Victoria has joined SA and NSW in creating a road usage fee specifically for electric vehicles. The state will collect 2.5c/km for pure EVs, 2c/km for plug-in hybrids and start July 2021. No details yet on how they'll implement the program. Federal Liberal MP (!!!) Trent Zimmerman has a very coherent opinion piece about why this road usage fee for EVs is way too early to implement and fails to compensate for the externalities of fossil fuel cars. I honestly don't know why any rational person would buy an EV in Australia. Compared to a hybrid they cost more up-front, not much less to operate per kilometer (high electricity pricing & road tax vs. cheap fuel) and you still have to deal with the bullshittery of public charging when going on long drives.
Victorian cops have revealed that they're using an algorithm to try and predict crimes. Here's the money quote from a "senior officer" talking to a Monash Uni researcher about their system - "We can run that tool now and it will tell us – like the kid might be 15 – it tells how many crimes he is going to commit before he is 21 based on that, and it is a 95% accuracy". I don't know what the point of this system is. Kid that does a lot of crime is gonna be an adult that does a lot of crime? Fucking hell, what an insight! You dingbats need a computer system to tell you that? Nothing else about this system has been made public beyond its existence, but I hope it's being used to try and get these kids into some sort of help program and not as an excuse to oppress them.
Samsung has announced they'll spend US$116b (billion!) to develop the the technology and manufacturing process for 3nm chips to rival the current king of silicon, TSMC. It'll mean that companies like Apple, AMD and Nvidia will have a second option for where to get their crucial SoCs and GPUs manufactured. Nice not only for market competition, but if say, a certain country was to invade/harm Taiwan, there is an alternative option for industry. Intel though, geez, what an emblem of the USA's rise and fall as a science and technology giant than having South Korean and Taiwanese companies steal your customers with a superior product?
A company that owns TikTok mansions has done a reverse takeover of a Chinese healthcare company in order to become a publicly listed company on a pissant stock market in the USA. There's a few layers here, lemme break it down for you. TikTok mansions are a thing where some rich bloke gets a bunch of influencers (normally teens) to live in an opulent house together and churn out sponsored content whilst taking a cut. It is very weird and abnormal. This is apparently so lucrative that they want to create more of these social media content sweatshops, but need millions in capital that nobody wants to provide except bottom dwelling penny stock enthusiasts - hence the reverse takeover of Tongji Healthcare Group. What a time to be alive.
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