- Why you cannot quit Amazon Prime — even if maybe you should (WaPo) "Amazon last year lowered its threshold for free standard shipping — five to eight days, compared with two for Prime — to packages worth just $25. So I counted the times I placed orders worth less than $25. I would have paid roughly $5 each to ship these, so I needed about 20 in a year to cover the $100 I paid upfront for Prime. Putting an economic value on my Prime membership was hard — and that’s by design. Its benefit isn’t financial; it’s psychological."
- Jeff Bezos is building a global army of Amazon Prime subscribers (Quartz) "Still, in recent years, analysts had started to worry about Prime. They feared that Prime, with somewhere between 60 million and 90 million subscribed U.S. households, depending who you ask, may finally have reached a ceiling on its domestic growth. Amazon just put those fears to rest. 'More new paid members joined Prime in 2017 than any previous year—both worldwide and in the US,' Amazon said today (Feb. 1) in its quarterly earnings statement."
BUSINESS/INVESTING:
- When Americans save this little, it’s usually a sign that recession is near (Quartz) "...most Americans appear to follow the opposite advice, spending in good times and saving in bad. In December, the U.S. personal saving rate fell to 2.4% of disposable income, the lowest level since 2007, which itself was low by historical standards. It’s natural to want to spend more when the economy grows and people feel optimistic about the future. But this might leave many households more exposed than they realize."
- The 10 Richest People in America (Time) "The richest people in America have a surprising amount in common. For starters, they’re all men who mostly work in tech. And almost all of them made their fortunes by starting their own companies and maintaining ownership as they soared to success... In fact, seven of the 10 richest men in America are also among the 10 richest people in the world."
ENVIRONMENT:
- Free Water Refill Stations: An Idea To End The Plastic Bottle Scourge (Fast Company) "It’s not that it wasn’t possible to ask a cafe to refill a bottle in the past–and under the law, all licensed premises in England, including pubs, takeout restaurants, and theaters, are required to provide 'free potable water' on request. But most Brits don’t feel comfortable asking. By joining the network, adding a sticker, and becoming part of an app that people can use to find the closest refill location, businesses can help shift norms."
- These Bold Ideas Aim To Make Plastic Waste A Thing Of The Past (Fast Company) "About 8 million tons of plastic become maritime garbage every year, according to scientifically grounded estimates. Only about 14% of the plastic used for wrapping food and bottling water is currently recycled and reused, and the numbers are going up all the time. From an innovation standpoint, the hardest nut to crack is the 30% of plastics that can’t currently be reused: the sachets, tear-offs, lids, and bags made up of complex or multilayer materials (like chip bags that contain both plastic and metal)."
HEALTH:
- How Childhood Trauma Can Affect Your Long-Term Health (NYT) "Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had found that the more traumatic events a person suffered in childhood — things like physical, emotional or sexual abuse, mental illness in a parent, divorce, neglect and domestic violence — the more likely he or she was to also suffer from chronic stress-related health problems like heart disease, obesity and premature death decades later."
MORE ON "THE MEMO":
- The 3 different memos about the FBI and Trump-Russia, explained (Vox) "The first is the original Nunes memo. The second memo, written by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), is a rebuttal to Nunes’s attacks on the FBI. The third memo is actually an edited version of Nunes’s original memo, which he sent to the Trump administration for review."
- The Republican Plot Against the F.B.I. (NYT) "It would be nice to treat Mr. Trump, Mr. Nunes and their cohort as the junior high school pranksters they resemble, but what they’re doing — cynically undermining the nation’s trust in law enforcement, fostering an environment of permanent suspicion and subterfuge — is far more dangerous. The question is whether there are any adults left in the G.O.P. The evidence so far is not encouraging, notwithstanding a sporadic furrowed brow in the Senate. Republicans from the top on down have made it clear, expressly or otherwise, that this is all about winning the political fight directly in front of them, the consequences — and the rest of America — be damned."
- In Trump vs. the F.B.I., Trump Will Lose (NYT) "But as Nixon learned, the president can’t fire his way out of this crisis. Despite the degradations and depredations that this president has inflicted on the executive branch, there remains a phalanx of honorable people at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. more beholden to principle than politics, prepared to fall on their swords rather than suborn high crimes. The president has measured Mr. Mueller for the guillotine for months. As the bloodhounds close in on the Oval Office, he may sharpen his blade and place the prosecutor’s head on a pike. If so, he’ll have to confront the Constitution. And he’ll lose again."
NEWS:
- White House Wants Pentagon to Offer More Options on North Korea (NYT) "The national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, believes that for Mr. Trump’s warnings to North Korea to be credible, the United States must have well-developed military plans... But the Pentagon...is worried that the White House is moving too hastily toward military action on the Korean Peninsula that could escalate catastrophically. Giving the president too many options...could increase the odds that he will act."
- Toward a Trump Republicanism (National Review) "The Bush Republican party leaned free-market liberal on economics and religious on culture. Trump is different. He has embraced the causes of religious conservatives — as anomalous as that may be, given his persona... He has abandoned much of free market Republicanism. So though Trump Republicanism has elements of other party traditions, its dominant tone is nationalist."
- Trump’s enablers are misreading the stars (WaPo) "The president’s enablers must believe that it is their unfortunate fate to blindly follow him. But they are misreading the stars, and they are underestimating themselves. No one expects grand Shakespearean gestures from this Republican Party. All that is required is the courage to push back against this president’s most dangerous moves."
- The Obstruction Case against Trump Still Has a Way to Go (National Review) "I don’t mean at all to minimize the moral or political problems with Trump’s actions. Misleading the public is a grave problem, and there is probably no Republican alive who would excuse a Democratic president who exerted similar pressure on the Justice Department. Bad faith and hypocrisy abound. For a president to be credibly accused of obstruction, he doesn’t actually have to succeed in stopping the investigation, but past presidential precedents suggest that the bar for impeachment is high enough that it requires proof of efforts that either corruptly prevent investigators from gaining information or corruptly facilitate perjury or other actions that feed false information to investigators or otherwise impede the investigators from doing their work. With Trump, we are confronted with choking, billowing smoke but so far no fire. For Mueller to file a solid obstruction charge, he needs to have solid evidence. While we don’t know what he knows, the publicly available evidence remains (so far) insufficient to make the case."
SPORTS:
- Why Remove 'Chief Wahoo'? (National Review) "The modern fight to purge professional sports teams of Native American mascots was seemingly abandoned in 2016 when the Washington Post found that nine of ten Native Americans polled took no offense at the Washington Redskins’ logo or team name. All in all, it looks like an unnecessary and misguided attempt at heading off a controversy."
TECHNOLOGY:
- Can Big Tech Companies Find A Way To Reward Users For Their Data? (Fast Company) "If you think online services like Facebook and Google are really free, think again. They come with a price tag–in the form of our personal data, which these companies transform into massive ad revenues. Personal data is the 'new oil,' in the words of The Economist. Instead of acting as mere passive data providers, ...we need to start thinking of ourselves as the creators of the new data wealth. Instead of being internet users, we need think of ourselves as labor–the workers who are helping companies to build the emerging automated economy."
TRUMPTEL:
- Trump claims his State of the Union ratings were highest ever. Obama, Bush and Clinton had higher (CNN)
WINTER OLYMPICS:
- No American woman has landed a triple axel in an Olympics. Mirai Nagasu intends to try twice. (WaPo) "Like the other two American women in the competition, she is not expected to earn a medal. Unlike the other two American women — and all but one American woman [Tonya Harding] before her — she will attempt the triple axel on Olympic ice."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- Keep your coats handy. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, meaning the U.S. will endure six more weeks of winter. (Maybe. He's often wrong.) (USA Today) "According to legend, if it's sunny and the famous groundhog sees his shadow, he returns to his burrow and the U.S. will endure six more weeks of winter. But if it's cloudy when the groundhog emerges on Feb. 2, the critter won't see his shadow and will leave his burrow, meaning winter will soon end and an early start to spring is coming. But flipping a coin might be as accurate as Phil. Since 1988, the groundhog has been 'right' 14 times and 'wrong' 16 times."
TODAY'S SONG:
- Love Won't Sleep (Lostboycrow)
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