- Giving the Behemoths a Leg Up on the Little Guy (NYT) "At the moment, the internet isn’t in a good place. The Frightful Five — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company — control nearly everything of value in the digital world, including operating systems, app stores, browsers, cloud storage infrastructure, and oceans of data from which to spin new products. A handful of others — Comcast, AT&T, Verizon — control the wired and wireless connections through which all your data flows. People used to talk about the internet as a wonderland for innovative upstarts, but lately the upstarts keep getting clobbered. Today the internet is gigantic corporations, all the way down. The giants seem likely to keep getting bigger. If we give them a chance to buy up every fast lane online, we’ll be removing another check on their untamed power."
- How to Protect Your Privacy as More Apps Harvest Your Data (NYT) "For consumers, giving up some data has become part of the trade-off of receiving compelling, personalized services. But that doesn’t mean you have to be caught by surprise. Here are some tips from privacy experts on protecting yourself from tricky data collection. Read privacy policies. Research company business models. Audit your apps. Opt out for good."
BUSINESS/INVESTING:
- Everything you need to know about trade economics, in 70 words (WaPo) "If a country consumes more than it produces, it must import more than it exports. That’s not a rip-off; that’s arithmetic. If we manage to negotiate a reduction in the Chinese trade surplus with the United States, we will have an increased trade deficit with some other country. Federal deficit spending, a massive and continuing act of dissaving, is the culprit. Control that spending and you will control trade deficits."
- The Online Marketplace That’s a Portal to the Future of Capitalism (NYT) "These shipments were made in accordance with a bilateral trade agreement between the United States and China that originated in 2010, meant to address the rising tide of cross-border e-commerce. Items up to 4.4 pounds — more than the weight of, for example, a violin and bow — can be shipped as ePackets, at extremely low rates with tracking numbers and delivery confirmation. This obscure trade deal has become the quiet conduit for an explosion in a new and underexamined American consumer behavior: buying things directly from their countries of manufacture. This, obviously, presents a problem for the stores and retailers accustomed to serving as importers themselves. Cross-border purchases compound the issue: Because of ePacket, and the decades-old international postal agreements that serve as its foundation, lightweight product shipments from China are heavily subsidized by the U.S.P.S. Wish certainly illuminates the peculiarities of international shipping, but it casts a much brighter light on the state of globalized manufacturing and commerce. In fact, it offers a somewhat convincing vision of what they might become in the near future. Wish shoppers are hardly less alienated from the labor that makes their purchases possible than Walmart customers or iPhone owners are. But their experience at least hews closer to the global economic situation as it truly exists. Services like this offer us a preview of a maximalist capitalist future, in which the near-entirety of current-day retail — stores, humans and even storelike websites — have been identified as gatekeepers or sources of friction and accordingly obliterated."
- Index Funds Are Finally Sexy. What a Shame (Bloomberg) "In any given year, at least four out of five fund managers underperformed their benchmark. Instead of chasing hot funds or hot stocks, investors would have been better served putting their money in index funds. These funds, baskets of stocks that replicate a stock index like the S&P 500 or the Russell 2000, don’t try to beat the market, but simply aim to match it. That’s enough to beat 80 percent of actively managed funds in any given year, and better than almost all of them over a longer stretch of time. In addition, their low fees make a meaningful difference to an investor’s return. There were actually three drivers of index-fund growth: the explosion of exchange-traded funds, the rise of fee-based advisers, and the powerful bull market that began in 2009, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average, now over 20,000, stood at around 7,000."
- Why I Lost My Bet With Warren Buffett (Bloomberg) "Warren discussed the bet in this year’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders, explaining that the high fees active money managers charge create a headwind relative to low-cost passive alternatives. He is correct that hedge-fund fees are high, and his reasoning is convincing. Fees matter in investing, no doubt about it."
ENTERTAINMENT:
- The Secret Hit-Making Power of the Spotify Playlist (Wired) "Think of it as the moneyball of music, a ruthlessly data-driven approach to introducing listeners to songs. By the time a song lands on Today’s Top Hits or other equally popular sets, Spotify has so relentlessly tested it that it almost can’t fail."
- The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Is Still Alive (New Yorker) "This year, Journey, Tupac Shakur, Joan Baez, Yes, and Pearl Jam were inducted into the Hall alongside E.L.O., while the producer, guitarist, and songwriter Nile Rodgers received an award for Musical Excellence."
NEWS:
- Trump: ‘normalized’ but still scary (WaPo) "Ignore what’s behind the curtain. Deal with what comes out in front: the policy, the pronouncements, the actions. And so far they hang together enough — Neil Gorsuch, Keystone XL, NATO reassurances, Syria strike, Cabinet appointments — that one can begin to talk plausibly about the normalization of this presidency. What happens when the red phone rings at 3 in the morning? I’d say: Let it ring. Let the wizard sleep. Forward the call to Defense Secretary Mattis."
- Trump has a dangerous disability (WaPo) "It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence. His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind."
READ THIS:
- Wilson (A. Scott Berg) "From the scholar-President who ushered the country through its first great world war to the man of intense passion and turbulence, from the idealist determined to make the world 'safe for democracy' to the stroke-crippled leader whose incapacity and the subterfuges around it were among the century’s greatest secrets, the result is an intimate portrait written with a particularly contemporary point of view – a book at once magisterial and deeply emotional about the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments, and failings. This is not just Wilson the icon – but Wilson the man."
SOCIALIZED MEDICINE:
- There are exactly zero women working on the Senate version of the GOP health care bill (Quartz)
- ‘Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care,’ GOP lawmaker says. He got booed (WaPo) "After the town hall Friday, Labrador said on his Facebook page, 'It was my privilege to spend two hours today in Lewiston fielding questions from my constituents, many of them about our efforts to provide quality health care to all Americans to an affordable and sustainable cost.'"
SPORTS:
- NFL players fight pain with medical marijuana: ‘Managing it with pills was slowly killing me’ (WaPo) "NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said last week that he opposes players using the drug recreationally but is willing to listen to the league’s medical advisers on the potential value of medicinal marijuana. The NFL Players Association has formed a pain management committee to study the issue, and many expect marijuana to become a bigger discussion point in the near future. The union could urge the league to differentiate between recreational and medicinal use or push to lessen the penalties for a failed test."
- This former NFL player lost 84 pounds in four months — and kept it off (LA Times) "I was eating at least 7,000 calories a day. I would start eating from the minute I woke up. I would pound protein bars, drink shakes, smoothies, eat a full breakfast with eggs, sausage — you name it. I had a bag of almonds that I would eat all day. I would have protein shakes after lunch. I would eat dinner and then consume half of one of those big tubs of Greek yogurt. Then, in bed at night, I would eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Don’t wait. Losing weight is like climbing a mountain. If you look up at the mountain before you start, it’s going to be daunting. But if you just put your head down and start walking, you have a chance to accomplish the feat."
TECHNOLOGY:
- Robots don’t have to take over jobs in order to be a problem for workers (Quartz) "...humans will continue to have a competitive advantage over robots and algorithms…because they’ll be so poorly paid. This type of transition has played out multiple times in the past (which, to be fair, some argue is irrelevant). Technology creates new, skilled jobs...even as it deskills others, like taxi drivers. For those deskilled jobs, or at least some of them, wages fall. In other words: Don’t worry about machines replacing humans. Worry about machines replacing the skilled portions of human jobs, and leaving the cheap drudge work behind."
- How to Prepare for an Automated Future (NYT) "Pew Research Center and Elon University surveyed 1,408 people who work in technology and education to find out if they think new schooling will emerge in the next decade to successfully train workers for the future. Two-thirds said yes; the rest said no." and Bosses believe your work skills will soon be useless (WaPo)
THE EDGE OF HUMAN ENDURANCE:
- Nike’s Quest to Beat the Two-Hour Marathon Comes Up Oh So Short (Wired) "It was a close-run thing, but the two-hour marathon remains unbroken, for now, with Kipchoge finishing his marathon in 2 hours and 25 seconds. (Because the three elite athletes contesting Breaking2 ran with a roster of interchangeable pacemakers, which violates IAAF regulations, Kipchoge’s run will not become an official world record. The current world record for the marath:n still stands at 2.02.57, set in Berlin in 2014, by Dennis Kimetto, also of Kenya.)"
- Why You’ll Never Run a Sub 2 Hour Marathon—But the Pros Might (Wired) "...that number fails to convey the psychological and physical fortitude needed to pull it off."
- Ranking All 373 Rolling Stones Songs (Vulture)
TODAY'S SONG:
- Start Me Up (Rolling Stones)
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