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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
February 27, 2015
• Today in Bespoke: Australian artisan Dan Bolwell charges $3500 to $6000 (AUD) for his handmade penny farthing bikes, just like great-great-(great?)-grandpa used to ride. The prices range because “the purchaser can inject their personality into the design by adding ...

Daily Bafflements
February 26, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: Fortune reports that Warren Buffett, 84 years old but going on 6, “stays youthful by drinking at least five Cokes a day,” three during the day and two at night. He is also really into Utz “potato stix,” and eats ice cream for ...

Daily Bafflements
February 25, 2015
• Chicagoans appear to be disillusioned; Rahm now faces a runoff. As the the AP puts it, “Emanuel discovered it wasn’t enough to spend millions of dollars on TV ads, earn the backing of the city’s business leaders, and secure the hometown endorsement of ...

Daily Bafflements
February 24, 2015
• Fifteen former students of colleges owned by Corinthian Colleges, one of the world’s largest for-profit education companies, are going on debt strike; Sarah Jaffe and Vauhini Vara report. • The FBI doesn’t seem to want the public to learn about the use of ...

Daily Bafflements
February 23, 2015
• Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics whose work is often cited by politicians opposing climate change legislation, has been found to have accepted $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry over the past ten years, thanks to ...

Daily Bafflements
February 20, 2015
• The latest Snowden revelation, published on The Intercept on Thursday afternoon, is particularly devastating. Spies from the U.S. and UK hacked into the computer systems of Gemalto, the world’s largest SIM card manufacturer. “With these stolen encryption keys, ...

Daily Bafflements
February 19, 2015
• Here’s Jessica Roy, US Weekly style, on the preferred diets of the GOP presidential hopefuls, from Jeb Bush’s Paleo to Bobby Jindal’s “whatever” method. • PSA: This Jeb Bush flask is only $35 at the site Millennials for Jeb! The website copy ...

Daily Bafflements
February 18, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has dumped stock in Exxon Mobil, citing a desire to stop supporting non-renewable energy resources that are threatening our environment. What’s that? Oh, sorry, no, the reason is actually just ...

Daily Bafflements
February 17, 2015
• “A survey from the American Management Association found that 66 percent of employers monitor the Internet use of their employees, 45 percent track employee keystrokes, and 43 percent monitor employee email,” reports Esther Kaplan in Harper’s. “Only two ...

Daily Bafflements
February 13, 2015
• Today in Labor Strikes: Workers at twenty-nine sea ports along the West Coast, from Bellingham to San Diego. Here’s a timeline of the long-running contract dispute. • Today in Billionaires: Bachelor billionaires, just in time for Valentine’s ...

Daily Bafflements
February 12, 2015
• Your uncle with all the conspiracy theories are right; the Department of Homeland Security does have a secret “kill switch” for the Internet, and a D.C. court has just ruled that it can remain secret. • You may have seen the news this week that the vile ...

Daily Bafflements
February 11, 2015
• Oh, brands! Red Bull has filed an opposition with the Patent and Trademark Office against a little tiny craft brewery in Ashburn, Virginia called Old Ox Brewery. For trademark infringement. Red Bull argues “that an ox and a bull are ‘virtually indistinguishable ...