Oy, this week… My life! 'Ere's all I can offer. For you and you only. Top quality schmutter. I'm cuttin' me own froat gaw blimey:

• The End of Cash; The End of Freedom — Ian Welsh: Every time someone talks about getting rid of cash, they are talking about getting rid of your freedom. Every time they actually limit cash, they are limiting your freedom. It does not matter if the people doing it are wonderful Scandinavians or Hindu supremacist Indians, they are people who want to know and control what you do to an unprecedentedly fine-grained scale. […] Cash isn’t completely anonymous. There’s a reason why old fashioned crooks with huge cash flows had to money-launder: Governments are actually pretty good at saying, “Where’d you get that from?” and getting an explanation. Still, it offers freedom, and the poorer you are, the more freedom it offers. It also is very hard to track specifically, i.e., who made what purchase.
• The economics of BBC pay — Chris Dillow: Take, for example, Peter Capaldi, who earned less than £250,000. This doesn’t seem much, given that the joint surplus is huge – Doctor Who is a worldwide hit – and Capaldi’s ability so great as to give him lots of outside options. But it’s more understandable, once we recognise two things. One is that the BBC’s fall-back position is strong: Doctors are replaceable and the format’s success doesn’t depend upon the actor – and that being the Doctor gives Capaldi a fantastic basis for negotiating his next job; it's worth being temporarily underpaid for that.