This year, cash-strapped Russians will spend half their money on food alone →

A collapsing currency, shrinking economy, and rampant inflation make a bitter combination for ordinary Russians. What makes it even more unpalatable is what’s happening at the grocery store, where meat, fruit, vegetables, and other staples are increasingly scarce and expensive. Russia’s economic woes are literally hitting its people in the stomach.
Finding new food suppliers at home and in friendlier countries abroad to replace imports lost to western sanctions and counter-sanctions has been slow. (Russia banned a wide variety of food imports from the US, EU, and elsewhere in August, after the annexation of Crimea and ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine prompted western nations to slap sanctions on Russian companies and individuals.) The resulting shortages mean that food inflation will rise above 20% in the first half of this year, according to analysts at VTB Capital, a Russian investment bank...

The Plan to Map Illegal Fishing From Space →

Illicit fishing goes on every day at an industrial scale. But large commercial fishers are about to get a new set of overseers: conservationists—and soon the general public—armed with space-based reconnaissance of the global fleet.
Crews on big fishing boats deploy an impressive arsenal of technology—from advanced sonars to GPS navigation and mapping systems—as they chase down prey and trawl the seabed. These tools are so effective that roughly a third of the world’s fisheries are now overharvested, and more than three-quarters of the stocks that remain have hit their sustainable limits, according to the FAO. For some species, most of the catch is unreported, unregulated, or flat-out illegal.

What Is Money And How Is It Created? →

These should be two of the easiest questions to answer in economics; after all, money is the one thing that we all use in an economy—surely we know what it is, and where it comes from?
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...Only one person ever really ever did—and no, it wasn’t Ayn Rand. It was Augusto Graziani, an Italian Professor of Economics, who died early last year. He understood what money is because he posed and correctly answered a simple question: how does a monetary economy differ from one in which trade occurs by barter?

This ruled out gold being money, since gold is a commodity that anyone can produce for themselves with a bit of mining (and a lot of luck). So even though gold is really special and incredibly rare, it is in the end, a commodity: an economy using gold for trade is really a barter economy, not a monetary one.

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This gave Graziani three basic conditions that had to be met for something to be called “money”:

a) money has to be a token currency (otherwise it would give rise to barter and not to monetary exchanges);

b) money has to be accepted as a means of final settlement of the transaction (otherwise it would be credit and not money);

c) money must not grant privileges of seignorage to any agent making a payment.

Graziani saw only one way to satisfy those three conditions:

The only way to satisfy those three conditions is to have payments made by means of promises of a third agent, the typical third agent being nowadays a bank.

So money is fundamentally the promise of a bank to its customer, and a monetary payment is the transfer of that promise from one customer to another.

For Yemen’s Arab Spring activists, hope plummets as chaos deepens →

 For Faizah al-Sulimani, the hope stirred by Yemen’s Arab Spring uprising has long since faded.

Four years ago, she joined the wave of nonviolent demonstrations that rippled across the Middle East and led to the ouster of entrenched autocrats, including Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh. Sulimani’s optimism, however, quickly turned to bitterness over what followed — a post-revolutionary order that she and many of her fellow Yemeni protesters consider as corrupt and inept as the one they had struggled to overturn.

Yet, even they never imagined that things would get this bad. A civil war looms after Shiite Houthi rebels deposed the government last month and dissolved parliament...

Making Do With More →

In the United States, just three out of ten workers are needed to produce and deliver the goods we consume. Everything we extract, grow, design, build, make, engineer, and transport – down to brewing a cup of coffee in a restaurant kitchen and carrying it to a customer's table – is done by roughly 30% of the country's workforce.

 The rest of us spend our time planning what to make, deciding where to install the things we have made, performing personal services, talking to each other, and keeping track of what is being done, so that we can figure out what needs to be done next. And yet, despite our obvious ability to produce much more than we need, we do not seem to be blessed with an embarrassment of riches. One of the great paradoxes of our time is that workers and middle-class households continue to struggle in a time of unparalleled plenty.

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One way to reconcile the changes in the job market with our lived experience and statistics like these is to note that much of what we are producing is very different from what we have made in the past. For most of human experience, the bulk of what we produced could not be easily shared or used without permission...
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...The creation of information-age goods is difficult to incentivize; their distribution is hard to monetize; and we lack the tools to track them easily in national accounts...

This produces a set of unique problems. To ensure that the workers of today and tomorrow are able to capture the benefits of the information age will require us to redesign our economic system to stimulate the creation of these new types of commodities. In addition to developing ways to account for this new type of wealth, we will have to develop channels through which demand for a product contributes to the income of its creator.

But for the video… →

He was not only arrested, he was also charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor. A prior drug charge on his record meant he was potentially looking at decades in prison. Seven witnesses backed up the police account that Dendinger had assaulted Cassard.

But Dendinger had asked his wife and nephew to record him serving the papers. It was a last minute decision, but one that may have saved him his freedom.

From what can be seen on the clips, Dendinger never touches Cassard, who calmly takes the envelope and walks back into the courthouse, handing [prosecutor Leigh Anne] Wall the envelope.

Meditation booms as people seek a way to slow down →

Given the increasing workaholism in the U.S., I am not surprised.

Meditation, primarily a 2,500-year-old form called mindfulness meditation that emphasizes paying attention to the present moment, has gone viral.

The unrelenting siege on our attention can take a good share of the credit; stress has bombarded people from executives on 24/7 schedules to kids who feel the pressure to succeed even before puberty. Meditation has been lauded as a way to reduce stress, ease physical ailments like headaches and increase compassion and productivity.

Take some time for reflection, every day.