Yahoo Finance After Math: Tesla goes budget and California has gas car ban plans
All this while TikTok went on a video wiping spree.
This week we saw Amazon roll out a bunch of next-generation Big Brother gear, including dash cams and an indoor camera-copter, in an ongoing effort to normalize its all-encompassing, inescapable surveillance schemes. That’s the bad news, but there was plenty of good news from the past week to offset. Let’s take a look.
Ousted Cambridge Analytica CEO can't run another company for seven years
The UK announced this week that it has put the disgraced former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, in businessman time out until 2027. He’ll be barred from “the promotion, formation or management of a company” within the nation without court approval after his data-scrapping company was investigated and he was caught discussing how to entrap politicians with the information. Real class act. But, with a record like that, Fox News can’t not afford to hire him.
Tesla lays out 'Battery Day' plans that lead to a $25,000 electric car
Elon “Im going to put a chip in your head” Musk has never been one to shy away from making grandiose forward looking statements but if he can keep his word from this year’s battery day — the one about being able to build batteries at half the current cost per kWh and usher in the era of $25,000 electric cars within tree years. That’s going to revolutionize the EV market far more than the Roadster ever did. Maybe even more than the Model S Plaid will.
TikTok removed more than 104 million videos in the first half of 2020
If a social video platform’s success is measured by the amount of hate-filled garbage rhetoric moderators have to continually pull down, then TikTok is killing it. The site yanked more than 100 million videos found in violation of its community guidelines. Even more impressive is that the videos it did pull constituted just 1 percent of total uploads for the year.
The LAPD has used facial recognition software 30,000 times since 2009
It wouldn’t be so bad if the department hadn’t simultaneously spent those years constantly, gleefully, lying to journalists and the public that they’re supposed to serve about whether or not they were using the technology. Makes you wonder what else the LAPD has been lying about.
California to ban sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035
It only took 3.6 million scorched acres and 26 deaths this year to finally spur California Governor Gavin Newson into taking more than performative climate action. This week he announced the issuance of an executive order requiring all new vehicles sold in the state come 2035 to be zero emission — effectively banning the sale of new gas-powered vehicles in the state. Expect this to be heavily litigated in the coming decade and a half until the new rules kick in.
