Obama gives it the old college try, fails

1. The old college try fails The Obama administration is abandoning its plan to limit college savings accounts for rich families. [NYT / Jonathan Weisman] The accounts in question — known as 529s — provide a way to save for college without paying tax on earnings, kind of like a Roth IRA. [SEC] Obama's plan would have made the earnings taxable, albeit at a reduced rate. [CNN Money / Jeanne Sahadi] The 529 program overwhelmingly helps the rich: 80 percent of the benefits go to families making more than $150,000, and 70 percent go to families making over $200,000. [CBPP / Robert Greenstein] Obama wanted to consolidate a number of different tax benefits for college — including 529s — into one tax credit that's overall much more progressive. [Vox / Libby Nelson] The case for his proposal: "I generally don't think that our higher education policy should be geared toward helping families that earned $150,000 or more send their kid to the most expensive possible school." [Slate / Jordan Weissman] The case against: "States are developing innovative ways for all parents, including the very poor, to save for college in 529s." [Slate / Justin King] 2. Close Sesame Yahoo! is selling its percent stake in Alibaba, the massive Chinese e-commerce company. [NYT / Vindu Goel and Michael de la Merced] The company paid $1 billion for 40 percent of Alibaba in 2005 … [AP / Michael Liedtke] … but today its investment — now only 15 percent —  is worth an estimated $39.5 billion. [NYT / Vindu Goel and Michael de la Merced] By one estimate, without the Alibaba stake Yahoo! was worth negative $4 billion as of July. More than 100 percent of the company's value was bound in Alibaba. [NYT / Nicholas Carlson] Selling the Alibaba stake frees up a lot of capital that Yahoo! can direct elsewhere in order to (theoretically) make its core business actually valuable. Normally, a sale this big would lead to a nearly $14 billion tax bill, but Yahoo! will probably be able to evade that through various forms of financial chicanery. [NYT / Michael de la Merced] One way to avoid the big tax bill would have been for Yahoo! to just buy AOL but it seems like they're going to do something less fun than that. [Vox / Matt Yglesias] In case you have no idea what Alibaba is or why it's worth hundreds of billions of dollars, see Matt Yglesias's explainer here. [Vox / Matt Yglesias] 3. Drilling in the sea, but not for thee The Interior Department plans to allow drilling for oil off the coast of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, but ban it in parts of the Arctic. [Vox / Brad Plumer] The Natural Resources Defense Council isn't pleased: "Opening up part of the Atlantic to drilling could expose the entire Eastern Seaboard to the risks of a catastrophic blowout." [NYT / Coral Davenport] Given that the eco-systems of the Gulf coast still haven't recovered from the BP oil spill in 2010, a degree of concern about more offshore drilling is understandable. [Mother Jones / Tim McDonnell] Naturally, the US petroleum industry and Alaska's Congressional representatives are pissed about the limits on Arctic drilling and are giving the standard warnings about how this will cost jobs. [Washington Post / Jody Warrick] This quote from Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is illustrative: "We will do everything we can to push back against an administration that has taken a look at Alaska and decided it’s a ‘nice little snow globe up there and we’re going to keep it that way.’" 4. Misc. Welfare spending is supposed to hurt the economy. But what if it gives entrepreneurs the cushion they need to take big risks? [Bloomberg View / Noah Smith] One of the many struggles MTF trans people face: learning to talk like a woman. That's where voice coach Norma Garbo comes in. [The Atlantic / Shivam Saini] Getting rid of corporate personhood wouldn't limit corporate power. In fact, it'd make it much harder to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing. [Washington Monthly / Kent Greenfield] The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle once put the entire World Wide Web on a shipping container. It weighed 26,000 pounds. That's only like five pickup trucks. [New Yorker / Jill Lepore] Autodesk is known for software for designing buildings and machines. Now it's writing software for designing living beings. [Synbiobeta / Spencer Scott] There's a new Louis CK special out, if you're into that kind of thing. [Louis CK] 5. Verbatim "The one-note guitar riff that the Strokes supposedly stole from Petty’s'American Girl' in their breakthrough hit 'Last Nite' is the musical equivalent of carbon — an element of the universe, hardly something you can copyright." [Slate / Adam Ragusea] "The iOS App Store distributed $10 billion to developers in 2014, which, Deidu points out, is just about as much as Hollywood earned off US box office revenues the same year." [The Atlantic / Robinson Meyer] "Somebody tried to explain WhatsApp to me. Somebody else tried to explain Snapchat. I do not know about them, but it is absolutely clear that the terrorists and jihadists do." [Lord King of Bridgwater via Canada.com / Ishmael Daro] "One More Day felt like an erasure of what had been one of [Spider-Man's] more unintentionally bold endeavors—the attempt to allow a superhero to grow up, to be more than Peter Pan, to confront the tragic world as it was, to imagine life beyond what should have been." [The Atlantic / Ta-Nehisi Coates] "You are not going to get zombie-like numbers for a story about 200 units of low-income housing being built on the east side of the Saw Mill Expressway and the racial strife that ensues." [David Simon to Grantland / Amos Barshad] Read the latest Vox Sentences here!

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