This true crime story ticks a lot of my boxes. The villain is created by the slow entropic decay of corruption and temptation, while the hero chose to prosecute white collar crimes because he wanted to go after crimes of greed, not desperation. I continue to believe that as a society, we’re too lenient on crimes of greed and too harsh on crimes of desperation, so it was easy to cheer the prosecution on.

This post claims that the pharmaceutical industry is soon going to fall apart because returns on R&D aren’t keeping up; all the low hanging fruit is gone and none of the harder to reach stuff is profitable. If anyone can give me a sense of how deeply I should be worried by this, I’ll be deeply appreciative.

If your restaurant is failing, or if you want to maximize your chances of success when you open a new location, you can apparently turn to restaurant consultants. I was especially appreciative of their weird specialized vocabulary.

The first commercial flight to circumnavigate the world did so accidentally, soon after the attack on Pearl Harbour made its return flight over the Pacific too dangerous. This is one of the cases where you want to yell at reality for being too unrealistic with its tropes; it features everything from an accidental passenger to a near miss in a mine field.

When I wrote about scrip stamp currencies, I joked that if they lasted more than a couple years, they’d melt down in some bizarre way. Alberta provides a real life example, where the scrip stamp system broke down within a month.

I’m young enough that I kind of just assumed the food item known as “the wrap” always existed. Turns out this is not the case! This article tracks the rise of wraps and the mania that surrounded them, as well as their inevitable fall and strange afterlife as a bland staple in catered lunches.

In 1994, Paul Krugman wrote the famous “Myth of Asia’s Miracle”, which claimed that Asian countries could not maintain their high growth rates indefinitely, especially because they lacked high productivity growth. 15 years later, another economist revisits this assertion and shows that massive re-investment can more than make up for slow productivity growth and drive strong overall growth. Turns out that in nation-building, quantity can have a quality all of its own.

LASIK side-effects worse, more common than most people realize.

I found a record of important political events from 1890 and I have to say, I’m glad we’ve come so far since the 19th century. Back then, the rest of the world was ganging up on America for taking a sudden protectionist turn, which doesn’t remind me of anything current at all.

I find I really enjoy it when judges are acerb, which makes this paper written by a judge about how annoying lawyers like catnip to me. It contains the line: ‘On mornings when I am scheduled to hear a family case, if someone greets me in the court house hallway with, “Have a good morning, Your Honour,” I typically reply, “Thank you, but I have other plans.” I adhere to the view that a legal system without Family Court is like Christianity without Hell.’, in the introduction, so you can tell right away that it’s going to be good.