The high prices limited the market to persons of means. However, princes and nobles at first scorned the books produced in quantities and continued to purchase only manuscript copies. The clergy and the lawyers were less reluctant to accept substitute for manuscripts ( Read more... )

In a statement on Thursday, Amazon said an employee on its S3 team was working on an issue with the billing system and meant to take a small number of servers offline -- but they incorrectly entered the command and removed a much larger set of servers ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Top five gasoline consuming states, 2015
StateMillion barrels/dayMillion gallons/dayShare of total U.S. consumptionCalifornia0.9339.1411%Texas0.9037.7910%Florida0.4920.526%New York0.3615.034%Illinois0.3113.054%
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Petroleum and Other Liquids-Prime Supplier Sales Volumes, as of November 17, 2016
Texas is a ( Read more... )

Another good graphic from "A history of commerce, 1907" - before and after the age of explorers (mid-15th century).


( Read more... )

Over the last 60 years, Asia absorbed an enormous amount of technology transfer from the US. Moreover, they are now capable of technology development themselves. By contrast, Germany does very little technology transfer to the rest of the world. Their education system is geared toward internal absorption, rather than export.
When it gets down to ( Read more... )

During the times of Augustus and Tiberius, Romans paid 1% sales tax to support the empire's military expenditures.
When the people of Rome asked for a remission of the one per cent. tax on all saleable commodities, Tiberius declared by edict "that the military exchequer depended on that branch of revenue, and, further, that the State was unequal ( Read more... )

Here's what Robert Shiller wrote a month ago about the recent stock market gains:
In the US, two illusions have been important recently in financial markets. One is the carefully nurtured perception that President-elect Donald Trump is a business genius who can apply his deal-making skills to make America great again ( Read more... )

I advance the hypothesis here that technical change in general can be ascribed to experience, that it is the very activity of production which gives rise to problems for which favorable responses are selected over time ( Read more... )

Studies suggest financial decision-making ability tends to reach its peak in a person’s mid-50s, after when deterioration sets in ( Read more... )