Yes, 2016 was the hottest year ever; Netflix is really on a roll, and more news

It was the hottest year ever. Again: For the third straight year, Planet Earth experienced its highest temperature on record. El Nino played a role in the past two years, but "the bigger factor in setting the records was the long-term trend of rising temperature," reports the New York Times, adding of global warming: "The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away."

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Behold, the nation's most expensive home listing: $250 million for a Bel Air abode that isn't the biggest home on the market but is a big gamble by a developer who wanted to create a "curated lifestyle" and an "experience that would appeal to a new class of global billionaire," per CNBC. Sure, this is free advertising, but nobody reading this can possibly afford it.

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Twitter is abandoning the "buy" button, launched with great fanfare in 2014 "at a time when the idea of building e-commerce capabilities into social networks was hot," as Recode puts it. Facebook tried — also also gave up on — this revenue stream. But it turns out that consumers were not, er, buying.

Netflix hit an all-time record after hours on news of a solid quarter which exceeded guidance and expectations on earnings and new subscriptions. The streaming service is still spending like a drunken sailor, but that seems to be in the service of maintaining its first-mover advantage in the original content game.

Music streaming overtook digital and physical media for the first time in 2016, a significant tipping point for a medium which has, perhaps, seen its final format change (though your vinyl LPs might be worth something). Even more intriguing in the Nielsen numbers: Sales of digital albums declined even faster than those of physical albums (see above).

Cover Art: A 16-foot-high sculpture of a polar bear and cub, afloat on a small iceberg on the River Thames, passes in front of Tower Bridge, Jan. 26, 2009 (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty)