Macau overtook Las Vegas to become the world’s biggest gambling center, with $6.95 billion in annual revenue. (New York Times)

Student loan debt eclipsed the total amount that Americans owed on their credit cards. (New York Times)

China has now overtaken the U.S. to become the world’s biggest producer of PhDs. (Nature 472, 276)

“For the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined” (Harari 2015). Yuval Noah Harari (2015) Homo Deus. Vintage London.

Service sector surpassed manufacturing in China in 2016. (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

We’re now closer to gender parity in education than at any time in modern history. Countries including Botswana, Nicaragua and Costa Rica have fully closed their enrollment gender gaps, and Nepal, Rwanda and Zimbabwe are 90 percent of the way there. (Devex)

In the mid-1990s, the best voice recognition software suffered error rates of about 95 percent. This fall, a team of Microsoft engineers published a paper documenting that robots hear better than you do. The researchers wrote that “our automated system establishes a new state-of-the-art, and edges past the human benchmark. (The Kansas City Star). http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article123652339.html

The rate of new business formation in the USA has fallen by 50% since 1978. Today, there are more deaths of businesses than there are new business births. (Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, reports in Forbes.)

In the United States, more people were employed in solar power last year than in generating electricity through coal, gas and oil energy combined. 374,000 people were employed in solar energy, while coal, gas and oil power generation combined had a workforce of 187,000. The boom in the country's solar workforce can be attributed to construction work associated with expanding generation capacity. The gulf in employment is growing with net generation from coal falling 53 percent. Solar energy added 73,615 new jobs to the U.S. economy over the past year while wind added a further 24,650. (Forbes)

Tables Turned: Vinyl Records Outsell Digital Downloads For First Time In the UK. (The Guardian)

China surpasses U.S. as world's biggest movie market. (Los Angeles Times)

Women and Minorities Hold Majority of New Board Seats For First Time. (Bloomberg)

Nearly Half of Millennials and Gen Xers Don’t Watch Any Traditional TV. (AdAge)

Analysis: UK auction reveals offshore wind cheaper than new gas. (CarbonBrief). https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-auction-offshore-windcheaper-than-new-gas

The United Nations reports that by 2030 India will have more people than China. (World Economic Forum). https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/when-will-india-have-morepeople-than-china/

China is about to surpass the US as the world’s leader in science, due to increased Chinese biomedical publications and reduced US support for research in that growing field. (Mic.com). https://mic.com/articles/180075/good-goingamerica-china-is-about-to-surpass-the-us-as-the-worlds-leader-inscience#.mtgnpoBpz

Amazon is set to surpass Macy’s this year as the largest seller of apparel in America, with big implications for jobs and shopping districts. (New York Times)

Tesla’s market cap exceeded those of Ford and GM. (Business Insider) 2017: The price of one Bitcoin climbed above the price of one ounce of gold for the first time ever. (Business Insider). http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoinprice-tops-gold-price-2017-3

Suburban poverty is higher than ever before. For the first time, the number of poor Americans living in suburban areas has surpassed the number of poor city dwellers. (Brookings Institution)

Trump’s approval rating dropped below his disapproval rating, according to a Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll. (IPSOS)

In America, more people now die from antibiotic-resistant bacteria (superbugs) than from homicides. (Foreign Policy magazine)

There are now more billionaires in the Asia-Pacific region than in the USA. (Nikkei). http://s.nikkei.com/2z8YbL6

Uber has overtaken yellow cabs in New York City in ridership. (New York Times)

Ad Spending On Mobile Video Will Surpass Desk Top. Not only will mobile viewing increase significantly, non-mobile will decline for the first time. (The LowDown)

At current rates of growth, more people will work at restaurants than in manufacturing in 2020. (The Atlantic) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/restaurant-jobsboom/536244/,           https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/GHlxJP7sg0EPXMdxPwVSc81-AVjhCvcFZ-iCrDuXJTxQV6iljaGMhj8snua5mZZ7zZj-1Ts8ve0LB7dwPZShCjpMgZeR6hyos97c9lLOv8x3uHba0ueKmtBdTW6gbvO19OZBB

Wind power to be cheaper than gas power. Source: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/O3dmSk6Cq2E/WgnGWWU54aI/AAAAAAAAwHY/TxRYBM6nlqcCu3Tmb qF6sslKq-wSPkA6wCLcBGAs/s1600/Image%2B-%2Bwind1.jpg

Green Energy Will Overtake Fossil Fuels by 2020, Morgan Stanley Analyst States. (Big Think). http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/green-energy-willovertake-fossil-fuels-by-2020-morgan-stanley-analyst-states

Solar power will be cheaper than coal nearly everywhere, aligning economic and environmental interests. (Futurism) https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/ivDyNs7jo1rs/v2 /800x-1.png

The USA will be a majority non-white country. Whatever “white” means. (US Census Bureau) http://www.motherjones.com/wpcontent/uploads/2017/12/blog_white_population_usa.gif