Tag: business model
How Not to Buy a Timeshare
Very early in my first marriage—I’m talking four or five days—I lay on a lounge chair on the white, powdery sand of an island paradise and took stock of my problems. First off, in that short time I’d already managed to lose both a piece of precious heirloom jewelry that my new mother-in-law had given me and also my new husband’s lucky Mets cap, which I’d left at a bar one island over. He’d taken both of these losses
How the Vape Shops Won
The vape shops seem to be multiplying. You’ve almost certainly noticed them, if only because most are difficult to miss, decked as they tend to be in rainbow colors and neon signs. You might have emerged from pandemic isolation to find a new one next to your local smoothie shop, or maybe one has sprouted in a long-vacant storefront you always wished would turn into something you actually need.
The national trend line is strong: Since 2018, the number of
Is Crypto Dead? – The Atlantic
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed 13 charges against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, accusing it of mishandling customer funds and a litany of other white-collar crimes. It also charged Coinbase, a public company and the biggest U.S. crypto business, with failing to register as a broker-dealer.
The government actions did not move the price of bitcoin much, nor did they crater Coinbase stock; traders and investors had been expecting the enforcement actions for months.
The Doctor Who Helped Take Down FTX in His Spare Time
The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.
James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media, has gotten overlooked in the swift and spectacular collapse of FTX. On November 2, a report from the
Of Course Instant Groceries Don’t Work
More than 20 years ago, as the rubble of the dot-com boom was still smoking, Wired magazine published an autopsy of the grocery-delivery start-up Webvan. The company had just filed for bankruptcy after evaporating the better part of a billion dollars of investment funds in about a year and a half, and the tale of its downfall opens with a sentence that, in retrospect, is pretty funny: “In the sober days of 2001, it’s hard to imagine a time when
Professors Need the Power to Fire Diversity Bureaucrats
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One of the most closely watched free-speech battles in higher education reached its denouement recently at Georgetown University’s law school, where that foremost obsession of the American intelligentsia––a problematic tweet!––sparked a months-long investigation of a newly hired legal scholar who was supposed to run Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution. Ilya Shapiro’s inquisition revealed how diversity bureaucrats and other administrators, seizing
Elon Musk Is Right About Free Speech on Twitter
Elon Musk, in his effort to buy Twitter, signaled that under his ownership, the company would allow all speech that the First Amendment protects. “By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” he tweeted on April 26. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
Many commentators were quick to point out that, as a private company, Twitter is not required to follow the First Amendment, which applies only to federal and state governments.
Maria Ressa: ‘Where Is the Line Where Immoral Becomes Evil?’
Editor’s Note: In yesterday’s keynote at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Maria Ressa compared the impact of social media on our information ecosystem in recent years to that of an atom bomb: destructive, all-consuming, irreversible. Afterward, Ressa sat down with Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance to discuss Rappler, the news site she co-founded in the Philippines; press freedom; social-media platforms; and how journalists and audiences
When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z
So you’ve been scrolling through Facebook for a while—dull, dull, dull—when you hear the sound of tropical bird chatter. You glimpse a 20-something woman floating in a natural pool of water with her eyes closed, and then she starts to talk to you about her passion for “manifesting money” and how every little thing she’s ever wanted is now hers. What’s this? She’s looking out the window of an airplane, through the clouds at a mossy mountaintop; she’s scooping up