Issue #3
A big fat (upto $180k) Christmas present from Santa
Apple is handing out big fat retention bonuses to selected employees. Yes, the keyword is selected. Meta (ex-Facebook) and Apple are engaged in a fight for talent since their roadmaps on AR, VR, Metaverse, Smart Watches, etc are colliding. You know the product roadmap for evil capitalistic empire is kinda same - so it was expected that both Apple and Meta will have to fight it out for the best talent.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is particularly concerned over the thousands of new employees Meta—formerly Facebook—will need to build the metaverse. In a preemptive strike to retain top talent, Apple is offering an “unusual and significant stock bonuses to some engineers in an effort to retain talent, looking to stave off defections to tech rivals.”
Also apparently, Meta’s reputation is so bad right now that it is paying an extra bonus called “Brand Tax” to retain and hire new people. This Brand tax is basically “Bury my guilt with money”.
Criminals had a good Christmas as well
Criminals have stolen close to $100 billion in pandemic relief funds, the U.S. Secret Service said Tuesday.
The stolen funds were diverted by fraudsters from the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program and a another program set up to dole out unemployment assistance funds nationwide.
When you are giving away $3500 Billion ( planned $4.5 Trillion) you do expect some leakage. And 100 Billion out of 3500 Billion is not that bad - close to 2.8%. Would love to compare it to fraud % of online payments but couldn’t find a public source for it.
Grinch comes calling for Tesla
Tesla made a video game that you can play with the steering wheel while the car is driving itself. Sounds exciting and dangerous. The only thing is if you decide to do something like this just make sure the regulators don’t notice it. There is a small chance that regulators won’t like drivers not paying attention to the road and playing games instead…like a small chance.
U.S. opens investigation into 580,000 Tesla vehicles over game feature
Imagine the meeting in Tesla when they were releasing this feature -
Tesla:
A: So we are releasing a new feature that allows our drivers to play games while driving, it’s a huge vote of confidence on our self-driving capabilities.
Everyone: cool, awesome
A: anyone has any comments or concerns?
everyone: nope
And then similar conversation at NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)
X: Have you seen the new NYT article about drivers playing games in moving cars?
Everyone: really?
X: we should do something about it right
Everyone: yea yea, let’s do something about it.
X: first, I need an NYT subscription to read the article and build the case on Tesla
The crazy thing is that the gap between those conversations is one year and the feature only came to the attention of NHTSA once the NYT article came out.
NHTSA said it has "confirmed that this capability has been available since December 2020 in Tesla 'Passenger Play'-equipped vehicles."
Earlier this month, the New York Times highlighted the game feature, prompting NHTSA to say it was in discussions with Tesla about its concerns.
I’m not sure what’s the joke here that nobody at Tesla thought of the consequences or it took NHTSA one year to discover it.
Mr. Putin updates
Russia’s agenda is becoming clearer as this saga continues.
And as it seems to me, Mr. Putin wants the two main things
Get the approval for the Nord Stream 2 - the pipeline that cuts Ukraine and Poland from the gas supply market and gives Russia the ability to strong-arm Germany in the future.
Nord Stream 2, completed in September, has faced resistance from the United States and several countries including Poland and Ukraine, which say it will increase Russia's leverage over Europe.
"The additional gas supplies on the European gas market would surely reduce the price on an exchange, on the spot (market)," Putin was quoted as saying by RIA news agency.
The pipeline from Russia to Germany is still awaiting regulatory approval from Berlin and the European Union.
Putin also said that Poland has sidelined Russia from managing the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline, which had resulted in surge of gas prices, Interfax news agency reported.
Get all the NATO forces out of its neighborhood
In one of its proposals, Russia said NATO states that were members in May 1997, before the first eastern European countries were invited to join the alliance, shouldn’t “deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe” that weren’t already in place on that date.
The second demand is quite an interesting one and one that will be dismissed immediately.
Santa comes calling for Park Geun-hye
The first female Prime Minister of South Korea.
The first Prime Minister of South Korea to be impeached.
The first Prime Minister of South Korea to be pardoned.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in has pardoned former President Park Geun-hye, who was serving a 22-year prison term for a vast corruption scandal.
Park has been hospitalised three times this year due to chronic shoulder and lower back pain.
New Christmas present for kids
VR has finally, after 10 years of hype, arrived.
That’s all, folks.
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