The National Venture Capital Association has some advice for Donald Trump: don't tax us. The letter is long on generalities except where tax issues are concerned. While most of the policy issues are ones to which I'm at least a little sympathetic, I find their presentation self-serving and overly optimistic, rather than really engaging with any ( Read more... )

The Apple situation is not hard to explain, despite what many journalists seem to imply ( Read more... )

If we are going to have price controls on out-of-patent prescription drugs, this seems like just about the worst way to do it: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/02/ ( Read more... )

There was a lively discussion on this week's Slate Money podcast about nonvoting shares ( Read more... )

I am rereading selected bits of "Combinatorial Auctions" in preparation for my session at Minnebar next week ( Read more... )

What can rich people possibly do with their money ( Read more... )

I watched the documentary "Stripped" last night, and enjoyed it. But it was trying to do too many things to really be a good documentary. The part I enjoyed most was hearing the artists talk about their process for "being funny" every day ( Read more... )

So the EU switched where VAT is collected for digital service from the seller to the buyer. This is not really shocking, and removes a big incentive to play locale games ( Read more... )

The conventional story of East-West trade is that China accepted only bullion from the Atlantic economies because the Europeans had nothing else to offer that was of interest. But that's not all that's going on.

China had an immense hunger for silver, from all of its trading partners. There were several reasons for this. One was that silver was ( Read more... )

I'm reading Jordan Ellenberg's "How Not to Be Wrong". He describes a paradox I don't recall seeing before. Here are four bets on drawing a ball from an urn, which has 30 red balls and 60 balls that are a combination of black and yellow (in some unknown proportion ( Read more... )