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PrizePicks launches ‘The Feed’ to bolster fantasy sports app

admin — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:59:03 +0000

PrizePicks, the daily fantasy sports site, is launching a new slate of features for its app. The company says that it’ll “evolve how fans engage” with the community, friends, and “celebrities,” all while watching sports. It’ll take the form of “The Feed,” a take on the usual social media feeds that provides methods of communicating with others on the app.

The elevator pitch is to bring “debates out of the group chat.” PrizePicks will be following tactics that other social media, gaming, and app-based companies are following to try to increase engagement with the app to drive new business. If users stick with the app by integrating social tech, it could push them to pay for certain features on the app.

This will be joined by player profiles, which the company unveiled recently. It shows lifetime stats, and others can now find users through the app. The Feed will then bring these to the attention of users who then follow those profiles.

Share Lineups with friends or to socials from the feed pic.twitter.com/cMmSDpnxJF

— PrizePicks (@PrizePicks) September 3, 2025

As it’s a fantasy sports app, users will now be able to react or copy the lineups that their followed accounts use. Players will also now be able to share their PrizePicks lineup through a link, and an insistence on bringing “friends along for the ride.”

This type of feature was introduced to DraftKings in the last few years, but hasn’t been at the forefront of the app’s business. The idea is the same, however, to bring the betting conversation out of other apps and into the business itself.

In August, PrizePicks ran a campaign to promote the new season of fantasy football, featuring different celebrities, like Druski and Marshawn Lynch. It also recently gained CFTC approval after lottery-led gaming entertainment company Allwyn International AG acquired a majority stake in PrizePicks, approximately 62.3%.

Featured image: PrizePicks

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New Study Could Bolster Climate Laws to Make Polluters Pay

admin — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 01:50:26 +0000

In 2023, the Winooski River in Vermont spilled its banks, kissing the green truss bridge that spanned it. River water poured onto the marble floors of the State House. Up to nine inches of rain fell within 48 hours, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

A year later, Vermont enacted the Climate Change Superfund Act, which holds oil and gas companies financially responsible for climate damage in the state. Similar legislation passed in New York in 2024 and is pending in California, Maryland, and Massachusetts.

Underpinning the laws is attribution science, which models huge numbers of scenarios using global temperature data to determine the likelihood that extreme weather events like floods or heat waves are related to emissions from burning oil, gas and coal.

A new paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature expands this type of work to link the emissions from specific emitters to the economic burden of extreme events.

“The oil industry is alarmed by state climate superfund laws and their growing popularity because they are the first policies adopted anywhere in the world that make climate polluters pay a fair share of the enormous damage their products have caused,” said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, the New York-based charitable foundation that helped created the climate superfund law.

Reaction to the laws was swift. In February, West Virginia and other Republican-led states sued to block New York’s law, saying that only the federal government could regulate emissions. President Trump signed an executive order this month calling the state laws “burdensome and ideologically motivated” and asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to block their enforcement.

For decades, environmental lawyers have been considering how to attribute the harm from greenhouse gas emissions, according to Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center.

“Attribution science is incredibly important because it draws a link between specific activities from a company profiting from fossil fuels and specific harms to states and communities,” Mr. Lockman said. “If you cause harm you should be responsible for cleaning it up, it’s as simple as that.”

The new study refines an approach known as “end-to-end” attribution, which links one particular emitter (a company, for instance) to one particular climate-related impact (extreme heat, for example) to a specific damage (a downturn in the global economy).

The study found that Chevron’s emissions had caused up to $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses to global gross domestic product. Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral earth scientist at Stanford University and an author of the study, said such a high cost was still a gross underestimate of the global impact of burning fossil fuels, especially in poorer, tropical regions that are least responsible for emissions.

“That staggering figure represents damages from just one climate impact,” said Delta Merner, associate director of the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The total harm attributable to major emitters is undoubtedly far greater when the full range of climate hazards is taken into account.”

Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., a lawyer for the Chevron Corporation said the Nature article “ignores the scientific impossibility of attributing particular climate and weather events to any specific country, company, or energy user. It is part of a misleading advocacy campaign on behalf of wasteful and unconstitutional state lawsuits and energy penalty laws.”

Overall, the paper found that the world would be $28 trillion richer were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from 111 major carbon producers between 1991 and 2020.

Since 2017, more than 100 climate-related lawsuits have been filed each year, according to the new study. But the attribution studies those cases relied on often failed to link emissions to estimated economic damages.

This new framework could provide a function similar to other big damage and loss cases, like holding tobacco companies responsible for lung cancer cases or pharmaceutical companies for opiate addiction.

“Legal scholars have called this kind of attribution the holy grail of climate liability,” said Justin Mankin, a geography professor focused on climate science at Dartmouth College and an author of the Nature paper.

World Weather Attribution, a group run out of Imperial College London, has regularly issued attribution reports over the past decade.

“Sadly we’re still the only ones who really do this, and we’re not an institution, it’s basically a project I do as a university professor working with a team of people,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist who helps to lead World Weather Attribution.

Dr. Callahan and Dr. Mankin used open source tools for their models, and they have made the code and data sources they used to compile the global costs of climate change publicly available on their websites.

“We believe in openly transparent science, especially since the work was paid for by U.S. taxpayers,” said Dr. Mankin, noting that much of the support for the research was financed by the National Science Foundation and NOAA, two of the nation’s largest climate science agencies that have been targeted for funding cuts under the Trump administration.

Extreme weather events continue disrupt communities and strain finances. The 2023 flooding cost Vermont hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Anne Watson, a Vermont state senator who sponsored the bill quantifying the state’s damages between 1995 and 2024. It passed the Legislature last year and the state’s Republican governor allowed it to become law without his signature.

Julie Moore, secretary for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, helped organize the request for more information to help the state better understand different approaches to attribution science and how to allocate damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

“The charge to us is to adopt rules of how we’ll apply attribution science and ultimately send out cost recovery letters,” Ms. Moore said. The state law says oil and gas corporations will receive letters at the start of 2027.

“The hope is that it’ll result in a significant amount of money coming into Vermont to help both pay for the damage and help us adapt to a hotter, wetter climate that’s a result of this carbon in the atmosphere,” Ms. Watson said. “We need to go to the source of who’s responsible for this.”

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China Outlines Plan to Bolster Consumption in Face of Trump Tariffs

admin — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 04:08:59 +0000

The Chinese government and the Communist Party jointly issued a lengthy list of planned initiatives on Sunday to get people to spend more, in yet another move by Beijing to offset potential harm from its escalating economic warfare with Washington.

The road map for economic stimulus included larger pensions, better medical benefits and higher wages — measures that could bolster China’s lagging domestic consumption. But it assigned many of these tasks to the country’s local governments, many of which are struggling under enormous debts and plummeting revenues from the sale of state land.

The action comes as China’s leaders are searching for ways to rebalance the economy away from its current dependence on an ever-rising trade surplus, which reached almost $1 trillion last year. President Trump has already imposed 20 percent tariffs on China’s shipments to the United States. Countries in Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East are also raising tariffs on China’s flood of manufactured-goods exports.

Part of the document released on Sunday seemed aimed at reassuring the Chinese public that their investments were safe, so that they would start spending money again. The authorities promised to undertake “multiple measures to stabilize the stock market” and to underpin the real estate market, which has been marred by falling property prices.

A housing market crash has wiped out much of the savings of China’s middle class in the past three years. Chinese households have responded by curtailing their spending on hotels, restaurants and other services and stuffing savings into bank deposits that pay very little interest.

One bright spot of late for China has been its stock markets. In the United States, the tariffs and uncertainty caused by Mr. Trump’s policies dragged the S&P 500 last week into a correction, down more than 10 percent from its peak. But China’s markets are positive, partly on enthusiasm for the country’s progress in developing its own artificial intelligence programs. Hong Kong’s stock market, where many Chinese companies trade, is up about 20 percent since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

The “Special Action Plan to Boost Consumption” was issued in the name of two of the highest organs of power in China: the General Office of the cabinet and the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The unusual step showed that Beijing’s leaders want to signal that they are serious about addressing lackluster domestic spending.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics has scheduled a news conference on Monday morning in Beijing to release economic data from January and February. Later in the day, senior officials are scheduled to speak at a news conference about the initiatives to increase consumption.

The plan includes many details that could prove popular with the Chinese public if implemented. It calls for local governments to issue payments or increase subsidies to “people in need” and increase retirees’ pension benefits. It also directed local governments to pay their overdue debts to businesses.

But the outline released on Sunday contained no new promises of money from the national government to help local governments pay for all of this.

China’s local governments, which are responsible for almost all social spending, raised most of their money until three years ago by selling state land to private sector developers. But these sales have collapsed because of the housing market crash.

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Ex-CNN chief Zucker was ousted to bolster case against Cuomo: sources

admin — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 10:03:24 +0000

When former CNN chief Jeff Zucker stonewalled Chris Cuomo and refused to pay out the roughly $18 million that was on the remainder of his contract, Cuomo’s lawyers decided to go over his head: They went to AT&T, CNN’s owner, sources familiar with the matter told The Post.

Cuomo’s lawyers argued AT&T was involved in selective enforcement, according to the sources. Zucker — who violated company policy by dating a colleague without disclosing it — was able to hold onto his cushy job, but Cuomo had gotten the boot for helping his brother, now-former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, navigate sexual harassment claims.

Given those circumstances, Cuomo’s lawyers argued, AT&T should pay Cuomo the full $18 million he was demanding.

But instead of paying up, AT&T forced Zucker to resign after Cuomo squealed on him to the telecom giant, sources told The Post.

From a financial standpoint, it appears Cuomo hasn’t gotten the windfall he was seeking. Sources familiar with the matter say AT&T hasn’t coughed up the $18 million. But from another standpoint, he might have achieved some vindication.

Chris Cuomo argued he was entitled to the roughly $18 million that was on the remainder of his contract after he was fired from CNN.Getty Images for Turner

AT&T forced Zucker to resign over his secret relationship rather than paying Cuomo the $18 million.AFP via Getty Images

“It shows clearly CNN is a mess — and also misery loves company,” one source mused.

AT&T and CNN didn’t return calls for comment. An attorney for Cuomo, Bryan Freedman, also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

After AT&T became formally aware of the situation with Zucker, it likely had to do something, sources said.

Zucker stepped down from CNN Wednesday after nine years at the network.The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images

“How do you fire a journalist who violates a policy while the CEO gets away with violating a policy?” said one source familiar with the matter.

The PR fallout for AT&T – a company with a market capitalization of $175 billion – would have been far worse than any possible settlement that could still come with Cuomo, one source noted.

Cuomo still wants to reach a settlement with CNN, sources said.

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