Новости за 25.12.2016

Phones routinely last me a full day now. They never did before this year.

Photo: Niantic One final mystery of Niantic’s Pokémon GO Christmas event has been solved. Data miners previously excavated some new “present” images from the game before the launch of this event, and now they’ve shown up in the game itself. For reasons I don’t quite get, Niantic decided to keep these new [...]

This Christmas the biggest movie at the box office is "Star Wars Rogue One." Which makes one think of the legendarily benighted TV special, the "Star Wars Holiday Special." Cartoon by Ted Rall.

This week’s milestones in the history of technology include Charles Babbage’s idea for the Analytical Engine, the first public screening of films (with paid admission) and the first live HD transmission from the Metropolitan Opera, and the establishment of Hewlett-Packard in a Silicon Valley garage.

If you do what everyone else is doing, the ceiling on what you can hope to achieve is no more than what everyone else has gotten. If you go your own way, however, that’s when things get interesting. Make 2017 the year you zig when everyone else zags.

Christmas Eve is generally the "calm before storm" before Christmas Day kicks off the end-of-year box office sprint.

Yesterday PM Modi said in India that there should be some greater contribution from the financial markets to India's tax revenues. I pointed out that this could mean simply making sure that people paid the income tax from their activities on such markets and that would be just fine. It [...]

Having worked with highly skilled traders of financial markets at a variety of money management organizations, I've noticed one distinctive marker of success: the great traders leverage one or more great strengths in their personalities and in their information processing. Those strengths differ from one exemplary money manager to another, [...]

Christmas day is a good time to reflect on the writings of Blessed Antonio Rosmini, a XIXth century priest who was a strong critic of socialism and made important contributions to philosophy and political economy.

The fantasy tentpole and the talking animal toon are crushing everything, which is a pretty good metaphor for the year.

Twenty five years ago I watched the Soviet Union crumble. I was a child, living in Moscow. The fall was coming and everyone knew it for years. People began to openly criticize the system. No matter the lies and the murders, the Kremlin could no longer hide its failure to deliver [...]

Prime Minister Modi has detailed his vision for India's economic development--that India should become a developed country in just the one generation. He's right to say that this is a worthwhile goal for that is the point and purpose of our having an economy at all, that the people can [...]

The main point that Matt Yglesias makes here is entirely correct--to make America's trade deficit shrink it will be necessary to make Americans poorer. Simply because real income is measured by what can be consumed. And the trade deficit is the extra consumption that can be done by Americans over [...]

The U.K.'s annual singles battle gives eight things for the music industry to consider this Christmas, ready for next year...

In our second installment, we present our picks of the top trends that were on show at the September 2016 edition of the biannual Maison&Objet furniture and home decoration fair in Paris.

This week in Sports Law covers NCAA Notices of Allegations sent to Rutgers and UNC, fallout for coaches connected to WakeyLeaks and the New Jersey Devils failing to turn over medical documents to one of its former players.

Washington DC has just passed a paid parental leave plan. Which you can regard as good or bad as you wish. I'm certainly not against the idea that maternity leave should attract some income. However, we ought to recognise who is actually paying for that parental leave--and that's all workers [...]

Trump just past the final stage to become the U.S. President, and the Electoral College confirmed that Donald J. Trump will be the 45th President of the U.S. Like it or not, Trump is taking office and could affect the markets. After Trump won the election, markets have been trending [...]

The growth of the economy is easily illustrated by water: how people used to fetch water from a well or fountain or stream, spending much time every day getting a basic necessity. Now most of us simply turn on a faucet.

Despite it being a Sunday in December, the matchup of the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers represents only one of two games on the day. That is a result of Christmas being on a Sunday, but the matchup still has large implications and is the final installment of the Color Rush Series.

The Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers played a memorable seven game series in the NBA Finals this past June and this Christmas Day matchup marks their first game of the 2016-17 season. The Warriors enter at 27-4 and bring Kevin Durant to the table after signing him in the offseason.

Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?

Robert Skidelsky has a rather "J'Accuse!" piece over at Project Syndicate insisting that economists are the idiots savants of the modern world for their concentration on mere mathematical models and that they don't look up enough at the real world. This is perhaps even a valid criticism of a certain [...]

A standard criticism of free market economies is that they are not perfect, that sometimes there can exist market failures. Something which is entirely true of course, an absolutely valid point. However, where the argument fails is that this is usually followed with "therefore government must do something." The problem [...]