Links for 12/21

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In Europe, after they became established as the latest method of flogging savers until their mood improves, all kinds of absurdities saw the light of the day. For example, bailed-out national governments can now fund their deficits at negative rates, extracting money from their bondholders, rather than paying them. Perhaps the coolest notion was that banks would be “paying your mortgage.”

Unintended consequences negative interest rates Switzerland - Business Insider

The growing disparity between pay at the high and lower ends of the pay scale for today’s workforce is leading to a real sense of unfairness which is impacting on employees’ motivation at work.

CEO pay gap demotivates staff, report finds | Business News | News | The Independent

Despite the popular perception, processed food will usually cost more than food you cook yourself. Restaurants are a money gouge. The downsides to cooking are time and convenience (it takes forethought and preparation to cook), but there's a real upside: People typically consume about 20 to 40 percent fewer calories when they eat in.

I asked the experts how to eat healthy on a budget. Here’s what they told me. - Vox

Canadian company which started out bottling Rocky Mountains air as a joke has seen its product fly off the shelves in pollution-hit China, with first shipment selling out in four days

Chinese buy up bottles of fresh air from Canada - Telegraph

One of the most sophisticated ransomware strains has brought in $325 million in profits for groups deploying it, according to a report by the Cyber Threat Alliance, a group sponsored by several major security companies.  Ransomware as a service is a variant of ransomware designed to be so user-friendly that it could be deployed by anyone with little cyber know-how. These agents simply download the virus either for free or a nominal fee, set a ransom and payment deadline, and attempt to trick someone into infecting his or her computer. If the victim pays up, the original author gets a cut (around 5% to 20%) and the rest goes to the “script kiddie” who deployed the attack.

Ransomware as a service is the next big cyber crime - Business Insider

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Finland should never have signed up to the single currency union, according to its foreign minister. With the northernmost euro member now set to become the bloc’s weakest economy, the question of currency regime continues to resurface as Finland looks for explanations for its lost competitiveness. Timo Soini, who is also the leader of one of three members of the ruling coalition, the anti-immigration The Finns party, says the country could have resorted to devaluations had it not been for its euro membership.

Finland Should Never Have Joined Euro, Foreign Minister Says - Bloomberg Business

"Europe runs a current account surplus, they have a lower inflation differential than the U.S. that traditionally leads to a stronger currency, Jakobsen said. "I think Fed hikes lead to a weaker dollar – because the rest of the world has more U.S. dollars than the U.S. has. So when you increase the price of money, you have to take the price off the currency to create a new equilibrium. It's totally misunderstood and people don't get it right," Jakobsen said.

Oil at $100? 'Outrageous' forecasts for 2016 - Yahoo Finance

A town in Italy has imposed a temporary ban on the traditional way of pizza-making as a measure to curb soaring pollution. An edict issued by the mayor of San Vitaliano, just outside of Naples, bans the use of wood-fired stoves in bakeries and eateries including pizzerias unless their owners install special filters to reduce air pollution.

Italy: Town bans pizza-making over soaring pollution - BBC News

Generous to a fault, Frank would reward loyalty with thoughtful and expensive gifts – gold cigarette lighters were a particular favourite – he always made a show of having the very best and extravagantly dispensing his bounty. He was also meticulous about how he dressed, even training himself to sit in a certain position while sleeping on the Dorsey tour bus, so as to avoid creasing his suit. This habit of conspicuous grooming and gladhanding put him at the very centre of a good many rooms, acting the role of a (mostly) benevolent monarch, taking tributes from everyone and offering the olives from his martini to favoured courtiers.

BBC - Culture - Frank Sinatra at 100: Was Ol’ Blue Eyes really dangerous?

A 92-year-old widow from South Africa who wants to spend the “end of her days” with her only child in Britain is facing enforced removal from the UK even though she has heart problems, loss of sight in one eye and no family in her native land.

Widow faces deportation from UK despite being 92 and frail | UK news | The Guardian

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An unemployed Senegalese man who was rescued by the Spanish coastguard after making a risky journey from Morocco eight years ago on a packed wooden boat won 400,000 euros ($437,000) in Spain’s annual Christmas lottery, local media reported Wednesday.

Rescued Senegalese migrant wins €400,000 in Spain’s Christmas lottery | World news | The Guardian

Although pooling common funds, giving Brussels tax and spending powers, and creating a banking union were "essential" reforms, they would still not make the "euro function smoothly even in the best of cases", said the Frenchman. Any mechanism to transfer funds from strong to weak nations - which has been fiercely resisted by Germany - would only mask the fundamental competitiveness problems that will always plague struggling member states, he said. "Fiscal transfers will help you go through the tough spot, but at the same time, it will decrease the urge to do the required competitiveness adjustment."

Fiscal union will never fix a dysfunctional eurozone, warns ex-IMF chief Blanchard - Telegraph

The year has been chock-full of scientific breakthroughs, but the University of Colorado is determined to finish 2015 with a bang. Its researchers have created what they say is the first full-fledged processor to transmit data using light instead of electricity. The design isn't entirely photonic, but its 850 optical input/output elements give it the kind of bandwidth that make electric-only chips look downright modest -- we're talking 300Gbps per square millimeter, or 10 to 50 times what you normally see. The key was finding a way to reuse existing conventional processes to put optics in places where regular circuitry would go.

Researchers show off a working light-based processor

A high school world geography teacher in Augusta County, Virginia, gave her students what seemed like a standard assignment: a worksheet on Islam as part of a curriculum on world religions. The backlash was so fierce that schools in the county, which is just west of Charlottesville, are closed today after a barrage of threatening phone calls and emails from people angry about the homework assignment.

When a school assigned homework on Islam, it drew so many threats the district shut down - Vox

One of the earlier studies drawing a link between alcohol consumption and health was performed by the late, great Archie Cochrane; the godfather of evidence-based medicine. In 1979, Cochrane and two colleagues tried to work out what exactly was responsible for the differing rates of death from heart disease across 18 developed countries, including the US, UK and Australia.

BBC - Future - Is alcohol actually bad for you?  

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Yvan Mamalet from Societe Generale said Spain’s potential growth rate has fallen to 1pc, from over 3pc before the crisis, a sign of how much damage has been done by the ‘hysteresis’ effects of long-term unemployment and lack of investment.

Political uprising in Spain shatters illusion of eurozone recovery - Telegraph

Islay whiskies get their signature flavour from smoking peat – the same vegetation that Scots have long been burning to heat their homes – in order to dry the malted barley used to create whisky. The results are polarising; some purists believe the peat takes away from the true flavour of the whisky, others become addicted, perpetually searching for something peatier.

BBC - Travel - Why you should never drink whisky on the rocks

Laphroaig, on the other end of the island and the other end of the peat spectrum, unapologetically overwhelms the palate with peat. Laphroaig’s recent “Opinions Welcome” campaign received feedback that varied from “like chewing on a well-tarred fishing boat” to “drinking the inside of an antique store”. The opinion that resonated most with me reads, “It’s like fighting a peat bog monster that is on fire, but suddenly you both pause, look in one another’s eyes and kiss.”

BBC - Travel - Why you should never drink whisky on the rocks

"In February, one study reported there were nearly 100 million people — perhaps 50 million on Tinder alone — using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club," Sales writes, "where they might find a sex partner as easily as they'd find a cheap flight to Florida."

Christian Schneider - Dating technology spells doom for humanity

For all the ways 2015 was a terrible year for the world, there is at least one metric by which it was a very good year. According to data from a United Nations report released this July, this year saw a historic decline in global poverty. The number of people living in extreme poverty has decreased so rapidly that it's been cut in half just since 1990:

This chart shows something actually great that happened in 2015 - Vox

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Average Lego set has increased in value 12 per cent each year since the turn of the Millennium, providing a better return than mainstream investments

Lego a 'better investment than shares and gold' - Telegraph

Across the country on New Year’s Eve, people will take to dance floors to groove away the last hours of 2015. But one of Britain’s most eminent philosophers is unlikely to be among the masses of humanity moving to a techno beat. Roger Scruton, author of more than 40 books and a noted authority on aesthetics, has used his latest work to offer a withering critique of much of modern dancing. In Confessions of a Heretic, a collection of essays to be published in the spring, Scruton takes issue with the dancing witnessed in the nation’s clubs and pubs, in which participants “jerk on to the floor in obedience to the puppet master at the desk”. Modern dancers, he notes, also “tend to avoid contact with each other, since there is no agreed convention as to what form their contact should take”.

Jive talkin’: top philosopher says modern dance has lost its soul | Life and style | The Guardian

This method of gaining their trust is called habituation. It was Fossey's great gift to the world, says gorilla conservationist Ian Redmond, who worked closely with her for over three years. Eventually it led to human-gorilla friendships. "I mean that seriously," says Redmond. "Gorillas are so like us and they can see they're like us. They are as fascinated by us as we are by them. They actually inspected us physically, pulled our lips down and looked at our teeth. They were very curious about this gorilla-like animal that does such different things [to them]."

BBC - Earth - The woman who gave her life to save the gorillas

Among more extreme cases reported by ambulance services are: A patient who called 999 more than 700 times in two years. The estimated costs to the ambulance service over a year was more than £110,000. A patient who cost NHS England £10,000 in a month. A patient who made 238 emergency calls over two months at a cost of nearly £40,000.

Frequent 999 callers cost NHS millions of pounds a year | Society | The Guardian

What would Britain be worth if we put it on the market? Official estimate reveals how much each person would receive if we sold the entire country and everything in it

Britain for sale: £8 trillion, or nearest offer - Telegraph

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This week, let’s do a bit of – ahem – roll play. How do you prefer to hang your toilet roll? Do you like the loose end to be far away from the wall (known as the over style) or next to the wall (the under style)? Now let’s see what Dr Gilde Carle (“Relationship Expert to the Stars”) has to say about your choice. If you roll over, you like taking charge, crave organisation and are likely to over-achieve. If you roll under, you’re laid-back, dependable and seek relationships with strong foundations. If you don’t care, as long as it’s there, you aim to minimise conflict, value flexibility and like putting yourself in new situations. But could your choice even tell us something about your earning power? One American survey found that 73% of people who earn under $20,000 a year roll under, while 60% of those who earn over $50,000 roll over. Of course, these surveys do not quite meet the standards required for a scientific psychology study, but – if this column is your favourite bathroom reading – it should certainly give you something to ponder.

Roll play | Psy-Q

Since the financial crisis, S&P 500 companies have spent trillions of dollars buying back shares of their own stock. In the third quarter alone, these companies gobbled up $156 billion worth of themselves. Goldman Sachs' David Kostin estimates that these companies will spend another $608 billion in 2016 buying back shares, up from $568 billion in 2015. It's important to note that these buybacks — which are enormous enough to sway markets — don't occur evenly throughout the year. "Typically, we have a huge tailwind in December from buyback action," JonesTrading's Dave Lutz observed on Thursday. "Fascinating: November/December has combined for almost 23% of annual buyback budgets from '07-'14(ex-'08)."

Share-buyback seasonality - Business Insider

Scientists at UCL have found that hormone levels of the 'haves' and 'have-nots' are significantly different which could explain health inequalities... Poor and uneducated people could be ageing faster, and more vulnerable to disease, because their hormones are out of balance, a new study suggests. Scientists have known for some time that the most underprivileged members of society die earlier and are ‘biologically older’ than the rich, with those in the most affluent areas expected to live around eight years longer than those in the poorest regions.

Poor and uneducated are biologically different to affluent, UCL finds - Telegraph

The dilemma My husband and I married recently. I am not his first wife. We came together with all our baggage from three decades of separate existence that included furniture, curtains, artwork and one dog. We’ve had our ups and downs deciding how to fit it all into our new home together, and there have been plenty of arguments about which individually “treasured” possessions we no longer have space for in our new life together. We’ve been battling for the last two years and, thankfully, tempers have died down. Except my husband has started buying more, which would be fine if our flat wasn’t already packed, and more importantly if he chose to consult with me before committing. If I don’t like his purchases (the latest a large ornate cabinet), he gets angry and say I am ungrateful. As for children, I’m beginning to think they’ll never be an option as we simply don’t have the space!

I don’t want our home full of my new husband’s stuff | Life and style | The Guardian

"We're really bad at setting reasonable goals," Cuddy told Business Insider. And when we don't meet an unreasonable goal, we fill ourselves with feelings of anxiety and lower our self-worth.

Amy Cuddy explains the dangers of New Year's resolutions - Business Insider