Zero Hedge covered one of the many alarming elements of Venezuela’s ongoing financial crisis:

• Hyperinflation in Venezuela has caused a financing crisis for the government – with public servants being required to take five day “weekends” in order to save money.
• The government has been trying to print money to make its payments – further fueling inflation and driving a vicious cycle.
• Venezuela has struggled to print the money itself – partly because the country has a shortage of the security paper, and metallic ink required to pump out the currency.
• So it has outsourced currency printing to other international vendors – who have been delivering bank notes by the 747 plane-load.
• Recently, however, it has emerged that the government has missed $71 million worth of payments to one of its vendors, and it’s unclear if the government will ever make that payment.
• It doesn’t help that the largest denomination note is for a mere 100 Bolivars – about ten American cents on the black market.
• The administration of Nicolás Maduro, the President, could save a lot of money by releasing higher denomination notes that it wouldn’t have to print as many of.
• However, the government fears that this will contribute to inflation – right now, at least, prices are limited by the amount of notes that can be carried in a wheelbarrow.
• As it is Maduro’s government has stopped printing denominations of 20 Bolivars and below because they cost more to produce than they are worth.

Read the full saga over here.

Source: Zero Hedge

Geoff Manaughmarch mused about the things he learned while he was flying around in Los Angeles’ police helicopters:

• A city’s infrastructure shapes the kind of crimes it has to deal with. The soft sedimentary rocks of Los Angeles mean that crimes committed through tunnels are far more common than in the granite New York City.
• Los Angeles’ extensive freeways also make bank jobs more lucrative as thieves have an easy route to make a quick get-away.
• Police choppers can’t get too close to airports because of the restricted airspace, meaning that get-away drivers are increasingly learning to lose heat in and around airports.
• Right now police copters are hindered by their inability to pinpoint exact addresses they can direct ground forces towards. As aerial policing – through things such as drones – becomes more common, expect to see a push to paint street addresses on rooftops.

Read more about what the police see from their eyes in the skies, and how predictive policing could change the role that helicopters have to play over here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

The headline is meant to be taken quite literally. In Apple’s app store, Twitter has changed its category from “Social” to “News”. In separate articles Sarah Perez and Dieter Bohn looked into why this change may have been made:

• Twitter had another disappointing financial quarter, with its share price plummeting soon after the results were announced.
• Part of the problem is that everybody compares Twitter, and its (relatively) small user base, to the massive pool of users that Facebook has.
• Instead of trying to compete with Facebook head on in social networks, executives may want to change the conversation so that they’re no longer being compared to Facebook and instead define their own category.
• After all, no one really tries comparing LinkedIn’s user base with Facebook as a measure of LinkedIn’s success – because we think of LinkedIn as existing in a category distinct from Facebook.
• It also has a more practical implication. On Apple’s app store Twitter was ranked the #5 most popular social networking app.
• As a news app it’s the #1 app of its category – massively increasing exposure and possibly even improving overall ranking numbers.

Read more on the two authors’ takes here and here.

Source: TechCrunch and The Verge

Richard Lai covered Hover Camera – a personal drone that follows you around:

• Hover Camera recognizes your face and then follows you about taking photos or videos as you engage in your daily activities.
• It works indoors and outdoors and can, for example, follow you while you’re out for a run.
• Features such as gesture control and orbiting mode are expected soon.
• Unfortunately, its limited to about eight minutes of flying – though the makers have gone out of their way to make the battery easily replaceable while you’re out and about.
• And the $600 price tag is steep. But once the technology improves perhaps we can all expect to have little personal assistant drones, following us around, helping us out, and documenting our lives.

Read more over here.

Source: Engadget

Angry Birds (the movie), Finding Dory, a new Ice Age, and even a movie about those 90s toy Trolls – the upcoming calendar is full of animated movies. Kyle Stock delved into the economics of the business:

• We’re reaching saturation point for animated movies, in part because they earn a 36% return.
• This is far ahead of the 26% that second placed Science Fiction/Fantasy movies earn, and well ahead of dramas and comedies that struggle to break even.
• But, while a lucrative opportunity, it is also an expensive one. The top movies need to shell out for A-List voice talent and skilled animators, all of which can cost $100 million.
• Through in another $150 million for promotions.
• If directors want to cut costs they avoid hair and water – two expensive things to animate. It’s no coincidence that the Minions movie starred largely bald characters.
• But you don’t want to cut too many corners. Fortune favours the bold. The more spent, the greater the likelihood of success. One expert believes that it’s riskier to make a $90 million movie than a $150 million one.
• The cost means that failures really hurt. Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and Rise of the Guardians, are two recent flops that cost DreamWorks a substantial amount of money.
• But no studio can resist the allure of making the next Frozen. Ticket sales for that movie alone were $1.3 billion. Which is peanuts compared to the $6 billion it made in ancillary revenue from things like its soundtrack.

Read more here.

Source: The Star

Via: Marginal Revolution

In the future mobile phones could subtly change city infrastructure, wrote John Metcalfe:

• Pedestrians who text and walk at the same time have a tendency to get hit by cars or run over by trains.
• One German city is embedding pedestrian lights into the roads around a train station. The hope is that texters while looking down at their phones will also see the red lights that indicate an oncoming locomotive.
• Critics of the idea say that you cannot “protect against…idiots”.

Read more here.

Source: City Lab

Harper Lee. Alan Rickman. David Bowie. And now Prince. 2016 has been a rough year for noted celebrities. Roland Hughes and Laura Gray wrote about why there has been so much death:

• Television meant increasing fame for a larger group of people.
• TV really spread in the 60s – and those that were famous then are beginning to enter their 70s now and are dying off.
• Soon after World War 2 there was also a growth spurt in the population known as the baby boom. Baby boomers make up a large proportion of the population and thus of celebrities. As they enter their grey years they’re passing away.
• All of this helps explains why in the first three months of 2016 around twice as many celebrities died as in the first three months of 2015.
• It also means that we should expect the rest of this year – and the next ten or so years – to be heavy on celebrity deaths, as boomers continue to age.

Read more over here.

Source: BBC

As you prepare for the premiere of the sixth season of Game of Thrones, you should wonder if all the problems in the show could have been solved if the King had merely hired an economist. At least that’s what Carolyne Larrington thinks:

• Part of the reason for the instability in the Seven Kingdoms is that the capital has run up debts that it’s unable to repay.
• Some bankers have thus resorted to financing the crown’s opponents, in the hopes that they will usurp the throne and pay down the original debts.
• In fact, in the books, the banks have stopped providing financing to the Kingdom’s merchants as well, causing trade to grind to a halt and increasing discontent.
• Meanwhile Daenerys is struggling to keep control of her lands because she disrupted the lucrative business of international slavery, thus leading to the creation of an insurgency funded by the wealthy.

The full article covers many more aspects of Westerosi economic policy. Read it here.

Source: 1843

Sophia Rosenbaum wrote about interesting measures that tour guides have resorted to:

• Paris is among the most popular cities for Japanese tourists to visit.
• But Japanese people are famously concerned about the overall cleanliness of an area.
• Feeling that Paris wasn’t living up to expectations, a group of Japanese tour guides have started cleaning the city themselves.

Read more here.

Source: New York Post

Via: Marginal Revolution