When life hands you lemons: A rainy forecast has led Lemonade Day Louisiana organizers to add a second day to the annual entrepreneurship event this weekend. Originally slated for Saturday—when there’s a 90% chance of rain—the event has been extended to include Sunday. “Lemonade Day participants are advised to follow the weather, plan for their stands and make safe decisions,” the organizers say in a statement released this morning. More than 16,000 youth across Louisiana are expected to participate in the ninth annual Lemonade Day this weekend.
Ocean of options: For decades, as oil exploration and production companies went farther and deeper into the world’s oceans, offshore technology meant developing, designing and building custom-made rigs and platforms that often were compared to spaceships, each unique to the particular drilling project and each costing many billions of dollars. But today, oil and gas companies are taking a vastly different approach, focusing relentlessly on increasing efficiency and lowering the costs of offshore production. It’s a focus requiring offshore technology to simultaneously become simpler and more complex. The Houston Chronicle has the full story.
Bottom line: For years it was the central question in an otherwise impressive recovery by the American job market: Why aren’t wages rising faster? Unemployment was low. Hiring was strong. Corporate executives were complaining that they could not find people to fill all of the available jobs. Yet workers’ paychecks were growing only sluggishly, barely outpacing inflation. And then wage growth suddenly picked up. Average hourly earnings in April were 3.2% higher than a year earlier, the ninth straight month in which growth topped 3%, the Labor Department reported this morning. The New York Times has the full story.
