Exclusive: Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest →

I find it incredible that we still have so much to discover in previous human spaces, let alone the rest of our world.

An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture’s lost city, never before explored. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied “White City,” also referred to in legend as the “City of the Monkey God.”  

Archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago, and then vanished. The team, which returned from the site last Wednesday, also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned.

Peak Cable →

So again, why have all the people been fooled all this time? Twenty years have passed since the industry reached saturation and prices keep rising. Today the average cable bill is projected to rise to $200/month by 2020.

My answer is that disruption is predictable. Users are cutting cords, the “uncabled” or “never-cabled” are a significant portion of the population. 13.5% of broadband households with an adult under 35 have no pay-TV subscriptions. 8.6 million US households have broadband Internet but no pay-TV subscription. That’s 7.3% of households, up from 4.2% in 2010.  Another 5.6 million households “are prime to be among the next wave of cord-cutters,” according to Experian.

Thoughts on the Israeli Election →

For me, the salient—one might say searing—fact about the Israeli election is this: Bibi Netanyahu won, and won decisively, (a) after going to Washington to campaign against the President of the United States, (b) after unpardonably questioning the legitimacy of voting by the one fifth of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian Arabs, and (c) after repudiating the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This fact will, I fear, reverberate loudly and for a long time in the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The Case for Free-Range Parenting →

A study by the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that American kids spend 90 percent of their leisure time at home, often in front of the TV or playing video games. Even when kids are physically active, they are watched closely by adults, either in school, at home, at afternoon activities or in the car, shuttling them from place to place.

Such narrowing of the child’s world has happened across the developed world. But Germany is generally much more accepting of letting children take some risks. To this German parent, it seems that America’s middle class has taken overprotective parenting to a new level, with the government acting as a super nanny.

Just take the case of 10-year-old Rafi and 6-year-old Dvora Meitiv, siblings in Silver Spring, Md., who were picked up in December by the police because their parents had dared to allow them to walk home from the park alone. For trying to make them more independent, their parents were found guilty by the state’s Child Protective Services of “unsubstantiated child neglect.” What had been the norm a generation ago, that kids would enjoy a measure of autonomy after school, is now seen as almost a crime.

Netanyahu wins elections →

With more than 99 percent of the votes tallied, Israel’s incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears poised to retain his office and form the next government.

Though the final campaign polls showed Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party trailing behind the centre-left Zionist Union, headed by Isaac Herzog, Likud gained 30 seats, six more than its main competitor, according to official results released on Wednesday. 

The Joint Arab Coalition, an electoral alliance of four Palestinian-majority parties in Israel, pulled 14 seats, and Yesh Atid, the centrist party headed by former finance minister Yair Lapid, earned 11 seats. Kulanu, a right-wing breakaway party led by former Likud member Moshe Kahlon, took ten seats.

100,000 Layoffs and Counting: Is this the New Normal? →

The bloodletting among the oil majors and their vast web of ancillary services has of course extended to the United States – which appears to be taking far more casualties than Saudi Arabia in the battle for marketshare. In January oilfield services giant Baker Hughes said it will lay off 7,000 employees, about 11 percent of its workforce; that number was rivalled only by its competitor, Schlumberger, which let go 9,000 workers. Shell, Apache, Pemex and Halliburton are among major oil companies to issue recent pink slips to the growing army of unemployed oil workers. In the U.S., the worst pain is, not shockingly, expected to be felt in Houston. Assuming a one-third reduction in oil company capital expenditures this year and 5 percent in 2016, the hydrocarbon capital of the world could lose 75,000 jobs, in a city that has added 100,000 new positions every year since 2011, said a professor at the University of Houston.

Negotiations with Greece Close to Breakdown as Budget Strains Worsen →

That means the inertial path is that Greece does not in fact get much or any of the bailout funds it had hoped to obtain by the end of April at the latest. While the government is scrambling to find cash to make payments to the IMF and perversely, on a Goldman swap this month, it is borrowing from the pension kitty to do so. That means if tax collections do not improve, it may come up short on pension payments in upcoming months. It is not clear whether Syriza will be able to maintain public support if it fails to meet its pension obligations in full.

Virginia school suspends an 11-year-old for one year over a leaf that wasn’t marijuana →

...While the juvenile court dropped its case against the student after the tests turned up negative, the school system, in a community located midway between Roanoke and Lynchburg, has been far less forgiving. That's because stringent anti-drug policies in school districts in Virginia and elsewhere consider "imitation" drugs to be identical to real ones for disciplinary purposes.

The school's lawyer, Jim Guynn, is quoted in the Roanoke Times article defending the policy on the basis that "it's a pretty standard policy across the Commonwealth." In 2011, for instance, four seventh-graders in Chesapeake, Virginia were suspended over bringing a bag of oregano to school. A quick Google search suggests similar policies are in effect in many other states as well.

It doesn't matter if your son or daughter brings a real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf -- okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a joke, or if another kid thinksit might be marijuana, that's grounds for expulsion.