i’m still on my Buy Amazon kick. If you didn’t read yesterday, please do. Click here.
The stock is rushing back to its pre-Trump anti-tweets. Here’s a one year chart:
I wonder how long before Amazon has more subscribers than Netflix?
Netflix has 118 million subscribers. Amazon has 100 million Amazon Prime Customers, who also get free video.
I like Netflix. But, for the first time, it has a really serious competitor. Amazon has 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars. Nice beginning.
When you know everything about your customers, you can make things for them, like batteries and headphones. I love these $14.99 Amazon Basic headphones. Light. Foldable. Great for travel. Great sound.
Buy yours here.
Always keep three copies of your IRS filings
The IRS keep losing my filings and sending me stupid notices and demanding I send them yet another copy of my filing. Which I do. Then I don’t hear any more. The latest:
My New York Office finally hit the wall.
Three words: Too much paper. Harry has too much paper. Solution?
Junk:
+ All K1s, once you’ve scanned them.
+ All monthly bank statements.
+ All brokerage transactions.
+ All prospectuses.
+ All annual reports, once you’ve read the Chairman’s letter.
+ All correspondence.
+ All receipts older than five years.
+ All old power supplies and old cables.
+ All small hard drives.
+ All CDs of old, dead software.
+ All bad, old books.
+ All old magazines and newspapers older than a week.
The best investment you can make is a laptop with a 500 gigabyte hard drive. a two terabyte Seagate USB 3.0 external hard drive ($65) — click here — and a Fujitsu scanner ($420) — click here. If you’re queasy with living your life on one machine, buy another identical one. Save software. Same files. If one crashes you can move to the other in a nanosecond.
Close your bank safety deposit box
+ You don’t need it.
+ Your bank will close its branch.
+ It won’t tell you it is closing.
+ Your bank will open your private, secure, safety deposit box, check what’s in it and move your box.
+ Three hours later, you’ll still be looking.
Thank you, Santander, for your great customer communications (i.e. none).
Useful weekend reading
+ How not to get sick on a plane. Click here.
+ The divine paranoia of Scott Pruitt, EPA head. How God is inspiring him to destroy our environment. Click here.
+ Five ways to save a web page. Click here.
Alexa’s future
Ellen DeGeneres’ view on how Alexa is taking over our lives. Funny.
Syria 2018
This was once a handsome residential street. To see the entire gruesome picture, click on it, please.
The photo comes from this month’s The Atlantic Magazine, which begins its article:
How Syria Came to This
A story of ethnic and sectarian conflict, international connivance, and above all civilian suffering
Seven years of horrific twists and turns in the Syrian Civil War make it hard to remember that it all started with a little graffiti.
In March 2011, four children in the southern city of Der’a scrawled on a wall “It’s your turn, Doctor”-a not so subtle prediction that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a British-trained ophthalmologist and self-styled reformer, would go down in the the manner of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and eventually, the Qaddafi regime in Libya. But Syria’s story would turn out differently.
The crackdown started small. Assad’s security services arrested the four graffiti artists, refusing to tell their parents where they were. After two weeks of waiting, the residents of Der’a-who are famously direct and fiery-held protests demanding the children’s release. The regime responded with live gunfire, killing several, and drawing the first blood in a war that’s now killed some half a million people. With every funeral came more opportunities for protests-and for the regime to respond with more violence.
The numbers spell out the biggest humanitarian disaster since World War II:
+ Half a million Syrians dead.
+ Five million registered refugees. Hundreds of thousands unregistered.
+ Syrian refugees in Lebanon today total over a quarter of the Lebanon’s population. Ditto, but slighter smaller figures for Jordan.
+ More than six million Syrians have fled their homes to other parts of Syria.
+ 13.1 million Syrians in need of humanitarian assistance. The Assad regime uses hunger and denial of medical supplies to conquer those parts of Syria it has lost to rebels.
Read the whole sad story here.
Harry Newton, who’s biking off this morning to yet another branch of Santander Bank in search of his birth certificate and U.S. naturalization papers.
The Search for my Errant Safe Deposit Box gives life a whole new meaning.
The second of all this is that bricks and mortar banks have no future. The online banks are eating their lunch. And the specialty loan companies that lend to businesses — I don’t know what they’re called — are eating their profitable corporate lending business. I have money with one of them. And I’ve seen others. They typically pay their investors 10%+. They get much closer to their corporate borrowers than the banks, with their sleepy management, can.
Before I read below the picture, I thought it was a picture of Detroit.
Not so fast Jerry – I’ll put my money on Harry.
In my tennis league the best teams are the ones that have the most people over 60, some over 70. In fact, 8 tennis players in our league just had a joint 70 year birthday tennis party. I didnt know the women but the men are dam good – and the tennis has been dam good for them – they look great.
you’re on!
You can’t play tennis very well at your age. I play in NY City all the time. My kid, who is nine and hot on the junior circuit, could beat you easily. Challenge match? Harry vs. my 9 yr old with us each putting in 20 grand and the $ going to the winner’s favorite charity?
I’d love to read “How To Not Get Sick on Planes” but I am not a NYT subscriber and it won’t give me access. Can you cut and paste please?
Correct that to a 500GB SSD, not slow Hard Drives. Hard Drives should only be used as external backup since they are significantly cheaper.
I select paperless statements when its an option for all brokerage, bank and credit card statements.