In This Issue


News

Investors currently value Apple at a massive two trillion dollars, by far the world’s most valuable business

Apple is now worth two trillion US dollars, the first public company to achieve that lofty feat. The rapid growth in Apple's stock price has been absolutely phenomenal. In 2018 Apple's valuation hit US$1t, which is insane enough, but it took only two years to gain another trillion dollars in value. What the hell happened in the last 2 years to make investors think Apple literally doubled in worth? There's no significant new revenue streams I can think of that Apple isn't already exploiting, so what gives? Apple is the biggest whale, but isn't alone - a report from Credit Suisse said that in 2020 the big 5's value rose 37% while the rest of the S&P 500 (i.e: the USA's biggest companies) fell 6%! Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook make up 20% of the entire US stock market's value. Five companies! In the USA's huge economy! The mind boggles.

Facebook gasses out out some Qanon bullshit prior to the US election

Facebook has decided now is a good time to say it has "removed 790 QAnon groups from its site and was restricting another 1,950 groups, 440 pages and more than 10,000 Instagram accounts related to the right-wing conspiracy theory". Apparently activity in these groups "rose 200 to 300 percent in the last six months", something I assume Facebook noticed and figured it better nip in the bud before we end up with another Pizzagate or Oklahoma City bombing. YouTube, Twitter and Reddit "regularly" remove Qanon content but it still persists all over the internet. It's easy to ignore Qanon because their beliefs are so fucked up, but for technologists like us I think it's worth keeping an eye on em because social media is the key enabler of their nonsense and social media is our fault, we did that.

New agreement between NBN and ISPs coming soon, with penalties for NBN being crap

The current agreement between ISPs and the NBN is ending on November 30, with a new agreement set to replace it soon. This new agreement will add rebates/penalties if NBN fuck things up. For example, if a new connection takes too long to complete, an on-site appointment is missed or NBN takes too long to fix a fault, the ISP gets paid a fee to compensate (which may or may not be returned to the end user). I'm surprised this wasn't already the case! What's more interesting to me are rebates for slow speeds and congestion. If FTTN/FTTB/FTTC connections don't manage at least 25/5 speeds the ISP gets a discount for however long it takes NBN to get their shit together. Ditto fixed wireless congestion.


Not News

Sale on bookmarks, everything 50% off, get your cheap saved items here!

Once again I am clearing out some old shit from my bookmarks that at one point I wanted to share with you but didn't make the cut for sharing it on the day I found it:


Bargains


🎶 My Own Summer (Shove It) - Deftones

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