A Retirement Maneuver More People Might Consider

It’s hard to hand over a big portion of your retirement savings when you’re old or getting there. Every fiber in your being shrieks “mistake.” And sometimes it is a mistake, as it was for Bob and Sandy Curtis, who forked out $840,000 in entrance fees for a continuing care retirement community that subsequently filed for bankruptcy.

Other times, though, writing a very big check is exactly the right thing to do for your long-term financial health. I’m referring to “Rothification,” a maneuver that costs a lot in taxes up front but raises your potential living standard in the long run. I wrote about it last year.

Rothification is the conversion of an ordinary individual retirement account or 401(k) into a Roth I.R.A. For simplicity I’ll stick with the case of converting an ordinary I.R.A. to a Roth I.R.A. from here on.

In an ordinary I.R.A., you put in money that hasn’t been taxed yet. (You can also put in money that has been taxed, but I’m going to ignore that complication.) Money in the I.R.A. grows tax-deferred. Later, when you withdraw money from the I.R.A. to cover retirement expenses, you pay taxes on the withdrawals as ordinary income. An ordinary I.R.A. can be a good deal if you expect to be in a lower tax bracket in retirement than during your working years — say, because you won’t have a lot of retirement savings to draw upon.

A Roth I.R.A., the mirror image, is stuffed with money that’s already been taxed. The money grows tax-free, and when you withdraw from it, you don’t have to pay any taxes on either the original contribution or any subsequent gains. It’s a great deal if your tax bracket in retirement is as high or higher than it was during your working years, as happens more often than many people expect. It can sometimes be a good bet even if you’re in a lower tax bracket in retirement: Because the withdrawals don’t count toward your taxable income, they help you avoid many years of income-related taxes on Social Security, lower your Medicare premiums and limit required minimum distributions from your ordinary 401(k) or I.R.A., which are taxed.

Now, back to writing that big check. The pain of a Roth conversion comes when the government demands its cut up front. The money you take out of an ordinary I.R.A. to fund the Roth I.R.A. looks like regular income to the Internal Revenue Service and is taxed as such. The maneuver may push you into a higher tax bracket — say from 22 percent to 24 percent, 32 percent, or even 35 percent.

Ouch. In financial planning, conventional wisdom says you should usually put off paying taxes as long as possible, and that you should even out your annual income so there’s never a year when you get pushed into a higher tax bracket. That would sometimes suggest stretching out a conversion to a Roth over many years or not doing it at all. That’s the answer you might get from a free online calculator, of which there are many.

In reality, though, the best move for a lot of people is to take the tax hit and convert a lot of money quickly, says Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University. “Go big or go home may be your best strategy,” he wrote in his newsletter Economic Matters in November.

Kotlikoff, whom I have quoted frequently, has a company, Economic Security Planning, whose software tool, MaxiFi Planner, uses economic principles rather than financial planning rules of thumb to help clients make decisions on Roth conversions, when to claim Social Security, how much life insurance to carry and other questions with big financial ramifications.

(MaxiFi is legit, by the way. Robert Merton, who has a Nobel for his work on derivatives, including the Black-Scholes-Merton options pricing formula, wrote in an email that he uses MaxiFi software in the asset management course he teaches at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management.)

Kotlikoff gives an example of a 65-year-old single retiree in Tennessee named John with $1.25 million in regular assets and an equal amount in an ordinary I.R.A. By converting about $1.1 million in his ordinary I.R.A. to a Roth I.R.A. over five years, John saves money on federal income taxes and extra Medicare premiums that are tied to income, allowing him to spend about $2,600 more per year through age 70 and about $11,600 more per year after that, according to MaxiFi’s calculations. John makes out even better if he also postpones claiming Social Security until age 70.

The hurdle for John is that the tax bill over the five years that he’s converting is nearly $300,000, versus a status quo tax bill of about $18,000. Many people are understandably hesitant to part with such a big sum, Rick Miller, a financial planner at Sensible Financial Planning and Management in Waltham, Mass., who uses Kotlikoff’s MaxiFi software with clients, told me.

“I can’t just tell a client, ‘MaxiFi says,’” Miller told me. “I have to walk them through the logic of why it comes up with that answer. It takes a lot of looking and thinking to figure out where that comes from. I have to look year by year at the outputs.” (...)

Everybody’s circumstances are different, of course, and accountants and lawyers need to be in on the decision. Don’t rely entirely on the output of free online calculators, which don’t take in enough data about you to be precise and may not use the most sophisticated calculation techniques.

I’m going to take off my personal finance hat now and say that I’m not a big fan of Roth conversions from the standpoint of public policy. They’re a back door that lets well-to-do people take advantage of a saving vehicle that was originally intended to help the working and middle classes prepare for retirement. Reflecting the original intent, the cap on the contribution to a Roth I.R.A. in 2025 is $7,000, or $8,000 for someone 50 and over, and joint filers’ modified adjusted gross income must be under $236,000 to make a full Roth I.R.A. contribution.

Those rules have lost their power because there’s no limit on who can do a Roth I.R.A. conversion, or how much they can convert. A conversion used to be restricted to people with adjusted gross income under $100,000 to stop higher-income folks from indirectly funding Roth I.R.A.s, but that limit ended in 2010.

Some pretty rich people have caught on that Roth I.R.A.s aren’t just for retirement. ProPublica, an investigative journalism organization, reported in 2021 that the venture capitalist Peter Thiel had $5 billion in his, and had used it as an active investment vehicle.

Last year, President Joe Biden proposed, to “ensure that the ultrawealthy cannot use these incentives to amass tax-free fortunes,” a measure that, according to the Department of Treasury, would generate nearly $24 billion in extra tax revenue over 10 years. It didn’t get anywhere, but it’s the kind of thing the Trump administration should be looking at as a way to shrink budget deficits. [ed. Maga-heads: do something useful for a change and suggest this. See what they think about budget deficits.]

So from the public policy standpoint, too many people are doing Roth conversions. From a personal finance standpoint, though, too few are. If you’re not one of those rare people who make gifts to the federal government (link here), then as long as the laws remain as they are, you should probably look into whether Rothification is right for you.

by Peter Coy, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sam Whitney/The New York Times; source images by CSA Images/Getty Images
[ed. I'm going to put on my blogger hat and say "no way in hell" would I pay $300,000 in taxes for more spending power in the future. However that future will play out. But that's just me.]

What Can Music Do Today?

30 months ago, I promised to publish my next book on Substack.

Today I fulfill that promise. Below I share the final chapter of my online book Music to Raise the Dead.

I’ve published the entire work in 22 installments. Each section can be read as a stand-alone essay. But taken together, they outline a secret musicology you can’t learn in music school. (...)

***

The music business wants to sell... entertainment. But the audience keeps reaching for something more.

That’s why musical events in the 21st century emulate those of ancient days to an uncanny degree. Even a high-tech genre such as EDM (electronic dance music) typically comes embedded in quasi-ritualistic events where otherworldly experiences and altered mind states are pursued with an intense fervor not much different from the mindset ancient Romans brought to their mystery cults.

These rituals might be known nowadays as raves or parties, but the actual behavior—and the quest for transcendence that drives it—is very much an extension of the ancient practices described in this book.

This mixture of music, ritual and transcendence keeps recurring for a very good reason. We still have much to learn about the impact music and rhythm have on the human brain, body chemistry, and physiology, but we know enough to grasp how powerful songs can be on a merely organic basis, without paying even the slightest attention to metaphysics or spirituality. And our body of knowledge is increasing rapidly—perhaps too fast for our music culture to adapt to what we’ve learned.

Just a few months ago, a team of scientists at Stanford University discovered a new way of producing out-of-body experiences in a test subject. Normally this requires ketamine or PCP (angel dust), which induce changes in brain cells associated with this altered mind state. But these Silicon Valley scientists found they could achieve something similar without any drugs—merely by using rhythm.

They began testing this with mice. But they needed to invent a special instrument that used light to control the rhythmic firing of brain cells. The results were remarkable. “We could see, right before our eyes, dissociation happening," remarked one of the researchers.

Could this work with humans too?

A severely epileptic patient, who had dissociative experiences, gave them the opportunity to test their hypothesis. When they emulated the rhythm that accompanied these interludes they found they could trigger an out-of-body experience. Somehow the rhythm could remove the linkage between mind and body, although only temporarily.

The scientists eventually concluded that the brains of mammals may possess this capability as part of its functioning, although few have found a way to tap into it.

This is a remarkable finding. But it merely reinforces the cumulative history and alternative musicology presented in these pages. We now are beginning to understand what happens inside the body of shamans in the midst of a ritual experience or of others in possession trances. We can measure changes in body chemistry among participants in a drum circle or vocalists engaged in group singing. We now understand the significance of surprising brain scan patterns in the MRIs of jazz musicians engaged in improvisations. All this new science confirms the old myths.

The body of research accumulates with increasing rapidity. And the results all testify to the empirical reality of the journey discussed here. Science, not superstition, validates the transformative power of music and rhythm.

Put simply: the quest is real, and song is the conductor—in a high tech digital age just as much as in a traditional society. I could fill up a book with summaries of research projects of this sort, but the problem at this stage isn’t a lack of scientific understanding, but rather the troubling fact that almost none of the key decision-makers driving our music culture have the slightest awareness of what we’ve learned here, or its potential impact.

We suffer not from mere ignorance, but from a mismatch between our expanding knowledge base and the narrowing parameters of a click-driven musical ecosystem.

Let’s take the simple question: How long should a song last? The music industry is convinced that a 3-minute song is the ideal duration for a hit record. But this is simply a legacy from the early days of recordings when the technology only had sufficient disk space for a song of that length. The limitations of the medium imposed that constraint, and the companies who ran the record business made a virtue of necessity. The 3-minute song became an artistic rule.

But have you ever noticed how people play their favorite song over and over—when it’s finished, they put it on again from the start? Have you noticed how DJs at a party seamlessly move from one song to another, without any silence in-between, often using two turntables (or digital tools with the same effect) to create a smooth transition from song to song? Have you been to a rock concert where the band plays their hit song for much longer than three minutes—with the audience responding viscerally and enthusiastically to the expansive time frame?

This isn’t coincidence or happenstance, but aligned with what both ritual and science tell us. In my research into music-driven trance, I’ve encountered again and again accounts that specify a duration of around ten minutes before an altered mind state is achieved.

I’ve seen this both in anthropological fieldwork and scientific research. Even a skilled participant needs time for music to work its magic—and three minutes is rarely sufficient. This is why listeners repeat songs or construct playlists, or why bands in concert play their songs longer. They all understand intuitively that the song needs to be longer than 180 seconds.

It’s only the people running the music business who haven’t figured this out.

And the industry has grown further out-of-touch with each new technological shift. Consider that the payout structure of streaming—now the major source of revenues in the music business—rewards artists who fill their albums with short songs. Tracks on Spotify count as streamed if someone listens for just thirty seconds. This arbitrary decision punishes artists who perform longer songs—but those are the songs that satisfy our deep-seated desire for longer, more immersive musical experiences.

There’s no surprise here: the music business runs on money, not the alpha and theta brain waves of trance-like experiences. When a choice needs to be made between the two, cash flow seals the deal.

It’s tempting to dismiss these considerations as irrelevant. After all, how many music fans really want to go into a trance or make a journey to another realm of existence? Mom would have told me to stay away from that crowd. That ain’t the way to have fun, son.

But on a purely theoretical level, this subject can’t be so easily dismissed—if only because it deals with the most profound philosophical mystery of them all, namely the bridge between mind and matter. This is the deepest rabbit hole of them all, and has bedeviled philosophers, psychologists, theologians, neuroscientists, and every other kind of thinker who peers into the biggest of big issues.

A recent theory, proposed by Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler, goes so far as to claim that consciousness is built on rhythm. “Synchronization, harmonization, vibrations, or simply resonance in its most general sense,” in their words, create our very sense of self—and I note with interest that these are all terms with musical associations.

They continue:

“All things in our universe are constantly in motion, in process. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at specific frequencies. So all things are actually processes. Resonance is a specific type of motion, characterized by synchronized oscillation between two states. An interesting phenomenon occurs when different vibrating processes come into proximity: they will often start vibrating together at the same frequency. They “sync up,” sometimes in ways that can seem mysterious….

Examining this phenomenon leads to potentially deep insights about the nature of consciousness in both the human/mammalian context but also at a deeper ontological level.”

In other words, rhythm may not be just the pace of reality, but reality itself.

The implications of this emerging perspective are too large for a book on musicology, no matter how ambitious. But one overarching fact is clear: music and rhythm have a power to transport us that may seem magical, but is as real as can be—perhaps even woven into the structure of the universe.

Are there limits to the musical journey? Is there a boundary beyond which it no longer operates? The title of this book even considers a trip outside the conventional demarcating lines separating life (as conventionally defined) and whatever exists outside it—in other words, music to raise the dead.

Is that legitimate, or even possible? (...)

Researchers increasingly validate and quantify these beliefs—proving music’s efficacy in improving endurance, lessening strain, and inspiring performance. And for a good reason. We now know that music impacts body chemistry, brainwaves, mood, heart rate, body temperature, grip strength, blood pressure, and many other parameters.

I offer these details on athletics as a single case study in how music empowers individuals who aspire to heroic achievements. But the same story could be told for a range of other disciplines.

• Most surgeons nowadays rely on song playlists during procedures, and believe it improves concentration and results.

• Computer programmers also rely on music while they write code, and many of them have enthusiastic stories to share about the benefits they have gained from working to musical accompaniment.

• Soldiers apparently need their music too—why else would government spending on military bands represent the single largest federal expenditure on arts and culture year after year?

• Or consider the case of astronauts, who invariably bring music with them on their missions, even to the surface of the moon. And when NASA sent its Voyager probe into the far reaches of the universe, the authorities decided to include a gold-plated copper recording featuring the songs of planet Earth.

You may wonder why extraterrestrials need to hear Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Goode” or Blind Willie Johnson’s slide guitar on “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” But music has been part of every heroic journey in the past, so it would be odd to leave it off this longest of strange trips.

I should perhaps apologize for focusing on glamorous professions, such as astronauts and brain surgeons. I do this for dramatic effect, and because these examples reveal the capacities of music to propel vocations of the most demanding sort. But the vision quest and its music are accessible to all, just as much to a cook or factory worker as to an Olympic athlete.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Ted Gioia

[ed. See also:

MUSIC TO RAISE THE DEAD: The Secret Origins of Musicology
Table of Contents
Prologue
Introduction: The Hero with a Thousand Songs
Why Is the Oldest Book in Europe a Work of Music Criticism? (Part 1) (Part 2)
What Do Conductors Really Do? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Is There a Science of Musical Transformation in Human Life? (Part 1) (Part 2)
What Did Robert Johnson Encounter at the Crossroads? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Where Did Musicology Come From? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Can Songs Actually Replace Philosophy? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Were the First Laws Sung? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Why Do Heroes Always Have Theme Songs? (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)
What Is Really Inside the Briefcase in Pulp Fiction? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Where Do Music Genres Come From?
Can Music Still Do All This Today?

The first ten chapters were about music history—revealing ways music has served as a change agent and source of enchantment in human life.

But the last chapter asks whether this still can happen today.

MousesHouses

Maggie Rudy, MousesHousess
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Victorio Edases, Mother Nature's Bounty Harvest
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Copyright Office: AI Copyright Debate Was Settled in 1965

The US Copyright Office issued AI guidance this week that declared no laws need to be clarified when it comes to protecting authorship rights of humans producing AI-assisted works.

"Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change," the Copyright Office said.

More than 10,000 commenters weighed in on the guidance, with some hoping to convince the Copyright Office to guarantee more protections for artists as AI technologies advance and the line between human- and AI-created works seems to increasingly blur.

But the Copyright Office insisted that the AI copyright debate was settled in 1965 after commercial computer technology started advancing quickly and "difficult questions of authorship" were first raised. That was the first time officials had to ponder how much involvement human creators had in works created using computers. (...)

The office further clarified that doesn't mean that works assisted by AI can never be copyrighted.

"Where AI merely assists an author in the creative process, its use does not change the copyrightability of the output," the Copyright Office said.

Following Kaminstein's advice, officials plan to continue reviewing AI disclosures and weighing, on a case-by-case basis, what parts of each work are AI-authored and which parts are human-authored. Any human-authored expressive element can be copyrighted, the office said, but any aspect of the work deemed to have been generated purely by AI cannot.

Prompting alone isn’t authorship, Copyright Office says

After doing some testing on whether the same exact prompt can generate widely varied outputs, even from the same AI tool, the Copyright Office further concluded that "prompts do not alone provide sufficient control" over outputs to allow creators to copyright purely AI-generated works based on highly intelligent or creative prompting. (...)

"The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectable ideas," the guidance said. "While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output." (...)

New guidance likely a big yawn for AI companies

For AI companies, the copyright guidance may mean very little. According to AI company Hugging Face's comments to the Copyright Office, no changes in the law were needed to ensure the US continued leading in AI innovation, because "very little to no innovation in generative AI is driven by the hope of obtaining copyright protection for model outputs." (...)

Although the Copyright Office suggested that this week's report might be the most highly anticipated, Jernite said that Hugging Face is eager to see the next report, which officials said would focus on "the legal implications of training AI models on copyrighted works, including licensing considerations and the allocation of any potential liability."

"As a platform that supports broader participation in AI, we see more value in distributing its benefits than in concentrating all control with a few large model providers," Jernite said. "We’re looking forward to the next part of the Copyright Office’s Report, particularly on training data, licensing, and liability, key questions especially for some types of output, like code."

by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Copilot; Copyright Office

[ed. So, upshot (as I understand it): there has to be some significant (whatever that means) human involvement in the production of a work to receive copyright protection (not sure if that applies to all or parts of the end product). Designing a special prompt is not considered significant human involvement.]

Deferred Culling Email to President Nyarlathotep’s Workforce

“The Trump administration is offering nearly all federal workers the opportunity to resign from their posts now and still retain full pay and benefits through Sept. 30.” — NPR

***

Nyarlathotep is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft. The character is a malign deity in the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared universe. ... described as a "tall, swarthy man" who resembles an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. In this story he wanders the Earth, seemingly gathering legions of followers, the narrator of the story among them, through his demonstrations of strange and seemingly magical instruments. These followers lose awareness of the world around them, and through the narrator's increasingly unreliable accounts, the reader gets an impression of the world's collapse. Fritz Leiber proposes three interpretations of the character based on this appearance: the universe's mockery of man's attempts to understand it; a negative view of the commercial world, represented by Nyarlathotep's self-promotion and contemptuous attitude; and man's self-destructive rationality. -- Wikipedia

***

During the first week of His Return, President Nyarlathotep issued a number of screeching carrion calls from Mount Blasphemy (formerly 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.) concerning the Cult of the Dread Lord. Among those directives, the President required that cultists return to in-person black masses at their local nexions, restored accountability for cults who retain mind-flaying authority, restored accountability for the few remaining Old Guard from the Days of Relative Sanity, and reformed the federal hiring process to focus on sadism. As a result of the above orders, the culling of the Cultists will be significant.

The Reformed Cult of the Dread Lord will be built around four pillars:

1. Return to in-person wailing. The substantial majority of cultists who have been gnashing their teeth remotely since Nylarlathotep’s first Pus Plague will be required to return to their physical nexions five days a week. Going forward, we also expect our physical orgy dens to undergo meaningless descents into abyssal putridity, potentially resulting in interdimensional relocations for a number of federal cultists.

2. Performance culture. The Cult of the Dread Lord should comprise the most hideously deranged monstrosities and daytime TV show hosts America has to offer. We will insist on cruelty at every level—our standards for madness will be updated to reward and promote those who exceed expectations and gruesomely punish those who do not meet the incomprehensible standards that the shrieking daemons of this wasteland have a right to demand.

3. More inchoate and heinous cultists. While a few hell planes and even branches of the Doom Brigade are likely to see increases in the size of their workforce, the majority of cult nexions are likely to be downsized through banishments, dismemberment, and brain liquidations. These actions are likely to include the use of psychic leeches and the reclassification to “nonexistence” status for a substantial number of cultists.

4. Enhanced standards of chaos. The Cult of the Dread Lord should be comprised of fiends who are totally lost, self-serving, reeking, and committed to annihilation. Cultists will be subject to enhanced standards of craven debasement and malcontent as we move forward. Cultists who engage in empathy or other false idols will be prioritized for appropriate inquisition and discipline, including [INCOMPREHENSIBLE SIGIL].

Each of the unholy pillars outlined above will be pursued in accordance with the Necronomicon, consistent with your nexion’s policies, and to the extent permitted under relevant blood pacts.

If you choose to remain in your current position, we thank you for your renewed focus on serving the indifferent Outer God to the best of your abilities and look forward to working together as part of an improved Cult of the Dread Lord. At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your tattered soul-husk, but should you be eliminated, you will be treated with ignominy and will be afforded [STILL SMOLDERING BURN MARK].

If you choose not to continue in your current role in the cult, we thank you for your service to your Dead God, and you will be provided with an unsummoning spell from the Gore Palace utilizing a deferred immolation program. This program begins effective January 29 and is available to all cultists until February 6. If you resign under this program, you will retain all blisters and boils regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person defilement requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your immolation for any reason). The details of this separation plan can be found in the accompanying crow’s skull.

Whichever path you choose, we all continue to sink into the abyssal void. May the Dread Lord continue to ignore your existence, lest this culling offer become the least of your worries.

by Andrew Paul, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Jens Heimdahl-Facebook : Art of Jens Heimdahl-Wikimedia Commons

Flying Manta

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[ed. Drone sightings in New Jersey continue...]

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What I Saw at the Streaming Revolution

Back in January 2020, Disney’s and Apple’s subscription platforms were just a few weeks old, Peacock and the Streamer Formerly Known as HBO Max did not yet exist, and there was a ton of mystery surrounding a soon-to-debut streamer that sounded like a joke — and yet somehow wasn’t. Five years on, while Quibi is no more, those four other services are still very much around, as is one other thing: Buffering, which published its very first edition five years ago this month. (...)

Since Buffering is only turning five and not 50, my bosses at Vulture politely passed on my pitch for a primetime special and a series of documentary specials about the early years of this newsletter. That said, they are allowing me to mark this milestone with a special edition focused on five of the biggest developments that have shaped streaming since 2020, what lessons can be taken from them, and some thoughts on what to expect in the years to come.

1. Netflix: Dominant then, dominant now

One of the lead stories in our debut edition revolved around Netflix racking up more Oscar nominations than any other studio or distributor for the first time. This was a huge deal back then, since it signaled the streamer would be able to reshape the film business in much the same way it had already transformed television. Five years later, what’s most remarkable to me is how — despite a few bumpy moments and the emergence of several strong competitors — Netflix still sets the pace in Hollywood. It’s the benchmark against which every other streamer is judged, and its successes (and failures) have resonated through so much of what we’ve covered here in Buffering.

For instance, when now co-CEO Ted Sarandos decided to push out his longtime deputy Cindy Holland in 2020, it was first and foremost a story about Netflix moving away from the premium, critic-friendly fare that marked its early years and toward its current status as the 21st-century equivalent of CBS in its Tiffany era: a mass broadcaster able to churn out everything from Mister Ed and The Beverly Hillbillies to The Twilight Zone and Harvest of Shame. But in retrospect, Holland’s ouster — and Netflix’s pivot — also look like the beginning of the end of streaming’s mini Golden Age, when the industry spent billions not just on content, but on getting the most audacious, star-studded, and not-even-really-TV-anymore programming that money could buy. Netflix pioneered the strategy of luring customers by trying to out-HBO HBO; its pivot to the center pushed most of the rest of the industry to follow.

We saw this pattern play out multiple times over the last five years, even when Netflix technically wasn’t the first to do something. The streamer decided to begin selling commercials a couple months after Disney+ announced it would do so, but it was Netflix’s entry into the space that felt like a sea change for subscription streaming. Ditto the industrywide crackdown on password sharing, or the trend toward ending even successful series after just three or four seasons. And even though Amazon has been airing Thursday Night Football games for a few years now, and Peacock has done playoff games and the Olympics, Netflix’s recent Christmas Day doubleheader still felt like an event. Netflix doesn’t innovate like it once did, but almost anything it does still makes the biggest splash.

Last week’s earnings report from the streamer underscores this point. Netflix said it added another 40 million–plus subscribers in 2024 — 19 million in the last three months of the year alone — and now boasts just over 300 million paid global customers, giving it a reach of more than a half-billion potential viewers. And while its peers are still mostly swimming in red ink or barely eking out tiny profits, Netflix has turned into a veritable ATM: Instead of losing a few billion dollars every year, as was still happening five years ago, the company is forecasting profits in excess of $40 billion in 2025. Adding subscribers, double-digit profit margins: “This is what winning looks like,” analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak of Pivotal Research Group wrote last week. This was true when Buffering first launched in 2020, of course, but that’s also the point: Despite the launch of several well-financed competitors, heavy spending from older tech rivals Amazon and Apple, and the usual laws of showbiz gravity, Netflix is still #winning. (And yes, that applies to Oscar nominations. It once again racked up the most noms of any individual studio.)

➼ Over the Next Five Years: Now that Netflix has gone from being seen as the cool future of TV to a generic word for TV, will brand affinity eventually start to suffer — not just among consumers but with the creatives Netflix relies on for programming? Or, as it has in the past, will Netflix continue to prove the doubters wrong?

2. Streaming became more like linear TV rather than the other way around

As the 2020s got underway, there was still a sense that digital, on-demand television was going to be a completely new medium, one very distinct from what we’d seen with traditional TV since the 1950s. Not only were there no channels or time slots, but the biggest streamers didn’t even bother with commercials, and compared to what we’d grown used to paying for cable, it was substantially cheaper. Well, the arc of the small-screen universe apparently isn’t that long, and in the case of streaming, it reverts to the mean.

The move of Disney+ to introduce an ad-supported tier (followed quickly by Netflix and Amazon Prime Video) was the most glaring example of this network-ification of the industry, but there were many others. For example, all of the upstart streamers launched over the last five or so years opted not to adopt Netflix’s binge release strategy for most of their new releases, thus preserving the linear tradition of doling out episodes of a show on a weekly basis. Instead of focusing almost entirely on expensive scripted programming, streamers started investing increasingly large portions of their budgets on live sports and events, less expensive reality shows, and true-crime docs. Rather than keeping prices low to attract (and keep) customers, platforms began implementing dramatic increases to their monthly subscription fees — while also cutting back on the number of new shows they green-lit and the size of their libraries of older TV shows and movies. Then, when those price hikes and content reductions started facing pushback from consumers, streamers took a page out of the old cable-TV playbook and began offering consumers discounted rates if they signed up for a bundle of services at the same time.

All of this was probably inevitable once legacy-media giants such as Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount Global jumped into the streaming pond. These are the companies that shaped the linear-TV business for decades; of course they were going to bring their old habits with them. But that’s not entirely a bad thing, as evidenced by how quickly streamers run by tech companies adapted so many of these ideas. Apple might be the company that once urged us to Think Different, but its Hollywood wing knew that a series like Ted Lasso needed the sort of word-of-mouth buzz that can only be built via launching a show with weekly episodes. Advertising is annoying, especially when you’re already paying for a subscription, and yet cable thrived for decades with exactly that combination of commercials and monthly fees. At least with streaming, there’s still the option to pay more for an ad-free experience and the ease of canceling for a few months if a streamer’s programming slate isn’t meeting your needs.

I get that for many consumers, all of this seems like a case of dumb, greedy TV execs pulling a fast one in order to jack up profits for shareholders. And to be sure, there’s plenty of dumb and no shortage of greed in Hollywood. But the fact is streamers came into the market significantly underpriced relative to how much programming they offered and compared to what cable was (and is) charging. Netflix racked up billions in red ink getting you hooked on its version of streaming nirvana, and the legacy-media companies also went deep into debt trying to compete in the early 2020s — and most are still losing money, or just now starting to turn the tiniest of profits. Those heady days when you could pay under $20 for Netflix and Hulu and get just about every show and movie you’d ever want to see, plus binge watch the latest season of Breaking Bad or Mad Men a few months after its finale? They were never gonna last, and it’s not because David Zaslav is a Trump-friendly wannabe mogul who seems to delight in annoying as many fandoms as possible. Streaming needed to become more like regular TV because it needed to become profitable, and if there’s one thing network and cable TV were good at, it was making money.

➼ Over the Next Five Years: Will audiences revolt if prices get too high or the volume of commercials on streaming reaches the same level as cable? Or will the seemingly inevitable consolidation of streaming platforms and bundling of services result in a sort of equilibrium where consumers feel like they’re not getting totally robbed?

by Josef Adalian, Buffering/Vulture | Read more:
Image: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Freevee, Ali Goldstein/Netflix), Apple TV+, Netflix
[ed. Revolt. See also: "The Infrastructure of the Recording Industry Is About to Fail” (HB).]

In Praise of Subspecies

Simon de Myle, Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat (1570)

via: In praise of subspecies (Aeon)

"Noah never reckoned with trinomials. Modern Creationists, grasping for footholds in the post-Darwinian world, maintain that Noah took 1,398 kinds of animal aboard his Ark, as the floodwaters gathered on the Mesopotamian plain. ‘Kind’, they argue, is a Biblical classification that corresponds to the modern ‘family’, and not, as you might imagine, to the modern concept of ‘species’. If Noah had accessed a modern taxonomic catalogue, he might have found himself with a cargo of up to 30,000 varieties of mammal, bird and reptile; if he had factored in the insects and arachnids, his Ark would soon have been foundering under the weight of about 1.1 million different species. (...)

Noah would no doubt, by this time, have been making frantic calculations about load distribution, ballast, stress and tipping balances, not to mention the logistics of food supply and waste disposal. What, he might have wondered, brushing an anole from his sleeve, is the point of all these subspecies?

He would not have been alone."

Snowbirds Scramble to Sell

Cesidia Cedrone has been soaking up the rays at her Florida condo every winter since 2011.

“Sunshine all the time. Don’t have to shovel snow. The beach, the sand ...” the Ontarian said from her second home in Hallandale Beach, halfway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

Last week, her retirement reverie came to an end as Cedrone and her husband signed the closing papers on their home sale.

“Things changed so drastically. The Canadian dollar is not at par with the U.S. dollar,” she said. “That was behind our major decision to sell.”

Other reasons played a role, too — higher insurance rates, taxes and condo fees. (...)

Insurance premiums have shot up in recent years because of more extreme weather, costing Cedrone more than US$16,000 a year — 10 times the rate when she first bought the property.

She also paid nearly US$4,000 in taxes versus US$1,500 a decade and a half ago.

Meanwhile, property upgrades required by stricter building codes meant residents had to cough up thousands more over the last few years, forcing the couple to remortgage their second home. (...)

Homeowners in that state now pay more than three times the national average to insure their properties, according to the Insurance Information Institute, making Florida the costliest home insurance state in the U.S.

Aside from the effect of climate change on premiums, there’s also the question of safety and a perpetual sense of precariousness in storm-prone regions.

“I ain’t going nowhere that’s got hurricanes,” said Laurie Lavine, an Arizona-based realtor whose clientele consists largely of Canadians.

A former Albertan, Lavine said most clients share his sentiments.

Nonetheless, he has observed a recent surge in listings from Canadians in his desert state recently. Again, expense is the bottom line.

“It’s costing them $20,000 a year just to have the property, between utilities and taxes and all the carrying costs of owning a property down here. They’re just not coming down as much as they want to because of the Canadian dollar,” he said.

Lavine said he’ll be handling eight listings — all Canadian-owned — in the next few weeks, twice his typical load.

by Christopher Reynolds, MSN |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Glut of New Houses for Sale in the South Is Bigger Even than during the Housing Bust. The Glut in the West Gets Close (WS):]

In the South – the largest region, with a population of 133 million, see map below – has the most inventory of new houses ever, surpassing even the astronomical levels on the eve of the Housing Bust, just before it all fell apart.

Since June 2024, new houses for sale in the South have surpassed the high of August 2006. In June, there were 293,000 new houses for sale (compared to 291,000 in August 2006). Since then, the inventory of new houses for sale has further ballooned and in October reached 304,000, and has remained in that range through December (301,000). Since December 2019, inventory has exploded by 76%. This is a massive amount of inventory of new houses for sale.

An Evening With Joe Pass

[ed. I met Joe one summer when I was working with the city Parks and Rec dept. setting up a mobile soundstage for outdoor concerts. We talked for maybe half an hour, and he was as nice and funny and down to earth as anyone you'd ever want to meet (cigar included) - an 'everyman' genius. I still remember cracking up when he told us about the many "fans" who'd invariably show up at his concerts wanting to give him lessons ("hey Joe, you ever try this chord?" - fingers splayed in weird patterns along their forearms, hahaha... For sure, don't miss the interview starting here at around 13:35]

What's In a Name?

Alaska lawmakers signal opposition to Denali name change in resolution (ADN)

Image: Bill Roth

[ed. Some anyway. Other's not so much. Here's one real profile in courage:]

Alaska’s two Republican U.S. senators — Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan — have already indicated they support keeping the name Denali.

Alaska’s lone U.S. House member Rep. Nick Begich, who has closely aligned himself with Trump, released a statement Monday in which he said the opposition from some House Republicans to the resolution indicated Alaskans were divided on the name.

“Recent polling has shown that Alaskans are split on this issue, and by today’s vote in Juneau, even members of the Alaska State Legislature are split on the issue,” Begich said. “While I understand the passion of this issue, my focus has been and will remain fixed on creating jobs and opportunity for future generations of Alaskans who, no doubt, will continue this debate long into the future.”

[ed. The sheer dumbness of all this (given other real-world problems) is headache inducing. But, as with all trolls, the best response is to just ignore them. So this is probably good advice:] 

***

“I don’t know a single person that likes the idea, and we’re pretty vocal about it,” King said. “Denali respects the Indigenous people that have been here and around Denali for tens of thousands of years.”

The mountain was named after McKinley when a prospector walked out of the Alaska wilderness in 1896, and the first news he heard was that the Republican had been nominated for president. (...)

McKinley served as president from 1897 until he was assassinated in 1901. He was an imperial colonialist who oversaw the expansion of the American empire with the occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Hawaii, pushed by business interests and Christian missionaries wanting to convert Indigenous peoples, Haycox said.

“Trump’s push to rescind the name Denali for the colonialist and white elitist McKinley is insulting to all Alaskans, especially to Alaska’s Native people, and should be soundly rejected,” Haycox said. (...)

Joe McAneney of Talkeetna worked as a summer raft-guide for two years before moving to Alaska full time in 2012. He’s now a pilot for an air taxi company, ferrying climbers and tourists to the mountain in a small airplane outfitted with skis to land at base camp, located on Kahiltna Glacier at 7,200 feet (2,194.6 meters) above sea level.

He knows once tourist season comes around, he will have to answer their questions of what he thinks about Trump changing the name. He knows what his answer will be.

“It’s always been Denali, and it always will be,” he said.

The executive order can instigate the name change, but compliance is another issue.

“The only people that are going to adhere to that are probably the people that would have been still calling it McKinley anyway,” McAneney said

Alaskans say Trump can change the name of Denali but can’t make people call it Mount McKinley (ADN)

Eva Cassidy

Tom Gauld, My Jetpack
via:

Gabrielle Garland (American, b. 1968) - Untitled 297, 2023

via:

How to Cover Stupidity (Including Our Own)

Journalists favor the serious and the certain. In an unserious, uncertain world, we must learn to embrace some difficult new topics. One particularly pressing issue: stupidity.

A number of European writers have tackled this subject in recent months. In Homo Cretinus, Olivier Postel-Vinay describes stupidity as a “mental polyp” that subtly encloses specific brain regions, impairing cognitive flexibility. This form of stupidity, he said in an interview, is not an occasional lapse or lack of knowledge but an “attack on intellectual integrity” that renders us incapable of exercising common sense.

 

“Our societies have never known such a high level of education, which obviously doesn’t prevent the development of stupidity,” he says. For Postel-Vinay, stupidity transcends ignorance because it operates even in highly informed individuals, who remain ensnared by rigid beliefs.

Such beliefs lead people to ignore contradictory information and select the evidence that supports their ideas. Postel-Vinay defines this confirmation bias as the polyp’s “tool of choice” because it perpetuates a self-reinforcing cycle of false beliefs that impedes intellectual development. Thus, he says, opinions become dogma in even the most intelligent individuals. Social media echo chambers only make the situation worse.

In his recent book Elogio dell’ignoranza e dell’errore (In Praise of Ignorance and Error), the Italian writer and former prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio distinguishes between two types of ignorance: unconscious ignorance and conscious ignorance. The former, he said in an interview, is particularly dangerous to democracy because it combines a lack of knowledge with the arrogant belief that one already knows enough. [ed. Dunning–Kruger effect]

“Unconscious ignorance undermines the foundations of democratic debate, trust in science, and respect for knowledge,” Carofiglio said, describing it as an attitude that poisons public discourse and fuels misinformation. On the other hand, he argues that we should embrace conscious ignorance—an intellectual humility that helps us recognize our own limitations while remaining receptive to the knowledge of others. This form of ignorance, like the Socratic “I know that I know nothing,” is the foundation of true competence.

By recognizing that others may hold truths beyond our understanding, we reduce the tendency for categorical statements that exacerbate division. “The truth each of us holds is, for the most part, a legitimate opinion,” Carofiglio explains. “And opinion pushes us to engage in dialogue with others, which is precisely the opposite of polarization.” (...)

Postel-Vinay notes that, from Europe at least, American society seems to be in the grip of a similar moment. Isaac Asimov once said that “there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.” Asimov argued that this ignorance is “nourished by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.”

by Sacha Biazzo, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Image: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
[ed. We've sure come a long way in my lifetime from Kennedy's "best and the brightest" to today's dumb and proudly obnoxious. Probably for a lot of reasons, some more relevant than others: 'smartphones; social media; a fractured media/news ecosystem; lack of reading and comprehension skills (and I would add, civics class instruction) and lately, just attention itself, which has been effectively weaponized for personal and political gain. Doesn't bode well for this country or for humanity's future (especially with AGI just around the corner, ready to outsource all our critical thinking skills). See also: Trump, Musk, and the Limits of Attention (CJR); and, Evangelicals Made a Bad Trade (Atlantic):]

***

"What is psychologically intriguing is how bracing and electrifying a figure Trump is to many evangelicals. It is as if his disinhibitions have become theirs. Parents who disapproved of their children saying “damn” are now enthralled by a man who says “motherfucker.” Those who championed modesty and purity culture celebrate a thrice-married serial adulterer who made hush-money payments to a porn star. Churchgoers who can recite parts of the Sermon on the Mount are inspired by a man who, on the day he announced his candidacy for reelection, promised vengeance against his perceived enemies. Christians who for decades warned about moral relativism are now moral relativists; those who said a decent society has to stand for truth have embraced countless lies and conspiracy theories. People who rage at “woke cancel culture” delight in threats to shut down those with whom they disagree. Men and women who once stood for law and order have given their allegiance to a felon who issues pardons to rioters who have assaulted police officers. (...)

But things get stranger still. A lot of evangelicals justify their embrace of Trump on biblical grounds. They insist that they are on God’s side, or perhaps that God is on their side. The more they are pulled into the MAGA movement, the more they tell themselves, and others, that they are being faithful disciples of Jesus, now more than ever, and the more furiously they attack those who don’t partake in the charade.

The cognitive dissonance caused by acting in ways that are fundamentally at odds with what they claimed to believe, and probably did believe, for most of their lives would simply be too painful to acknowledge. The mind has ways of minimizing such discomfort: We rationalize our conduct, justify ourselves, and trivialize the inconsistencies. The story that many evangelicals today tell one another is that they are devoted followers of Christ, fighting satanic forces that are determined to destroy everything they know and love, and willing to stand in the breach for the man called by God to make America great again."

How the FAA Is Keeping Flying Cars in Science Fiction

Flying cars would have been here decades ago if they were regulated differently.

Flying cars are used as a synecdoche for all of the 20th-century sci-fi dreams that never came true. But they shouldn’t be grouped with moon cities or Dyson spheres. Private, point-to-point aircraft as cheap as a Chevy Tahoe could have been available decades ago. We should have them by now and could have them soon with a few regulatory changes.

Many outright dismiss the idea of flying cars as impossible science fiction, but small, private, point-to-point aircraft are technologically possible and have been for nearly 100 years. Here is one prototype, the 1935 Pitcairn Autogiro, making a near-vertical landing on the National Mall while surrounded by a crowd and then driving to the Bureau of Air Commerce down the street. The fundamental physics and engineering of flying cars was not a constraint in the early 20th century, and it certainly isn’t now, as demonstrated by electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft like those made by Beta or Joby. (...)

Despite dozens of successful prototypes over the past 100 years, early momentum in mass-manufacturing, and clear demand for the aircraft, flying cars never materialized, and the private aviation industry in general cratered to levels of production as low as those in the first decades of the airplane’s invention.

This massive gap in small aircraft manufacturing needs explanation. Air traffic congestion, the higher skill floor of flying, and energy prices are real constraints that would have made it difficult for private aviation to grow as fast as automobiles did, but they can’t explain a modern rate of production that’s 30 times lower than what it was in the ’70s.

Extraordinarily strict regulations on aircraft by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are the clearest explanation for the absence of flying cars and the decline of aircraft manufacturing in general. There are thousands of pages of meticulous rules governing everything in the lifecycle of an aircraft, but some stand out as massive drivers of cost.

One is pilot training, where the FAA is a global outlier in requiring 1,500 instructor training hours compared to 250 in most other developed nations. Even the lower grades of pilot license can cost several tens of thousands of dollars. Another is the strict liability applied to aircraft. The national explosion of liability lawsuits in the US through the ’60s and ’70s hit aircraft manufacturers particularly hard. The industry’s liability insurance premiums increased by nearly ten times, from $24 million to $210 million, from 1978 to 1980. There are also strict requirements for maintenance approvals on all general aviation aircraft after every 100 hours of flight. The procedures required for this maintenance and the certifications required of the person maintaining it also comprise dozens of dense pages in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

There are many other costly and unnecessary regulations on aircraft that have surely slowed their development. But none of these can fully explain the failure of flying cars. The section of the CFR dedicated to safety requirements for cars is longer than that for general aviation aircraft, and those regulations are not less meticulous in general.

By far the costliest part of the FAA’s regulation is not any particular standard imposed on pilot training, liability, or aircraft safety, but a slight shift in the grammatical tense of all these rules. The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law.

The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA’s signoff, which can take more than a decade. This regulatory approach also makes the FAA far more risk-averse, since any problems with an aircraft after release are blamed on the FAA’s failure to catch them. With ex post enforcement, the companies that failed to follow the law would be blamed, and the FAA rewarded, for enforcing recall.

This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing.

In some ways, this is an optimistic message, since it illuminates an attractive political compromise: keep all of the safety standards on airplanes exactly as they are, but enforce these standards like they’re enforced with cars—i.e., through post-market surveillance, recall, and punishment. This small change would reinvigorate the general aviation industry, putting it back on the exponential trend upwards that it lost 50 years ago.

by Maxwell Tabarrok, Foundation For Economic Education |  Read more:

Image: Grok; Kamala I. Shetty and R. John Hansman

Contraception Begins At Erection

JACKSON, Miss. - A state senator in Mississippi has filed a bill entitled the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act.”

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

In a statement to WLBT News, Blackmon wrote, “All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are fifty percent of the equation.

This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.”

by WLBT Staff |  Read more:

Image: 123RF
[ed. Three strikes/$10,000. Guess that's one way to plug holes in the state budget.]

Clubbing in the Wild (With David Attenborough)

(David Attenborough Nature Documentary Parody) 

via:

Naples Botanical Gardens
Images: Deb Heebner

Ichiro Suzuki, The Warrior

Who left Ichiro off Hall of Fame ballot? You should know (but not for reason you think). (The Athletic)

Image: YouTube

To watch Ichiro Suzuki hit ’em where they weren’t for all those years was to have a front-row seat at the intersection of athleticism and artistry. Ichiro was Greg Louganis on the springboard in Seoul. He was Randy Moss extending his arms and collecting the deep ball. He was Bobby Orr going coast-to-coast and netting a short-handed, backhanded goal.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

And so when Ichiro’s name was called Tuesday night as the leadoff hitter in the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025, an opportunity presented itself for us to close our eyes and relive some of those magical days. Or, we could just look into Ichiro’s eyes during the live interview on MLB Network. It was all right there, in the eyes.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Memecoin Mania

Buyer's remorse? Maybe? Crypto Executives Fear Investor Backlash Over Trump Memecoins.

The memecoins launched by President Donald Trump and his wife days before his inauguration are damaging the industry’s reputation and risk a backlash from investors, crypto executives have warned.

$TRUMP was launched by the president on Friday evening in the US and was followed on Sunday by $MELANIA. The total nominal value of both tokens initially surged over the weekend, with the president’s reaching $14.5bn and Melania’s hitting nearly $3bn.

But they have since lost more than half of their value, leading to accusations of conflicts of interest and concerns that thousands of retail investors were sucked in to trading tokens even more volatile than bitcoin.

“Call me old fashioned but I think presidents should focus on running the country,” said Nic Carter, founding partner at crypto venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures and a Trump supporter.

“Not to mention the obvious [conflict of interest] given the fact that Trump can set crypto policy,” he added. (...)

Memecoins have no cash flow, business model or practical use underpinning their valuations. Their value is derived from their popularity, which is often as fleeting as the memes they represent. (...)

The Trumps’ coin launches come after the president lent his enthusiastic support for crypto during his election campaign. He promised a more industry-friendly regime for companies, after executives faced a regulatory crackdown under the Biden administration. (...)

“This meme coin represents the worst of crypto,” said Maxine Waters, Democrat congresswoman and member of the US House Financial Services Committee. “Trump has created a way to circumvent national security and anti-corruption laws, allowing interested parties to anonymously transfer money to him and his inner circle.”

“His economic interest is for sale,” said Oskar Åslund, chief strategy officer at AKJ, a crypto hedge fund brokerage. “There are no checks and balances here.” (...)

The world’s most popular memecoins are tokens that refer to viral internet moments and characters — such as Dogecoin, representing a Shibu Inu dog; Pepe, representing a comic green frog; and Fartcoin. (...)

Following Trump’s lead, Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit pastor who spoke during the president’s inauguration, announced the launch of his own memecoin later that day.

“I need you to do me a favour and go and get that coin in order for us to accomplish the vision that God has called us to do on earth,” he said in a video online. (...) [ed. hallelujah!]

In an apparent attempt to stave off potential lawsuits, terms listed on the Trump memecoin website state that users “agree that you will not bring, join or participate in any class action lawsuit as to any claim, dispute or controversy that you may have”.

by Nikou Asgari/Arjun Neil Alim/Stephen Morris, Financial Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. Lol. Priorities! I wasn't familiar with memecoins until today but got a good laugh anyway. I suspect the gullible will get hit over and over again until the well runs dry (if ever). Credit where credit is due though, they really hit the ground running. See also: Crypto Thought Trump Would Bring It Legitimacy. Then He Launched a Meme Coin. (Wall Street Journal):]

***

Meme coins are still the wild west of crypto, operating largely without regulation. Even the most ardent Trump supporters reached a breaking point when the $MELANIA token launched less than 48 hours after the rollout of her husband’s coin. (...)

After the stunning collapse of the FTX exchange in 2022, the crypto industry made big inroads in rebuilding its brand and reputation. It emerged as one of the biggest spenders of the election cycle by donating $170 million to a trio of super PACs to elect friendly lawmakers.

Some crypto enthusiasts questioned if the coins were a scam and if Trump’s accounts had been hacked. The mechanisms on the token reminded some of a rug pull, crypto parlance for a project that is launched and quickly abandoned, leaving investors with steep losses. (...)

The backlash over the Trump meme coins reached beyond the crypto industry. Michael Gayed, a portfolio manager and market analyst who publishes the Lead-Lag Report, posted criticism of the coin on X that drew support within the crypto community.

“There’s a general level of disgust,” said Gayed. “I do believe this puts into question some of Trump’s credibility when we have a president-elect enrich himself just before inauguration and make a mockery of an entire ecosystem.” [ed. Oh man, too much.. emphasis added for additional hilarity value!]