Payday loans. All these sports gadgets. College grad and no good job? Yup, more oil. iRobots etc. Internet privacy whatever. Generation Squeeze. Go to your psychotherapist instead of eHarmony. Chinese automakers?

PAYDAY loans—the short-term, high-cost credit that can mire borrowers in debt. Some banks offer the loans tied to checking accounts, with the understanding that the lender can automatically withdraw the loan amount, plus the origination fee, when it is due. Now, federal regulators are cracking down on them, but instead of taking aim at the big fish, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation are gunning at storefront payday lenders. Bigger players like Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank are left unscathed. What else is new? The regulators are expected to impose more stringent requirements on the loans. Before making a loan, for example, banks will have to assess a consumer’s ability to repay the money. Of course, they can—but squeezing their guts more... Wells Fargo charges $1.50 for every $20 borrowed. Add other fees on ATM withdrawals etcetera etcetera...

ALL these sports gadgets, life's gizmos that we are so fond of spending hard-earned money on... Like goggles. Example: Oakley, the eyewear company, makes a $600 ski goggle that comes with a warning in the package: Do not operate product while skiing. But of course, the digital goggles are meant for skiing and snowboarding... However, safety advocates say the concept of high-tech displays for goggles — and for other sports eyewear — is information overload run amok, particularly when people are using them at high speeds. Surely, Oakley, based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., argue such warnings. Meantime, Google is expected to introduce soon its computerized glasses, called Google Glass, which will perform many of the same functions as smartphones. Jeez...

A LOT of young people these days are like Pearl Brady: a stable job with good benefits, holds two degrees, a bachelor’s and a master’s. But despite her best efforts, she has no savings, and worries that it will be years before she manages to start putting away money for a house, children and eventually retirement. “I’m in that extremely nervous category,” Ms. Brady, 28, a Brooklynite who works for a union, told New York Times. “I know how much money I’m going to be making for the near term. I hope in my 30s and 40s to be able to save, but I have no idea how. It’s scary.” A new study from the Urban Institute finds that Ms. Brady and her peers up to roughly age 40 have accrued less wealth than their parents did at the same age, even as the average wealth of Americans has doubled over the last quarter-century. Inequality? Let's look at life, per se. More millionaires, yes. Yet there a lot more food-to-mouth wage earners.

MIDWAY-Sunset oil field near Fellows in California has been producing crude for more than a century since Socal's oil boom. Midway-Sunset is tapping crude directly from what is called the Monterey Shale, which could represent the future of California’s oil industry — and a potential arena for conflict between drillers and the state’s powerful environmental interests. Comprising two-thirds of the US’ total estimated shale oil reserves and covering 1,750 square miles from Southern to Central California, the Monterey Shale could turn California into the nation’s top oil-producing state and yield the kind of riches that far smaller shale oil deposits have showered on North Dakota and Texas. Good news? Lesser dependence on OPEC oil? That is not the question that I'd like to answer. Do we really need more oil?

SINCE Roomba, the iRobot, has been doing my daily floor vacuuming job lately—no complaints here, so far. But then, wait... Robots actually want our job, not just the housework. According to professors at Cambridge University, robots also want our life and our little dog, too. But then, such android anxiety has a long history. John Maynard Keynes wrote about “technological unemployment” during the Great Depression.

In the Industrial Revolution, disgruntled laborers smashed automated looms and threshing machines that “stole” their jobs. In the 15th century, scribes protested the printing press, with a futile zeal rivaled perhaps only by that of modern journalists. Well, I also lost writing jobs due to the internet's instant “blog journalism.” In hindsight, historical fears of technological change look foolish, given that automation has increased living standards and rendered our workweeks both safer and shorter. In 1900, when nearly half the American labor force was employed in backbreaking agriculture, the typical worker logged 2,300 hours a year, according to Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University. Today that number is 1,800. By year 2062, we’ll be working only two hours a week. Good? Bad. Imagine Roomba doing all the housekeeping work in a motel chain? More unemployment. In fact, I am very wary that Georgia and Chloe—the lovable babedawgs under my care—might be so enamored with Roomba that they'd eventually ignore me when asking for food (1 click, here comes Roomba with a bowl of Purina!) Then, I will just be a lifeless, useless human being in the batcave...

ONCE the monster is unleashed, there's no way that it can be stopped. Or is there really a way? I am talking about the internet and the loss of human privacy (willingness in disguise?) Yet, over the years, the United States and Europe have taken different approaches toward protecting people’s personal information. Here, Congress has enacted a patchwork quilt of privacy laws that separately limit the use of Americans’ medical records, credit reports, video rental records and so on. Meantime, the European Union has instituted more of a blanket regulatory system; it has a common directive that gives its citizens certain fundamental rights — like the right to obtain copies of records held about them by companies and institutions — that Americans now lack. “Yes, we share the basic idea of privacy,” says Peter Hustinx, Europe’s data protection supervisor. “But there is a huge deficit on the US side.” With a dizzying array of new e-baubles flooding the market, expect more ways to reveal or invade privacies.

WHO are most hit by the hard times? Young graduates are in debt, out of work and on their parents’ couches. People in their 30s and 40s can’t afford to buy homes or have children. Retirees are earning near-zero interest on their savings. The most hit, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company, are Americans in their 50s and early 60s. The elderly do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago. Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”

IF you are in psychotherapy, there’s a good chance your therapist knows more about your inner thoughts and secret desires than anyone else. Hence, he/she's better be the person to match you up with your soulmate lovey-dovey, you reckon? Chuck eHarmony and Match.com and other sites that rely on impersonal algorithms, and chuck your BFF's super-zealous analysis that, anyways—simply mirrors his/her angst. An NY Times article by Richard A. Friedman, himself a shrink, goes: “Psychotherapy, especially insight-oriented therapy, is designed to conjure intense feelings — on the part of the patient and therapist. Much of what patients feel toward their therapists, the so-called transference, are unconscious feelings that are redirected from important early figures in their lives — parents, family members and teachers. Your therapist mirrors this phenomenon with his own countertransference.” Go get a psychotherapist, pronto!

CHINA may not be manufacturing pencil holders and back scratchers anymore. The next boom in China, according to the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based research group, are college graduates... China's youths have highly specific ambition: to work some day for a Chinese automaker and provide the cultural insights and English fluency the company needs to supply the next generation of fuel-efficient taxis that New York City plans to choose in 2021. China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they move from farms to cities. Good for China's vaunted working class economy? Let's wait and see.