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The NYT reports that in a major blow to a multibillion-dollar industry that introduced sports betting to legions of young sports fans, the New York State attorney general has ordered the two biggest daily fantasy sports companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, to stop accepting bets from New York residents, saying their games constituted illegal gambling under state law. “It is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country,” says NY attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, “Today we have sent a clear message: not in New York, and not on my watch.”

Fantasy sports companies contend that their games are not gambling because they involve more skill than luck and were legally sanctioned by a 2006 federal law that exempted fantasy sports from a prohibition against processing online financial wagering. “Fantasy sports is a game of skill and legal under New York state law," says FanDuel. "This is a politician telling hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers they are not allowed to play a game they love and share with friends, family, co-workers and players across the country.” The attorney general’s office also said that ads on the two sites “seriously mislead New York citizens about their prospects of winning.” State investigators found that to date, “the top 1 percent of DraftKings winners receive the vast majority of the winnings.” Schneiderman’s investigation was spurred after reports arose that a DraftKings employee used internal data to win $350,000 on rival site FanDuel, which the operators denied. While both companies had allowed employees to place bets on the others site, they have since banned such practices.

Alana Semuels writes in The Atlantic that Millennials want the chance to be alone in their own bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens, but they also want to be social and never lonely.That's why real estate developer Troy Evans is starting construction on a new space in Syracuse called Commonspace that he envisions as a dorm for Millennials that will feature 21 microunits, each packed with a tiny kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and living space into 300-square-feet. The microunits surround shared common areas including a chef’s kitchen, a game room, and a TV room. “We’re trying to combine an affordable apartment with this community style of living, rather than living by yourself in a one-bedroom in the suburbs,” says Evans. The apartments will be fully furnished to appeal to potential residents who don’t own much (the units will have very limited storage space). The bedrooms are built into the big windows of the office building—one window per unit—and the rest of the apartment can be traversed in three big leaps. The units will cost between $700 and $900 a month. “If your normal rent is $1,500, we’re coming in way under that,” says John Talarico. “You can spend that money elsewhere, living, not just sustaining.”

Co-living has also gained traction in a Brooklyn apartment building that creates a networking and social community for its residents and where prospective residents answer probing questions like “What are your passions?” and “Tell us your story (Excite us!).” If accepted, tenants live in what the company’s promotional materials describe as a “highly curated community of like-minded individuals.” Millennials are staying single longer than previous generations have, creating a glut of people still living on their own in apartments, rather than marrying and buying homes. But the generation is also notoriously social, having been raised on the Internet and the constant communication it provides. This is a generation that has grown accustomed to college campuses with climbing walls, infinity pools, and of course, their own bathrooms. Commonspace gives these Milliennials the benefits of living with roommates—they can save money and stay up late watching Gilmore Girls—with the privacy and style an entitled generation might expect. “It’s the best of both worlds,” says Michelle Kingman. “You have roommates, but they’re not roommates.”

If there’s one thing politicians of all stripes can agree on, it’s this: The immigration system is broken. What’s less obvious is the extent to which that’s physically true. An online system that was supposed to automate the processing of green cards and other immigration benefits has struggled to function properly since at least 2009. Now Jerry Markon writes at the Washington Post that, the US government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated paper approach to managing immigration and a decade into the project, all that officials have to show for their effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper. The project called ELIS, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats. “You’re going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we’re still a paper-based agency,’’ says Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. “It’s a huge albatross around our necks.’’

Government watchdogs have repeatedly blamed the mammoth problems on poor management by DHS, and in particular by the immigration agency. When the project began, DHS was only two years old, cobbled together after the Sept. 11 attacks from myriad other government agencies, and the department was still reeling. “There was virtually no oversight back then,’’ says a former federal official. “DHS was like the Wild West on big acquisitions.” “The biggest problem is that the holes that were in the system that allowed the terrorists to come in—for 9/11, the Times Square bomber, all of those people—came through USCIS” and the flaws in the system remain, says a USCIS manager who departed within the past year and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation that could affect future employment. “They don’t have any real-time validation of any of the documents” from banks and higher education schools. The long-delayed website has burned through more than a billion dollars, mainly from refugees, asylum seekers and other foreigners who fund the system through application fees. It now faces an influx of more than 5 million petitioners under Obama’s executive actions on immigration—if ELIS ever becomes capable of handling the relevant forms.

Nobel Prizes are given for making important — preferably fundamental — breakthroughs in the realm of ideas and that just what Satoshi Nakamoto has done according to Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance at UCLA, who has nominated Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, for a Nobel prize in economics. Chowdhry writes that Prize Committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, has invited Chowdhry to nominate someone for the 2016 Prize and he started thinking about whose ideas are likely to have a disruptive influence in the twenty first century. "The invention of bitcoin -- a digital currency -- is nothing short of revolutionary," says Chowdhry. "It offers many advantages over both physical and paper currencies. It is secure, relying on almost unbreakable cryptographic code, can be divided into millions of smaller sub-units, and can be transferred securely and nearly instantaneously from one person to any other person in the world with access to internet bypassing governments, central banks and financial intermediaries." Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin Protocol has also spawned exciting innovations in the FinTech space by showing how many financial contracts -- not just currencies -- can be digitized, securely verified and stored, and transferred instantaneously from one party to another.

There's only one problem. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Suppose that the Nobel Committee is convinced that Satoshi Nakamoto deserves the Prize. Now the problem it will face is how to contact him to announce that he has won the Prize. According to Chowdhry, Nakamoto can be informed by contacting him online just the same way people have communicated with him in the past and he has anonymously communicated with the computer science and cryptography community. If he accepts the award, he can verifiably communicate his acceptance. Finally, there is the issue of the Prize money. Nakamoto is already in possession of several hundred million U.S. dollars worth of bitcoins so the additional prize money may not mean much to him. "Only if he wants, the committee could also transfer the prize money to my bitcoin address, 165sAHBpLHujHbHx2zSjC898oXEz25Awtj," concludes Chowdhry. "Mr Nakamoto and I will settle later."

BBC reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will "review" the appointment of his new communications director, Ran Baratz, over comments Baratz made on Facebook accusing President Obama of anti-Semitism and describing US Secretary of State John Kerry as having a "mental age" of no more than 12. Netanyahu has described the comments as totally unacceptable while US state department spokesman John Kirby said Mr Baratz's Facebook posts were "troubling and offensive". “Insults, certainly, aimed at individuals doesn’t do anything to help advance and deepen the relationship. … We learn in kindergarten about name-calling, and it’s simply not a polite thing to do, ‘ Kirby said. The Facebook posts emerged shortly after Netanyahu announced the appointment of philosophy lecturer Mr Baratz as his chief spokesman. In March, Baratz described President Obama's criticism of Netanyahu's opposition to the Iran nuclear deal as "the modern face of anti-Semitism in Western and liberal countries".

Netanyahu quickly distanced himself from the comments but indicated the appointment remained valid. "I have just read Dr Ran Baratz's posts on the internet, including those relating to the president of the state of Israel, the president of the United States and other public figures in Israel and the United States," Netanyahu said in a statement. "Those posts are totally unacceptable and in no way reflect my positions or the policies of the government of Israel. Dr Baratz has apologized and has asked to meet me to clarify the matter following my return to Israel." Baratz, in a Facebook post Thursday night, apologized for “the hurtful remarks” and for not informing the prime minister of them. Baratz said the posts “were written frivolously and sometimes humorously, in a tone suited to the social networks and a private individual.” Baratz added, “It is very clear to me that in an official post one has to behave and express oneself differently.”

More than 40 states have banned the sale of electronic cigarettes to minors, but Michael Greenwood reports at the Yale School of Medicine that a study indicates that these measures have an unintended and dangerous consequence: increasing adolescents’ use of conventional cigarettes. “Conventional cigarette use has been falling somewhat steadily among this age group since the start of the 21st century. This paper shows that bans on e-cigarette sales to minors appear to have slowed this decline by about 70 percent in the states that implemented them,” says Abigail Friedman. “In other words, as a result of these bans, more teenagers are using conventional cigarettes than otherwise would have done so.” Guided by her findings and the fact that habitual use of conventional cigarettes first spikes at age 16, Friedman suggests that bans on e-cigarette sales may be more effective in reducing teenage smoking if they were limited to those under 16, rather than those under 18. This middle ground solution may provide a way to reduce teen smoking while the long-term effects of vaping, still largely unknown, are being determined. “Policy makers have been assuming that banning e-cigarette sales to minors will improve public health. This paper’s finding, that these bans increase conventional cigarette smoking among teens, suggests that we may need to rethink this conclusion."

We've all read about standing desks and treadmill desks but now Rachel Gillet reports at Business Insider about the Altwork Station, a workstation that allows users to sit, stand, and recline while they work on their computers. Designed to accomodate two computer screens, the manufacturer says their new product is the ultimate combination for workplace productivity. "Most experts agree that humans should change positions and move throughout the day. We believe movement throughout the day is important," says the company who targets "high intensity" computer users, which it defines as people who spend at least four hours a day in front of a computer and are required to focus on complex tasks for extended periods of time. If the $5,900 ($3,900, if you pre-order) reclining workstation is not for you, there are other options you may want to consider including the scooter desk, bicycle desk, and hamster wheel desk.

Gina Kolata reports at the NYT that something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling, primarily because of the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites who are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans. “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” say Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner.

Though not fully understood, the increased deaths are largely thought to be a result of more suicides and the misuse of drugs and alcohol, driven by easier access to powerful prescription painkillers, cheaper high quality heroin and greater financial stresses. Death rates for people with a high school education or less rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education. The rise in death rates among middle-aged white Americans means half a million more people have died in the US since 1998 than if the previous trend had continued. The death toll is comparable to the 650,000 Americans who lost their lives during the Aids epidemic from 1981 to the middle of this year, the researchers say. Anne Case and Angus Deaton warn that middle-aged Americans who are turning to drink and drugs are set to suffer more health problems than their elders unless the downwards trend can be halted. "This is not automatic. If the epidemic is brought under control, its survivors may have a healthy old age. However, addictions are hard to treat and pain is hard to control, so those currently in midlife may be a ‘lost generation’ whose future is less bright than those who preceded them.”

In the 1910s, the number of cars in the US exploded from 200,000 to 2.5 million. The newfangled machines scared horses and ran over pedestrians, but by the time government could pass the very first traffic law, it was too late to stop them. Now Kevin Matley writes in Newsweek that thanks to political gridlock in the US, lawmakers respond to innovations with all the speed of continental drift. so new technologies spread almost instantly and take hold with almost no legal oversight. And according to Matley, this is terrific for tech startups, especially those aimed at demolishing creaky old norms—like taxis, or flight paths over crowded airspace, or money. "Drone aircraft are suddenly filling the sky, and a whole multibillion-dollar industry of drone making and drone services has taken hold," says Matley. "If the FAA had been either farsighted or fast moving, at the first sign of drones it might’ve outlawed them or confined them to someplace like Oklahoma where they can’t get in the way of anything too important. But now the FAA is forced to accommodate drones, not the other way around." Bitcoin is another example of a technology that's too late to stop. "But have you heard the word bitcoin uttered once in any of the presidential debates? Government doesn’t even understand bitcoin, and that’s been really good for it." Uber and Airbnb show how to execute this outrun-the-government strategy. By the time cities understood what those companies were doing, it was too late to block or seriously limit them.