#2: Purple Rain

Welcome back! Look, I know what you're thinking. But it goes without saying that losing Prince qualifies as "important" news. It's devastating is what it is. So let's just all take one more goddamn moment and remember what a real man looks like. 5'2" and purple, he made it feel ok to dress and act and sing however you wanted, with exactly zero fucks given. He made some of the best baby-making music of all-time. He was the greatest living guitarist. He had a neon sign in his bedroom that said "lovesexy". So...yeah. It blows. Real bad. But...reluctantly...we move on. 


On to the news!

1.This is the single best piece I've read on the past, present and future of money and how we spend it.

"Just as you have to work to get money in a developed economy – so the money constitutes a record of labour – the fei are an unfakeable record of the labour that went into their creation. In addition, the big ones have the advantage that they’re impossible to steal. By the same token, though, they’re impossible to move, so what happens is that if you want to spend some of the money, you just agree that somebody else now owns the coin. A coin sitting outside somebody’s house can be transferred backwards and forwards as part of a series of transactions, and all that actually happens is that people change their minds about who now owns it. Everyone agrees that the money has been transferred. The real money isn’t the fei, but the idea of who owns the fei. The register of ownership, held in the community memory, is the money."


2. India's turning on digital banking -- for 1.2 billion people. An entire sub-continent, pulled out of poverty, right past credit cards and ATM's, into the digital age.

"So far, India's attempt to assign every citizen a unique 12-digit number associated with a person's unique iris, fingerprint or facial features, is succeeding—just last week, Aadhaar reached its milestone of registering 1 billion people."


3. Time to get angry! Exxon bragged about melting glaciers 54 years ago.

"In 1955, Scripps Institute scientist Hans Suess demonstrated that naturally occurring carbon-14 in the atmosphere was being “diluted” by depleted carbon-12 derived from fossil fuels. Suess’ 1955 paper provided the first clear proof that, as hypothesized by Arrhenius and theorized by Callendar, carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels was accumulating in the atmosphere."


4. But then here comes India again, trying desperately to turn a corner and do their part for the world not to melt and then we're all dead like Prince.

"In the past financial year, nearly 20GW of solar capacity has been approved by the government, with a further 14GW planned through 2016 according to the Union Budget.

Capital costs have fallen 60% in the past four years and could drop a further 40% reports Deutsche Bank, which said in a report last year solar investment would overtake coal by 2020."


5. Lotta reports and analysis out this week about the new (old) arms race with Russia and China. Some new space weapons, some submarine action. This one takes the (uranium) cake. Sleep tight!

"According to Russian news reports, the Russian Navy is developing an undersea drone meant to loft a cloud of radioactive contamination from an underwater explosion that would make target cities uninhabitable."