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Good morning and welcome to October. 🎃
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.38 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.68 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"A mistake is only an error, it becomes a mistake when you fail to correct it."
–John Lennon (1940-1980)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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📬 Let’s Talk About The Mail
 GIF: YouTube
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🎁 The U.S. Postal Service is implementing new service standards that will result in slower and more expensive mail delivery for Americans.
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✉️ Details, details… Starting today, the USPS delivery standard for first-class mail delivered anywhere in the U.S. will be five days instead of three.
- The postal service will continue to have a two-day delivery standard for single-piece first-class mail traveling within a local area.
- A USPS spokesperson said 61% of first-class mail and 93% of periodicals will remain unaffected by these changes.
In addition, beginning October 3 and ending on December 26, the postal service will temporarily increase prices on all "commercial and retail domestic packages" due to the holiday season.
📅 Zoom out… The changes are part of the 10-year strategic plan announced by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy this past March in an effort to put the postal service “on a path for financial sustainability and service excellence.”
- Last month, USPS announced its standard for first-class mail delivery was met 83.6% of the time for the quarter ending June 30, compared to 88.9% over the same period in 2020. It also reported a loss of $3 billion compared with $2.2 billion the previous year.
📝 The bottom line… When you combine USPS’ new plan with ongoing global supply chain issues, it might be a good idea to order your Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah presents, like, yesterday.
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🪄 The Wizards of Ozy
 Image: Gifer
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🎁 Billionaire investor and Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry resigned as chairman of Ozy Media yesterday, just three weeks to the day after taking the position.
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📜 Backstory: As we linked to in our DONUT Holes section earlier this week, a bombshell New York Times report published Sunday revealed Ozy co-founder Samir Rao impersonated a YouTube executive on a conference call with Goldman Sachs earlier this year, presenting rosier-than-reality statistics on the company’s reach to solicit a $40 million investment from the bank.
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Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC contributor and CNN host, founded Ozy Media with Rao in 2013. The company has raised more than $70 million dollars from the likes of Axel Springer and Laurene Powell Jobs and boasts partnerships with A&E and the BBC.
🤔 Hmmmm… This most recent call with Goldman wasn’t the first time Ozy raised eyebrows regarding its engagement numbers.
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In 2017, it was revealed that the company bought fraudulent web traffic from automated networks.
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Ozy’s Instagram account boasts 654,000 followers… but its last three posts have 52, 37, and 28 likes.
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The company currently claims 50 million unique monthly visitors. Comscore, one of the best-known web tracking firms, recorded only 230,000 visitors to the site in June and 479,000 in July of this year. Just a tiny difference.
📉 The fallout… In addition to Lasry, Katty Kay, one of Ozy’s biggest stars who was poached from the BBC just months ago, has also resigned, calling the situation “serious and deeply troubling.”
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On Wednesday, early investor SV Angel relinquished all of its shares in the company for nothing, an extraordinarily rare move for a VC firm – and it’s especially odd considering Ozy founder Carlos Watson told Axios earlier this year that his company brought in $50 million in revenue last year, hit profitability for the first time in its seven-year history, and fielded two acquisition offers from major media companies.
+Piling on: Sharon Osbourne told CNBC yesterday that Carlos Watson lied when he claimed the Osbournes invested in Ozy Media after a court fight.
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
Image: USGS/B. Carr/Handout
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☝️ Kīlauea, Hawaii’s youngest and most active volcano, is erupting for the first time since December 2020.
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🚬 More than 2 million middle and high school students used e-cigs this year, according to CDC data; the number marks a 40% drop from last year though officials said the data might be skewed as this year's survey was conducted online instead of in schools, others say the big decrease is real and makes sense given the lack of social vaping opportunities.
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⚖️ A 96-year-old woman named Irmgard Furchner, who was due to stand trial in Germany for her role as a secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp, fled her nursing home via taxi to avoid the hearing and was later arrested.
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🤝 Scarlett Johansson and Disney settled a lawsuit over the actress’s pay for Black Widow; terms of the deal were not disclosed. (Behind the lawsuit.)
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🎤 The 2022 Super Bowl halftime lineup was released. On the docket: Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar.
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🏛️ Capitol Hill: Congress avoided a midnight government shutdown with a short-term bill through Dec. 3; it passed in the Senate with bipartisan support and in the House by a 254-175 vote after Democrats stripped language that would have suspended the debt ceiling. (From the Left | From the Right) | House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed a promised vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package
as negotiations continue between wings of the Democratic Party. (From the Left | From the Right)
+Markets: The S&P 500 had its worst month since March 2020, dropping 4.8%; index still recorded its sixth consecutive quarterly gain.
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… "The damages to Macy's customer goodwill, image, reputation and brand, should a 'prominent online retailer' (especially, Amazon) advertise on the billboard are impossible to calculate." – Macy’s.
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The retailer filed a lawsuit against its landlord to prevent Amazon from taking over the Times Square billboard overlooking its flagship store. The billboard has carried Macy's name for almost 60 years. Here’s the tea. 🍵
🔢 Stat of the Day: College endowments with more than $1 billion averaged a 36% return in the fiscal year ending June 30.
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The University of Minnesota’s endowment gained 49%, the University of Virginia’s 49%, Brown University’s 50%, and Duke’s 56%. The endowment at Washington University in St. Louis posted its biggest return ever, at 65%, bringing it to $15.3 billion.
📖 Worth Your Time… How Peyton and Eli Manning Are Changing Television
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
💰 What To Do – Or Not Do – About Student Loans ?
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 Image: Credible
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🎁 Navient, one of America’s largest student-loan companies, became the third such lender in the past three months to announce plans to end its federal program.
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🤿 A deeper dive… The Sallie Mae spinoff services 5.6 million federal student loan borrowers. It joins FedLoan Servicing (8.5 million) and Granite State Management and Resources (1.3 million) in calling it quits, though the proposal is contingent on federal approval.
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As with the other companies, borrowers currently with Navient will be reassigned to a new federal loan servicer by the end of the year – in this case, Maximus Inc.
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There aren’t many details about how the transition will happen for federal borrowers, except that it will occur automatically. Navient will continue to service its more than 6 million private student loans.
👥 A tale of two stories… Navient said the decision represented a shift in focus to “areas outside of government student loan servicing.”
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Meanwhile, Richard Cordray, head of the Federal Student Aid office, said this month that student-loan companies are choosing to shut down rather than face increased oversight.
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Navient is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the federal government in 2017 over what it alleged was a pattern of misdeeds and mistakes hindering borrowers trying to repay their loans.
🏛️ Zoom out… Americans owe more than $1.7 trillion in student loans, nearly all of them federal, spread across 43+ million borrowers (who each owe an average of ~$37K).
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Congressional lawmakers have proposed several pieces of legislation to forgive federal student loans - ranging from $10K, $25K, and $50K per person - but none have come up for a vote so far this session.
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Prominent Democrats have also requested President Biden follow through on a campaign promise to cancel federal student loan debt via executive order (which may or may not be legal, depending on who you ask).
👁️ Looking ahead… Nearly all federal student loan borrowers have been skipping their payments since March 2020 thanks to a government-imposed moratorium in response to the pandemic – but that’s about to change.
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The Biden administration last month announced it will restart collection on Jan. 31.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🔬 Keep An Eye Out
 Image: Innovative Genomics Institute
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🎁 In a first-of-its-kind experiment, researchers used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to modify the DNA of individuals with a rare genetic eye condition and moderately improve their vision.
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This marks the first time scientists have injected the CRISPR sequences directly into cells that are still in the human body.
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Earlier experiments had removed cells from patients' bodies, edited them in the lab, and then infused the modified cells back into the patients.
👁 Looking ahead... The researchers’ findings could open the door to using CRISPR to treat other diseases where doctors can't take cells out of the body, including brain disorders such as Huntington's and muscle diseases like muscular dystrophy.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
🦁 Furry Friends Friday: The Simba Cam
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Images: Instagram
Most major sports games have a kiss cam – but have you heard of the Simba Cam ?
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It all started at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, which is known for its “Bark in the Park” games where fans can bring along their well-behaved dogs to root, root, root for the home team.
When the opening tune of Disney’s The Lion King starts to play over the speakers, pups – big and small alike – are lifted up by their owners hoping for a shot at the big screen.
The result is as adorable - and hilarious - as you’d expect.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
❓ Community Chest
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Which of the following is not a property from the original Monopoly game ?
A) Connecticut Avenue
B) Massachusetts Avenue
C) Vermont Avenue
D) Pennsylvania Avenue
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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🍩 Share The DONUT, Earn Rewards
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Simply:
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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B) Massachusetts Avenue
The properties in Monopoly standard editions were named after streets in Atlantic City, NJ.
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