### Issue 1324 - Tuesday 16th March, 2021

## In Today's Issue

- News Corp & Facebook do a deal that sees Rupert Murdoch paid when his crap appears on Zuck's hellsite
- Volkswagen to massively scale up EV battery production and invest big in a European charging network
- Elon Musk rebrands himself as Tesla's "technoking" & releases a song for sale as an NFT
- A more accurate and realistic method of comparing semiconductor manufacturing prowess
- Cheap Xiaomi smarthome kit, Cities: Skylines DLC, refurb HP laptop & free shipping at Scorptec

## The News

### News Corp & Facebook do a deal that sees Rupert Murdoch paid when his crap appears on Zuck's hellsite

The News Media Bargaining Code's primary objective is now complete - News Corp and Facebook have stitched up a three year deal that'll see Facebook pay News Corp for the luxury of having their content on its platform. What they'll be paid for exactly (a fee each time someone links to a News Corp property???) and how much they'll get paid isn't mentioned in News Corp's press release, but it doesn't really matter as that was never the point. News Corp is happy its getting money, the government is happy it made News Corp happy whilst pretending to be tough on multinational tech companies and the tech companies don't have to reveal their algorithms, so now everything can go back to normal.

### Volkswagen to massively scale up EV battery production and invest big in a European charging network

The main cost of an electric car is the battery, so its no surprise then that Volkswagen has announced a massive increase in scale of battery manufacturing to get prices down. They're going to build or fund 6 factories across Europe. Some will be owned by VW, some will be in partnership with Northvolt. By 2030 they'll be pumping out 240 GWh of batteries a year. VW is also going to spend over 400m euros on installing fast chargers across Europe. Lots of big numbers and big claims from VW, but they seem to be the only car OEM operating on this scale besides Tesla. The full 2 hour announcement is on VW's YouTube channel if you're keen.

### Elon Musk rebrands himself as Tesla's "technoking" & releases a song for sale as an NFT

As much as it pains me to report on relatively unimportant comings and goings of Elon Musk, lowering The Sizzle down to the level of a nerdy version of New Idea, I can't resist and I know you are interested too. Old mate is unsurprinsgly getting in on the NFT action, selling an electronic music track he's made about NFTs. It's a horrible song that comes with a looping animation of a "vanity trophy" I'm sure he thinks is fucken hilarious. Meanwhile, in an SEC filing he's renamed his position at Tesla from CEO to "technoking" and the CFO's position to "Master of Coin". Elon is 50 years old and one of the world's richest people.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### A more accurate and realistic method of comparing semiconductor manufacturing prowess

The simple 10nm, 7nm, 5nm labels to describe modern semiconductors is mostly marketing bullshit. These chips are so complex that simply comparing the size of a transistor on a wafer of silicon doesn't mean much. IEEE Spectrum proposes a more accurate way to compare semiconductor manufacturing - "LMC". L is the density of logic transistors per square millimeter, M is the density of a system's main memory cells per square millimeter and C is the amount of connections between logic and main memory per square millimeter. Apparently AMD and ARM already use a similar metric internally to gauge how competitive their products are in the market.

## Bargains

- Xiaomi Mi 4-in-1 smarthome kit (window/door sensor, wireless switch, temp & humidity sensor, smart hub) - $53.82 from digiDIRECT's eBay store
- Loads of Cities: Skylines DLC on sale and under $5 each from WinGameStore
- Scorptec has a free shipping promo going on at the moment if you spend more than $100
- Refurbished HP Probook 430 G5 13.3" laptop (i5-8250U/8GB RAM/256GB SSD/shitty TN screen) - $599 from Recompute

## The End

📻 9 Out Of 10 - Magic Dirt

😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.

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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.​