Free Republic

The country's top finance official, Anton Siluanov, said the government must be prepared for prices to fall further in 2016 as the global glut grows and new supply -- for example from Iran -- enters the market. "Everything indicates that low oil prices are likely to dominate next year. And it is possible that at some periods [the oil price] will be $30 per barrel," Siluanov was quoted as saying by Russian state-run news agencies. That would spell more pain for Russia. Oil and gas exports make up almost half of government revenue. Oil futures were trading at their lowest...

I have for many years now, been warning of the age old battle between the super rich and the middle class. Only in the usa during the 19th and 20th century, did the middle class win that battle. During the 19th and 20th century in the usa the power of the super wealthy was curtailed. Government enacted laws that protected the middle class and encouraged exspandsion of the middle class. Anti-trust laws prevented the super rich from gaining control over entire industries. Today these laws are ignored. Labor laws enabled workers to bargain for a living wage. Today these laws...

Wal-Mart profit misses forecast; outlook weak CHICAGO (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Thursday reported a weaker-than-expected profit and said second-quarter results would miss Wall Street forecasts as steep energy prices and cool, wet weather cut spring sales. Shares of Wal-Mart, which said gasoline prices would continue to curb consumer spending in the current quarter, fell 4 percent in premarket trading. The world's biggest retailer said it expects trends to improve in the second half and remained optimistic about the U.S. economy. "Our results were not up to Wal-Mart standards," Chief Executive Officer Lee Scott said on a recorded message,...

The Mozilla Foundation has released the first version of Sunbird, its standalone calendar application, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Sunbird 0.2 offers various features, including the ability to create scheduled events and to see an overview of events on a particular day, week or month. The calendar can be shared by publishing it to a WebDAV (World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)-capable server. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the basic HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) underlying the Web, enabling people to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote Web servers. The Sunbird application is available for...

Just a short note commenting on the fact that more food is produced now than ever before in human history. While that may be true, it is misleading: Food is very unevenly distributed. In North America, Europe, Australia, etc. (the Western World), we waste enough food every day to feed all of the world's hungry. So when people contend that "food scarcity" is due to bad economic policies, they are correct, except for that there are no food scarcities anymore. But because we have a globalized market, poorer countries (and people!) have a much harder time getting at the stuff....