New Half-Foot Long, Beer, Wine, Te -Proof iPhone Xs Max, Also Water Proof

Remember in the late 90’s how cell phones kept getting smaller and smaller to show you how amazing new technology was? Well, so much for that, because now they’re getting bigger and bigger to show you how amazing technology is. Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) new iPhone Xs Max has a 6.5” screen and can be dunked in just about any liquid that can be swallowed by a person without causing immediate health problems, excluding anaphylactic allergic reactions, including beer, wine, and tea, and water, if you happen to be drinking that. iPhone revenues account for about half of Apple’s top line, and therefore about half of its now $1.1 trillion market cap, meaning that the capital value of the iPhone is about $550 billion. Is it really that much or is there something bubbly going on in the capital markets? Stay tuned. We’ll find out eventually.

SEE: California State Passes Law To Form A Blockchain Working Group

Bernanke Admits He Messed Up By Having Wrong Econometric Models

Like a typical central planner bureaucrat who sees no flaw in the principle but blames all calamities on incorrect application of the principle instead, former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke admitted that he messed up back in 2008, specifically by not forecasting the severity of the financial crisis because he had the wrong econometric models for predicting human behavior within chaotic systems. Rather than coming to the conclusion that maybe the Federal Reserve should let the free market dictate interest rates in order to clear the money markets naturally rather than have a group of people do that by vote, he has come to the conclusion that the equations the Fed uses as prediction models simply “demand a more thorough inclusion of credit-market factors in models and forecasts of the economy.” Well, now that he knows this he can communicate his fix of the problem to Jay Powell and everything should be fine for the foreseeable future. Problem solved?

Venezuela Rolls Back Socialism a Pinch

Venezuela is finally rolling back some of the totalitarian policies instituted by the late Hugo Chavez after his rise to power to carry through a socialist revolution meant to provide plenty to everyone. After Chavez assumed office, he state-owned oil company PDVSA in charge of every oil field in the country, essentially monopolizing the country’s reserves. Now that oil production has collapsed and Venezuelans are starving in the streets, his successor Nicholas Maduro is admitting that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, and has issued licenses to 14 private oil firms in Venezuela, or whatever is left of them, to pump the oil themselves. Only 7 of the 14 have been publicized though, so let’s not get our hopes up .The slight but important decentralization should get production back up a bit but there is still the problem of everything else in Venezuela falling apart at the seams that probably won’t be solved a state-owned cryptocurrency that nobody knows how to use.

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New EU Copyright Law Could End Memes, Smash YouTube Artists

The European Union is on the verge of passing a new copyright law that would prevent sharing copyrighted material online, including possible linking to other copyrighted news stories such as the one in this very sentence. This would include sharing copyrighted pictures from movies for example, which means that internet memes would technically be illegal. The law would make YouTube, and therefore its owner Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) responsible for copyright infringement by its users, and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) as well, but the law is very unclear as to what constitutes copyright infringement exactly. So if the law passes it will become substantially harder for artists to publish content on the video platform. Google News would also be in Jeopardy because it links to copyrighted content and makes revenue off the links, which means that it would also be technically violating the new law. Same goes for sites like the Drudge Report, which does nothing else but link to copyrighted news stories. Could the internet be about to fundamentally change?