Crypto News: Disney uses a king, not a princess, to thwart DeSantis

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Florida is a disaster.
Seaweed blobs aren't so bad.
Alibaba breakup update.
Pay gap paralysis.

Is Walt Disney's beef with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis giving us the King Charles III redemption arc we've been waiting for? Because this is pretty incredible stuff:

Source: Twitter

Thanks to a nifty clause about the British monarch, Disney appears to have secured control of its theme park for decades to come. As it stands, one-year-old Princess Lilibet of Sussex is the most likely last survivor of Charles — which is a rather solid safety net for the theme park's sovereignty. It's a truly bizarre Disney princess plot twist that not many could have predicted, unless you're deeply familiar with the intricacies of old English common law. Of course, DeSantis's cronies won't go down without a fight. His new board members are enraged by the Magic Kingdom's alley-oop, to say the least.

Beth Kowitt says "the storied company has become a punching bag for Republicans," and it is but one of many issues that are rotting the state of Florida. "Dead kids can't read" is a real quote from Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz, who yesterday called out his colleagues for being more obsessed with banning books than assault rifles. Then there's the Florida principal who was forced to resign after parents complained that their children were being exposed to "pornography" during a lesson about Michelangelo's David. Things are not so sunny in the sunshine state. And that's not even accounting for the fact that Floridans have been in a perpetual state of disaster for the past 10+ years, as Mark Gongloff shows:

And yet!!! We still have headlines like this: "New Yorkers Are Moving to These Three Florida Cities." It really makes me wonder: Are they moving there for the drama? Are they trying to snag Jair Bolsonaro's old digs? Or maybe they saw this $1,199,000 home on Zillow and had zero concerns about, I don't know, the toothpick stilts, or the ocean that is two inches away from swallowing it whole?

Who needs 3.5 baths when you have the Atlantic Ocean? Source: Zillow

A lot of people will say, duh, they're moving for the low taxes. But Jonathan Levin says the "tycoon tax migration" narrative can be a bit misleading. "The wealthy don't need to bother with the hassle of moving just to maximize their earnings; they're already rich," he writes, noting that "these conversations always center on Florida and Texas and never, for instance, zero-tax Alaska — underscoring how this is not purely a financial phenomenon." Instead, the ultra-wealthy want to migrate to Florida because of warm weather and political optics — a choice that Mark argues is incredibly unwise, seeing as current residents are already battling a slew of floods, sinkholes, red tides and seaweed blobs (more on that later) on their way to the grocery store. At the rate things are going, Princess Lilibet might end up living longer than the state itself. Read the whole thing.

Sometimes good things are bad and bad things are good.

Exhibit A: Normally, cleaning up pollution is a great achievement. "Thanks to human activity, we've actually managed to slow the progress of global warming over the past two centuries by as much as 0.8 degrees Celsius," David Fickling writes. But one cause of that cooling — aerosol — is actually bad for our health. Now, you might be thinking: aerosols, like Lysol or WD-40? Kinda, but not exactly. These chemicals are "emissions of fine particles of sulfur and nitrogen compounds and carbon," and are created by the same process that creates greenhouse-gas emissions:

Aerosols are cooling our atmosphere through a counterbalance by forming clouds that end up reflecting solar power back into space. It sounds like some pretty cool science until you realize that millions of people die from this atmospheric effect every year. Good things are bad!

Exhibit B: Normally, seaweed is a menace. "When it starts to rot, it scares away tourists, not only blocking access to pristine sandy beaches, but releasing a toxic gas called hydrogen sulfide, with an ungodly stench of rotten eggs," Lara Williams writes. But Florida's "Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt," which weighs 10 million pounds and spans 5,000 miles, may actually be a climate solution in disguise. In the UK, a seaweed startup is interested in cultivating sargassum for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) because it can grow rapidly and doesn't require a physical surface. Bad things are good!

Bonus Climate Reading: An uncoordinated clean-tech subsidy race between the US and the EU is an avoidable expense. — Bloomberg's editorial board

Out-of-the-blue breakups are hard, but for Alibaba, it seems to be working out just fine:

Earlier this week, the e-commerce giant announced its surprise decision to split up into six parts. Each business will now be able to raise funds and launch its own IPO. Isabelle Lee says the breakup is an attempt to drive up overall value and appease crackdown-hungry Chinese regulators. Nobody's quite sure how it will all play out — breakups can be unpredictable — and Tim Culpan says "some of these Baby Babas will be more highly prized than others." If this chart is any indication, there's already a clear draft pick for the favorite child:

"Taobao is the crown jewel, accounting for 67% of revenue and more than 100% of its operating profit. That latter figure is not a typo," Tim writes. When Alibaba spins off its cash cow on April 1 and leaves the little guys in the dust, we'll likely start to see some of these businesses shine more than others. Until then, spend your days listening to this crowd-sourced breakup playlist, assembled by John Authers.

On average, women make about 20% less than men. Andreea Papuc says forcing individual companies to reveal their gender wage gaps will help equalize things, but it isn't what's going to take us to the finish line.

Pepsi's first logo redesign in 14 years is "a decisive rejection of the 2008 rebrand," Ben Schott writes. The new look offers a return to nostalgia not unfamiliar to what we've seen with Burger King and Warner Bros.