$12.87 an hour?

"My job sucks."

Everybody I know, black or white, has said this before. But if you're black, you're more likely to mean it and with good reason: a new study from U.C. Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education says more than half of black workers in the US have jobs that, well, suck.

Whether you like your job is irrelevant; the point of the study was to show that race matters when it comes to finding work with decent pay and benefits. 56.4 percent of black workers make $12.87 or less. Only Hispanics had a higher percentage, but it's a good bet those numbers are skewed by immigrants doing manual labor and other low-paying jobs.

At first glance, $12.87 an hour might not sound that bad, but think about it this way: that's less than $28 grand a year, or $514 per week. And that's before taxes. My rent would eat up almost half that.

And you think YOU got it hard.

There's more to this story, I'm sure, but the full report won't come out for a few weeks. I'll come back to it then.

Got! (by online jackers)

A couple months ago, while I was still blogging for AOL Black Voices, I posted an item about preventing identity theft. It's a huge problem, especially given how much business most people do electronically these days (how many times have you punched in your credit card number or address online this month?).

But even though I've talked about this topic on TV before, I never thought I'd know somebody who fell for one of those "phishing" schemes, you know, where they send you an email saying your lost aunt in Nigeria has a trillion dollars for you and all she needs is your social and bank account number to get it to you. They're so obviously scams that no reasonable person, I figured, would go for it.

I stand corrected. A friend of mine who I know is a really smart and pretty sophisticated woman, wasted no time replying with her social security number and bank account pin number after getting an email claiming she has refund money coming from the IRS. The money never came, of course and she spent the rest of her day cancelling credit cards, closing bank accounts and placing fraud alerts in her credit files.

All that is to say that I suppose not even smart people are immune to dumb scams when greed is involved. Free money? Great, here's my info! So in the interest of helping you protect yourself, here's a link to the Federal Trade Commission's tips on identity theft.