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The mayor’s program to haul away New Yorkers’ food scraps means a lot more dirty work for the city’s building staffers. Samantha Guff on the residential logistics of a green idea.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest plan for the Big Apple is landing with a splatter in the lap of New York’s landlords and superintendents.Fresh off his fight to limit the size of soft drinks and introducing bike-sharing, Bloomberg is taking aim at the dinner plates, requiring New Yorkers to separate their food waste from their regular trash for composting. Residents will be asked to save chicken bones, rotting fruit, and stale bread in special containers in their homes, which they’ll have to deposit in larger curbside bins that will be emptied weekly by sanitation trucks.

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The prophets of American economic decline revise their thinking.

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The nonpartisan number-crunchers point to the obvious: More working-age Americans means more jobs and more people paying taxes. By Daniel Gross.

Give me your tired, your poor. Your productive, hard-working taxpayers.That’s not quite how the lines from the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty go. But it’s an accurate assessment of the economic impact of immigration. Anti-immigrant politicians frequently cite the prospective high cost of immigrants—they require social services, get benefits, have children who need to be educated—as a reason to maintain the status quo or to boost restrictions.

Break new boundaries.

There is a new creature in the wild jungle of daring travel —the investor. In what is being called “adventure capitalism,” some investors are doing research on emerging markets on their own two feet. Heading to the far corners of the world, these fortune-seekers meet locals, talk with native company executives, and even walk around local markets looking for locally popular products; all in the pursuit of the perfect stock. Trading on volatile local exchanges and often taking on extreme political and economic risk, these men and women find the deals others can’t. 

Read it at The Wall Street Journal

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Paging Hillary Clinton. In an interview, billionaire Carlos Slim says that in this modern world, the best workers are sexagenarians.

by Michelle Caruso-Cabrera Billionaire Carlos Slim, age 73, says workers—those in developed economies, anyway—are at their prime in their 60s."When you have an industrial economy like in the past where people ... do a lot of physical work and people live less years, it's OK to retire at 65," Slim told CNBC. "When you have a society of knowledge and experience and information, at this age is where you are at your best. It's [foolish] to retire at this age.

Number of data requests mounts.

Do you Yahoo? According to a statement on Tumblr, Yahoo received 13,000 requests for data by the National Security Agency in the last six months. The company says that many of the requests concerned crimes such as fraud, homicide, and kidnapping, but that requests were also made under the FISA laws. This latest disclosure puts the total number of disclosed NSA data requests made of some of America’s largest tech companies, such as Apple and Microsoft, in the past six months near 50,000.

Read it at CNBC

Influencers rapidly gain attention.

Some may laugh, but with its lists and cheesy platitudes served up by CEOs, LinkedIn is carving out a large space online. The online career networking site’s “Influencers” section has been routinely mocked, but readers have gobbled up contributions from the likes of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson. And that’s making LinkedIn a serious player in the business-publishing game. According to the company, its Influencers posts are regularly receiving more than 100,000 views.

Read it at The New York Times

Makerbot

It’s easy, and pretty cheap.

Thanks to the work of a Washington puppeteer and a South African carpenter, all it takes is a 3-D printer and about $150 to make a functioning hand. After losing two of his fingers to his table saw in Johannesburg, Richard Van As searched for a way to create prosthetic fingers that he could afford. He reached out to special-effects artist and puppeteer Ivan Owen after discovering a YouTube video Owen posted of one of his puppets—a large hand with bending metal digits. The pair embarked on a cross-continental collaboration that ultimately led them to create Robohands: prosthetic, 3-D-printed hands that they’ve already provided to over 100 children, free of charge.

Read it at NPR

Mosaic

Save the planet, turn a profit. That’s the thinking of Mosaic, a company that lets you invest in solar panels, and promises a pretty decent return. Daniel Gross gives it a whirl.

It’s hard to get a 4.5 percent annual return on your money without taking too much risk. Banks pay less than 1 percent. Blue-chip stocks pay dividends at about2 percent. The U.S. government borrows for about 30 years at 3 percent.But I found one way to get a decent interest rate while also boosting my personal green credentials: I bought a very small piece of a solar electric power plant in New Jersey.Solar power is growing by leaps and bounds.

Music’s new rivalry.

What do Fifty Shades of Grey and the nuns of the Benedictines of Mary have in common? Both are vying for the top spot on Billboard’s classical-music chart. With their latest release of Angels and Saints at Ephesus, the sisters knocked Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album down to No. 2. While the nuns declined to comment on their position, surely Fifty Shades author E.L. James doesn’t mind someone else being on top.

Read it at The Wall Street Journal