Shares of Netflix (NFLX) rose in early trading Wednesday despite media reports that the streaming video/DVD rental service is trimming nearly 1,900 titles from its library throughout the month of May as content deals expire. The stock gave up those gains as the broader market slid on some poor economic reports.

Still, customers of the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company probably aren't going to notice a difference because Netflix has 60,000 titles available for them to access. And more folks are tapping that library: During the latest quarter, Netflix added 2 million new video-streaming customers and reported earnings that were much better than Wall Street expected.

Some of the films being dropped are hardly "classics." 

Congratulations, Seattle. You're now to the National Basketball Association what Los Angeles is to the National Football League.

Amid a busy sports day that saw NBA free agent Jason Collins come out as gay and ESPN ignore that fact for almost an hour as it reported on the New York Jets cutting seldom-used backup quarterback Tim Tebow, an NBA ownership committee voted on Monday against relocating the Sacramento Kings to Seattle.

As ESPN notes, Seattle businessman Chris Hansen and Microsoft (MSFT) Chief Executive Steve Ballmer had bid $365 million for 65% of the team and had made a separate deal with a bankruptcy court to pay $15 million for an additional 7% stake (Microsoft owns and publishes moneyNOW, an MSN Money site).

 

The question of whether money brings happiness has been debated by philosophers since the beginning of time. Similarly debated is the related question: Is there a point at which additional wealth brings no additional satisfaction? Now, two economists have declared the answer to the second question: There is no "satiation point."

According to research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan, the relationship between well-being and income "does not diminish over time." That leads Stevenson and Wolfers to reject the idea of a point where someone no longer gains pleasure from the accumulation of more goods. This runs counter to a conclusion made famous by economist Richard Easterlin that increasing average income did not raise average happiness. It's known as the "Easterlin paradox." 

What does it take to get business-minded Bloomberg and the employee-aligned AFL-CIO to agree on something? An exponential increase in executive pay, apparently.

 

Bloomberg reported Monday that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000% since 1950. Today's Fortune 500 CEOs make 204 times more than regular workers on average, up from 120-to-1 in 2000, 42-to-1 in 1980 and 20-to-1 in 1950. The AFL-CIO has only a minor quibble with that ratio, insisting that the 2012 figure is closer to 354-to-1.

 

In each case, both Bloomberg and the unions agree that the balance of executive pay to worker compensation can be far more skewed, depending on which company is under the microscope. Bloomberg notes that recently departed J.C. Penney (JCP) CEO Ron Johnson was given a package worth 1,795 times the average wages and benefits of a U.S. department store worker when he was hired in 2011.

 

Yes, the economic landscape in the United States is still far from rosy. But if it's any consolation, consider the financially beleaguered eurozone -- the European Union countries that adopted the euro as their currency -- where unemployment hit a record high in March and where, in some countries, the jobless rate is worse than it was in the U.S. during the darkest years of the Great Depression.

 

Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office, reports the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for the 17-nation eurozone was 12.1% in March, up from the previous high of 12% reached just a month earlier. Unemployment for the broader, 27-member European Union stood at 10.9% in March.

 

The office also reported eurozone inflation at 1.2% in April, down from 1.7% in March.

 

Yahoo (YHOO) appears to be trying to undo the poor image it earned after chief executive Marissa Mayer banned working from home, offending many with what they viewed as an anti-family policy. 

 

Mayer is now offering her employees a generous package of family leave benefits, which give new moms 16 weeks of paid leave and fathers up to eight weeks. Employees also retain their other benefits while taking the leave, according to NBC Bay Area.

 

That means that new moms working for Yahoo will receive up to twice as much paid time off as they previously could claim, as the company used to offer eight weeks paid maternity leave, or 10 weeks if the mom had a C-section. 

 

While Democrats are thought to be proponents of "big government," some new data about public sector employment during President Barack Obama's tenure is shedding surprising light on the subject. 

Public sector jobs -- positions in federal, state and local government -- have declined by 718,000 jobs since Obama took office, according to the economics blog Calculated Risk. 

Under his Republican predecessor, President George W. Bush, the number of public sector jobs swelled by 1.75 million, the blog found. 

There's a big caveat with the findings, though. Most of the public sector jobs lost during Obama's tenure are due to cutbacks at the state and local level, the study notes.

 

Do you find the price-matching policies that are endlessly hyped by retailers in their advertisements confusing? Well, according to Bloomberg, you're not alone. In fact, even many workers at the very stores that promote these policies aren't sure how they work.

Shoppers at Wal-Mart (WMT), the world's largest retailer, complained that the company's "Price Match Guarantee" is applied "inconsistently" from store to store, according to the news service. Spokeswoman Deisha Galberth Barnett told Bloomberg that the Bentonville, Ark., company doesn't believe it's a "national problem."

Indeed, other retailers such as Toys R Us are running into difficulties with their policies as well. The toy retailer was advised by the industry-backed Advertising Self-Regulatory Council's National Advertising Division to either quit making its price-matching claims or post its limitations, Bloomberg says.