A library of snippets
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Parents who are worried about their children being on Roblox should not let them use it, the chief executive of the gigantic gaming platform has said.
The site, which is the most popular in the UK among young gamers aged eight to 12, has been dogged by claims of some children being exposed to explicit or harmful content through its games, alongside multiple reported allegations of bullying and grooming.From: Keep kids off Roblox if worried, CEO Dave Baszucki tells parents.
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Keynote speech by Philip R. Lane, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, University College Cork Economics Society Conference 2025
Cork, 20 March 2025
From: The digital euro: maintaining the autonomy of the monetary system.
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central bank money would play a much-diminished role in the payments system, if households and firms were to maintain their primary transaction accounts in stablecoins and only use commercial bank accounts to upload and download funds from these transaction accounts
n a sense, a stablecoin provider would resemble a so-called narrow bank that only holds high quality liquid assets and promises to maintain a stable value of its liabilities (the funds held by customers in their stablecoin accounts). While the pros and cons of narrow banking have been much debated over the decades, a material decline in the volume of deposits held in commercial banks would disrupt the role of commercial banks in credit provision, which is especially prominent in the bank-based European financial system.
The digital euro is also an effective tool to limit the dominance of foreign digital currencies, including the monetary sovereignty risks created by widely-adopted foreign-currency stablecoins. Furthermore, in a world dominated by platform-based payment systems, where payments are bundled with other services in closed ecosystems, a digital euro would provide an open and interoperable alternative, preventing the fragmentation and limited interoperability of money.
In Europe, the digital euro is on the drawing board and will enter its “second phase” of preparation in October of this year, by which time the ECB will have prepared an outreach plan, procurement standards and technology providers. More than a billion euros worth of contracts have been awarded and I cannot help but note that the budget for developing an offline solution accounts for some €662m out of contacts awarded, so clearly the priority is recognised at the highest levels. Last yeasr the Bank invited experts from across the mobile sector to expolore the business and technical aspects of deploying the digital euro’s offline functionality on embedded Secure Elements (eSE) and embedded SIMs (eSIM) in end-user devices.
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Australia’s federal government has announced plans to mandate cash acceptance for essential purchases, ensuring that businesses cannot refuse physical money for necessities such as groceries, fuel, medicines, and personal care products.
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President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he has instructed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to halt the production of pennies, citing the high cost of producing one cent.
From: Trump instructs Treasury to halt penny production | CNN Business.
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Back in July last year
I was surprised to discover what I think future economic historians will label a weak signal for change: As of today, Target will no longer accept personal checks as a form of payment. Yes, that’s correct. Checks, along with foreign currency, mall gift cards, money orders and sundry other retail payment mechanisms are no longer valid in Target stores due what a spokesperson called “extremely low volumes” of the once popular paper payment process.
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The Order mandates that, effective September 30, 2025, the Federal government will cease issuing paper checks for all disbursements, including intragovernmental payments, benefits, vendor payments, and tax refunds… Exceptions will be made for people without banking or electronic payment access, certain emergency payments, certain law enforcement activities, and other special cases qualifying for an exception under the Order or other existing law.
From: Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Modernizes Payments to and from America’s Bank Account – ].
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OpenAI is embracing rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data resides.
In a post on X on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI will add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, across its products, including the desktop app for ChatGPT. MCP is an open source standard that helps AI models produce better, more relevant responses to certain queries.
“People love MCP and we are excited to add support across our products,” Altman said. “[It’s] available today in the Agents SDK and support for [the] ChatGPT desktop app [and] Responses API [is] coming soon!”
MCP lets models draw data from sources like business tools and software to complete tasks, as well as from content repositories and app development environments. The protocol enables developers to build two-way connections between data sources and AI-powered applications, such as chatbots.
Developers can expose data through “MCP servers” and build “MCP clients” — for instance, apps and workflows — that connect to those servers on command. In the months since Anthropic open sourced MCP, companies including Block, Apollo, Replit, Codeium, and Sourcegraph have added MCP support for their platforms.
From: OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data | TechCrunch.
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The key dynamics of check use in America are well-known. Most checks are written by businesses, check use overall is falling, check fraud is rising. The writing has been on the wall for checks for some tme. Personally, I think that Target’s decision to stop accepting checks last year sealed their fate and now President Trump has hammered the last nail in their coffin. Well, almost.
In an executive order, President Trump has instructed the Treasury to stop issuing paper checks for all Federal disbursements inclusive of intragovernmental payments, benefits payments, vendor payments and tax refunds. The reasons given, which I am sure that we all agree with, were that checks impose costs, add delays, increase the risks of fraud, lead to theft and cause inefficiencies.
So, that’s that then. With the government not issuing checks and Target not accepting them, they will vanish from view. Well, not exactly. According to the executive order, exceptions will be made for those without access to banking or electronic payment methods, certain emergency payments and law enforcement activities.
The American Bankers’ Association broadly welcomed the move, saying that it means an opportunity to “further reduce the number of unbanked in the country from the current record low of 4%”.
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Eady noted that requiring banks to investigate and halt every suspected fraudulent transfer would create “an unacceptable burden”.
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Snippings