Links for 12/29

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Goldman Sachs's chief economist Jan Hatzius just published answers to what he believes are the eight top questions for next year.

Jan Hatzius Top Questions For 2015 - Business Insider

There are quite a few investments in social programs that would have spectacular return on investment, but that in fact remain unfunded or underfunded. I am thinking here of things like broadened preschool programs, enhanced dropout prevention programs, regional economic development efforts, and prison re-entry programs. Why are these spectacular opportunities so dramatically under-exploited in the United States and other nations?

Understanding Society: Underinvesting in the public good

This, of course, ends up affecting how we look back on the end of the year. All too often, memories of family tension or being stranded on a tarmac for hours seem to win out over the good stuff. But what if there were a way to prevent that? What if we could choose which memories of the holiday season—or any season—will stand out most vividly and which we’re content to let fade with the passage of time?

How to Change Your Holiday Memories | The New Republic

Snake venoms contain a bewildering array of proteins that work together to bring down prey. Some, like king cobra venom, have more than 100 different kinds. These toxic cocktails are hugely variable. Not only do different species produce different mixtures, but snakes of the same species can mix different drinks as well. What's more, a snake's venom may change as it ages.

BBC - Earth - What were the legendary man-eating snakes of Borneo?

We always believe we will live forever. Bad things always happen to others. Only when things hit us bang on your head you realise... Life is so unpredictable....

Letter written by a wife after her husband's death in an accident | Moin Qureshi | LinkedIn

Criminal gangs have become adept at using social media to sell “lifestyle” drugs to a mass market at minimal risk and cost, said Alastair Jeffrey, head of enforcement at the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). This year, he said the MHRA had seized 1.2m doses of illegally supplied erectile dysfunction drugs, 383,000 slimming products and 331,000 doses of sleeping pills, tranquillisers and antidepressants – mostly originating from China and India. For the first time, the MHRA pursued YouTube accounts and removed 18,671 videos that directed viewers to websites offering illicit drugs.

Surge in illegal sales of drugs as gangs exploit ‘phenomenal market’ online | Society | The Guardian

Gauntlett had been arrested just before Christmas for breaking into the same derelict house to sleep and had been charged under the new anti-squatting legislation. So the father of two lay down outside on the porch to get what sleep he could under a damp tarpaulin. As temperatures dropped, he died there of hypothermia. On the same Saturday night another homeless man, Douglas Poynton, 45, also died in Aylesford.

The father who froze to death in a Kent village | Society | The Observer

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And even if a full-blown financial crisis were to send the economy into a slump, bringing Vladimir Putin, the president, down with it, security hardliners look better placed to choose his successor than either the economic liberals or a vibrant popular protest movement that has yet to emerge.

Russia Is In Crisis And Putin Is Trying To Survive It - Business Insider

When Olga Savelyeva took out a $226,000 mortgage to buy a small apartment on the outskirts of Moscow in 2008, she could never have imagined that the ruble would lose more than half its value in a few short years. But Savelyeva's $2,090 monthly instalments have skyrocketed in ruble terms due to the Russian currency's dive against the dollar. The resulting jump in monthly payments from 49,000 to 115,000 rubles now devours most of her family's income.

Dollar mortgage holders urge Russia to end 'financial slavery' - Business Insider

Yet for one Brooklyn-based company, the hacking has translated into big business. "Our numbers have doubled since the Sony attacks," Nathan Hecht, founder and chief executive of DSTRUX, said in a recent interview with CNBC.

After the Sony hack, business DSTRUX offers email solutions

American Airlines said Tuesday that it plans to pay flight attendants an additional four percentage points on top of raises already averaging 10 percent, thanks to profits that have strengthened as oil prices have collapsed.

American Airlines says 'strong' profit to allow bigger wage hikes

A group of hackers who may have had a hand in taking both Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox offline on Christmas day appear to have released a repository containing 13,000 user passwords and credit cards.

Hackers claim to have exposed Sony, Playstation personal data

What do a shadowy oil czar, a deeply religious railway boss and a billionaire judo enthusiast have in common? They form most of what experts believe to be Vladimir Putin's inner circle—a coterie of old allies and confidants that defines the country's trademark system of crony capitalism.

Think it's just Putin who runs Russia? Guess again

"The Central Bank started the printing press to help the Sechin-Putin business and gave Rosneft 625 billion newly printed rubles," opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, wrote on Facebook last week. "The money immediately appeared on the currency market, and the rate collapsed."

Think it's just Putin who runs Russia? Guess again

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It becomes tempting to take on too much leverage, use financial wizardry to reward shareholders or even stretch accounting principles. S&P 500 profits are 86% higher than they would be if accounting standards of the national accounts were used, Pelham Smithers Associates notes. And the gap between the two measures is widening, the research firm finds.

BlackRock: S&P 500 Profits Boosted By Accounting - Business Insider

The best bet for low-cost electric-car batteries may be Tesla Motors’ “gigafactory,” which the car maker started constructing this summer in Nevada. The factory will use sheer scale to drive down the cost of batteries with fairly conventional lithium-ion chemistry—plans call for its annual production of lithium-ion batteries to match that of all other worldwide producers combined. However, radical changes in battery chemistry—solid-state batteries, and liquid batteries you can recharge in minutes by pumping in new electrode materials—also made encouraging progress this year.

Rechargeable Fuel and Printed Body Parts: The Year in Materials | MIT Technology Review

Negotiations for an ambitious Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal involving a dozen countries from Asia and the Americas are quietly nearing the finishing line. Another historic agreement, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union, also shows signs of becoming a reality.

Obama Is On The Verge Of Two Historic Trade Deals That Could Radically Change The US Economy - Business Insider

Of all the cities on the South American Siemens Index, only Curitiba scores above average in the green rankings. After building one of the planet’s first large-scale, rapid-transit bus systems in the 1960s and developing a world-leading recycling program in the 1980s, the southern Brazilian city continues to be environmentally forward-thinking. In fact, the heavy use of public transportation means Curitiba has one of the highest air qualities in the index.

BBC - Travel - Living in: The world’s most eco-friendly cities : Eco-tourism

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For storing files of all shapes and sizes, a basic drive will often do the trick, like the Leef Bridge 3.0 (16GB), which offers a speedy USB 3.0 connection while still being very inexpensive. If you need higher capacity, especially when dealing with larger files for work or school, it's hard to go wrong with a high-speed, high-capacity drive, like the SanDisk Extreme 3.0 (64GB) or the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 G3 (64GB), which offer significant storage size, as well as support for optional encryption. For real security, don't use a drive for storage, but for a portable operating system. The IronKey Workspace W500 gives you a bootable version of Windows that can be run on most any PC, and tops it off with the protection of IronKey's 256-bit AES hardware encryption, with built-in password protection. Maybe security isn't what you're worried about, but the physical dangers of daily life.

The Best USB Flash Drives | PCMag.com

When turmoil hits the Middle East, one of the first questions everyone asks is: "How much oil is at risk?" Before prices crashed again, oil was actually rallying for a little while on Monday. News outlets and energy pundits were quick to attribute the early upward moves to Libya, where a rocket attack caused an oil storage tank fire. Turmoil in the region could lead to a disruption in oil supply. Because Libya is known to be a big player in the oil markets, this was a decent rationale. But how big a player is Libya really? It's about 1% of total global oil production.

MAP: Middle East Energy Production, Chokepoints - Business Insider

It's scary to lose memories, especially in the early phases of diseases like Alzheimer's -- you're really losing part of yourself. Thankfully, researchers at UCLA may have found a way to get those memories back. They've conducted experiments suggesting that memories aren't stored in synapses, as established theory dictates. Instead, you only need to make sure that neurons are intact and that the brain can synthesize the proteins needed to form new synaptic links.

Scientists show how you can restore lost memories

As if we needed another sign of Xiaomi's skyrocketing growth, the Chinese smartphone maker says it's now the most highly valued technology startup in the world. Yes, it's even worth more than wunderkind Uber. Xiaomi announced that it raised a whopping $1.1 billion from investors, which pegged its valuation at $45 billion, slightly higher than Uber's $40 billion-plus value.

Xiaomi passes Uber as the world's most valuable startup

Greece may be one of the first trouble spots for markets in 2015, but it's not likely to be what really rocks them.

Why Greece is not the risk it once was

Gluskin Sheff's David Rosenberg described himself as "the poster boy for the bull market" in a note to clients on Monday.

Rosenberg's Investment Ideas For 2015 - Business Insider

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The Russian currency extended its losses on Monday after a report showed the economy has started shrinking in annual terms for the first time since 2009

Russian ruble drops 7 percent as economy shrinks - Yahoo Finance

Few countries have invested more heavily in Russia than Germany has, rushing in to exploit new trade opportunities that opened up after the Cold War ended. More than 6,000 German companies set up operations there, and Russia became a major customer for German cars, pharmaceuticals and machinery. But now the rush is going in reverse.

In reversal, Germany cools to Russian investment

The Federal Reserve may be able to limit damaging spillovers to emerging economies by refraining from asset sales during its exit from unprecedented monetary stimulus, according to an IMF study.

Fed Can Limit Spillovers by Avoiding Asset Sales, IMF Paper Says - Bloomberg

Cyber thieves have had a good year. Especially those seeking to steal from shops and stores. Millions of payment card details have been liberated by gangs that targeted the payment systems at tills.

BBC News - Why 2014 was a good year for retail robbers

For one, the fear of dying in a plane crash might actually kill you. For instance, in the wake of the 9/11 air tragedy, huge numbers of Americans switched from flying to driving – for the year following the attack, airline passenger miles fell between 12% and 20% while road use surged. Eventually Americans returned to the skies – but not all of them, tragically, were alive to do so, because driving long distances is much more dangerous than flying – indeed, because the increased road use may have led to more accidents. Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, a German academic, estimated that the road death toll in the year after 9/11 increased by 1,595 people.

If you're avoiding air travel after MH17 and more, let statistics be your guide | James Ball | Comment is free | theguardian.com

So while the 777 you're flying on won't end your life, the peanuts you eat on board just might (4,600 Americans a year die from choking and obesity contributes to at least 110,000 preventable deaths a year in the US). It's just that plane fatalities are sort of a man-bites-dog story (whereas the 32 Americans who died of dog bites last year were not).

If you're avoiding air travel after MH17 and more, let statistics be your guide | James Ball | Comment is free | theguardian.com

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One of my largest assets is about to take a hit, and there’s nothing I can do about it. In January, my United Airlines (UAL) points will fall in value and I’ll lose my elite status. Even if I kept it, it’d be worth less.

Get the Most from Your Reward Points Before They're Worthless - Businessweek

One idea is that guilty forms of pleasure have been so engrained in our psyche that feelings of sin and remorse actually trigger thoughts of desire in the brain. In other words, our vices are so tempting partly because we know they are bad for us.

BBC - Future - Psychology: Why does guilt increase pleasure?

VR is an impressive experience, and often awe-inspiring. It also needs work. VR as we know it now is a work in progress. 2015 could bring huge next steps, however. Despite its incredible promise, virtual reality's limitations are still very clear...and here's what it needs next.

What VR needs next - CNET

Median U.S. annual household income in November Americans’ household income has been crawling back since 2011 in what Sentier Research calls “an uneven, but generally upward trend.” But it was still 2.8 percent below the level of June 2009, when the current economic recovery began, and 5.7 percent below the level of January 2000, when Sentier’s series began.

Ten Numbers That Matter for the Economy in 2015 - Businessweek

While Tsipras's rise in Greece has been impressive, the rise of Iglesias and Podemos is even more mind-blowing. Podemos isn't even one year old as a party, and already it's polling near the major parties. Like Syriza, Podemos strongly opposes the path that the euro zone has taken.

Is This the Dawn of the Tsiglesias Era in the Euro Zone? - Businessweek

Red meat has been linked to cancer for decades, with research suggesting that eating large amounts of pork, beef or lamb raises the risk of deadly tumours. But for the first time scientists think they know what is causing the effect. The body, it seems, views red meat as a foreign invader and sparks a toxic immune response.

Red meat triggers toxic immune reaction which causes cancer, scientists find - Telegraph

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Despite battling a debt default and currency crisis, Argentina's stock market has won the unlikely accolade of the best performing global index of 2014.

Here it is...the world's top-performing index in 2014

A Chinese man has been jailed for 13 years for buying and eating endangered tigers and making wine made out of their blood, state media reported.

Chinese man jailed for 13 years for eating tigers and making wine from their blood | World news | theguardian.com

Okay, technically speaking, the malware afflicting Steam gamers might be more aptly described as "Trojans" given that the user has to manually download and open the attack package to become infected.  That said, the malicious files -- examined by former Sophos security blogger/researcher Graham Cluley -- does exhibit wormlike characteristics in its automated distribution and the apparent self-replication of the viral script/executable.

DailyTech - Steam Chat is Being Overrun by Worm-Like Trojans, Latest is "WTF" Malware

That figure equates to a per-capita debt of €29,550: high enough to place the UK eleventh on the list of 53 countries, which includes the world's major economies. You can use our interactive map to explore the per capita data.

World debt mapped: The UK has the fourth-highest household debt in the world | City A.M.

BRANSON: Wild Parties Are Essential To A Company's Success

Richard Branson On The Importance Of Parties - Business Insider

A new wave of U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) document leaks show the agency wasn’t able to spy on everyone thanks to some encryption tools several programs use that successfully thwart digital espionage.

New Snowden Documents Reveal That The NSA Can’t Hack Everyone | ThinkProgress

Back in 1991, the sociologist Scott Feld made a surprising discovery while studying the properties of social networks. Feld calculated the average number of friends that a person in the network has and compared this to the average number of friends that these friends had. Against all expectations it turned out that the second number is always bigger than the first. Or in other words, your friends have more friends than you do.

How the Friendship Paradox Makes Your Friends Better Than You Are | MIT Technology Review

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Stephens told The Atlantic that one thing researchers know that our body first metabolizes ethanol, the main alcohol in booze. But after we break that down we start to break down other alcohols, including methanol, which our body turns into formaldehyde and formic acid — toxins that make you hurt.

What To Do About A Hangover - Business Insider

America’s closed economy can handle a surging dollar and a fresh cycle of rising interest rates. Large parts of the world cannot. That in a nutshell is the story of 2015.

2015 Will Be The Year Of Dollar Danger For The World - Business Insider

To qualify, Lithuania had to meet five economic "convergence criteria," including price and exchange rate stability and low levels of government debt and deficit. Its people will exchange their Lithuanian litas at a rate of 3.4528 to the euro.

What? This country just joined the euro zone

The secret to healthy eating is painfully basic. Michael Pollan articulated it memorably several years ago: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Almost all of the unhealthiest food — the products highest in bad fats, sugar, and salt — comes out of a bag or a box, not off of a tree or from the ground.

How To Lose Weight And Eat Healthy - Business Insider

AS 2014 drew to a close, the European Central Bank (ECB) signalled an increasing readiness to pursue a big programme of quantitative easing (QE)—creating money to buy financial assets—in order to lift worryingly low inflation.

Euro-zone quantitative easing: Coming soon? | The Economist

Maybe people are still going to line up to pay $70,000 for one of his fancy new battery-powered Tesla S models. But it was a lot easier to sell the concept when gasoline was $3.70 a gallon than it is at $2.25.

Can Tesla survive collapsing gas prices? - MarketWatch

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European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said the risk of the central bank not fulfilling its mandate of preserving price stability was higher now than half a year ago, and reiterated its readiness to act early this year should it become necessary.

Draghi: Risk of ECB failing its mandate higher than six months ago - paper - Yahoo Finance

Myth Number 1:  The U.S. is approaching energy independence. There is no doubt we are in the midst of a shale oil revolution.  But the growth of production has led to reporting that might charitably be described as overly optimistic.  In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported today, in an article entitled Democrats Warming to the Energy Industry, “Since March 2008, oil production has increased 58% and natural-gas output has risen 21%, making the U.S. the world’s largest producer of both fuels, according to federal and international agency statistics.”

Two Myths Associated With U.S. Shale Oil

Greece bank-deposit withdrawals accelerated this month after Prime Minister Antonis Samaras opened the way for snap national elections that risk severing the country’s lifeline in the euro area.

Greek Bank-Deposit Outflows Grow as Poll Looms - Bloomberg

Plain old bad luck plays a major role in determining who gets cancer and who does not, according to researchers who found that two-thirds of cancer incidence of various types can be blamed on random mutations and not heredity or risky habits like smoking.

Groundbreaking Study Reveals The Main Reason Most People Get Cancer - Business Insider

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According to the budget, Greece will achieve a primary budget surplus—before taking into account debt payments—of €3.3 billion ($4.1 billion), equal to 3% of gross domestic product, next year, which is in line with the country’s bailout program. Overall, the government will record only a minor budget deficit of €338 million—equivalent to just 0.2% of gross domestic product—next year, in effect marking the first balanced budget Greece has produced in four decades.

Greece Expects Primary Budget Surplus for 2015 - WSJ

Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America’s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show “Jeopardy!” Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms across a range of industries to help with all sorts of pattern-recognition problems. Its acumen will grow, and its costs fall, as firms learn to harness its abilities.

The future of jobs: The onrushing wave | The Economist

The value of the euro has fallen to its lowest level since the middle of 2010, following comments from Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB). In a newspaper interview, he hinted again that the bank might soon start a policy of quantitative easing to try to stimulate the eurozone economies. The aim would be to stop the continued fall in the general level of prices. The euro fell 0.4% to $1.2034 after Mr Draghi's comments were made public.

BBC News - Draghi comments send euro to lowest level since 2010

Often called the “Atlantis of the East” by travellers, the underwater city of Shicheng is a magnificent, mysterious time capsule of Imperial China. Stone architecture dating to the Ming and Qing dynasties (which ruled from 1368 to 1912) stands perfectly preserved 40m under Qiandao Lake in Zhejiang province, 400km south of Shanghai.

BBC - Travel - China’s Atlantis of the East : Diving, China

A hacker has released a tool that he says can break into any iCloud account. The tool, iDict, uses an exploit in Apple's security to bypass restrictions that stop most hackers from gaining access to accounts. On iDict's GitHub page, user "Pr0x13" says the exploit used to create the hacking tool is "painfully obvious" and that it "was only a matter of time" before hackers used it to break into iCloud accounts.

Hacker Tool For iCloud Account - Business Insider

With Greece just three weeks away from the general election on Jan. 25, called after the country's politicians failed to elect a president at the end of December, Athens is firmly back in Europe's spotlight along with a serious discussion about whether Greece will remain in the euro.

Greece's Political Crisis Euro - Business Insider

The European Central Bank set Cyprus a Monday deadline to agree a bailout plan, threatening to cut off funding to the island's cash-strapped banks through Emergency Liquidity Assistance if a bailout programme is not agreed by then with the EU and the IMF.

Factbox - How ECB's Emergency Liquidity Assistance works | Reuters

Keynes claimed, in contrast, that the real economy can get stuck in a position of high unemployment and that permanent high involuntary unemployment can persist as an equilibrium phenomenon. See my earlier post on the neo-paleo-keynesian perspective. If Keynes is correct, and I believe he is, a single instrument, monetary policy, is not enough to hit two targets. Fiscal policy in one form or another, is an important second string to the policy maker's bow.

Roger Farmer's Economic Window: Secular stagnation: a neo-paleo-Keynesian perspective

For a long stretch, government spending cutbacks at all levels were a substantial drag on economic growth. Now, finally, relief is in sight. For the first time since 2011, local, state and federal governments are providing a small but significant increase to prosperity.

Government Spending, Edging Up, Is a Stimulus - NYTimes.com

How many of you, dear readers, could hold onto a giant winner like these five for the duration? How do you know that any of these are not about to turn into a classic disaster stock? Think about once-giant winners that collapsed: Lehman Brothers, WorldCom, Lucent, JDS Uniphase. All of these were one-time market heroes; all went bust in spectacular fashion. Your superpower gives you the ability to find the giant winners, but it does not give you the ability to hold onto them, nor does it give you the ability to distinguish between the superstars and the washouts. As we have discussed previously, this is a feature, not a bug. The good news is your brain has kept you alive long enough to read this column. The bad news, it also made you sell Apple 10,000 percent ago. The reality is, when it comes to risk/reward decisions, you are just not built for it.

What If You Were the World’s Greatest Stock Picker® ? | The Big Picture