Opinion

I am giving you permission: You can safely ignore Amazon’s Prime Day, the annual fake shopping holiday Jeff Bezos invented two years ago. True to form, Amazon released a crush of mostly useless statistics about the “success” of its invented holiday. Prime Day 2017 was the “biggest global shopping event in Amazon history”. Prime Day couldn’t even be contained by …

Don’t worry, the robots won’t destroy all our jobs. History suggests just the opposite — that new technologies inspire new jobs. So concludes a study from leading labor economists. It’s a useful antidote to widespread fears that robots and ‘artificial intelligence’ will displace millions of workers and lead to permanently high joblessness. No doubt, the anxiety is real. Despite a …

If at first you don’t succeed, slash prices and try, try again. That seems to be the strategy at Facebook Inc., which said it would temporarily cut $200 from the $600 price of its Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles plus a related accessory. It’s the second time this year that Facebook has discounted Oculus gear. (The cost doesn’t account for …

Acid attacks are catching on in Britain. The numbers may still be small relative to other violent crimes, but they’re sharply on the rise. These assaults are especially shocking — and they’re attracting feverish attention, which could inspire copycats. The government needs to act. The UK now has one of the highest rates of recorded acid attacks in the world, …

Will it be R.I.P. for China’s VPNs? The Chinese government had ordered telecommunications providers to block access to individual virtual private networks by February 1. VPNs are popular and widely utilized services that allow internet users to bypass web restrictions. In effect, the new rules would block the most popular means for Chinese netizens to see beyond the so-called Great …

Things only seem to get worse for India’s farmers. They’d barely recovered from two years of drought when they were hit by the government’s decision last fall to declare 86% of India’s currency illegal. They struggled through that, and the consequent crash in prices, in hopes that this year’s monsoon would be healthy. And, although forecasters insisted enough rain would …

Citigroup Inc.’s risk takers are once again leading the charge. So far, it’s been all rewards. The bank reported second-quarter results that were better-than-expected, including revenue for the period of $17.9 billion, or nearly $450 million more than analysts were anticipating. The results are the latest in a string of good news for Citi. Just last month, it flew through …

Our story thus far: After decades of expensive and often underperforming active fund management, the public has embraced low-cost, passive-index investing with a vengeance. The old chin-rubbing-this-company-looks-good school of stock picking has been hit with enormous asset outflows. Vanguard Group Inc. and BlackRock Inc. have captured trillions of dollars in new assets, tied to broad indexes, to the collective detriment …

What lessons can we take from the IS’s defeat in Mosul and its coming eviction from Raqqa? The collapse of the ‘caliphate’ tells us that the US can succeed militarily in the Middle East if — and probably only if — it works with local forces who are prepared to do the fighting and dying. Where the massive US ground …

There’s a green bubble in India, with investors flocking to fund a planned tripling of renewable energy capacity over the next five years. Luckily for Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, one of the more gung-ho backers of solar, wind and hydroelectric power in the country, there’s a bigger bubble out there — in global bond markets — that’s allowing the green …