Roubini, who teaches at New York University’s Stern School of Business, explained the economic disaster looming on the horizon could cause the global financial system to “grind to a halt”, which isn’t the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re attempting to keep your family’s heads above water. Most folks are still trying desperately to regain the foothold they lost during 2008′s disaster, never mind preparing for a much larger problem down the road.

Dr. Doom’s theory: Tax increases and spending cuts will push the United States into yet another recession. This, combined with Europe’s debt crisis, China’s wonky economy, and a potential military presence in Iran, could shove most of the civilized world towards a complete collapse. The problem, of course, is that we’re quickly heading towards the point of no return. Unless something is done immediately to turn the tide, turmoil seems inevitable.

“There might be a weak rally because people are being cheered by more quantitative easing by (Chairman Ben) Bernanke and the Fed, but if the economy is weakening, that is going to put downward pressure on earnings growth,” Roubini explained.

Curious to hear more thoughts on the subject? The video you see embedded below contains a lengthy interview with Roubini, so feel free to dive in if you need more information.

I dropped out of high school Economics. There, I said it. I dropped that class and took a study hall. And I did it because of a girl. She had study hall first period and I wanted study hall too. Well, that and the fact that my Econ teacher was nearly senile. Most of us had difficulty in that class. She had a knack for skipping around, teaching from the wrong chapter without realizing it. We flipped pages and looked at each other, desperately trying to keep up. But really, that was just my excuse. It was really the girl.

So, with all that I am about to lay on you, I want you to understand that you can find all this information yourself. I want you to look these things up, get them reduced to simple English, and make up your own mind. I want us to step out of the politicization of it all and get to a real answer. Because, friends, we’ve been lied to. We’ve been told something that simply is not true. We’ve been told this lie by both political parties and every candidate for as long as we can remember. And their sneaky little lie is based on a kernel that used to be true (here comes the “he dropped out of economics” part), and sometimes still is.

Supply and demand.

On your first day in any economics or business class, you learn about supply and demand. They are the two great forces in business. They are what keep a capitalist economy going. Shoot, they are what keeps a communist economy going, for that matter. They are as inescapable as laws of nature. The relationship between scarcity and demand is so basic, that we can seldom see past it to other factors.

If the price of orange juice goes up, we presume a supply and demand issue is at work. Was there a late freeze in orange country that reduced the supply of oranges? Was there a natural disaster that took out processing plants, trucking, etc? Was there a sudden revelation about the magical cancer-fighting properties of orange juice? Does it simultaneously raise your IQ and lower your cholesterol?

If I have 4 apples and there are 40 people wanting to buy apples, I am at an advantage. I can almost name my price. If I have 40 apples and only 4 people are buying, the price is going to drop. It’s Economics 101. I was there long enough to get that. It was on page one.

So, when the price of gasoline hits $4.00 per gallon, as it surely will soon, we can safely assume that something is happening in the supply of gas. We know that demand is rising. People on the radio and television tell us all the time that the Chinese are making cars at a breakneck pace. Even as we try to shave our gas demand, they are ramping up their own.

In my lifetime, there have been multiple instances where the price of oil has spiked. In two of those cases, 1973 and 1979, the spike was caused by international issues. The Arab Oil Embargo in 1973 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979. There were domestic government decisions that factored in to both these cases, but the overall economic factors were the same. In both cases, issues of supply and demand were at work. We simply were not getting – or expecting to get – the oil we needed. At-the-pump prices shot through the roof. People lined up at gas stations to get gas, draining the hoses, hopping on their bumpers to get the last little bit in.

The 1980s saw a “glut”. Oil prices fell to almost a third of their crisis heights. This glut was actually an aftershock of the ’79 issues. Reserves had been cranked up. Conservation efforts had been put in place. Again, it was a matter of supply and demand.

But, there is something funny afoot in our latest gas price hikes. Step back with me to 2008, the year of the last presidential election.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

Matt Taibbi recalls the 2008 presidential campaign season this way:

That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply… John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be “very helpful in the short term,” while Barack Obama… argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

It was in this season that cries of “Drill, Baby Drill!” went up. The answer was simple: Drill in the Gulf. Drill in ANWR. Frack in Canada and pipe it down. And the merits of all of these things were discussed. Some wanted to get away from oil altogether, and as fast as possible. They framed it as a matter of national security. Then-candidate Barack Obama offered a novel idea: let’s do all of it. If we increase our domestic production (supply) AND raise efficiency standards and invest in alternative forms of energy (demand), we could crack this gas price nut once and for all. It was all about getting off foreign oil, controlling our own destiny.

However, as Taibbi points out, the candidates were dancing around the real issue:

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

So, if demand was decreasing, and supply was increasing…? Maybe this was the part where I took a study hall. It was later that I learned that my Economics teacher never would have taught me the real reason gas prices spiked. That’s because there had never been a commodities market in the kind of shape we saw in 2008 before.

Commodities

Commodities markets are a mystery to most people. We kinda understand stocks. We have gotten pretty good at mutual funds, no problem. But phrases like “pork bellies” and topics like “soybean futures” are not where we typically feel comfortable. But commodities in general, and especially the market forces around commodities, are very much a part of our everyday lives. You don’t have to memorize any definitions about this; there won’t be a test. Afterward you can head off to study hall with me. But listen to how this man very simply explains commodities and the speculation on those commodities.

Get all that?

Commodities have fixed amounts. There is little or no question about supply overall because the supply is averaged out over longer periods. That was the original purpose of the commodities market, actually: to help level out from year to year the volatility of agricultural markets that were so weather-sensitive.

But the freedom to invest in commodities markets has become very attractive as the dollar has fallen. Investors want someplace they can put their money that is going to be insulated from falling demand.

Are you ready for the next piece of that puzzle? Though our friend in the video talked mainly about food prices only mentioned it briefly, oil is a commodity. Can you see where this is going already?

In 1936, Congress empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. If speculation was allowed to run unchecked in commodities markets, the very things our friend in the video described would happen. Food prices would skyrocket. Gas prices would spike. Stick with me.

Beginning in 1991, certain investment firms began to secure letters of exception from the SFTC to allow them to trade heavily in commodities.

By the summer of 2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country’s commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined.

Then, in 2008 when the housing bubble burst, tons of money poured into these markets that was never intended to be there. Investment companies moved their customers’ money from housing-related stocks and funds – including mutual funds for 401K plans of large companies – to commodities.

In fact, so many oil futures were bought that there was not enough oil to cover them all. The value of future oil was now bought. That’s demand. But it’s demand on paper, not you and me at the pump. But it drove prices up and we ended up paying at the pump, dearly.

That was in 2008. What has happened since then?

Oil production in the U.S. is now at the highest it has been in 8 years. The political question about who deserves credit for that aside, it remains that we are producing more oil than since before we invaded Iraq.

The effect of uncontrolled futures trading in oil has caused such a volatility in the market that gas prices have gone from $3.22 a gallon just before Christmas to $3.92 a gallon last week. And every penny of price increase gets the oil companies $200 million dollars in profit.

As the Washington Post reported recently:

Earlier this year, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, estimated that speculation was then contributing an extra $30 a barrel to the price of oil.

But wait. Wasn’t all of this illegal? Did the law get changed? No. But there are ways around those laws. For example…

By law, mutual funds are supposed to derive 90 percent of their income from investments in stocks, bonds and other securities, under the regulatory supervision of the Securities and Exchange Commission. So to get around that prohibition and offer commodity funds, some clever securities lawyers in the mutual fund industry came up with the idea of setting up shell companies in the Cayman Islands for the sole purpose of investing in commodity futures and swaps. By selling shares in the offshore subsidiary to their sponsoring funds, the mutual funds are able to meet the requirement that they only invest in securities, and can also pass the subsidiary’s profits on to mutual fund investors without paying a corporate profit tax. And because these are subsidiaries of mutual funds regulated by securities regulators, they escape oversight of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

There is no better proof of all this than this chart. Keep in mind, this is not a chart of oil prices. These are at-the-pump prices.

See that huge dip in 2008? That’s the one you’ve been hearing about in the presidential races. People like to imagine that things were just peachy at the pump before Obama and the current administration messed it all up. I’ll withhold comments about the current administration, but the chart shows the truth. Things were messed up at the pump long before. Then, when the bottom fell out of the market, when Lehman lost everything, when investors ran from everything in sight, gas prices fell too.

This is a market-driven price bubble, not a supply/demand driven one.

So, as this presidential race heats up, don’t buy all the hype about hybrid cars or domestic drilling, no matter what your opinion of those things may be. Those are old supply and demand arguments. I only wish they had an effect on what we pay at the pump. The reality is that investment companies have rigged a side game of betting on the gas you and I pump and that is what is driving our prices up.

I’ll let you form your own opinion about what needs to be done to stop people from gambling on your gas.

Vagelis Hristidis, an associate professor at the university, along with one of his graduate students and three members of Yahoo! Research Barcelona, have created a trading strategy model that examined the correlation between Twitter topic activity and stock market prices and trade volume. Focusing on the volume of tweets regarding a topics associated with companies that are publicly traded, Hristidis and his research team developed a model based on Twitter data and compared it with several other models used to predict stock market performance, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

While they expected that the trade volume would correlate with the number of tweets, they discovered that the number of trades “is slightly more correlated with the number of what they call ‘connected components.’”

For example, it’d pollute the integrity of the data if the research team tracked all tweets containing the phrase “apple.” Aside from being the preeminent tech company in the world, you may remember that “apple” started out as a fruit. The team needed to separate tweets about the fruit from tweets about the tech company, their products, and tweets about the company’s financial performance, so the fruity tweets were excluded from the data.

To test the different models, the research team simulated investments between March 1 and June 30 of last year and compared the performance of the different strategies. Within that window, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 4.2% whereas the Twitter model only lost an average of 2.4%, suggesting that the Twitter model may outperform the Dow Jones.

While its tempting to tease out causality from the correlation, Hristidis acknowledges that, should the market turn bullish, the Twitter-turned-trading strategy model might not produce the same results. Speaking with Forbes about the relationship between Twitter conversations and a stock’s price, Hristidis said, “To be honest, I’m not sure why we found this correlation” but it could be that people tend to dwell on a bad piece of news whereas good news is not as fun to meditate on. And lord knows people love to complain on the internet.

The relationship between Twitter conversations and stock price’s became particularly striking with an example from earlier this week that includes two odd components: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s spokesman, Eric Fehrstrom, and the beloved magnet doodler of children of multiple generations, the Etch a Sketch.

Recall that on March 21 while speaking on CNN, Fehrstrom, whether tongue-in-cheek or not, compared his boss to an Etch a Sketch. Subsequently, people caught wind of this gaffe and related their thoughts via Twitter, boosting the frequency of posts including the phrase “etch a sketch” on Wednesday after Fehstrom’s comment.

What’s more, on the day following the gaffe, the stock value of Etch a Sketch’s manufacturer, Ohio, skyrocketed 200%.

So was this Team Hristidis’ model at work again? It’s hard to say since the quality of the tweets would be expected to not have been related to the stock value of Etch a Sketch’s manufacturer, Ohio Art Company. “That’s a great point,” Hristidis told WPN when asked about Ohio’s stock value, “but if many of the tweets look non-financial, we would have to refine our rules or drop the stock from our group of studied stocks.”

So the take-away from all of this speculation: Twitter may not be the new yardstick by which Wall Street speculators gauge the performance of a company’s stocks, but it could certainly add to the inventory of tools investors consider in their trading strategy.

Got any meditations or dismissals you’d like to add to this story? Feel free to share them below in the comments.

These are complicated economic times and people are looking for whatever break they can get when it comes to parting ways with their hard-earned money. “Across the country, more Americans than ever before are turning to digital coupons to help them save their hard-earned cash,” said Jeanette Pavini, Coupons.com household savings expert. “The South and Midwest dominate the list of most frugal U.S. cities, out-saving other regions including the West and Northeast.”

Joining Atlanta in some good old southern frugality were Tampa (#2), Raleigh (#4), and Nashville (#10). However, the distinction of the most frugal region in the country belongs to the Midwest, where nine cities rank among the top 25 most frugal cities.

See below for the full list of the most frugal cities in the country. Oddly, what’s going on east of the Mississippi that’s got everybody couponing so much?

You may have noticed that Ohio has three cities in that list, two of which are in the top ten. Those three coupon-clipping cities have given Ohio the distinction of most frugal state in the United States.

People in Atlanta aren’t just printing off coupons and zipping out to stores, either. The city was the most “on-the-go” frugal city, as well, due to the high number of people using their mobile devices in order to cash in their coupons.

Anybody in these cities (or beyond) an unabashed couponer? What’s your favorite way to save? Share with the rest of us below in the comments.

Despite the concept sounding counter-intuitive – lower the price of your product and then make more money – the numbers have been crunched by people in the know. In a study across the three main app stores – Apple’s App Store for iPhone and App Store for iPad, and Android Marketplace – Distimo found that despite selling an app at a reduced price, the “surge in downloads makes up for the loss in price,” enough to actually turn a profit on the less expensive app. Selling an app not only encourages more downloads from users, but being on sale will also get you a featured spot within the app store.

But before you run off on a price-slashing frenzy, don’t think you can reduce a price on your app and immediately see a boost in your revenue. For instance, while apps on sale generated an overall increase in revenue, only two-thirds of iPhone apps gained rank in the first three days after being featured. Lesson: having an app featured doesn’t automatically guarantee a boost, but it still is likely to help.

Even then, the average revenue increase for iPhone apps was 41% on the first day it was on sale. Anything will sell expediently on the first day of a discount, but Distimo found that within the entire period that the app was on sale (which they defined as a maximum of 15 days) the revenue generated by the app was up 22%. A similar trend was observed among iPad apps and apps downloaded from the Android Market. Android apps, in fact, generated the greatest revenue during the entire sale period despite having lower first-day increases.

Although developers can benefit greatly from putting their apps on sale, you can’t just slap a sale onto any old app and expect it to haul in money like gangbusters, Distimo warns. 44% of iPhone apps, they found, lost revenue during the sale “and 23% actually saw a decline in revenue by more than 20%.” Distimo offers an explanation as to why some apps did not benefit from being on sale:

Offering a discount of one dollar on an application that normally costs $7.99, lowers the revenue, whereas offering a discount of three dollars on average increased the revenue by 131%. In general, we noticed that the tipping point happened when the price was cut in half or the application was offered in tier 1 ($0.99) or tier 2 ($1.99).

As you can see below, there’s a refined matrix involved when predicting whether putting an app on sale will produce an increase in revenue:

So putting your app on sale will general higher revenue, but only if you discount it a certain amount depending on what the standard cost of the app is. Got it. So now the question you’re probably wondering: how much should the app be sold for?

It all depends, Distimo says. You have to take into consideration what type of app it is, work invested into the app, how much demand there is for the app, and so on (what, you didn’t expect a singular Midas answer, did you?). Given all of this criteria, the table graph below should give you an idea of how much the top grossing apps cost among different categories.

Again, though, there is not one magic bullet to put a hole in the wallets of all of your customers. You still have to use that organ between your ears to benefit from discounting the price of your app.

Other fun observations made by Distimo:

The claim is counter-intuitive to how we understand the assessment of credit risk in the developed world because Cignifi’s plan has very little to do with how much debt – if any – you’ve accrued in your lifetime. Instead, it creates a credit report based on a completely separate metric: your mobile phone activity.

Here’s the gist: if a potential consumer or patron has no credit score due to no history of debt, it’s hard for a business to assess the potential risk involved in doing business with this person. A way to side-step that obstacle would be to enlist the services of Cignifi, which will calculate the credit risk of anyone with a mobile phone based on that user’s mobile phone behavior (this premise being functional only in the 21st Century assumption that everybody has cellphones these days). The way a person uses their mobile phone, Cignifi claims by way of their website, “is highly predictive of an individual consumer’s lifestyle and risk.”

Despite how such a calculation could seriously affect the quality of someone’s living standards, Cignifi’s website doesn’t provide much background on their science:

Cignifi patent-pending analytics technology turns billions of raw mobile phone calls, messages, and payments into unique insight. Our multi-dimensional models deliver scores based on hundreds of distinct variables.

Capturing changes in subscriber mobile behavior, Cignifi dynamically updates scores. Unlike traditional credit scores, Cignifi Scores quickly adapt to customers’ evolving lifestyles, risks, and needs.

I can somewhat understand the lack of transparency given their patent-pending technology but at the same time it’s important to know how your behavior affects your credit score. If I pay off my credit cards every month, I maintain a good score; if I blow off my bills for months at a time, my score suffers. In the end, I’m aware of the consequences of my actions. It’s Operant Conditioning 101. The article from the Globe casts a little more light on Cignifi’s number-crunching ways:

Cignifi has developed sophisticated modeling software that can look at usage data from consumers’ mobile phones and make predictions about who that person is and how they live. There’s no single data point —like making lots of short calls between 2 and 5 a.m. every morning —that suggests that someone is a bad credit risk. But Hakim says, “The way you use your phone is a proxy for your lifestyle. It’s not random. So we’re looking at things like the length of calls, the time of day, and the location you make them from. Also things like whether you top up [a pre-paid SIM card] regularly. We want to see how stable the patterns are. When you look at that, you can create these behavioral clusters that give you information about users’ appetite for new [financial] products, and their ability to repay a debt.”

That sounds like the typical diplomacy you’d expect from a group proposing an action that could potentially affect the quality of your life: carefully tailored to assuage any of the knee-jerk fears of people filling out applications for apartments or car loans while validating the insidious maxim “If you’re not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about.” Until Cignifi is able and willing to share a little bit more about how they assess a person’s credit risk based on mobile phone usage, any anxiety on behalf of the consumer is justified.

Conversely, I can understand not wanting to draw the ire of the Verizons and AT&Ts of the world. There’s nothing quite like a company stating, “Hey, you use your phone too much in too many of the wrong ways, so your credit score is going down,” to cause people to consider using their cellphones less (if that’s even possible now). And the last thing wireless providers want is somebody out there giving their customers frightful reasons to not use their cellphones as much. Less cellphone use = less money spent = very unhappy wireless providers.

The service that Cignifi is offering could open up possibilities not previously available to consumers with no credit history. That would be a good thing. Then again, evaluating someone’s “credit” based on what they do (or don’t do) with their cellphones could be a hard step forward into a future of endless debt. I mean, how do exactly fix a bad “credit score” if it’s based on your mobile phone habits? Get a LAN line? Tie a string between two tin cans and wait a year before applying for that student loan again?

So it’s quiz time, readers: the Globe reports that Cignifi doesn’t have any plans at this time to deploy the technology in the U.S. but that doesn’t mean it’s not coming. In what is likely the inevitable arrival of mobile phone usage-based credit ranks, what do you think about this new debt calculus? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Interested and optimistic or ill-advised and opportunistic? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.

Through their European Public Policy Blog, Google has announced the launch of a new website, Value of the Web, that will collect economic reports from around the world in order to determine the “economic impact of the Internet.” Some of the research you will find on Value of the Web will look at topics such as the “value of cloud computing in Europe, the value of search around the world, and the Internet’s contribution to GDP – a theme highlighted just last week by the European Commission in its new strategy to build trust in the Digital Single Market.”

The post continues:

Even though industrial metrics like GDP can’t fully capture the Web’s contributions to our information society, these reports represent the best efforts so far to quantify the Internet’s contributions to the economy and society. The new website will highlight the broad range of value generated by the internet, including in areas such as the contribution of the firms who provide the essential hardware and software to power the Internet and the jobs

The data from the research is collected and presented into easily understood infographics like the ones included below:

The information found on Value of the Web draws on reports from economic analyst groups as well as individual economists from around the world, like Boston Consulting, Deloitte Access Economics, and Federico Etro. The goal of Value the Web, the post concludes, is to develop a new metric with which a better understanding of the Internet’s economic impart on different countries in the world.

Unless, that is, most people would prefer to huddle around their electronic devices to steal the warmth off of their over-worked processors because, given how people are spending their money on household services these days, that may be what they resort to this year.

How indispensable have your technology utilities – cell phones, Internet, etc. – become in your everyday life? How would you prioritize these expenses among traditional utilities like water, gas, and electricity? Tell us your thoughts in the comment section.

iYogi, a research initiative that examines the technology issues of today, has conducted a study that found that, among the 1100 people surveyed, 63% of people spend almost 35% more on technology bills than utility bills. For the purposes of this study, the services filed under the “technology bills” category are Internet Service Provider bills, mobile communication services, and multimedia services (cloud storage, subscriptions to Netflix-like services, etc.).

The importance of having a reliable Internet service in the home isn’t incredibly hard to grasp when you consider that “the average American home with two family members own as many as 7 IP devices.” Phones, tablets, laptops, online streaming services – these technological implements add up quickly. As you can imagine, the quantity of IP devices increases as the amount of household members grows. Households with 3 to 7 members may have upwards of 11 IP devices. That the quantity of devices doesn’t increase commensurately with the amount of household members suggests that some of these IP devices are likely shared, the Internet (since you can connect multiple devices onto one wireless network).

iYogi explains how the constantly increasing inventory of PCs, tablets, printers, scanners, cameras, and digital music players “is driving a new consumer demand for tech support services.” Add to the mix “smart phones, gaming devices, and Internet-enabled televisions and set top boxes are becoming a critical part of the home.”

Indeed we are in the thick of the digital age, so now that American households are beginning to fully weave Internet and mobile communication into their everyday lives in such dedicated ways, have online services become as necessary as water and electric utilities? Considering how many households have become seemingly dependent on the Internet, it looks like it could shape up that way.

Perhaps the biggest aspect to consider now that Americans are wired to the teeth these days is: how much is all of this costing us? iYogi says that “the average monthly expense [on mobile services] was found to be $94.” Add to that the average $19 per month that people fork over to download games, apps, music and the like and you’ve turned a pricey bill into a more pricey bill. As you can imagine, “the increasing popularity of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets is only likely to see increased spendings on mobile communication in the future.”

And then there’s the actual ISP bill. iYogi found that 58% of people can spend anywhere between $20 and $180 on monthly ISP service bills. (An aside: it’s probably not surprising that people would spend a lot of money on their Internet service, but that’s a really big range of expense. That’s like the difference between saying “I want to eat one hot dog for lunch” and “I want to win the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.” But I digress.) While the cost of subscribing to an ISP will depend on the data plan, the sum of money spent inflates as you include Internet-based services like Netflix. Corroborating what we have previously reported, this change in habit “has seen TV take a backseat as an entertainment medium.”

As if the technology tab wasn’t high enough, now people are beginning to pay for yet another service: cloud-based storage. While 30% of people currently spend an average of $10 per month for cloud services, iYogi expects this figure “is only going to increase as comfort levels with these new services go up.”

So given all of this habituated use of online services, is it valid to say that the Internet is an essential utility – at least inside of what iYogi describes as “digital homes” – as opposed to an elective commodity? Granted, nobody needs the Internet to stay alive the way they need heat to cook their food or water to drink and bathe. But people, I’d argue, have re-created the Internet as a need insofar it has become the linchpin of our communication infrastructure.

And it’s not as if people have recently realized they have stacks of extra cash laying around and decided to get themselves a Home 2.0. I don’t think you can make the case that people have more expendable income because economic growth has been near-flatlining in the United States for several years now. There’s been a nudge of economic recovery in the past year or so, but hardly enough to generate enough excess income in American households where they can spend the money on “superfluous” amenities like smartphones and high-speed Internet.

It’s not that people want the Internet anymore; more and more, people need the Internet.

Whether technology finds a space in an updated version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs doesn’t matter: people are increasingly becoming dependent upon the Internet. And given how integrated the Internet is to our lives, a lack of it would drastically change the way we live these days. Sure, some bugbears will contest this notion with antiquated protests like, “We were getting along fine before the Internet so we can easily do without it now.” That’s true, we were doing fine, but we were also getting along fine before indoor plumbing, penicillin, and a national highway system but does anybody truly want to return to a way of life when those now-standard amenities don’t exist? I doubt it. It’s not about the bare minimum of resources on which humans can continue to survive – it’s about what improves the quality of life.

As for the future, iYogi doesn’t foresee the proliferation of Internet-enabled households slowing down anytime soon, so again, at what point does the Internet become a necessity and less of a luxury? Could you go without the Internet these days or is it as necessary as warm water and reliable light sources? Do you see the prevalence of Internet in our way of life as a good thing or a bad thing? Share your opinions in the comments below.

Hostess Brands, the maker of Twinkies and other sugar-laden treats near and dear to the American waistline, have announced that they are prepping to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reports the Wall Street Journal today. So how deeply into the red is Hostess, whose sweet stash also includes Ding Dongs and Ho-Hos? $860 million.

That’s a big Twinkie.

Despite the megasweet treats from Hostess having precisely zero redeeming health value, people are saddened nonetheless about the news of the impending absence of Twinkies on their grocery shelves. Many people expressed their lament today on Twitter:

Ever since Cyber Monday kicked off the blitzkrieg of online shopping this year by becoming the most lucrative shopping day ever, the amount of money spent by shoppers has consistently trumped every corresponding week from 2010. In this year and last, sales steadily increased leading up to the big Day of Unwrapping (i.e., Christmas Day) with the penultimate week seeing a huge gush of money from consumers. I’d suspect that the week before Christmas is a huge shopping day for online retailers because those present-buying procrastinators wanna make sure the gifts arrive in time. This year, however, has seen a pronounced increase in money being spent for each interval that comScore recorded.

Increases in online retail sales have been observed to increase with each passing year recently so the fact that people spent more money this year than 2010 isn’t completely surprising. What makes this year so significant is just how crazy Americans went with their holiday shopping. It’s like everybody wasn’t quite content with merely spending some more money this year, so Americans decided that they didn’t like too many figures in their bank accounts and spent a lot more money. $6.3 billion worth of a lot more!

I guess some people think this is good news, but that more money than ever is being spent online raises an interesting question: given the tax loophole associated with online sales, how much tax revenue was lost in last week’s boom (and for the total $32 billion spent this holiday season, really). I’d like to see that analysis. I bet the different tiers of government want to see those stats, too. A loss of tax monies like that might not matter so much at a federal level, but that could have some heavy impact on struggling municipalities.

Anyways. So how’s your holiday shopping going? Anybody out there contribute to last week’s eruption of online shopping? Let us know with your comments below.