those lucky souls who have been grandfathered in, unlimited data plans are a thing of the past. Which is, it turns out, a big concern for content providers -- the companies that make whatever you are watching or listening to. So, they’re thinking about helping consumers cut their data costs.

The entertainment ecosystem is crowded and competitive, and David Finke, who heads the digital transformation practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, says smartphones are a big part of that.

“Everyone is looking to increase revenue and profitability, and everybody is looking for a way to leverage other parts of the ecosystem in order to do that.”

This week, Daniel Mead, the CEO of Verizon Wireless, said the company is looking at a new business model. Advertisers and content providers would subsidize consumers by paying for part of their data plan.

That’d be good news for media companies. They’d get viewers.

“The reason you want to deliver your content is so you can get valuable advertising dollars,” Finke says.

It’d be good news for consumers. They’d save money. And it’d be good news for wireless companies. They’d continue making money off all that data.

Rob Frieden, a  professor of telecommunications and law at Penn State, says watching shows on smartphones gets us one step closer to “the end of appointment television as we know it.”

According to Frieden, no one wants to set a clock anymore, to watch one show on one channel on one platform.

“People are expecting anytime, anywhere, over any device access to content,” he says.

More Americans are spending more time watching video on smartphones -- on average, about five and a half hours a month.

If data plans are subsidized, chances are there would be more demand.

Weston Henderek, with telecom and software research firm Current Analysis, says wireless companies have to be cautious. A surge in demand could clog their networks.

“As much as carriers like the additional data revenue, they have to be very careful in terms of their network planning and how quickly they can add additional capacity.”

They’ll have to move fast. According to Cisco, by 2017, two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video.

British sailor Andrew Simpson died yesterday when his AC72 yacht capsized during training for the America's Cup in San Francisco. Now, many are questioning the safety of these racing boats.

A high-performance yacht these days doesn't so much sail as it hovers, says Ben Farnborough, associate publisher of Boat International Media.

"None of it is in the water other than the rudder and a daggerboard, so it's essentially flying," he says.

Flying faster than ever before. And Farnborough says because the yachts move at such high speeds, we're seeing new safety precautions. 

"The guys on the AC72's are wearing crash helmets, which is something that we've not seen before in sailboat racing," he says. 

Lee Tawney is the executive director of the National Sailing Hall of Fame. He says say events like the America's Cup need yachts that are at the forefront technologically. And that comes with risk. "Safely one could ask the same kinds of questions when you fly a new kind of airplane, or test anything that's on the edge," he says.

Tawney says the race does need to be safe. Unfortunately, slower yachts just aren't as exciting to watch. Stuart Streuli,senior editor at Sailing World Magazine, says these high-speed yachts are meant to draw a crowd.

"They want the competition to be exciting enough and easy enough to comprehend, so that non-sailors who saw it on TV would stop and watch and not turn away," Tawney says.  "And in the past, that's been a big problem."

And sailors in the America's Cup can use all the advertising dollars they can get. After all, these boats can cost more than $10 million each.

By now, you've heard about a global ATM heist for the ages; this complicated operation did $45 million worth of withdrawals.

The high-tech part involved hacking into financial accounts. The low-tech part: making homemade debit cards that get away with it in one important country: ours.

To simplify, this was a two-part crime. The bad guys stole debit card information online, and then pasted that info onto magnetic stripe debit cards. The kind you and I use.

Easy peasy, says fraud analyst Julie Conroy at the Aite Group. You can buy the equipment to do it for $25.

"So you can take any ordinary plastic card," Conroy says. "It can be an old gift card you've gotten. Create your own magnetic stripe. And then use it like any other ATM card."

This magnetic stripe technology is older than the Ford Pinto. Its vulnerabilities let the presumed crooks in this case make duplicate debit cards to use all at once.

"It was really choreographed," says financial researcher Brian Riley with CEB Tower Group. "Within the course of ten hours, thousands of transactions passed through. And if you saw the map that was released, it showed a map going straight down Broadway."

The U.S. is the world's only advanced economy using magnetic stripes. Every other member of the G20 group of industrialized countries uses a newer technology.

"That puts a chip on the cards," says fraud consultant Jerry Silva. "And now you had kind of a double layer of security."

Cards with chips embedded are harder to copy. And they generate a unique code for each transaction, for additional security.

Ideally, American consumers and banks want that.

"But the cost of replacing all of the plastic in this country, the cost of upgrading every ATM to date has exceeded the cost of the fraud itself," says Silva.

By one estimate, the hardware upgrade would cost around $4 billion. That puts this $45 million case in some perspective.

One reason Americans are in this situation is, we invented credit cards. So we have old infrastructure, a bit like the New York City subway system.

"A lot of times the early adopters are stuck with a generation 1.0 system," says cybersecurity analyst Chris Wysopal of Veracode. "And I think that's what we have here."

Still, higher-tech cards are coming to the U.S. in the next few years, analysts say. They've started to hit the market for global travelers, though financial firms still have to work out details of the chip format.

When the new cards do come, no one in the industry believes our fraud problems will be resolved. The hackers will just need to get a little more creative.

How do you waste money? We heard from a lot of you about your morning lattes, lottery tickets and lunch dates. One listener said she buys far too much chocolate. But "waste" is subjective. Here's a fact about personal finance though: you have to plug the leaky holes in your spending to stick to a budget.

If you can learn to do that, Paula Pant says you can eventually buy whatever you need -- and want, too. She is a personal finance journalist and author of the aptly named blog, Afford Anything. Pant joins us to talk about spending habits and answer some of your questions about waste.

We all waste money, one way or another. So how should people think about where to draw the line on their budget leaks?

"There's a difference between wasting money and using money in ways that you enjoy," says Pant. "Don't fall into the trap of thinking that any money that you spend on fun or entertainment is necessarily a waste. I mean, those are the memories you're creating that you'll look back on 20 years from now and think, wow, I really enjoyed those times in my life. That's not a waste at all, in fact, it's arguably some of the highest and best use of your money, as long as you do it in a constrained, judicious fashion."

One of the trickiest aspects of budgeting is separating your wants from needs. To help make it easier for you, we created a simple three-step guide.

Several Marketplace Money listeners wrote in to ask for advice about how to get their spending under control:

• Kari, an orchestral musician in Charleston, S.C., wants to know how she can curb her social spending. As someone who spends a lot of time practicing alone at home, Kari enjoys going out with friends but often comes home with a bar tab of $100 or more.
• Seth is based in Houston, Texas, but as a management consultant, he spends long stretches away from home. He likes to unwind by watching newly released movies in his hotel room, but they cost him $20 a pop, and often he falls asleep on the first-run films after working a long day.  He wants to know if his hotel movie habit is a waste of money.

"As a general rule... there's nothing wrong with spending money on entertainment," says Pant. "And in fact, there's a rule if thumb that says that you should spend roughly 50 percent of your money on necessities, another 30 percent on discretionary spending and then 20 percent on savings.  If that entertainment is contained within that 30 percent portion, then generally speaking -- assuming you don't have any huge credit card debt or anything like that, that should be addressed first, and assuming that you're saving enough for retirement and taking care of all of those things -- then there's nothing wrong with spending money on your social life and entertainment."

Click play on the audio player above to hear more of Pant's advice.

How do you waste money? We heard from a lot of you about your morning lattes, lottery tickets and lunch dates. One listener said she buys far too much chocolate. But "waste" is subjective. Here's a fact about personal finance though: you have to plug the leaky holes in your spending to stick to a budget.

If you can learn to do that, Paula Pant says you can eventually buy whatever you need -- and want, too. She is a personal finance journalist and author of the aptly named blog, Afford Anything. Pant joins us to talk about spending habits and answer some of your questions about waste.

We all waste money, one way or another. So how should people think about where to draw the line on their budget leaks?

"There's a difference between wasting money and using money in ways that you enjoy," says Pant. "Don't fall into the trap of thinking that any money that you spend on fun or entertainment is necessarily a waste. I mean, those are the memories you're creating that you'll look back on 20 years from now and think, wow, I really enjoyed those times in my life. That's not a waste at all, in fact, it's arguably some of the highest and best use of your money, as long as you do it in a constrained, judicious fashion."

One of the trickiest aspects of budgeting is separating your wants from needs. To help make it easier for you, we created a simple three-step guide.

Several Marketplace Money listeners wrote in to ask for advice about how to get their spending under control:

• Kari, an orchestral musician in Charleston, S.C., wants to know how she can curb her social spending. As someone who spends a lot of time practicing alone at home, Kari enjoys going out with friends but often comes home with a bar tab of $100 or more.
• Seth is based in Houston, Texas, but as a management consultant, he spends long stretches away from home. He likes to unwind by watching newly released movies in his hotel room, but they cost him $20 a pop, and often he falls asleep on the first-run films after working a long day.  He wants to know if his hotel movie habit is a waste of money.

"As a general rule... there's nothing wrong with spending money on entertainment," says Pant. "And in fact, there's a rule if thumb that says that you should spend roughly 50 percent of your money on necessities, another 30 percent on discretionary spending and then 20 percent on savings.  If that entertainment is contained within that 30 percent portion, then generally speaking -- assuming you don't have any huge credit card debt or anything like that, that should be addressed first, and assuming that you're saving enough for retirement and taking care of all of those things -- then there's nothing wrong with spending money on your social life and entertainment."

Click play on the audio player above to hear more of Pant's advice.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Treasury will report a $112 billion surplus for the month of April. So far in 2013, the federal government is running a deficit $230 billion less than it was last year.

Forty-eight-year-old Jack Ma, founder and CEO of the world's largest e-commerce website, Alibaba, says he's stepping down because he is "a bit old for the internet." The idea that a man who is not yet 50 could be "too old" for any leadership position may strike some as laughable but some analysts say tech entrepreneurship is often a young person's game.

The president will host several women at the White House today to talk about how Obamacare has helped them and their families, just in time for the Mother's Day. It's is just the latest in a week's worth of Affordable Care Act news as the administration gears up the charm offensive to sell health reform to the millions who still don't quite get it.

Believe me, I know the point of "Mad Men" is not to make us nostalgic for the good old days of advertising. But at least back then, as smarmy as the ad men were, the game was more straightforward: Companies wanted your money, and they ran ads to get it.

Okay, so that hasn't changed, exactly. Companies still want your money. But now they actually try and make you work to make it easier to sell you their products.

Oh, I'm sorry -- you thought that when your favorite DJ asks you to vote on whether you prefer your candles vanilla or cinnamon-scented, or which way you like your toilet paper to hang, or who was the best dressed at "The Great Gatsby" premier, it's because she's interested in your thoughts?

Ha.

It's all part of a two-part ploy. Step one: lure you to the company website, Facebook page or Twitter feed. Step two: motivate you to "like"/share/pin/rank/rate/comment/complete a survey -- anything to build a "relationship" or to show advertisers that you're an "engaged" user.

Can't we just watch or listen in peace?

Apparently not. The quest for engaged consumers is relentless. ABC wants me to follow my favorite "Shark Tank" shark on Twitter. CNN.com wants to me to submit my suggestion for the country's best beer town. The local oldies station nags me to stop by on Facebook and tell the hosts about incidents in which I've almost injured myself in the bathroom.

Even I don't care about that. Or do I? Listeners, tweet me and let me know your opinion.

There's some rare good news expected for the finances of the federal government this afternoon. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Treasury will report a $112 billion surplus for the month of April. So far in 2013, the federal government is running a deficit $230 billion less than it was last year.

Chris Low chief economist at FTN Financial explains how this is possible.

Fannie Mae said on Thursday that it's paying $59.4 billion in dividends to the U.S. Treasury. So between that and the sequester, does this mean our debt limit problems are over?

"I think that it's kind of impressive that this clever little accounting gimmick that Fannie Mae discovered about tax credits has turned into $60 billion of real money, which is going to the government -- yay, good for them," said Reuters' Felix Salmon. "But the debt limit fight is absolutely certain to happen sooner or later, and at some point this year."

Mostly, it's good news for the government, said Bloomberg Government's Nela Richardson.

"Not only do they not have to deal with the debt ceiling, they don't have to deal with Fannie Mae," she said. "The company's now profitable and the calls for reform are much less frequent when the company is actually making the government and putting off decisions for the government. It's a win-win all around."

Listen to the full audio for more analysis.

#Longreads

Time to catch up on the week with our Wrappers' picks for #longreads for the weekend!

Felix Salmon suggests:

• Soros vs Sinn: The Europe debate.
• Martin Filler on MoMA and the Folk Art Museum building.
• Jim Holt on Benoit Mandelbrot.

Nela Richardson picked:

• Kelefa Sannah takes a deep dive into the Occupy Wall Street movement and the state of American anarchy.
• Chrystia Freeland explores parents and the money they spend to make their kids smarter, faster, more talented than their peers. Is it working?
• Related: Karen Weise reports that colleges financial aid is increasingly going to wealthier kids.
• Peter Coy asks what's wrong with the American job market. The article takes a look behind the numbers to the obstacles to full employment that still remain.

And a bonus from both:

• That New American Foundation Pell report on Pell Grants, related to the Weise article.

In just a few hours, POOF. $40 million. Gone. 

In what may be the largest heist of its kind, thieves across two dozen countries made off with $40 million dollars from thousands of atms around the world on February 19. 

In a similar scheme in December, they made off with $5 million.

Here’s how it worked: 

1. Hackers stole prepaid card numbers.
2. They hacked into card processing centers and raised the withdrawal limits on those cards.
3. They made fake cards.
4. They sent legions of thieves out to withdraw money from thousands of ATMS. 

NOT A NEW CRIME

“We’ve seen a pattern in these kinds of attacks in the past few years,” says Tom Cross, director of computer security research at Lancope. “There’ve been a few heists like this one.”

He says what’s surprising about this instance isn’t any technical novelty, but rather “the coordination of the cash out network where large amounts of cash was withdrawn by ATMs by multiple people almost simultaneously.”

A WEAKNESS IN HOW PEOPLE GET ACCESS TO CASH

That card processing centers continue to be subject to – in this case – spectacularly successful hacking is itself a major issue. “It shows a significant weakness in how people get access to cash,” says Ken Pickering, development manager of security intelligence at Boston-based CORE Security. There’s something wrong with “the infrastructure of how transactions are authorized,” he says.

Cross, with Lancope, says there’s another weak link in the chain mail around the world’s cash.

 Many ATMs, he says, don’t talk to each other. “A large financial institution may operate large numbers of ATMs, and can analyze transactions across their network” to detect signs of fraud. But many ATMs are run by small businesses and individuals who are not connected up to a financial institution, so one machine may not know that a card was just used five times at five other machines. “That coordination doesn’t exist today.” 

Pickering adds another weak point to the list: those magnetic strips on credit and debit cards. “Anyone who has access to the swipe or digital readout of the swipe can replicate the card,” says Pickering. In much of the rest of the world, cards use harder to fake embedded chips. 

Replacing those strips would involve changing not only all the cards in the U.S., but also all the readers. 

“I don’t think until fraud hits a certain level would people be willing to incur the cost of that,” he says. He notes that in 2008, credit and debit card fraud was over a billion dollars. “I think we’re getting pretty close.”

Several alleged footmen, responsible for withdrawing cash from ATMs in New York City, have been apprehended. But so far, the masterminds of the scheme remain at large.