All Hail the Middle Man. (Or at least this one.) Meet Ryan Grant, a 28 year old who raids the clearance aisle at big box stores, and upsells items as a third party seller on Amazon. He started doing this to make some side hustle money, but then quit his job in accounting to do it full time. It quickly started consuming space:
Arbitrage, baby! Maybe not all Millennials are bad.
Who are the real flyover people? As a midwesterner, it always bothered me when people’s attacks on Washington got personal. “You wouldn’t know what it’s like out here, outside the Beltway!” Oh, ok. Similarly, there are folks in the big east coast cities who derisively refer to the places people like me call home (Ohio, Missouri) as “flyover country.” At MarginalRevolution, Tyler Cowen wonders, who are the realflyover people? Meaning, those who are flown over the most? Answer: “The state flown over the most actually is…Virginia.” I guess I live in a flyover state after all!
Dr. Carter Page’s Rumbling Bumbling Stumbling Intel Testimony. It’s amazing that a man with this CV could sound so… dumb. Have a few hours to kill? Here’s 200 pages of Carter Page, formerly of the Trump campaign, representing himself before the committee. It is bonkers. Or, read this humorous (but not unfair) faux summation by Alexandra Petri, it’s not too far from the truth.
Look At What You Made Me Do. Taylor Swift, artist extraordinaire, has denounced the alt-right, in a letter from her lawyers: “Let this letter stand as a yet another unequivocal denouncement by Ms. Swift of white supremacy and the alt-right.”
As the kids say, “way to go fam!” (Did I do that right?) But the denunciation is a little… weird. Taylor was (via lawyers) responding to a kooky social justice blogger and law student who basically compared her to Hitler:
This is the latest installment in the You Will Be Made to Care™ movement. Back to the letter from Taylor’s lawyer and why it was weird. As LawNewz reports, the letter contained this line:
The ACLU has stepped in (correctly) to defend the social justice blogger, since this tactic is… let’s be kind and say an inventive view of copyright law. This blogger may be everything that’s wrong with the politicized world, but hey: she gets results
Afternoon Links are part of the Daily Standard newsletter, a free daily newsletter that goes out Monday through Friday. Sign up here!
