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Every year on New Year's Eve, at least one TV channel in Russia will show The Irony of Fate, a three-hour movie that was made for TV in 1975.

"It has this slight nostalgia for the Soviet times, when life seems to be easier and simpler," says Olga Fedina, the author of What Every Russian Knows (And You Don't). "There were fewer decisions to be made — all the decisions were kind of made for you."

Those decisions included where you could live, and for city people that meant a flat in one of many identical apartment buildings.

The film begins with an animated sequence, in which an architect is shown finishing his design for a creative and beautiful building. As he takes it to various bureaucrats for approval, it's gradually stripped of every feature that makes it interesting, and reduced to the same rectangular block as every other building.

On the very first Monday of 2013, Boeing got some bad news: There was a catastrophic battery fire on a 787 parked at Boston's Logan International Airport. Less than two weeks later, a second battery meltdown on another Dreamliner prompted an emergency landing in Japan.

Government regulators responded quickly. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered the entire fleet of 787s grounded indefinitely.

The planes sat on the ground for more than three months while investigators and engineers figured out how to fix their overheating lithium ion batteries. Deliveries of new 787s were halted, too.

But Boeing's stock never really faltered. In fact, the airplane manufacturer's stock price grew 80 percent over 2013, one of the market's best performers.

As Carter Leake, an investment banker at BB&T Capital Markets and a longtime industry observer, puts it, Wall Street "shrugged off" the 787 battery problem "because they made the correct bet that Boeing would be able to get through this."

But beyond that, Leake says, investors were focused on the company's large and growing backlog of orders for its other airplanes.

"The smart money saw that the 737, the 777 — the aircraft that had the highest margins and the highest cash flow — were on track. Demand was at all-time high and production rates were likely to go even higher, which they did," he says.

Keep in mind that Boeing has just one real competitor for large commercial jets: Europe's Airbus.

Boeing launched its newest line of planes, the 777X, at the Dubai air show in November. The redesigned version of the existing 777 model won a record number of orders, totaling $95 billion at list prices.

The Two-Way

Boeing Will Restructure Marketing, Commercial Plane Strategy

On the very first Monday of 2013, Boeing got some bad news: There was a catastrophic battery fire on a 787 parked at Boston's Logan International Airport. Less than two weeks later, a second battery meltdown on another Dreamliner prompted an emergency landing in Japan.

Government regulators responded quickly. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered the entire fleet of 787s grounded indefinitely.

The planes sat on the ground for more than three months while investigators and engineers figured out how to fix their overheating lithium ion batteries. Deliveries of new 787s were halted, too.

But Boeing's stock never really faltered. In fact, the airplane manufacturer's stock price grew 80 percent over 2013, one of the market's best performers.

As Carter Leake, an investment banker at BB&T Capital Markets and a longtime industry observer, puts it, Wall Street "shrugged off" the 787 battery problem "because they made the correct bet that Boeing would be able to get through this."

But beyond that, Leake says, investors were focused on the company's large and growing backlog of orders for its other airplanes.

"The smart money saw that the 737, the 777 — the aircraft that had the highest margins and the highest cash flow — were on track. Demand was at all-time high and production rates were likely to go even higher, which they did," he says.

Keep in mind that Boeing has just one real competitor for large commercial jets: Europe's Airbus.

Boeing launched its newest line of planes, the 777X, at the Dubai air show in November. The redesigned version of the existing 777 model won a record number of orders, totaling $95 billion at list prices.

The Two-Way

Boeing Will Restructure Marketing, Commercial Plane Strategy

A year after losing the popular vote for the fifth time in the past six presidential elections, the Republican Party has crafted a series of rules tweaks designed to regain control of — and dramatically shorten — its presidential nominating process.

The subcommittee charged with looking for fixes has approved five proposed changes for review by the Republican National Committee's rules committee at its January meeting. The full RNC would then need to pass the changes by a three-quarters supermajority.

"I think this strikes a good balance," said John Ryder, the RNC's general counsel.

February 2016 would be set aside for the traditional early states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. The other states could start as soon as March 1, but could not hold winner-take-all contests before March 15. Larger states that violate either of those rules would lose all but nine of their delegates to the summer nominating convention, not counting their three RNC members who are automatic delegates. Smaller states would lose two-thirds of their delegates, not including the three RNC members.

At the back end of the calendar, state parties would have to submit their slates of convention delegates 45 days prior to the convention, rather than 35 days. With RNC leaders hoping to schedule the convention in late June, rather than late August, this would mean the last primaries and caucuses would have to be set for mid-May — thereby cutting what was a six-month-long process in 2012 down to 3 1/2 months.

The balancing act, Ryder said, was to compress the calendar without giving an insurmountable advantage to a candidate who has "$200 million on day one."

The weeks and months leading up to Iowa and New Hampshire, in particular, would still be the time for low-budget candidates to make their case directly to the voters. Success in those contests could be parlayed into stronger fundraising heading into the first half of March, when the proportional-only mandate would mean that second- and third-place finishers could continue to win significant numbers of delegates.

"It gives a six-week period for a retail candidacy to take hold, if it's going to take hold," Ryder said.

If this thinking sounds familiar, it should. The RNC tried to accomplish similar goals heading into 2012. The four early states were given the month of February. Other states could start holding contests on March 1 if they allocated delegates proportionally, and on April 1 if they awarded all the delegates to the top vote-getter. A state that violated either rule faced a 50-percent loss of delegates.

That plan, though, was thwarted by Florida — which also violated the rules in 2008 — prompting the official early states to move even earlier. (Iowa held its caucuses on Jan. 3 in both 2008 and 2012.)

In 2012, the new rules were silent on how to deal with states like Florida that violated both calendar and proportionality rules. Only the single, 50 percent penalty ended up being levied, and 100 percent of the remaining delegates went to Mitt Romney, letting him get back on track after losing South Carolina to Newt Gingrich.

The new, harsher penalty appears to have solved the Florida-going-early problem. But whether it maintains a lane for a little-known, low-budget candidate remains to be seen.

After the "all-but-nine" delegate penalty was first imposed at the Tampa convention last year, the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature passed a law setting the presidential primary on the first Tuesday permitted by party rules that didn't involve a penalty.

In 2016, that Tuesday would be March 1 — the same date that Texas is planning to hold its presidential primary. Which means the first allowable day for contests in the non-"carve-out" states will feature primaries in two of the four largest states. Both have lots of big media markets and are extremely expensive to run in; the two states will, between them, award nearly a quarter of the delegates needed to win the nomination.

In other words, it would be just the sort of day best suited for a candidate with, say, $200 million.

S.V. Dte edits politics and campaign finance coverage for NPR's Washington Desk.