Top Spot:
☆☆☆☆ World’s First 3D Printing Photo Booth to Open in Japan (I WANT this! When are they pening these in Europe?)
☆☆☆☆ How I learned a language in 22 hours (And there I have something I must most definitely try)
☆☆☆☆ Why Are So Many Single-Parent Families in Poverty? (that's a rhetorical question, one would think, and yet apparently is not. And what would the underlying problem be? That the government hasn't kept track of "change in family structure"... so the solution is subsidizing single parent families, not incentivizing the creation of traditional families... BULLSHIT. And apparently ☆☆☆ I'm not the only one thinking this)
☆☆☆☆ 99 life hacks to make your life easier (GENIUS at work)
On the Euro Crisis:
☆☆ Slow but steady? External adjustment within the Eurozone starts working (and figure 5 is taken as good news... a 10% drop in labor cost, meaning wages...)
Time for euro zone to revisit debt default option (on the other hand, heavily indebted euro countries would become even more indebted if the debts they are backing thro bailouts would default, possibly triggering another, larger, problem)
☆☆☆ Violent clashes as austerity protests grip EU cities (In Rome, they were particularly bad, it seems)
Greece
Leaked Greek troika report: devil in the details (Ah ah ah... the critically indebted -except Germany obviously- European"big ones" to find another 50 billion euros for Greece and Greece to enforce another -only?- 4 billions of cuts.. financial sci-fi!)
Battle of the (third) bailout (Ditto)
Greece: continuing the disastrous ‘squeeze and hope’ strategy (Ditto)
☆☆☆ On Greek elephants (oh, ok, it's actually even worse)
France
Battling French decline (and here it comes another recessionary austerity spiral)
Portugal
Portugal shut out of OMT in order to keep Greece out (logic, in fact, has been severely lacking when it comes to actions to address sovereign debt)
Portugal’s growing discontent (and how very unsurprising it is, cosnidering Portugal is made to suffer even more for the "sins" of others, as cleared above)
Spain
Is Rajoy considering an IMF-only bail-out? (I don't think the IMF would require any less austerity than it would the EU)
On the US Economy:
‘The Queen of Versailles’: the best film on the Great Recession (Kind of interesting, but I must see if I can get to see the documentary mentioned in the comments)
U.S. Oil Output to Overtake Saudi Arabia’s by 2020 (Which on the long term would be auspicious, meaning having to accommodate less the arab countries.)
Merry Christmas and a recessionary new year (Optimism!)
World Economy and Economics in general:
☆☆ To Slow Warming, Tax Carbon ("As the price of energy has increased using current renewables, energy-intensive industries are being driven offshore, only for their products to be imported back into the European Union." and that, really, says it all. Consider that those are job intensive industries too)
Corruption Threatens to Bring Down China and Russia (Brazil and India are pretty bad too...ah, the BRICs...)
Introducing the ‘youth sacrifice ratio’ (Ok, I'm not in the youth section anymore, regrettably, but in any case it's sad)
Google Has Officially Eaten the Newspaper Industry (The interesting question is: once the industry dies, where will Google get the contents? Blogs?)
☆☆ How Economists Got Income Inequality Wrong (Several interesting points raised)
☆☆☆ Manufacturing Fetishism (Sorry, i disagree, I hardly would call fetishism the fact that there are more jobs in manufacturing than in designing something. Ideally, one country would like to do both as much as possible.)
Argentina
Pari Passu Endgames (I don't know, but together with HFT, this is currently fascinating to me)
China
Impending Bad Debt Headache Likely Bigger Than Expected (Massive currency reserves should be enough to erase the debt, in the worst case)
UK
Starbucks, Amazon and Google to face MPs over tax (perhaps it is time to do something about tax avoidance of multinationals, indeed)
☆☆☆ Starbucks Commitment to the UK (the comment section is a must read)
Politics:
China
☆☆ Who’s Who in China’s New Communist Party Leadership Lineup (Average age, 60-something...kids, compared to politicians in my country)
Egypt
☆☆☆ Extremist calls for destruction of Egyptian antiquities (Oh, what a surprise... Arab spring everyone! Democracy!)
Israel
☆ Israel Takes Out Top Terrorist (Nice shot!)
Miscellania:
☆☆ The Uncertain Future for Universities (For an example of how the system could not work, see Italy, where mass enrollment started in the 60s and produced some among the worst university in the western world)
☆☆ What does equilibrium look like for the book business? (Quite possibly true. But houses without real books will look so empty and sad)
Dirty Money Spends Faster (Always thought that small notes are spent faster than large ones)
☆☆☆ Making Cents (Interesting insight in the world of music today)
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