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The game is over. That game where they get to hire you for 40 years, pay you far less than you create, and then give you a gold watch, and then you get bored, you get depressed, and you die alone.

It wasn’t that fun of a game anyway.

When I had a corporate job I would wake up depressed. I couldn’t move out of bed.

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The pro-coal T-shirts at the Chicago hearing. (Photo by Lauren Kastner/Beyond Coal.)

A version of this post originally appeared on Climate Progress.

Apparently unable to find real activists, the coal industry paid astroturfers $50 to wear pro-coal T-shirts at an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hearing yesterday.

The EPA hearings, held in Chicago and Washington, D.C., were focused on the agency’s 

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Tim De Chant at Per Square Mile has noted that rich urban areas have way, way more trees than poor areas in the same city. In fact, the difference is so stark that income inequality can be seen from space. The satellite images above are low-income West Oakland and high-income Piedmont, and I probably don’t have to tell you which is which.

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Facebook is still trading well below its IPO price, and suddenly it’s hip to dump on the company. Sure, that IPO was ugly, and its negative effects will continue to be felt for some time. But to everyone out there who thinks Facebook has already played all its revenue tricks and so isn’t worth all the hype, I say: hold up.

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It has been a week since the Facebook IPO, with a whole lot of drama in the aftermath about the glitch with Nasdaq (and the legal implications), and questions about how much traders have lost as a result, while the share price has fallen: from a start of $38 it is now $32.79 in pre-market trading. But in a speech earlier this week to the 2012 graduating class of Harvard Business School, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg steered very clear of these topics.

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SurfAir, the company launching a new small jet service between Silicon Valley and Southern California, has gotten so much interest from the Venture Capital community that we’re hearing it’s accepting a little more than expected.

When we originally interviewed SurfAir CEO Wade Eyerly last March, he indicated the company was seeking about $2 million. But over the past couple of days we’ve gotten unsolicited calls from investors, who wish to remain anonymous at this point, who have told us that there was so much demand that the company has raised nearly $14 million.

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Talk about a sea change. These three business titans are cutting back.

Athena, companion of heroes.

FORTUNE — The oldest adage on the sea is that the two happiest days in a sailor’s life are the days he buys his boat and the day he sells it. For three business titans, the days seem to be getting happier.

In 2009, Tom Perkins, the nonpareil venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, sold the Maltese Falcon, a 289-foot futuristic Darth Vader-esque square-rigger.

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Samsung has a recent history of mocking others in its ads — some poked fun at iPhone users — but now Samsung is using humor to tout its gesture controlled line of Smart TV sets. Thanks to an integrated web cam atop the display, consumers can control video playback, volume and other functions without touching the set.

To show how — dare I say it — sexy this is, the company’s latest ad shows what happens when you put a female model wearing a camisole top and shorts that are two sizes too small in front of a Smart TV.

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The world inside a snow globe is usually pretty idyllic — just pure white snow falling lightly on famous landmarks. Not really an accurate reflection of the environmental toll of mass-produced tourist kitsch. So the artists of the Dorothy collective have produced a limited run of two coal power plant globes, complete with ash-flake “snow.” One has already been sold — but the other can be yours for £2,000, or a little over $3,100.

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With two taps of a sword, Jony Ive becomes Sir Jonathan

FORTUNE — Britain’s Princess Anne does the honors, then she and Apple’s (AAPL) senior vice president for industrial design have a nice long chat.

BELOW: A 2:24 ITV report includes a brief interview with Ive and footage of him and the Queen.

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Good Morning!

James Nares has been on our design radar for quite some time as his paintings have been featured in some of our favourite publications, including Elle Decor and Lonny Mag. If you haven’t had the chance to parooze the work of Mr. Nares, we suggest you do yourself a favour and check it out.

Originally from London England he now resides and works in New York City.

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Instead, their consumer product expert describes a wall-mounted panel he calls the iHub

Source: technobuffalo.com

FORTUNE — James McQuivey, writing on his Forrester Research blog about Apple’s (AAPL) widely anticipated entry into the full-fledged TV market, had me convinced.

Up to a point.

What he says about the current situation — except for the use of the word “failed” — struck me as smart and fair:

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It may be the next frontier of intellectual property: your dinner table. Oklahoma State University is working on patenting a new cut of steak. Yes, you heard that right: there are, apparently, hitherto undiscovered regions of that steer.  Jacob Nelson, a “value-added meat-processing specialist”  at the university’s Robert M. Kerr Food & Agricultural Products Center, has created what he calls the “Vegas Strip Steak.” The new cut of meat is…

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Autodesk is expanding its growing portfolio of iPad apps today with SketchBook Ink. The pen-and-ink app is built on a new graphical engine that’s independent of resolution, allowing the created artwork to be exported in resolutions exceeding 100 megapixels.

This, Autodesk hopes, will reinvigorate graphic artists and even doodlers about iPad content creation since the vector-based artwork can scale to massive print sizes.

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Luxury jewelry retailer Tiffany & Co. (NYSE: TIF) reported first quarter earnings this morning that were a light even though revenues were better than expected. The company posted EPS of $0.64 compared with a consensus estimate of $0.69. Revenue totaled $819 million versus an estimate of $817 million. The stock is getting slashed in the pre-market, though, based on the company’s revised guidance.

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Step aside, bridge-scaling adrenaline junkies and natural wonder of the world tightrope-walkers. The wingsuit-clad Gary Connery scoffs at your childish antics as he leaps from a helicopter to enjoy a leisurely 2,400-foot drift to Earth with only the tender embrace of 18,600 cardboard boxes to greet him.

Sorry, was that angle not scary enough for you?

This week’s Fortune Magazine cover story penned by Apple watcher Adam Lashinsky is called “How Tim Cook is Changing Apple”, and it goes pretty deep into some of the high-level changes at the top of Apple since its late CEO Steve Jobs stepped down. Through a few anecdotes and observations, he noted how Cook inevitably changed Apple’s culture, which perhaps drives the company to a more normal structure and M.O.

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The media is full of news stories about the power of the Religious Right, the American and Canadian Christians who equate support for capitalism with their belief in the salvation power of Jesus, the Jewish peasant sage whom they believe is the Messiah.

But it turns out Americans, including American Christians, are inclined to believe Christian values are at odds with capitalism, according to the respected…

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Apple aired two new television commercials this evening to advertise its personal assistant feature Siri that introduced on the iPhone 4S last October. The commercials follow a similar pattern as the other Siri spots that featuring actor Samuel L. Jackson and aactorZooey Deschanel. They show Siri’s uses like finding the weather, getting calendar information, getting Siri to tell a joke, or even getting her to share some life advice.

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London – Today, we go to the Chelsea Flower Show, the most famous garden show in the world. I will be writing about the highlights for the Home & Garden section on June 1 but I can tell you that the buzz around town is that all the garden designers have pulled out the stops this year, it being the Queen’s special year.

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Fair warning that things get a touch racy toward the mid-point of this stock image love story, but it’s reasonable to say that after six months of research and database trawling, AlmaBBDO’s 60-second ad for our friends at Getty Images is the best use of stock photos since this.

1. Say goodbye to the individual investor on Wall Street. Whatever positive impression they had of the IPO market and the stock market in general was just torched to the ground. When everyone you know associated with the stock market is telling you and the media is confirming that this could be a huge IPO that will make money for those lucky enough to get shares and the opposite happens, goodnight.

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