After a three-year long class-action lawsuit, the case accusing General Mills of falsely advertising its cereals as healthy when they contain high levels of sugar has been dismissed by a federal judge in California.
The judge noted there was no consensus on how much sugar is healthy (the FDA hasn’t updated their definition of the word since 1994 and also has no clear guidelines on how much sugar in a product is too much).
He further noted that “the actual ingredients were fully disclosed” on both the front and side panel of the company’s packaging and the plaintiffs therefore could not plausibly claim to be misled about the sugar content of their purchases.
Analysis and Comments
While the case was dismissed a few weeks ago, it’s still worth pointing out as it is not the only one of its kind; there are two similar lawsuits filed in 2016 against cereal makers involving the same law firm and some of the same plaintiffs which are still in play.
Another lawsuit against Post is still in court, claiming that their packaging is allegedly misleading as it states that honey is the primary sweetener when according to the plaintiffs the cereal gets most of its flavour from cane and beet sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, malted barley syrup, and molasses rather than honey.
This issue is unlikely to go away anytime soon (even though the ruling may speed up the closing of some of these cases), as breakfast cereals are a major source of free sugars in children. Sales volumes are likely to continue to go down because of the consumer backlash at their high sugar content.
Currently, in the majority of countries it is mandatory to have nutritional information for food and most drinks. However, the problem is that for the average consumer the data is meaningless because of its complexity. In the long term, we think that there is a strong possibility that graphic health warnings and traffic light labelling could be used for high-fat sugar and salty (HFSS) food and drinks.
Bitcoin (BTC) adoption by institutions has gone from a myth to fact in the past year, the CEO of major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has said.
‘We know the answer’ about adoption: Armstrong
Speaking on Twitter Aug. 16, Brian Armstrong said that 2019 had formed the year of reckoning for institutional Bitcoin uptake, with the trend now obvious. He wrote:
“Whether institutions were going to adopt crypto or not was an open question about 12 months ago. I think it’s safe to say we now know the answer. We’re seeing $200-400M a week in new crypto deposits come in from institutional customers.”
Coinbase becomes world’s largest crypto custodian
Armstrong made the comments hours after Coinbase confirmed its acquisition of the international operations of storage giant Xapo. The move, as Cointelegraph reported, put Coinbase top of the institutional manager list for crypto with $7 billion of assets under custody.
Steemit, a blockchain project that focuses on monetizing social media sites, has given details of a coming code upgrade that will usher in big economic changes.
Announced on Wednesday, the steem blockchain will undergo its 21st hard fork on Aug. 27 – one that will build in a new Worker Proposal System aimed to allow the blockchain to “fund its own development.”
The new system – set up as a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO – will allow Steem users to publicly propose work they are willing to do in return for payment in the project’s native cryptocurrency, steem dollars (SBD). The Steem.DAO will provide a way for the platform’s users to vote on proposals, weighted by their stake in the platform.
QuadrigaCX’s former users are running out of patience with Miller Thomson and EY, the court-appointed companies tasked with recovering their missing funds.
The users want more transparency into EY’s investigation of Quadriga’s missing funds, as well as a better understanding of how the audit firm accidentally lost 103 bitcoin earlier this year.
Some users are contemplating finding new legal representation due to their frustrations with Miller Thomson. Ripple has until mid-September to file its response.
Changpeng Zhao, CEO of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has predicted that Binance will resume crypto-to-fiat operations in the United States within the next two months.
Navigating U.S. regulation
Zhao, also known as CZ within the crypto community, made his prediction in an interview with online news outlet Cheddar published Aug. 15. When asked about Binance’s return to operations in the U.S., Zhao said:
“I don’t want to promise any fixed dates, but there’s a lot of work being done and there’s a lot of things going on in flux, but I would say in a month or two.”
“The team is set to host their first live AMA on 17th August to answer all your questions!”
STEEM Trading Update by my friend @cryptopassion
Here is the chart of yersterday :
Here is the current chart :
So the support line created by the previous low has been broken and as predicted, the drop has continued on the STEEM. We have no real support now at these levels. We are having currently at little bounce but if we cannot go higher than the line that we just broke, I expect that it is just a pull back before the drop continuation.
Rocket League, a highly successful live-service video game (PC/console) debuted in 2015 is still very popular, ranking in the top 10 most played games on gaming distribution platform Steam.
Its developer, Psyonix, was recently acquired by Epic Gamesand is now dropping the lootbox-style crate system it used to generate revenues from its player base.
Psyonix has already shifted the main focus of its monetisation strategy over to premium progression passes (so-called Battle Passes), which have been very lucrative for Epic Games.
Analysis and Comments
Lootboxes and micro transactions have long been popular monetisation techniques in mobile games, but it is only more recently that the big-budget games from AAA studios have been introducing them as well.
The main reason we are highlighting this story is because it showcases the subsequent shift away from monetisation techniques based on randomized item rewards (in premium games), as they have received a lot of attention and criticism in the near past – and come with a looming regularity overhang.
Battle Passes, on the other hand, are a tried and proven method to generate revenue from a game’s player base (and importantly not hated by gamers, unlike the “surprise mechanics” of lootboxes).
There are many successful examples of companies using this technique (including Epic Games & Riot), with perhaps one of the best ones being Valve’s annual Battle Pass sale for the esports World Championship of its game Dota 2: the game’s prize pool is almost entirely crowdfunded via the Battle Passes, and while only 25% of the in-game sales actually go towards the prize pool, the total prize pool currently amounts to more than US$32m, with 18 days left until the crowdfunding ends.
Notably, the Battle Pass-funded prize pool has consistently broken its own recordevery year, with this year’sofficially being the largest single-event prize pool in esports history.
Tencent’s Share price (majority shareholder of EPIC Games)
Amidst a decline in the price of bitcoin, the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency could find support at $7,500 – that is if it follows past patterns on the charts.
Bitcoin has faced selling pressure over the last few days, despite an impending golden crossover on the three-day chart – a bullish crossover of the 50- and 200-candle moving averages, as discussed last week. As of writing, the 50-candle moving average (MA) is on an upward trajectory and looks set to cross above the 200-candle MA in the next few days.
It is worth noting, however, that a similar golden crossover on the three-day chart was observed in early February 2016, when a bitcoin bull market was then in its nascent stages.
The Japanese government is attempting to spearhead the creation of a new, global cryptocurrency payments network that would be similar to SWIFT.
Replace SWIFT with a global crypto payments network?
Citing an anonymous source, a Reuters report published on July 18 claimed that the country’s push for the network is motivated by a resolve to combat money laundering more effectively.
While plans are being kept firmly under wraps, the source alleged that Tokyo hopes to have the network established within the next few years.
Cuban expat Claudia Rodriguez of the Brazilian startup Fusyona, the sole bitcoin exchange proactively serving Cubans, told CoinDesk the exchange has nearly 700 accounts since launching in 2018. She said up to 60 users purchase a total of one or two bitcoins every week.
U.S. lawmakers repeatedly pressed Facebook’s top blockchain executive to halt development of the Libra cryptocurrency during a contentious hearing on the project Wednesday.
They didn’t get far.
David Marcus, the CEO of Facebook’s subsidiary Calibra, reiterated his promise that Libra would not launch until regulators’ concerns were fully addressed. But he stopped short of committing to freezing technical work on the project, much to the chagrin of House Financial Services Committee members.
The committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), had previously called for a moratorium, and it was one of the first things she brought up in the hearing, asking the Facebook executive:
“Will you stop dancing around this question and commit here in this committee … to a moratorium until Congress enacts an appropriate legal framework to ensure that Libra and Calibra do what you claim it will do?”
Jamie Dimon, CEO of global financial services firm JPMorgan Chase, argued that Facebook’s cryptocurrency project Libra does not pose a threat in the foreseeable future.
As reported by CNBC, Dimon delivered his comments during a conference call with analysts on Tuesday, July 16. Dimon said that he would not spend too much time on Libra, specifying that “to put it in perspective, we have been talking about blockchain for seven years and very little has happened. We are going to be talking about Libra three years from now.”
Dimon continued saying that any new effort will have to comply with the industry’s Anti-Money Laundering provisions.
Bitcoin Suisse, a crypto-broker and pioneer of Switzerland’s “Crypto Valley,” has taken anticipatory steps to comply with a “maturing” regulatory environment.
The firm announced on Tuesday that it has applied for a banking license with Swiss Financial Markets Supervision Authority (FINMA), as well as a security dealer’s license, mandated by the Stock Exchange and Securities Trading Act (SESTA). In the past, financial authorities at the Swiss Federal Council said blockchain and distributed ledger technology will be governed by existing regulatory schemes.
However, a Suisse company representative said:
“We believe that in the long-term, more regulation will follow, as soon as the legislation catches up with the technological developments of the space. We believe that within this new regulatory environment, companies without the necessary licenses will have a limited ability to serve clients with the full spectrum of high quality, innovative crypto-financial products and solutions.”
“Sia will be hosting its congressional hearing..oops..#AMA tomorrow, July 18th from 12 pm EST on @reddit and twitter!”
STEEM Trading Update by my friend @cryptopassion
Here is the chart of yesterday :
Here is the current chart :
We are currently consolidating just upper the major resistance line at 0.24$ while the BTC is having a very nice bounce. It is becoming hard for all the altcoins and STEEM is not better than other and is sometimes even worst. What to say, we have to wait for better days, the market doesn’t really care currently for the altcoin market and I really don’t know how many time it will last like that. Courage and perhaps focus on the BTC if you want do short term trades.
Today I had a busy day at the office…nothing new thought since working on technological projects projects has always crazy overloading days difficult to forecast in advance.
Actually, I used to work mostly of the time under unpredicted scenarios and that, as I said, it is not a surprising new…
The new is that I have been checking my feed at steemit and partiko whenever I could, I mean, as usual, at the coffee break, at lunch, on my way to different places etc… and today I noticed something that did not happen to me since long time ago…
My Voting Power reached 100%… actually, and sorry if I missed something interesting posted by the people I follow, I have not found any article that attracted me minimally to give my upvote and that is really weird! I am a consistent upvoter, or at least that’s how I consider I am myself…but I like to upvote some good stuff as well which, honestly I miss nowadays…
I don’t know what is happening here but I really think that not only the quality of the posts are decreasing but also the amount of posts is also doing so… even if it seems we are escaping from the BEAR’s claws, it looks like people are not so motivated to write about interesting things or even normal life topics or projects…
Very difficult to find usual steemians writing these days, even more difficult to find new ones…
…or perhaps it is only my subjective perception…. I don’t know…
We are starting the Easter weekend called “Semana Santa” in Mexico and both of my Airbnb units are full of people. It’s wonderful to meet new people, yes, it can be very stressing and the work accumulates. Only this past week we have hosted seven groups and it can turn very demanding if you host one group after another.
At the moment Gris and I are in charge of the cleaning, my mom also helps if she has time and my dad is in charge of cleaning the pool. We are doing very good and winning extra money definitely is worth the extra effort. In the near future we would like to hire a person that can help us with the cleaning, that would be great we would only be in charge of the administration.
Today we welcomed to groups that will stay until Sunday. Next week we have three groups confirmed and that will make April a wonderful month. We are winning more money that the one we would win if we were renting the house on the traditional way, almost the double.
Let me share some photos of the Bungalow we are renting:
We are enjoying this Airbnb adventure, it’s not something that I would like to do all my life and Steem is my main project but at the moment this activity is paying us more and it’s a great way to save money to invest it on Steem Power.
And yes! finally, with the help of the excellent developers of the SCRIPSIO team seems that from now on I can post my thoughts using this site.
I am still setting up my account but it seems quite easy and straightforward for the moment.
Really surprised for what it seems to be a good user friendly environment for bloggers willing to use a more advanced features for writing, editing, posting and spreading your blog not only at the Steem blockchain but also at other platforms as twitter.
Disney is rocketing forward this morning on news about a new streaming service that will be offered. Disney was always in a great position owning ESPN if they would ever put their politics aside and move forward with advancing their company! Well it looks like we may have found this answer. I have had this measured move mapped out for multiple weeks now, if not months (disclaimer: I have not touched these lines). Take a look…
DIS has traveled out of the financial crisis and pullback in 2011 from 20…to 100-110ish. With this FOUR AND A HALF YEAR BASE of consolidation
Look, i love the ability to see my Steem Monsters/Drug Wars ROI so easily. Imo, its a great tool. I used to keep my own record manually before “bookkeeping” came along but i was nowhere as precise so when this tool came along i was super happy with it.
And kudos to its creator @holger80.
But the tool has a problem. Because its so useful, folks keep on calling up the tool constantly and flooding up comment sections.
When i use the tool i try and call it up in one of my old payed out posts. Problem is that many people just dont care and spam any post related to the game they are pulling up the stats for. I could use MUTE on “bookkeeping” but that would stop me from using it. Theres another thing as well….
Do we really want to fill up the chain with information like this? Theres literally hundreds of calls per post. Take a look at the @drugwars posts and you will see that almost half the comments are from bookkeeping.
What i propose is that you move bookkeeping from STEEM offchain.
@holger80 ill ping you again. Could you go talk to guys like @steemchiller, @dragosroua, @penguinpablo and move the tool to “Steem World”,”Steem Supply” or “Steem Now”, if thats possible, and shut down the service onchain? Or maybe build a front end yourself.
I just think its a bad idea letting this go on. Thats all…..
