Looks like Nvidia's big US$40b plan to buy Arm off Softbank is off. They've told partners that due to all the regulatory issues its facing around the world, but mostly in the USA, the fight to prove they aren't going to be anti-competitive with their ownership of the world's most popular computer processor architecture just isn't worth it. Nvidia probably wants to avoid the shitshow Qualcomm faced when trying to buy NXP a few years ago. What's the plan now? Softbank will probably take Arm straight to the market with an IPO - then we can all own shares in it. Probably a better outcome for society.
Also in things that never got off the ground - Meta's attempt to make a cryptocurrency, Diem, formerly known as Libra. Announced in 2019, the plan was for Diem to "serve as the foundation for payments within Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp" and got companies like "Visa, MasterCard, Uber, Lyft, eBay and Spotify" to take part. When governments asked about pesky stuff like how it would be "compliance with financial laws, including money laundering and terrorist financing", along with the risk of an "excessive concentration of economic power", Meta's allies backed out. Now its "intellectual property" (whatever the fuck that is) is up for sale.
The memes of Tesla being unprofitable can stop now, as they've recorded another profitable quarter. Q4 2021 saw a US$4.8b gross profit, bringing the yearly total to around US$13.5b. Their fancy new Texas factory has begun making heaps of Model Y's for eager customers and they're on the lookout for new factory locations. Elon is still crapping on about FSD turning their cars into a "robotaxi fleet" that he reckons will launch this year, going on to say that "I would be shocked if we do not achieve Full Self-Driving safer than a human this year. I would be shocked". The phrase "safer than a human" doing some heavy lifting there. Oh and the Tesla Bot is still a thing they're working on and is not a joke.
Who remembers Kim Dotcom? 10 years have passed since the German dude living in a New Zealand mansion had his property raided by 74 NZ coppers on orders from the US Department of Justice, who charged Kim with "running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and other related sites". Megaupload got shut down and Kim's assets seized, but he's still fighting the extradition order in NZ courts. Currently the NZ Supreme Court said he has to be sent to the USA to face the charges, but allowed him a judicial review, which is still ongoing so he is still residing in NZ. Sounds similar to a certain Australian citizen in the UK.
📻 Karma - 1200 Techniques
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