It’s already started:
“There is a wave of consolidation coming in tech and particularly software,” said Ryan Nolan, global co-head of software investment banking at Goldman Sachs. He said many of the approximately 1,000 unicorns — tech start-ups valued at more than $1bn — are “stuck without a clear path to liquidity”.
[FinancialTimes]
But this time by Ripple, not Elon Musk. (I now get a personal notification every time his vacations are interrupted.) Levine writes:
I am not sure that it is actually all that good for crypto in the long run. The message of this decision is that crypto companies can freely sell tokens to retail investors as long as those retail investors are uninformed and the companies are secretive about it; only if they sell tokens openly to sophisticated investors will they get in trouble. That’s bad.
[Bloomberg.com]
So today’s ruling — using the much-contested Howey test — may be appealed by both sides, says Ann Lipton.
What about future crypto cases? Well, the thing about crypto is, the facts are different in every case. Assuming the Ripple decision is followed in other cases, some would involve ongoing obligations of some kind between the issuer and the token holder, and in those cases, courts may be more likely to find there was an expectation of profit from the promoter’s efforts.
[lawprofessors.typepad.com]
Enjoyed this Bloomberg story about the possibility that we are all old and tired, sick of seeing each other’s bad posts, and hoping to touch grass:
In 2022, according to GWI’s latest report, daily time spent [online] fell by 13 minutes. It’s now six hours and 43 minutes a day, slightly lower than it was in 2017. The drop was the biggest since the company started tracking the topic and suggested, as GWI’s report put it, “that we’ve reached a kind of internet saturation point.”
I guess I’m not the only one who’s been seasoning their cast iron!
After the algorithm rings the alarm, a human team makes a choice. But the incentives for the financial institutions are skewed, according to The New York Times: it’s easier to close a customer’s account, even if they’ve done nothing wrong, than to risk penalties for bad transactions. That means a lot of innocent people are getting left in the lurch, with no access to their money.
[The New York Times]
Just one thing to keep in mind if you’re using Affirm or Klarna: their structure may not be to your benefit.
By making the service “pay in four,” allowing users to pay in four installments, the companies don’t have to abide by the Fair Lending Act, which mandates certain consumer protections. Most BNPL companies also only do negative reporting, Di Maggio said, meaning the only credit information they make public is when a customer misses a payment.
I mean, look at that lil face.
“When the surfer got the board back, there were bite marks on it.” Listen man, generally I feel that wildlife that has lost its fear of humans is a bad deal for everyone. However, in this specific case, I do want to see if the otter can actually hang ten.
The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka tried out an AI model fine-tuned and trained on his work:
No matter how many times I asked it to describe how I felt about being replaced, Robot Kyle always came to the conclusion that I would ultimately be happier as a result of my A.I. self. The program’s output reminded me of the fragility of language and original thought. As writers, we are all prone to falling into lazy patterns; avoiding them requires active effort. Robot Kyle is no different.
One hilarious possible outcome is that AI glurge makes real writers more expensive — but only, of course, if you care about quality. One more unsettling outcome is that you can train an AI to produce glurge in the style of a writer, ruining their reputation by mindlessly vomiting forth their prose tics.
[The New Yorker]