Tired of capitalism? There could be a better way.

Governments have typically dealt with capitalism’s more misery-inducing tendencies by creating institutions of labor protection — such as the right to organize unions — and by building out modern welfare states. Although these policy programs have been fairly successful, especially in the countries that have pushed them the furthest, they have not fully eliminated coercion and deprivation.
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No, GMOs didn't create India's farmer suicide problem, but...

The situation is a lot more complicated than the rhetorical war over GMOs suggests.
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YouTube Will Let You Buy Stuff You See in Anyone’s Videos

Watch. Click. Buy. Your TV can't do this.
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Inside The Mermaid Economy

It’s not easy being a mermaid. Just ask Rachel Smith, the head mermaid at Dive Bar, a plush lounge in downtown Sacramento. Every night, she and a dozen other professional mermaids perform elaborate routines to entertain patrons in a 40-foot aquarium populated by fish and filled with 7,500 gallons of saltwater. While Smith, who has been working at Dive Bar since it opened in January 2011, describes her job as a dream come true...
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Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Munir Uwaydah alleged ringleader in $150 million insurance scam

An orthopedic surgeon is charged as the ringleader in one of California's biggest health fraud schemes, which included unnecessary operations by an untrained assistant that scarred patients forever, according to indictments unsealed Tuesday. Dr. Munir Uwaydah and 14 associates, including another doctor and a lawyer, bilked insurance companies out of $150 million in the scheme, Los Angeles District...
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Ralph Lauren Leaving CEO Post

The fashion industry saw one of its iconic figures step aside Tuesday when Ralph Lauren said he is is giving up the title of CEO of the company bearing his name.
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Swiss watchdog opens bank probe into precious metal collusion

The Swiss competition watchdog has launched an investigation into possible collusion in the precious metals market by several major banks, it said on Monday, the latest in a string of probes into gold, silver, platinum and palladium pricing.
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What happens when U.S. rates rise?

When U.S. rates rise how will this affect longer-term rates, the dollar – and precious metals? Saida Litosh, senior precious metals analyst at GFMS at Thomson Reuters explains. We analyze the three episodes of monetary policy tightening in the United States in the past 20 years, specifically 1994-1995, 1999-2000, and
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Sneaker Wars: Inside the Battle Between Nike and Adidas

For decades it’s looked like no company could ever topple Nike, the $86 billion global sneaker juggernaut. But just across town from ultra-secretive Nike HQ in Oregon, Adidas has suddenly mounted a full-scale arms race, poaching designers, signing superstar endorsements, and unveiling space-age technology in an attempt to dethrone the king. Matthew Shaer reports on the bitter battle over the right to dress your feet...
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Whole Foods cutting 1,500 jobs

Whole Foods (WFM) is cutting 1,500 jobs over the next two months, or about 1.6% of its workforce, as it focuses on its strategy to lower prices for customers, the grocery chain said Monday. Shares ended down 1.1% for the day. The cuts come after Whole Foods added more than 9,000 jobs in the past year. The company said it expects "a significant percentage" of employees being let go to find other jobs among Whole Foods' open positions...
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Medium Raises $54M, Will Hold Event On October 7th To Announce New Features And Partnerships

Today, publishing platform Medium announced that it has brought in $57 million in new capital in a series B led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz. That makes the total raised for Ev Williams’ Medium a hefty sum of $82 million. From head of operations at Medium, Andy Doyle...
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iPhone 6S: Apple sells record 13 million iPhones

It was a good weekend for Apple. The company said that it has sold a whopping 13 million new iPhones. This record number includes iPhone sales from pre-orders and in-store sales from this past weekend. Last year, Apple sold 10 million units, including pre-orders, in the first weekend. "Sales for iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus have been phenomenal, blowing past any previous first weekend sales results in Apple's history,"...
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It’s sleazy, it’s totally illegal, and yet it could become the future of retirement

They used to be ludicrously popular in America. Could they be again?
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Why We Must End Upward Pre-Distributions To The Rich

You often hear inequality has widened because globalization and technological change have made most people less competitive, while making the best educated more competitive. There’s some truth to this. The tasks most people used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.
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How Sweden's negative interest rates experiment has turned economics on its head

Nordic experimentation with sub-zero interest rates has changed the way central bankers think about fighting recessions, and it is not good for savers.
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Media General, Meredith Corp. announce $2.4B merger

Meredith Media General will be present in 30 percent of U.S. TV households with 88 stations in 54 markets.
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10 Ways Monopoly Airlines Use 'Calculated Misery' to Make Flying an Increasingly Overpriced Nightmare

In other words, customer dissatisfaction pays off big for airlines. The industry figured out that if it only made flying a nightmarish experience for the average traveller – one in which things like food and comfort come a la carte and at additional cost – customers would pay extra for even the most basic services. Airlines get to pretend that they’re offering customer choice, and passengers are duped into believing they’re spending more for premium service.
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Iran earns more from tax than oil for first time in almost 50 years

The Iranian government is earning more from tax than oil for the first time in almost half a century as the country shifts its traditional reliance on crude to taxation revenues in the face of plummeting oil prices. President Hassan Rouhani’s economic strategy is to significantly reduce the government’s dependency on oil and instead collect tax more systematically, according to Ali Kardor, the deputy managing director of the national Iranian oil company.
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Wind Point Lighthouse

In 1870, the Lighthouse Board petitioned Congress for $40,000 to construct a lighthouse and fog signal on Racine Point, located three-and-a-half miles north of Racine and eighteen miles south of Milwaukee.
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RIAA chief says DMCA is “largely useless” to combat music piracy

Cary Sherman, the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, has some choice words about the current state of US copyright law. He says that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, rightsholders must play a game of whack-a-mole with Internet companies to get them to remove infringing content. But that "never-ending game" has allowed piracy to run amok and has cheapened the legal demand for music.
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Big banks abusing 2012 settlement deal

Banks continue to foreclose on homeowners they claim to be helping in violation of 2012 settlement.
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Cash beats stocks, bonds for first time in 25 years

So far this year cash is outperforming global stocks and bonds—something that hasn’t happened since 1990, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
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Top 10 train station restaurants in Europe

The romance and frisson of rail travel are the perfect accompaniments to these superb dining experiences in the continent’s top stations
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Audi says 2.1 million cars have 'cheat' emissions software

Audi says 2.1 million of its cars are fitted with the software that allowed parent Volkswagen to cheat US emission tests.
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Shell stops Arctic activity after 'disappointing' tests

Royal Dutch Shell abandons Arctic exploration off the coast of Alaska after "disappointing" results from a key oil well.
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Google Wants to Break Cable's Grip Over Set-Top TV Control Box

It’s an afterthought or even an object of scorn in some homes, and it costs TV viewers an estimated $232 per household each year.
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Forget the Book, Have You Read This Irresistible Story on Blurbs?

Those snippets of praise on book covers have been around for over 150 years (at least). But how do they get there — and why? The answers are more complicated, and compelling, than you might think.
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The drug industry wants us to think Martin Shkreli is a rogue CEO. He isn’t.

Three millennia ago in ancient Greece, a plant called autumn crocus was used to treat gout. A pill form of the active ingredient, colchicine, has been used to treat the illness in the United States since the 19th century. But six years ago, a clinical trial showed the drug's safety and efficacy and URL Pharma was granted the exclusive marketing rights for a drug that had previously sold for 9 cents a tablet. The price shot up to $4.85 -- a more than 5,000 percent increase.
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Economics Is Too Important to Be Left to Economists

Inequality and other pressing issues are fundamentally political, and political scientists must take up the gauntlet. By Robert B. Reich
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Corporate mindfulness is bullsh*t: Zen or no Zen, you’re working harder and being paid less

Mindfulness matters, but make no mistake: Corporations are co-opting the idea to disguise the ways they kill us
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10 More Wisconsin Supper Clubs That Are Old-Fashioned But Incredible

There are HUNDREDS of supper clubs in Wisconsin, and you should strive to check them all out. But here are ten more you should definitely get to.
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Sorry Ello, the Real Anti-Facebook Is Good Old Email

It all happened so quickly, about a year ago today. One minute, hardly anyone had heard of the ad-free social network Ello. The next, it was a viral sensation, spawning countless think pieces on its chances for survival. Then, as quickly as it appeared, Ello faded from the spotlight. Now, only a year later, Ello is nearly forgotten, filed away with other would-be Facebook killers like the open source Diaspora and the near-dead Google+.
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How Gigaom died and then came back to life again, kind of

On a Monday night in March, Gigaom, the site where I’d worked for four years, abruptly shut down. In a hastily scheduled conference call, the company’s 80-plus employees were told that we’d run out of money and would cease publishing immediately. Our long-planned conference Structure Data, which was just nine days away, was canceled.
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'The Martian' Plagiarism: Russian Screenwriter Sues Fox Over Alleged Copied Script

Russian screenwriter Mikhail Raskhodnikov is suing Fox for allegedly plagiarizing his script in The Martian. Raskhodnikov's lawyer Shota Gorgadze said on the air of the Russian FM station Vesti that his client wrote a script entitled Marsianin (The Martian) back in 2008, which was later submitted to local and international studios. According to Gorgadze, Raskhodnikov is certain that the script eventually made it to Fox's main...
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New technique could make cement manufacturing carbon-neutral

Concrete surrounds us in our cities and stretches across the land in a vast network of highways. Many aren’t aware that concrete’s key ingredient, ordinary portland cement, is a major producer of greenhouse gases. Each year, manufacturers produce around 5 billion tons of portland cement, for every ton of cement produced, the process creates approximately a ton of carbon dioxide, all of which accounts for roughly 7 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
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This is what a $350,000 house in San Francisco looks like

Apparently, it's the cheapest property in the city.
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How Peanuts Changed the World

How did a little ground nut (that isn't a nut at all) become one of the most important foods on Earth?
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Volkswagen emissions scandal: Switzerland bans sale of some models

Country halts sale of VWs in the Euro5 class, which contains bulk of vehicles said to have defeat devices, which mask true emissions.
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The motor scooter that thinks it's a van

Denmark's Tripl electric motorbike has more cargo space than a Mercedes E-Class estate.
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'Most hated' pharmaceutical CEO's contact info exposed online

Late Wednesday night, someone posted the home address and phone number of Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive who has been labeled “the most hated man in America.” Martin Shkreli is the former Wall Street guy who now leads a pharmaceutical company -- and recently raised the price on a long-existing drug called Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 overnight. The drug, which fights parasitic infections, cost AIDS patients 55 times more than before.
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Who owns outer space?

As humans - and corporations - continue to push boundaries in space, the question of ownership becomes more important.
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Tanzanite: The hidden treasure of Tanzania

Rarer than diamond but hardly known, Tanzania is struggling to take advantage of a unique natural resource.
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Can you trust your medicine? The answer, increasingly, seems to be 'no.'

2 new studies show the FDA is rushing more drugs to market based on shoddy evidence
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Disaster capitalism is a permanent state of life for too many Americans

Hundreds of full-time New York City workers are homeless and in San Francisco bus drivers sleep in their cars to save money: this is a never-ending crisis
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Old net addresses run out in US

North America has officially run out of its stock of old net addresses.
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Dewey, Cheatem & Howe

There are, it turns out, people in the corporate world who will do whatever it takes, including fraud that kills people, in order to make a buck. And we need effective regulation to police that kind of bad behavior, not least so that ethical businesspeople aren’t at a disadvantage when competing with less scrupulous types. But we knew that, right?
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Africa's Farmers 'Need Urgent Climate-Proof Investment'

A lack of investment will hamper efforts to ensure Africa's farmers can feed future generations in the face of a changing climate, a report warns.
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Draconian US copyright rules made it easier for Volkswagen to cheat

If you buy a car, do you own the software inside?
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Health plan deductibles are growing seven times as fast as wages

While there was a relatively modest 4 percent increase in premiums, deductibles have continued a steep upward trend, a new survey finds.
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What Ad Blockers Will Really Do to the Web

Ad blockers are nothing new. This software, usually designed for Web browsers, blocks most banner, flash, and pop-over ads, and is often used to save time and bandwidth. OpinionsThe first ad blocker I recall was for an early online service called Prodigy, which was designed to compete with CompuServe in the 1980s. The history of this operation is a fascinating read.
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