Skip to content
 

What it’s all about

What it’s all about: Taking Sophie to the Nutcracker. That’s why we work so hard.

This is her outside The Nutcracker at New York’s Lincoln Center on Saturday.

The Nutcracker is playing until January 5. Tickets here. 

Don’t buy

+ Dyson vacuum cleaners. They’re poorly made, way overpriced and way over-hyped. We have two broken ones, no longer covered by warranty. I bought into the hype. I was stupid.

+ My Pillow. Terrible pillows. And horrible lack-of-return policy, despite the ads.

+ “Trial” free subscriptions that turn out to be impossible to cancel.

+ Second and third houses. You can Airbnb and VRBO much cheaper. On leaving you hand the key back, along with a note: The toilet is not working.

+ Overhyped. easily replicated investments, e.g. Peloton, marijuana and virtual reality companies.

+ Retailers who don’t understand that the consumer wants entertainment and proprietary decent products, e.g. Lululemon (LULU).

+ Prevagen, the brain “enchancing” dietary supplement. Which only enhances the pocketbooks of the promoters.

+ Probiotics. “The current evidence does not convince me to recommend probiotics for any of my healthy patients,” said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Cambridge Health Alliance. For more, read Facts, fiction and probiotics. 

Probiotics sold as dietary supplements are not disease-treating drugs. If companies want to market their probiotics as medical treatments, they have to pursue a form of Food and Drug Administration approval to market them as live biotherapeutic products. Thus far, no probiotics have been given this designation.

Click here.

Harry’s view: All dietary supplements are marketing hype. Healthy people don’t need them. You’ll do a lot better playing tennis, eating less and napping.

Favorite Buys

+ The Say NO Pen. Your kids and grandkids will be endlessly amused with the Say NO pen.


It says NO in a million ways. It teaches kids the hardest word  to say in the English language — NO. $17.99 for three at Amazon. Click here.

+ 50% off at LandsEnd. I love their $20 flannel pajama pants and their $32 Thermacheck 200 Fleece Jacket in tall. Click here.

+ Easiest way to find your luggage on the carousel:


Tags for Bags, click here.

God bless inventors. 

This thing shoots ketchup and mustard on your food.


This thing “locks” your ice cream.

How the Democrats think they have a prayer?

Remember last week’s quotes:

Vox asked the democratic candidates seven questions on technology. Here are two candidates’ insanity:

Should Facebook, Google, Apple, and/or Amazon be broken up? Why or why not?

Bernie Sanders: A few massive corporations have control over vast swaths of Americans’ lives. Facebook harvests the data of 228 million Americans and uses this sensitive information in dangerous ways. They have endangered our democracy and enabled the spread of disinformation and hatred on their platform. Amazon has amassed control over the e-commerce industry, capturing a full 50 percent of the market and using its power to drive down wages for workers and prices for suppliers.

When [I am] in the White House, [I] will reinvigorate the FTC and appoint an Attorney General who will aggressively investigate and break up these tech giants and other conglomerates that have monopolized nearly every sector of our economy. These corporate giants control too much of what we see, hear, and read online and must be subjected to regulation and antitrust authority.

Elizabeth Warren: Yes. I introduced my plan for this back in March. Today’s big tech companies have too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.

To make our government and our economy work, we need to stop big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor. That means breaking up Big Tech.

For the rest of their madness, click here.

I spent some time with Biden the first time he ran for president. I was not impressed then. And I’m not impressed now. He was on CNBC recently. I wasn’t listening. Here’s what I saw:

Just what the world needs; More taxes. And more idiots in government to spend my money.

About the Democrats and about life in general:

No one can shoot yourself in the foot more accurately than you can. Not your competitors. Not your enemies. Just you. YOU are your own worst enemy.

Don’t do stupid

+ Don’t let your car drive itself. It WILL crash itself. Another Tesla just did.

+ Don’t rush down steps. You’ll fall on the last one.

+ Don’t buy a stock because your neighbor (or your broker) told you to.

This weekend

A friend turned me onto SkipLagged.com — cheap airline tickets, courtesy “hidden cities.” For example, buy NYC to New Orleans. Get off in Dallas. Cheaper than buying a ticket NYC to Dallas.

I suspect that trade with China will get worse and overhang our markets for much of 2020. For example, the Financial Times reports that China has ordered all non-Chinese PCs and software to be removed from government offices within the next three years. Click here. 

Nice employment numbers Friday. Nice pop in share prices. But higher tariffs are coming and there’ll be pressures. Trump is stubborn and omniscient. Xi is stubborn and omniscient.  Both are stable geniuses. Both don’t care about you and me.

Welcome to a new week. — Harry Newton

 

 

6 Comments

  1. Mike Nash says:

    Harry, you made it clear that you hate Warren and Sanders, which I get but now you also don’t like Biden. You clearly are no Trump supporter. I can only surmise that you are supporting Pete Buttagieg? Or Cory Booker?

  2. Lucky says:

    I can’t believe you fell for that “My Pillow” crap…our wonderful feather pillows come from https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M4P1Y5S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 We love ’em so much we bought enough for all beds plus our camper.
    You might also try https://featheredfriends.com/collections/down-pillows/products/feathered-friends-down-pillow-850-fill we love their very expensive goose down comforter. Their comforter is so great I suspect their pillows are fantastic…we had already bought pillows so just bought the comforter, their Duvet and Down Booties for Lorette for Christmas.

  3. Dman says:

    Hey Harry, obviously you have zero chance of being able to figure out the Trump/Xi relationship on your own. Allow me to assist you: Trump and Xi are working together to BRING DOWN the worlds CENTRAL BANKS. Of course they are also working on TRADE, but that is simply a “side-show.”

    See if you can wrap your weak feeble liberal mind around that.

    Qanon is 100% REAL.

    That means not only the evil democrats are finished, but….so are evil leftist all over the WORLD.

    Jeffery Epstein is the very tip of the iceberg. Who is Rachel Chandler. Who is Adam Schiff really?….see the LA Standard Hotel, or The Port of Long Beach CA.

    Hey Harry—did you know Ed Buck?
    PizzaGate and Comet PingPong Pizza are 100% TRUE!!!! East coast west coast—-All around the town.

    Who’s more evil—John Podesta or Valerie Jarrett? Why did they kill Seth Rich? Donna Brazile knows why. So does Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. So does Julian Assange.

    The Great Awakening
    WWG1WGA
    Dark To Light
    Q

    I love watching evil dems in shear utter panic…..it’s simply a beautiful thing to watch.

    Enjoy The Show!!!
    The Kenyan Obama will hang, along with many others.

    Thank God for Pres Trump….how many thousands of children has Trump already SAVED?

    • gerryb says:

      You can’t be serious. Surely you are lampooning Trumpers.

      • Dman says:

        gerryb……Knowing that Trump is going to finish-off not only the EVIL dem party but to also understand that Trump is going to destroy the EVIL MEDIA as you know it is beyond anything I could have ever hoped for.

        Please gerryb “stay stupid”, that will make our celebration much more special…I want to hear the high-pitched screaming. Think of it as music to my ears.

        You are nothing but another lazy ass liberal who thinks he has a clue……YOU DON’T.

        Why DOES NOT the evil media simply ask Trump if Qanon is real or not?……Because they know Q is VERY REAL.

        …….the perfect setup……Trump 2024…..take it to the bank.

        The Great Awakening
        WWG1WGA
        Q

      • Omer Acikel says:

        Hey Gerry, I wish you did not give this …let’s say it nicely “lost soul” a “bone” to chew on. But just in case he is reading: this is relatively more sensible information than he has ever written here, I have a very credible theory: why VP Pence is out of front page most of the time? Well I am betting he is looking ways to sit in P position if Mr. T loses his P. If you read his political history, it makes you wonder how on earth such ambitious, shallow religious person portraits himself as a cat spilled the milk bowl. It smells rotten.