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Afternoon Links: Manafort’s Shenanigans, the Perfect Christmas Gift, and Amazon’s Future

By Jim Swift

Manafort, Paul Manafort. As folks comb through the Manafort papers, some interesting things are popping up. Like the fact the Manafort had three valid U.S. passports. Now, cyber security experts are hinting that Manafort’s password for file-sharing sites was “bond007.”

“Do you expect me to talk?”

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“No, Mr. Manafort, you used one of the least secure passwords ever. Thank you.”

Now that it’s Christmas Season… The perfect gift for the Trump fan in your life is here: Trumpy Bear! For only $39.90 (plus shipping and handling) you can gift this fearless stuffy with small paws and a trademark coif!

But that’s not all! It comes with a special pocket in the back which brings out an American flag cape, just like Tomi Lahren’s! Don’t miss out on owning a piece of American history!


‘We Swore to an Oath and We Upheld Ours. He Did Not.’ As you’re probably aware, Bowe Berghdahl skated today, getting no jail time. Worth revisiting is Stephen F. Hayes’s 2014 interview with members of Bergdahl’s platoon:

“You don’t mail all your personal belongings home, especially your computer. It’s not like you can go to a sports bar—there’s no sports bars over there,” says Specialist Full. “You just wouldn’t give up your computer if you weren’t planning to leave. He knowingly deserted and he put countless fellow Americans in danger—not just his platoon mates.”

This will leave a mark. While not all is well in Trumpland, the DNC is suffering from a very public identity crisis in the wake of Donna Brazile’s viral story yesterday in Politico Magazine:

I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.

Can Amazon Survive? At Quartz, Michael J. Coren has a look at whether or not Amazon can keep competing with so many competitors.

Amazon, unlike its Silicon Valley counterparts, does not prioritize a technology platform that churns out profits while third party developers take on the risk of building applications to sell to customers. Instead, it enters brutally competitive, low-margin businesses, such as fashion and groceries, and pumps money into growing them despite losses. “I really don’t the know the logic of why they would keep moving into these areas,” says Michael Cusumano, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “From a profitability point of view, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.” But zoom out and Amazon’s real platform comes into view: the e-commerce marketplace itself. Today’s profit margins matter little because no single industry is crucial to Amazon’s ambitions over the coming decades.

You think back to the fall of A&P and other behemoths and wonder: What is Amazon’s end game? Getting broken up by a court, or is it just SkyNet by another name?

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