Intentionally depriving the Catalonian economy of funds it desperately needs to keep things ticking over — including keeping the cycle of bribes to local politicians in motion — could prompt independence-minded Catalans to begin asking themselves, “why bother paying taxes to Madrid at all if they’re not going to send the money they owe us?”

these [QE] purchases have not proven to be particularly effective in doing much of anything, except possibly pushing up ETF share prices. But even that has been a mixed blessing. ETFs are supposed to be the cart that is pulled along by stocks (which function as horses). But trying to move the market by buying ETFs creates a whole other level of potential price distortions. It also tends to limit the impact to those holders of financial assets, rather than the broader economy. For this reason the BoJ is now contemplating the more direct action of buying shares in individual Japanese companies.

Such purchases would allow the Japanese government to accumulate sizable voting interests in some of Japan's biggest companies. Equity ownership would then allow, according to an economist quoted in Bloomberg, the Abe administration to demand that Japanese corporations adhere to the government's priorities for wage increases and heightened corporate spending. The same economist suggested, this "micro" stimulus provided by government controlled corporations may be more effective in spurring the economy than "macro" purchases of government bonds.

All of these radios can operate on unlicensed wireless spectrum. So the radios are cheap and the spectrum is free. When you consider that buying cellular licenses to cover the US would cost billions of dollars, that’s a pretty big deal.

It means that anyone can deploy an LPWAN network, no license required. With a couple of gateways, you can build your very own network to cover a corporate campus or basement or farm where cellular doesn’t reach, and run thousands of devices on it.