This tool helps you avoid going over your weekly and session Claude subscription limits with a monitor right in the MacOS menubar. It's like a battery indicator but for your Claude usage.
This is a fair point, but as of their most recent financials merchandise (excluding merchandise sold inside the parks) only made up $5bn of the $28bn in the "Parks, Experiences and Product" category. By contrast park admissions was $8bn, resorts was $6bn and food/merchandise sold in the parks was $6bn.
So IMO this is a departure from the classic merchandise based strategy. It seems pretty clear that the theme parks more so than the products are the major profit centers today.
It's interesting that Disney today almost the entire profits of the company come from the parks division (which also includes cruises, resorts and "experiences"). The media division by itself is in a massive war for eyeballs with tons of other streaming competitors, all of whom are probably over-investing in content relative to what consumers can support.
One interesting possibility is that maybe the business model of media companies in the 21st century will become content as a loss leader for the purpose of providing valuable IP to amusement parks. Certainly seems like a similar thing is happening with Comcast with their massive expansion of Universal parks.
> All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in.
The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.
Decentralized consensus is a fundamentally new computing primitive, similar to packet switched networks. Developing applications on top of new primitives is hard and long, and there will be a lot of time required just to build out usable infrastructure.
Turing complete smart contracts are only 7 years old. Layer 2 scaling is only two years old. Decentralized exchanges and other on-chain financial contracts about four years old.
I guess what exactly do you define as scamming? In terms of outright fraud, I agree there's a lot. It shouldn't be super surprising that scammers tend to prefer decentralized permissionless financial rails, for the same reason that political extremists and pornographers were some of the biggest earliest users of the decentralized permissionless publishing rails of the early Internet.
But I wouldn't characterize all, or even most of crypto as scams. Gambling, maybe. Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling. Which you might argue is a bad thing, and certainly is dubious from a social standpoint. But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.
Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.
Now you might argue that all of these things are stupid and pointless and wastes of money, but that's a separate debate. Of the large projects in these categories almost none are outright scams. They're teams experimenting with new ways to run financial markets or move payments or train models or hedge inflation. Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.
I think it's easy to be cynical. But one major reason I'm a believer in decentralized consensus is because I think it can make the silo'd financial systems of the world as seamlessly interoperable as the Internet made the silo'd telecommunication systems of the world.
It feels a lot like when AOL first started supporting email in 1993. It's easy to dismiss AOL and Nasdaq as highly centralized systems that don't align with the ethos of decentralization. But the other way to look at it is a previously maximally centralized system is interfacing with a decentralized one in a way that gives the users of the former slightly more freedom and the latter wider user base and legitimacy.
Generally I would expect a higher degree of security from an agency with a $2bn budget whose primary purpose is the integrity of communications about financial markets than an average person with a credit card.
Certainly you will admit at some size, responsibility and level of funding the organization should take responsibility for protecting itself from hacks. If the Department of Defense got hacked and nuclear secrets were leaked, I certainly hope people would get fired rather than sympathized with.
Bitcoin futures are correlated but nowhere near a 1:1 proxy for spot markets. Crypto markets are known for very steep "contango" in the curve, and it's not unusual for the price of the 30 days futures to be more than $1000 away from the current Bitcoin price.
The issue isn't just additional volatility and tracking error, but the fact that the con tango creates a "roll yield" which affects the long-term returns of the strategy. To keep constant maturity exposure, the futures ETF has to constantly "roll" its positions into further dated contracts. In particular because the market tends to be in contango it means further dated futures tend to be higher priced than near dated futures. So usually the futures ETFs in their daily rebalancing are selling cheap near dated contracts for more expensive longer dated contracts. Hence the roll yield tends to be negative. Then add all the transaction costs from daily rebalancing. It should be clear why the futures strategy has inferior returns to simply holding spot.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs truly are a game changer compared to futures ETFSs.
The price of BTC initially jumped 3% on the hacked tweet. That's $25bn+ of market cap. The irony is the SEC itself is probably now responsible for the largest crypto pump and dump in history.
The large majority of Americans live within 50 miles of where they grew up. And this number has been steadily ticking up. Geographic mobility is the lowest it’s ever been in the post war period.
> When I purchase a baseball card, I do not have the expectation that there is any additional value attached to the baseball card beyond what the collector's market will pay.
What about music royalties rights? Those are almost always purchased with expectation of profit. Those are even explicitly marketed on the basis of how big an artist is going to be. Yet the SEC does not consider them securities
There's literally nothing in existing law that identifies tangibility as a specific criteria for what constitutes a security and what constitutes a commodity. In fact both the CFTC and SEC are specifically on record as saying Bitcoin constitutes a commodity. And obviously Bitcoin is as intangible as it gets.
Any speculative profit you hope to make on buying a limited edition Rolex is entirely reliant on the business of Rolex continuing to market the brand of Rolex.
But if you don't have a formal contractual relationship with Rolex SA, then it's quite simply not an investment contract.
Should be noted this decision came from an Obama appointee judge in a fairly liberal district (SDNY). The Second Circuit is half Federalist Society judges, and six out of the nine SCOTUS justices have been on a consistent battle to roll back the power of the regulatory agencies. Pretty hard to see how the case becomes more favorable for the SEC on appeal.
The holder of a stock certificate has a formal legal contractual relationship with the corporation that issued the stock. The holder of a token does not have a contractual relationship with the entity that issued the token.
Now there's probably some silliness in the fact that if Alice creates a token and sells it to Bob, it's an investment contract, but if Alice creates a token sells it to Mark the middleman who then sells it to Bob it's not an investment contract and therefore not covered by the SEC. But this really comes down to how Federalist society wing of judges have changed Constitutional law.
Up until about 20 years ago, if Congress passed a law that wasn't very well defined or left a loophole open, courts were generally willing to consider the original intent of the lawmakers and interpret the law relative in a commonsense way even if it went against the specific language used by Congress. Federalist Society judges would argue that courts should generally only apply the law as it's actually written (i.e. an investment contract requires an actual legal contract). The argument is that Congress is around and still exists and perfectly free and able to update the existing laws if they're unhappy with the wording or oversight of previous legislation.
This is a fundamental disagreement in Constitutional law. Should courts use commonsense interpretation of the meaning of the laws or should Congress itself, as the actual elected representative, be responsible for updating laws and courts just enforce the plain meaning. It's also tinted by the fact that Congress today has become hopelessly gridlocked and obstructionist, and we're largely incapable of passing sweeping legislation. So generally if you're not a fan of big government or regulation, you're going to be biased towards one view and vice versa.
It only leads to housing prices rising (in the long-term), if NIMBY politics makes building new housing essentially illegal. There are plenty of examples of "boom towns" throughout history where prices may have rose initially, but didn't spiral out of control, and usually settled back to a reasonable baseline relative to wages.
Just because China does something to their citizens (denies them access to foreign tech products that they'd otherwise enjoy), doesn't mean its rational for the US to do the same same thing to its own citizens.
Consumers benefit from having access to a globally competitive array of products. Including tech products. I wish Chinese consumers could as well, but just because they don't doesn't mean that US consumers should also suffer.