BC BUSINESS
Saved by @SteveeRogerr

The early Disney company had several near-death experiences, some due to exogenous shocks and some self-inflicted (bad labor practices, weird technology choices), and all through it, a power struggle between "Roy people" (finance) and "Walt people" (tech/art).

1/

 After WWII, the company was transformed, with Roy ascendant and financial discipline the order of the day. Walt - who struggled with depression - sought desperately for an escape from the company.

2/
He came up with plans to outfit a train with traveling exhibits that he would drive around the country, putting thousands of miles between him and his brother.

3/
Another plan called for Walt to build an ambitious model train system and transform his role in the company to showing people around his trains.

4/
In 1953, Walt came up with the plan that stuck: a park called "Disneyland" that would be his own fiefdom, a commercial project that would justify the kinds of R&D and experimentation that Walt doted on and Roy looked on as high-risk, potentially ruinous follies.

5/
There was only one problem: Roy wouldn't authorize the company to bankroll it, so Walt had to fly to New York (far from his brother) to court the Wall Street banks and ask them to foot the bill.

6/
Walt worked with legendary artist Herb Ryman to create an eight-page prospectus with a gorgeous painting to accompany it, and had three copies typed up in the Disney company steno pool and he flew to New York with them.

7/
Only one copy of that prospectus exists today. In 2013, it changed hands at auction, with the winning bid going to noted asshole Glenn Beck, who offered no plans to allow study or exhibition of it.

8/
During that process, I came into possession of a high-resolution scan of that document. I made sure that the Imagineering archivist got a copy - they'd never seen it before - and deposited a long-term public archival copy with the @internetarchive.

https://t.co/7LQvTEh60D

9/
It's a strange and curious document, but one striking feature is that it conceptualizes Disneyland as a place you might go to not to ride any rides, but just to walk around and enjoy yourself, soaking in the atmosphere (and buy a tropical bird or fish) (no, really).

10/
Reading that, I thought of Walt, with his anxieties and his fraught relationship with his workers and brother, the factionalism that divided his company and his longing for escape, and that iconic photo of Walt strolling through an empty castle, looking perfectly at peace.

11/
From 1955-1982, Disneyland operated on a ticket system. You paid a low price for admission, and then paid for each ride using ticketbooks that rated the rides from A (boring) to E (main attraction) (the system ended due to competition from nearby Knott's Berry Farm).

12/
That low-priced admission ticket meant that locals could easily afford to slip away to Disneyland, stroll the park, maybe buy some junk food or watch a parade, and go home again.

13/
The advent of unlimited-ride admission created demand for annual passes, and discounts for kids and locals made DL into an after-school hangout. Early Disney message-boards raged with arguments over the Orange County goths who hung around Tomorrowland, smoking and glowering.

14/
Annual passes grew and grew. When I first moved to LA in 2006 for a Fulbright chair at USC, I used to teach my classes then drive to Disneyland with my cheap LA resident's pass. I'd park, get a Fastpass for Space Mountain, ride the Haunted Mansion.

15/
Then I'd write part of the novel I was working on in a quiet bench in New Orleans Square, ride Space Mountain once my Fastpass ripened, then I'd go home for dinner.

Annual Passes grew too successful, selling so well they crowded out vacationers on a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

16/
A series of price-hikes did not dampen Annual Pass sales. While repeated doublings of the price raised a lot of revenue, it also created a large cohort of troublesome customers who felt all that money entitled them to white-glove treatment.

17/
Then came a suite of baroque tiers and restrictions on passes, with blackout dates - which made people entitled, confused and cranky.

Then came the pandemic...and the end of the Annual Pass program altogether.

https://t.co/PrbdFsnS4U

18/
There's lots of reasons that killing the Annual Pass makes sense, but one that's not immediately obvious is that DL is a "happy place" for a lot of people who struggle with the world, like Walt did. Most of us just find a moment of peace in a quiet corner of the park.

19/
But some people exhibit pathological behavior. One family sewed their own Disneyland employee costumes and tried to entrap a ride attendant into an arranged marriage with their daughter!

Most of the problems generated by Annual Passholders aren't that extreme, of course.

20/
But even the smaller problems grow in significance by dint of repetition: the mildly troublesome customer who comes EVERY DAY and makes trouble can quickly grow more than mildly troublesome.

21/
I understand the logic of killing the passes. But I can't help think of Walt, wanting an escape from a bad situation that he'd made worse through his own screw-ups, and then, incredibly, actually pulling it off.

22/
A lot of us have been missing our various happy places since the lockdown, and Disney doubtless anticipates a massive rush when the vaccines have been distributed (they are tapped to be Southern California's largest distribution site).

23/
It feels like someone at Disney thought about just how intense and freaked out some of those returning Annual Passholders were likely to be and decided that the costs (for employees and other visitors) of coping with that outweighed the benefits.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

1/


* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

2/

* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

3/

Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

1/


Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

3/

But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

4/

Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

5/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

1/


Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

2/


Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

3/


Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

4/


(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

https://t.co/716iaXUXWR

1/


Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your

That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

3/

It's an investment that pays off. Back in July, @EFF documented how the @SFPD was able to commandeer 200 Ring cameras to produce surveillance data on #BLM

And in a new blockbuster report, EFF's @maassive and @mguariglia document how @LAPDHQ did the same thing, fraudulently using "unusual occurance" protocols to gain access to last summer's BLM
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The pandemic has afforded all of us a refresher course on the five stages of grief, a theoretical and controversial framework for describing how people cope with tragedy: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

https://t.co/nqPmjCvyab

1/


A far slower-moving unfolding of these stages can be seen in the reactions of the super-wealthy to the breakdown in neoliberal orthodoxy, the tale that says that inequality results from meritocracy, and makes us all better

Denial came out in the "rationalist" view: the world is better off than ever - richer, less violent, healthier, and any discontent you feel with your plummeting fortunes and the contracting possibilities for your kids is just your tunnel vision. Lack of perspective.

3/

But the Great Financial Crisis and Occupy triggered the anger of the elites: violent suppression of protests, the "Doom Boom" in new luxury bunkers, Howard Schultz's insistence that "billionaire" is a slur (he says we should call him a "person of wealth").

4/

The pandemic - and the "K-shaped recovery"- has revealed the existential threat inequality poses for our species, between price-gouging, fraud, profiteering, flouting health directives, and coercing the poor and vulnerable into risking their lives to keep the economy afloat.

5/
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PePe Le Q
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So while America was forced into a high percentage of unemployment, billionaires in America made 406 billion from their “essential” businesses.

I wonder how much came from the

Funny, this transfer of wealth from the poor citizens to the rich billionaires aided by lockdowns and tyrannical governors wasnt just isolated to America. Australia billionaires seemed to amass much wealth during a time record number of businesses
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SoFi was founded in 2011 by 4 students who met at Stanford

🎓 The goal was to decrease the student debt burden by giving out lower rates than federal standards

💸 SoFi’s rates ranged from 5.99% to 6.5%, undercutting federal and privates rates which ranged from 6.8% to 16%


By September 2012, SoFi was reported to have commit over $ 200m in loans

📈 This increased to $ 450m by April 2014 and its borrowers reportedly got on average $ 9,400 in savings by refinancing their

💸 Today, SoFi wants to help its customers with every “financial” step of their journey, providing:

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And $SOFI thus turned itself into a convenient, affordable, transparent and user-friendly financial platform


This means that SoFi’s wants to be a “one-stop-shop” for its users

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Carlos E. Perez
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@IntuitMachine
The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.

From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.

We cannot argue that there are benefits of scale associated with having more money. Also, high-frequency trading has shown the value of high-speed trading. So in an abstract sense, market manipulation can involve a kind of momentum play.

The objective of stock trading is to buy a financial instrument at a low price and sell it at a higher price. The purpose of a momentum play is to front-run the decision process of other traders such that one acquires the assets before a decision is made.
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@ReformedTrader That is a long post, but well written. Real estate is a claim on the future prosperity or ruin of a geographical location. Real estate intrinsic values is its ability to generate cash or similar costs to rent in that area. Intrinsic value is above zero in most cases.

Ironically enough, the location that benefits most from property ownership are places where rising living costs expand faster than rising middle income wages. Deflationary areas are hostile to property ownership as price is falling make collateral and borrowing difficult.

Homes are bought using leverage with agencies loan subsidies by the governments. As long as you have fixed rates, the costs of living expenses for your housing is set for 30 or 15 years which allow family to budget. Wealth can be accumulate over time as asset and income risen.

Time passed, real estate become detach from intrinsic values. Monthly mortgage rocket pass incomes and growth in the area. Quick money into real estate turn into a landmine. The 2007 fiasco could have been better or worst, but the free market is effectively dead as an ideology.

At the time, investors attack the institutional that vulnerable to the MBS and structured derivatives linked to real estate bubble risks. Since many financial institution owned the agencies MBS, defaulting on these security means downward spiral for M1 and M2 in developed nations
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Kyle Prinsloo
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The freelancing blueprint 🧵👇

Disclaimer:

Freelancing is NOT for everybody, but it is for everyone 😎

Just give freelancing an honest attempt for a year.

If you enjoy it - cool.

If you don't - cool.

At least you tried.

Freelancing starts with a SKILL.

1. Learn how to make a website (Web Design).
2. Learn how to get sales for a business (Digital Marketing).
3. Learn Web Design and Digital Marketing.

I'd recommend option 3.

You're offering a once-off and monthly service.

Win-win.

Where do you learn this skill?

YouTube, Google and Udemy.

Don't overcomplicate it.

How do you make money from this skill?

Marketing and Branding.

This will help you get clients.
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Triple straddle is one of the best and accurate methods for expiry day

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A #story from #Thiruvilayadal puranam- one of divine leelas of Bhagwan Shiva

#threadseries #madurai

Koodal Kaandam

Story 21 - it is about how stone elephant came to life and ate sugarcane - When Raja Abhisheka Pandyan met Ellam Valla Siddhar

கல்யானைக்கு கரும்பருத்திய படலம்


Raja Abhisheka Pandiyan went ahead to meet Ellam Valla Siddhar on the premises of the temple.On seeing the arrival of Raja, people surrounding Siddhar moved back. Abhisheka Pandiyan introduced himself to Siddhar &asked about his whereabouts.Also his purpose of visit to Madurai.

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Siddhar asked Raja if he has the capability &power to give anything that he asks for. Siddhar told King that he has power to do things even if he think of it.Siddhar asked King to ask whatever he wants & it would be provided, whatever these people had asked, they were granted.


Abhisheka Pandyan was shocked to receive such a reply from Siddhar,& he decided to test the power of this Siddhar. By that time, Raja saw a person in crowd having Sugarcane.

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Made by James Howard Kunstler

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He is NOT a fan of Trump which makes his predictions even more interesting.

1) The election is re-adjudicated, fraud subtracted from the tally, and President Trump is declared the winner.

2) The mail-in vote for the Georgia Senate seat runoff is disqualified as systematic fraud is revealed. Stacy Abrams is indicted for organizing the fraud.

3) A number of political celebrities, DC swamp rats, K-Street hustlers, media figures, and tech company executives are arrested and charged with serious crimes around election fraud.

4) The CIA is purged and reduced to a strictly analytical role for advising the executive.
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