And who cares if my paltry freelance earnings are barely enough to trouble the taxman most years?
Instead, it's a sad roundup of female-dominated industry sectors doling out paltry pay in comparison to the median men's earnings.
Cendant, owner of Avis car rental, says Inn hotels and Century 21 real estate, on Monday said a stronger-than-expected rebound in travel and a booming mortgage business helped second-quarter earnings surge from a year ago, when a charge resulted in paltry profits.
Assuming all Bulgari minority shareholders took the offer, it would only take LVMH's debt to a paltry 0.8 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine, which conducts the annual hedge fund pay survey, described the earnings as "paltry" despite their collective personal earnings being more than the gross domestic product of Nicaragua, Laos or Madagascar.
The median new single-family house in the United States grew from 1,570 square feet in 1970 to more than 2,300 square feet by 2007, an increase that can't be explained by the paltry growth in median earnings during those years.
But the company's critics say that Disney's earnings were so paltry last year that the only place to go is up.
The forward price-to-earnings ratio, a measure that compares a company's stock-market value to its forecasted earnings, is a paltry 3.3, which makes it look like quite a bargain.
America Online, with the help of Bob Pittman, is one of the few, but its earnings are still paltry compared with that of the grandfathers of the strategy: Microsoft and Intel.
For their troubles, most earn a paltry $14 a day, even as a commodities boom is generating far more earnings than in the past.
