Investors reckons Tesla is worth more than Toyota, making it the world’s most valuable car manufacturer
The CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet will get roasted by US politicians over antitrust abuses
ACMA fines Woolworths $1m for spamming Everyday Rewards members after they unsubscribed
MSCHF make cheeky technology related projects and pass it off as art
Cheap Nintendo Switch & Switch Lite consoles, Nokia 6.2 smartphone, ThinkPad E14 Ryzen laptop, 15% off iTunes gift cards & Canon EOS camera cashback
Tesla overtook Toyota to become the most valuable car manufacturer in the world, with a market cap of almost US$210b compared to Toyota's US$170b. In the real world it doesn't mean much - Toyota is still vastly more profitable than Tesla (US$22b vs negative US$144m) and sells shitloads more cars than Tesla (10.7m vs 367,500). What it does mean however is that demand for Tesla shares is so high, presumably based on investors judging Tesla to be set up so well it'll be extremely profitable in the future, that the value of the company now exceeds Toyota because investors reckon Tesla has way more room to grow than Toyota. I like my Tesla and it's a fun car, but damn, the markets are totally detached from reality right now, aren't they?
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet will front up to a US House Judiciary Committee this month to be asked questions about "accusations of antitrust abuses at their companies" and "other issues, like Amazon’s treatment of its warehouse workers or the spread of hate speech on Facebook and YouTube". I can't wait to see them squirm. If you didn't already know, these tech companies are fucking enormous. If you combine the 2019 revenues of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, it would put them just above the Netherlands and below Indonesia in terms of GDP. It's mind boggling that 5 companies in the same sector can amass that sort of wealth.
Woolworths has been busted by ACMA for continuing to email members of its Everyday Rewards program after they unsubscribed and copped a $1,003,800 fine for doing so - the biggest fine ACMA has ever slapped on someone for spamming. ACMA said that "Woolworths' systems, processes and practices were inadequate to comply with spam rules" and considering the laws have been in place for 17 years and Woolworths is stacked full of lawyers and box tickers, the "scale and prolonged nature of the non-compliance is inexcusable". Woolworths tried to justify their actions by saying "while we were acting on unsubscribe requests from individual Rewards members, we did not assume it meant other members sharing that email address had to be opted-out as well", who's sharing email addresses in the year of our lord 2020??
I just discovered MSCHF, an business/art project that fucks around with technology. Their first "drop" (what they call their pieces work) was "The Persistence of Chaos" - a laptop full of infamous malware that sold for over US$1m at an auction. Since then they've made a bastardised version of Times New Roman that looks identical but is spaced out so you can write fewer words to fill a page, an SMS service to receive machine generated foot pics for foot fetishists, Boomer Email where they send you all the weird chain emails old people love to share with their mates, recreated every episode of The Office in Slack and heaps of others. Their 24th and latest drop is a smartphone app called Finger on The App (sadly only available in the US) that will give $25,000 to whoever keeps their finger on the screen the longest. Hopefully there's no deaths as a result of this promotion!
$80 - $250 cashback on Canon EOS cameras from authorised Canon retailers
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Nokia 6.2 Android One smartphone - $263 at JB Hi-Fi
Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen2 laptop (14” 1080p, Ryzen 5 4500U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) - $869 from Lenovo’s educational store, so you need a .edu.au email addy
15% off iTunes/App Store gift cards at Big W
🎶 Daydreaming - Radiohead
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