Wednesday, January 8

BUSINESS

Dungeons & Dragons Licensing Fiasco — Content Creators And Corporations Clash
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BUSINESS, GAMING, IN OTHER NEWS

Dungeons & Dragons Licensing Fiasco — Content Creators And Corporations Clash

Content creators and corporations clash in Dungeons & Dragons licensing fiasco. The tabletop role-playing game community took a keen interest in intellectual property law in January when changes to the Dungeons & Dragons Open Game License (OGL) were leaked. The OGL is a public copyright licence that allows the general public — anyone from small companies to independent authors — to create content for Dungeons & Dragons under an approachable set of guidelines. Traditionally, creating content for an existing game means negotiating finances, creative freedom and content distribution with the game’s owner. While commonplace, these negotiations take time and can be challenging for smaller creators who don’t have the administrative knowledge or corporate reputation to get a deal do...
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How Interest Rates Helped Trigger Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse And What Central Bankers Should Do Next
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BUSINESS

How Interest Rates Helped Trigger Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse And What Central Bankers Should Do Next

Silicon Valley Bank: how interest rates helped trigger its collapse and what central bankers should do next. A former prime minister of Britain, Harold Wilson, is famous for remarking that a week is a long time in politics. But in the world of finance, it seems everything can change in just two days. Only 48 hours elapsed between a statement from US-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on March 8 that it was seeking to raise US$2.5 billion (£2 billion) to repair a hole in its balance sheet, and the announcement by US regulator the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that the bank had collapsed. At its peak in 2021, SVB was worth US$44 billion and managed over $200 billion in assets. America’s 16th largest deposit-taking institution just a week ago, it has now become the second biggest banki...
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A Finance Expert Explains The Impact Of Silicon Valley Bank Failure The Biggest US Lender To Fail Since 2008 Financial Crisis
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BUSINESS

A Finance Expert Explains The Impact Of Silicon Valley Bank Failure The Biggest US Lender To Fail Since 2008 Financial Crisis

Silicon Valley Bank biggest US lender to fail since 2008 financial crisis – a finance expert explains the impact. Silicon Valley Bank, which catered to the tech industry for three decades, collapsed on March 10, 2023, after the Santa Clara, California-based lender suffered from an old-fashioned bank run. State regulators seized the bank and made the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation its receiver. SVB, as it’s known, was the biggest U.S. lender to fail since the 2008 global financial crisis – and the second-biggest ever. We asked William Chittenden, associate professor of finance at Texas State University, to explain what happened and whether Americans should be worried about the safety of their financial system. Why did Silicon Valley Bank collapse so suddenly? The short answer is th...
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President Biden Wants To Raise The Tax On Stock Buybacks – A Controversial Use Of Corporate Capital – Why And What Are Stock Buybacks?
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BUSINESS, IN OTHER NEWS

President Biden Wants To Raise The Tax On Stock Buybacks – A Controversial Use Of Corporate Capital – Why And What Are Stock Buybacks?

Companies have been buying back their own stock at record levels – something President Joe Biden doesn’t care for. In his state of the union address, Biden said “corporations ought to do the right thing” and invest more of their profits in producing more goods and less in stock buybacks. To encourage them to do so, he proposed quadrupling the new tax on buybacks to 4%. But what are stock buybacks, and why do some people consider them to be a bad thing? We tapped D. Brian Blank, who studies company financial decision-making at Mississippi State University, to fill us in. 1. What are stock buybacks? Before we can answer that question, first we need to understand the basics of how stock works. Stock represents an ownership interest in a company, such that stockholders have a stake in the bu...
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Read This First Before Joining A Multi-Level Marketing Scheme Or MLM As Your Side Hustle
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BUSINESS, INFLUENCERS, VIDEO REELS

Read This First Before Joining A Multi-Level Marketing Scheme Or MLM As Your Side Hustle

Multi-level marketing (MLM) is a business model that relies on direct selling and consultants recruiting friends and relatives to also become consultants, salespeople or distributors. MLM salespeople sell products – such as beauty products, kitchenwares, essential oils or health supplements – directly to end-user retail consumers. These sales are made through relationship referrals, word-of-mouth marketing, and increasingly through social media. Billed as entrepreneurial self-employment, many people (mostly women) join MLMs to supplement their income or make some money while caring for kids. However, while MLMs promise financial independence, flexibility and work-life balance, it’s been widely reported by media and researchers that very few MLM sellers make any profit. To find out more, ...
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Two Economists Forecast What’s Ahead In 2023: A Possible Recession, Inflation, Unemployment, And The Housing Crisis
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BUSINESS, IN OTHER NEWS, VIDEO REELS

Two Economists Forecast What’s Ahead In 2023: A Possible Recession, Inflation, Unemployment, And The Housing Crisis

With the current U.S. inflation rate at 7.1%, interest rates rising and housing costs up, many Americans are wondering if a recession is looming. Two economists discussed that and more in a recent wide-ranging and exclusive interview for The Conversation. Brian Blank is a finance professor at Mississippi State University who specializes in the study of corporations and how they respond to economic downturns. Rodney Ramcharan is an economist at the University of Southern California who previously held posts with the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund. Both were interviewed by Bryan Keogh, deputy managing editor and senior editor of economy and business for The Conversation. Below are some highlights from the discussion. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity. B...
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How A ‘Gig’ Job’s Legal Definition Affects Workers’ Rights And Protections
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BUSINESS, IN OTHER NEWS

How A ‘Gig’ Job’s Legal Definition Affects Workers’ Rights And Protections

The “gig” economy has captured the attention of technology futurists, journalists, academics and policymakers. “Future of work” discussions tend toward two extremes: breathless excitement at the brave new world that provides greater flexibility, mobility and entrepreneurial energy, or dire accounts of its immiserating impacts on the workers who labor beneath the gig economy’s yoke. These widely diverging views may be partly due to the many definitions of what constitutes “gig work” and the resulting difficulties in measuring its prevalence. As an academic who has studied workplace laws for decades and ran the federal agency that enforces workplace protections during the Obama administration, I know the way we define, measure and treat gig workers under the law has significant consequence...
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Look At Atari And Bitcoin – Innovative Products Lead To A Boom In Imitation And Often A Bust
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BUSINESS

Look At Atari And Bitcoin – Innovative Products Lead To A Boom In Imitation And Often A Bust

Buried in a dusty landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, are more than 700,000 discarded Atari game cartridges, including E.T., the 1982 Atari game based on the blockbuster film. This bleak trove of artifacts symbolizes the video game crash of 1983, when consumer demand plummeted and companies like Atari literally dumped their cartridges in the trash. Why did the popularity of Atari video games rise exponentially only to collapse seemingly overnight? As soon as creative original Atari games like Centipede and Space Invaders hit store shelves, many, many imitations flooded the market. Lucrative ideas are often copied and replicated to capitalize on successes by the company that created the original, and by imitators. There are, for example, more than 20 movie sequels to Marvel’s “Avengers” a...
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A social media Expert Explains How The ‘Federated’ Network ‘Mastodon’ Works And Why It Won’t Be A New Twitter
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BUSINESS, IN OTHER NEWS

A social media Expert Explains How The ‘Federated’ Network ‘Mastodon’ Works And Why It Won’t Be A New Twitter

In the wake of Elon Musk’s noisy takeover of Twitter, people have been looking for alternatives to the increasingly toxic microblogging social media platform. Many of those fleeing or hedging their bets have turned to Mastodon, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of new users since Twitter’s acquisition. Like Twitter, Mastodon allows users to post, follow people and organizations, and like and repost others’ posts. But while Mastodon supports many of the same social networking features as Twitter, it is not a single platform. Instead, it’s a federation of independently operated, interconnected servers. Mastodon servers are based on open-source software developed by German nonprofit Mastodon gGmbH. The interconnected Mastodon servers, along with other servers that can “talk” to Mast...
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Mark Zuckerberg Can Sack 11,000 Workers But Shareholders Can’t Sack Him: It’s Called ‘Management Entrenchment’
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BUSINESS, POLITICS

Mark Zuckerberg Can Sack 11,000 Workers But Shareholders Can’t Sack Him: It’s Called ‘Management Entrenchment’

“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg told the 11,000 staff he sacked this week. But does he really? The retrenchment of about 13% of the workforce at Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, comes as Zuckerberg’s ambitions for a “metaverse” tank. The company’s net income in the third quarter of 2022 (July to September) was US$4.4 billion – less than half the US$9.2 billion it made in the same period in 2021. That’s due to a 5% decline in total revenue and a 20% increase in costs, as the Facebook creator invested in his idea of “an embodied internet – where, instead of just viewing content, you are in it” and readied for a post-COVID boom that never came. Since he changed the company’s name to Meta a year ago, its s...
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