Statistics are tricky whenever people try to guess their underlying cause but it doesn’t make it less fun. A recent Gallup poll results showed stock market investment by U.S. adults is at its lowest percentage since Gallup has started asking (1998). It’s been on a steady decline since 2007 (65%) and this year it stands at 52%.

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One of the most frustrating things in life is being unemployed. This is especially true if you want to work, but you are unable to find a job. Even though the unemployment rate is falling, many people still find it difficult to land a job.

Many states administer unemployment benefits to help support those who can’t find work. If you don’t have a job, it might be worth it to see if you qualify for unemployment benefits.

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We haven’t covered it much on Bargaineering (you might have guessed given the increased interest in credit scores), but we’re buying a new home. We submitted an offer a little while ago and after a little back and forth, it was accepted. We’re buying a house about ten minutes south of where we live now and while we aren’t excited about packing up and moving, we are really excited about the home itself.

Bargaineering was around when we bought our first house and we chronicled the entire process. A lot of it is mundane, downright boring if you’ve already done this yourself, but at the time it was all new to us. Getting pre-approval, while much easier then, hasn’t changed much except for how much paperwork you need to submit. Back then you typed a few numbers on a form and you were in! That’s why I didn’t write much about the process this time around – it wasn’t that much different and it wasn’t a completely new experience for us.

That said, in the last eight years, some things have changed…

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One of the great things about technology is that you have the opportunity to make money in new and different ways. You can even find work at home jobs that pay reasonably well. At the very least, you can start a home business as a freelancer, or doing some other type of work.

Since the dream of working from home is so strong, you need to watch out for scams. Whenever something seems very attractive to a wide swath of the population, there are scammers out there trying to take advantage. If you’re not careful, you might find that the dream job advertised online at places like Craig’s List is actually scam. Here are 5 signs your dream job is probably a scam:

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I was watching CNN’s list of the big-name college commencement speakers and saw that there were a few names on that list I’d love to see. Bill Cosby is delivering the commencement speech at the University of Baltimore on May 21st. President Obama is speaking at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis on May 24th. And Cal Ripken Jr. is speaking to the graduates of the University of Maryland on May 19th. All within fifteen minute driving distance, these all hold great promise. While they may not not be as powerful as Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2008 or The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch from my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, they all have the promise of being entertaining.

There’s just one problem… I’m not graduating from any of those schools. So how do I get in?

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There is a battle raging right now about the usefulness of a graduate degree, or even of any college degree at all. Joining the fray right now is the online degree space.

A number of colleges and universities offer online degree programs, and there are online schools completely in the Internet education space. My husband teaches online classes for Utah State University, and one of them is a graduate-level course mostly aimed at teachers working on their master’s degrees.

While my husband’s students find it useful to continue their educations online, since the master’s degree will come with a pay increase, not everyone is in the same boat.

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Back when I worked as a consultant in the defense industry, I was expected to wear a suit every single day into work. I was fortunate in that I had just made a trip to China and came back with five suits (at around $80 a piece – they were very nice quality too) so I was well equipped to wear one every single day. (I would later learn that you just left a jacket behind your door and only wore a full suit to meet with clients) Even with five suits, I wanted to make sure I maintained them properly so that I could get the most out of them. While they were under $80 a piece, a great price for a great suit (that’s what happens when you go straight to the tailor), I knew they were worth two or three times that and wanted to treat them that way.

So I read up on how to maintain a suit and was surprised how simple it was.

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Here’s an interesting question – is taking advantage of an exploitable bug in something inherently illegal? By luck and lots of playing, John Kane discovered a bug in the Game King video poker gaming system (this is true of all systems, not a single unit, in which certain settings were turned on) that would give him a significant advantage. I won’t go into the exact exploit, it gets pretty detailed, but Kane was charged with a violation of federal anti-hacking law even though he didn’t tamper with anything. He simply looked for a setting (or asked that it be turned on) and used his workaround. He also worked with others to visit several casinos over and over to use the exploit to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The exact charge wasn’t that they hacked the unit itself, since they didn’t, but that they exceeded “their otherwise legitimate access ‘to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter.’” In other words, they discovered this workaround, used it, and made lots of money. They found a bug (the thing the accesser is not entitled to obtain or alter).

Personally, I don’t think what they did should be a crime. The manufacturers of the Game King system didn’t test their systems enough and now turning this into a legal case just brings more exposure to their oversight. This is big news only because of all the recent news about Aaron’s Law (named after Aaron Swartz), and the fight over internet regulation laws.

Did they do something ethical? No, certainly not. But you could argue that gambling is hardly ethical either (and being unethical in an unethical place… well, that’s not two wrongs make a right either!). That said, gamblers are always trying to beat the house when they play any rigged game (all casino games favor the house), these gamblers simply found a way to work things in their favor. I applaud them!

What do you think? Did they commit a crime?

(Credit: midom)