Tim Fernholz

Some 3.5 million customers who bought unlimited data service from AT&T received a surprise in 2011: After using more than 2 gigabytes of data in a month, AT&T would dramatically throttle back data speeds, leaving customers facing degraded or denied service for everything from GPS navigation to streaming music. When angry customers cancelled their contracts, AT&T collected early termination fees.

On Dec. 14, 2012, 20 children and six adults were killed in a school shooting in Connecticut by a disturbed 20-year-old using a semi-automatic rifle, the Bushmaster AR-15. The company behind that rifle is Cerberus Capital Management LP, a Manhattan private equity firm named after the mythical three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is one of the world’s financial epicenters, because it follows the business model adopted by many small countries: Create tax structures that allow multinational companies to avoid onerous levies applied in wealthier countries.

Fertilizer is a strategic commodity, and that’s no load of manure.

This summer, Richard Gonzalez, the CEO of US pharmaceutical maker AbbVie, said of his company’s plan to merge with UK-based Shire: ”We wouldn’t be doing it just for the tax impact.”

This story has been corrected.

This new research will be music to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s ears: It turns out that taxi drivers are exactly the income-maximizing, labor-optimizing robots that neoclassical economics expects them to be.

The long-simmering issue of economic inequality in the US got moved to the front burner yesterday, with Federal Reserve head Janet Yellen noting in a speech that the effects of income and wealth disparity “greatly concern” her.

Saddam Hussein didn’t have a weapons of mass destruction program when the US invaded Iraq in 2003. But the country, in many of the same places now controlled by ISIL, had scattered stockpiles of chemical weapons dating back to the Iran-Iraq war. The US has never revealed the full extent of these stockpiles—in part because they were made with US designs and assistance.

There are lots of headlines out of Dublin today about the end of the “double Irish,” a notorious tax break used by multinational companies to avoid paying government levies around the world. Don’t be fooled: The Emerald Isle isn’t giving up on its race to the bottom of the tax world. It’s just making its strategy to attract global profits more transparent.

America’s top-secret space drone is coming home today after a record 22 months in orbit—and we have no idea how it spent its time up there.

Here’s one for the Too Big To Fail watch: Citigroup, the third largest bank in the United States, is spinning off its venerable sub-prime lender, One Main—the original vehicle for the Voltron-like assembly of financial firms the bank became at its height.

Jean Tirole, today’s big economics prize-winner, has built a career examining some of the thorniest problems of the modern economy.

When money changes hands and the prize is a chance to live in a prosperous Western democracy, anything goes—a lesson that politicians in Canada and the US are learning this fall.

At least one African country has been able to fight back against Ebola: Nigeria, West Africa’s largest and most developed nation, has set the tone for a successful public health response to the frightening and often-misunderstood disease.

Mars One, an organization based in the Netherlands, has been recruiting amateur astronauts to send on a one-way, televised trip to Mars, with the hopes of building a colony there. The organization says that the technology to do this exists, or will be ready by the time of its expected 2022 launch date.

A few days ago we noted that it isn’t a good sign for the nascent bitcoin industry that transaction volume—a decent proxy for use of the currency—has been pretty stagnant lately:

People are starting to notice: The bad boy of the digital currency world is losing its mojo.

The Ebola outbreak in west Africa is hard to control in part because it is the most temporally distant region of the globe—that is to say, compared with every other region of the world, sub-saharan Africa is the place that goods take longest to reach.

Today, the US trade deficit shrunk unexpectedly as a new record in oil sales abroad boosted American exports. Though exports have helped boost the economic recovery since the 2008 financial crisis, American elites worry that growing populism, driven by fears of lost wages exploited by opportunistic politicians, is a major barrier for the US effort to ink major international trade deals.

Not many bankers complain about executive compensation being too high—and even fewer contemplate a brief strike to warn the powers that be of their objections.

Convincing people not to chop down trees is hard, especially in poor countries, where the quick fix of clearing land for development and selling timber seems like a winning strategy. When money is on the table, it’s hard for do-gooders warning about threats such as global warming to get much traction with talk of carbon reserves, or locals to win debates with arguments about tradition.

Why is the US falling behind on its promises to destroy old nuclear weapons? Here’s one reason given to government auditors (pdf):

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell the government what you’d pay in taxes, not the other way around? Apple did it in Ireland, and might now be in trouble for it.