BUSINESS:
- Amazon’s Ambitions Unboxed: Stores for Furniture, Appliances and More (NYT) "For years, retailers have been haunted by the thought of Amazon using its technological prowess to squeeze them into powder. Now the fight is coming directly to retailers on actual streets around the globe, where Amazon is slowly building a fleet of physical stores. If those experiments work...they could have a profound influence on how other stores operate. Over time, they could also introduce new forms of automation, putting traditional retail jobs in jeopardy."
- Retail Instincts Propel Investor to Venture Capitalism’s Top Tier (NYT) "Ms. Green is an unorthodox venture capitalist for several reasons. Apart from having never worked at a venture capital firm before starting her own in 2012, she is also a woman in a male-dominated field. And unlike many generalist venture investors...Ms. Green focuses specifically on commerce and other retail-related start-ups. So Ms. Green, 45, parlayed that retail knowledge into her venture capital endeavors and used it to bring specialized advice to her companies. In one of her first moves as a venture capitalist, she put $1 million into Dollar Shave Club... Later, she invested in Jet.com... Last year, both those start-ups hit the jackpot: Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion, while Walmart purchased Jet.com for $3.3 billion." and The Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide (NYT)
MEDIA:
- How the New York Times' mobile-first strategy has turned millennials into its biggest audience (The Drum) "Kopit Levien is looking beyond the transaction of a newspaper purchase or a digital subscription to a deeper and more lucrative relationship with Times 'customers'. The paper, through its Beta Group, is developing new digital products and services – specializing in property, health, cooking and crosswords – which can give the news brand an even greater role in the lives of its users."
NEWS:
- FISAgate: The Question Is Not Whether Trump Associates Were Monitored (National Review) "Thus, as long as there was a valid intelligence purpose for targeting the foreign subjects with whom Trump associates interacted, the interception of the associates’ communications would have been entirely proper. ...while such a practice might be deemed abusive, it would not be illegal — the government has nearly limitless latitude to spy on foreigners outside the U.S., and on agents of foreign powers inside the U.S. the question is usually not whether there has been illegality. It is whether political power has been abused. In reality, however, the FISA court rubber-stamps the collection and relies on executive-branch agencies to carry it out, analyze it, and decide what incidentally collected American information may be scrutinized and what American identities should be concealed. Those who are claiming that it was illegal for the Obama administration to 'incidentally' intercept the communications of Trump associates, and to unmask the identities of those associates for intelligence-analysis purposes, are almost certainly wrong. So if it was lawful for the executive branch to collect the information in the first place, it is lawful to spread the information to any intelligence agent who might assist in its full understanding and exploitation. Here, however, is the crux of the matter: To claim that something is technically legal is not to say that it is appropriate. Still, let’s not confuse a dearth of criminal wrongs with a dearth of misconduct. It is possible that the investigation of Trump officials was a massive abuse of power. It is also possible that the investigation was triggered by good-faith concerns about Putin-regime perfidy, and that the connections of Trump associates to Russian interests are scandalous even if they are not illegal, and even if the Left’s 'Russia hacked the election' narrative is a red herring. It is critical for Congress to get to the bottom of these questions, regardless of whether, technically, crimes were committed."
- The Moral Case for Spending Restraint (Weekly Standard) "Peel back the hyperbole, and what you see are cuts to domestic programs, but hardly catastrophic ones. Does this mean the government has a moral obligation to balance the budget? No. Deficits can have positive economic effects in certain circumstances. But there is an obligation to govern for the general welfare, broadly conceived to include a regard for future generations. That means keeping deficits relatively under control, either by cutting wasteful spending or increasing taxes to pay for necessary services. Our government simply does not do that. Our current fiscal situation runs contrary to the principles upon which our country was founded, and we should not delude ourselves into thinking that one side of the present divide is any better than the other."
- This is why the Freedom Caucus called the shots on Trump’s health-care bill (WaPo) "...Freedom Caucus members were able to present a united front in negotiations with party leaders. If the hard-liners’ future influence depends on capacity to compromise, the Freedom Caucus leaders may find themselves in a precarious position. In upcoming battles over tax reform and government spending, unless the caucus can convince members and party leaders that they’ll compromise, Trump and Ryan may decide to look elsewhere for votes."
- After the health-care fiasco, Trump’s next move may be even more disastrous (WaPo) "Thus, the Trump strategy — allow the ACA to collapse, and profit — makes little sense. Nothing further to the right than the GOP plan can pass, since that would alienate still more moderate Republicans. The only thing that could conceivably pass is something that would have Democratic and moderate Republican support, and thus would be more liberal than the GOP plan. That should theoretically give Democrats leverage to demand fixes to the ACA on their terms — fixes designed to incentivize more enrollment to the markets and further expand Medicaid in states that haven’t opted in — even if Trump is successful in sabotaging the individual markets."
- Meet Indivisible, the young progressives leading the resistance to President Trump (LA Times) "...Sarah Dohl, along with a handful of friends and former Capitol Hill colleagues, wanted Americans — mostly distraught Democrats — to know their voices could still be heard. Not expecting much, they published online a 26-page document in mid-December, outlining a succinct idea: resist. The strategy, said Dohl, echoes the tea party movement that sprang up in 2009. At the time, President Obama’s efforts to pass the Affordable Care Act caused a conservative uproar. Images of constituents, angered by the legislation and jabbing fingers in lawmakers’ faces, filled television screens and front pages nationwide. The next election cycle, Democrats, who at the time had controlled both chambers of Congress, lost the House. Now, members of the movement hope it’s the reverse."
- Trump taps Kushner to lead a SWAT team to fix government with business ideas (WaPo) "The White House Office of American Innovation...will operate as its own nimble power center within the West Wing and will report directly to Trump. ...with sweeping authority to overhaul the federal bureaucracy and fulfill key campaign promises — such as reforming care for veterans and fighting opioid addiction — by harvesting ideas from the business world and, potentially, privatizing some government functions."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- You can now call your congressman through Facebook (WaPo) "After submitting your address...Town Hall pulls information about your elected officials. The data comes from their public Facebook pages or a third-party database called Cicero, which tracks who your representatives may be, from members of Congress to your mayor and city council member. In some cases, it can even show you who your state attorney general is."
TODAY'S SONG:
- Bungalow (Scott Helman)
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