Monday

Enjoy wine more by overpaying. "In one experiment, Mr. Hodgson served 100 wines to actual California State Fair Wine Competition judges, over the course of four years. The tastings were blind, and each judge was presented the same wine three times, each time from the same exact bottle. What Mr. Hodgson found was remarkable: On a 20-point rating scale, from 80-100, judges typically varied in their ratings of the same wine by plus-or-minus four points. The same wine could be rated a 90, an 86, and a 94, all by the same judge in the same year." A nice find here was the essay by Richard Quandt that is referenced in the article- On Wine Bullshit.

Great article on the size of international remittances. It's estimated at $338 billion which is staggering, especially when you consider all foreign aid equals about $100 billion (per the article). Money quote: "Pritchett recently calculated that sending 3,000 Bangladeshis to work to the United States for a year would provide more capital for Bangladesh than a year’s worth of loans from the celebrated Grameen Bank – the microfinance lender whose founder, Mohammed Yunus, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. “If I get 3,000 Bangladeshi workers into the US,” Pritchett asked facetiously in a recent lecture, “do I get a Nobel?”

Two very good posts from Mark Cuban on understanding salary caps and risk management in sports. The second one is really interesting, don't let the risk management thing deter you.

Just read this.

Fareed Zakaria on why Iran can be deterred.