In an interesting blog post, The Blunt Bean Counter asks whether newspaper paywalls will save newspapers or if they are just a last ditch effort to save an industry that will ultimately fail . I think the answer is some of each. Revenues for newspaper businesses will continue to decline as more people opt not to pay for a physical newspaper each day. It will take some time but people like me who like to flip through the dead-tree version of newspapers will eventually die off. Newspaper business people recognize this and hope they can replace subscription revenue from physical papers with subscription revenue from web site access. For the most part, this won’t work; collectively, people will never pay as much for web site subscriptions as they pay for physical newspapers. The reason is simple: competition. It costs far less to run a newspaper as a web site than it does to deliver physical newspapers. Production and delivery costs are eliminated and there is far less need for a...

It’s not every day that you hear of a court ordering an individual to pay over a billion dollars in damages. I just heard of two separate cases. Adam Guerbuez of Montreal was ordered to pay Facebook just over a billion dollars for sending spam messages. Former Société Générale SA trader Jerome Kerviel was convicted of trading fraud and ordered to pay his former employer US$6.7 billion in damages. It’s hard to understand the purpose of judgments that are so far beyond the means of these people. I suppose it sends some sort of message. Unfortunately, the message I hear is “we’re not very good at math.”