Elon Musk was allowed to chip people, and the default on the US national debt is postponed
Almost all the most important and interesting financial news in Russia and the world for a week: a new law allows government agencies to confiscate passports, investors in Yandex will be faced with an interesting choice, and the Forbes 30 Under 30 rating turned out to be scammed by crooks.
Is there a border guard? What if I find it?
The State Duma adopted a law to oblige those called up for military service to hand over their passports; and empower the border service (and a bunch of other government agencies, including Russian consulates in other countries) to confiscate “invalid” passports from citizens – well, if, for example, it seems to them that they are “unsuitable for further use” (whatever that means).
Kirill Korshunov and I wrote about this separate articleI recommend you take a look at it.
Investors in Yandex want to make an offer that is impossible to refuse
As we discussed in previous news releases, Yandex, the most important Russian IT company, has been in a sluggish mitosis for the last year. The parent company of the group is registered in the Netherlands; at the same time, the Russian part of the business no longer wants to have anything to do with the “unfriendly” West – and the founder of Yandex, on the contrary, wants to go on a separate voyage and further develop promising start-up developments already on the world stage.
Under the current circumstances, carefully dividing such a company is a very difficult exercise, both from a legal and financial point of view. But Bloomberg writesthat a solution is allegedly being worked out from the Dutch side, and they want to offer investors in Yandex a choice of three chairs:
exchange your papers for shares with a purely Russian “registration” – and get a share in the whole set of working and profitable businesses (but with the corresponding country risk to the load);
keep a share in the spin-off international I-business – in fact, bet on the genius of Volozh and the hope that he will again be able to do something cool and competitive;
just get a cache patty (or, more likely, a “patty”) and forget about it all.
The default on the US national debt is postponed, we disagree
Remember how Janet Yellen promised us a beautiful default by June 1st? So, she deceived us: this “holiday” was postponed (perhaps so as not to spoil International Children’s Day) – now we offer mark the date June 5 on the calendar with a red marker.
But in general, the head of the US Treasury has the following job: first, to scare a terrible date closer, in order to stimulate the Republicans and Democrats to quickly agree among themselves on raising the ceiling of the national debt. But if they are slowing down there, then we must already admit that the default is not so close / scary, so that financial markets should not be disturbed in vain.
So far, everything continues to indicate that most likely the traditional ceiling crisis in the United States will end as usual: at the last moment, politicians will agree among themselves, agree on the continuation of borrowing, and forget about this stand-up show for the next couple of years. (Biden over the weekend, by the way, said that, as it were, already agreed.)
A new argument in the age-old dispute “iPhone vs Android”
Anyone who has studied economics at university knows that the blue dream of any business owner is called “price discrimination”. This is when you make rich people pay more for the same product or service, and poor people pay less. Then profits swell pleasantly, and sales volumes do not suffer!
There is only one problem here: what is the smartest way to separate more wealthy clients from less? The guys from the American company DoorDash (app for food delivery) approached this task simply: you order delivery from Android – so be it, pay the minimum; installed an app on an iPhone – here you are, moneybags, get your Apple Pay ready for additional fees!
Or, at least, so claim the guys who sued DoorDash for a billion dollars. But it sounds logical, right? Since Tim Cook scammed you to buy an expensive iPhone, then you probably won’t notice a couple of extra bucks for shipping either? ..
What’s Wrong with the Forbes 30 Under 30 Ranking?
The prestigious Forbes magazine each year releases a list of 30 Under 30 – like, 30 of the most promising young entrepreneurs who are changing the world for world peace, fluffy cats and general prosperity.
So, in The Guardian not so long ago published an article about the fact that getting on this list is somehow very strongly correlated with subsequent going to jail. Among these guys with bright faces, all sorts of scammers and rogues are somehow especially tightly uncovered:
Charlie Javis, who is now going to plant for slightly less than completely imagining the 5 million users of her student startup called Frank and then selling it off to naive JPMorgan investment bankers for $175 million.
Doves Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, who via FTX/Alameda extorted money from cryptans on an industrial scale.
Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli, who was jailed for 7 years in 2012 for stock market fraud.
Elizabeth Holmes, who did not cosplay Steve Jobs very well in her fake startup Theranos.
But Trevor Milton (this one will sit down in June) – the author of the “self-propelled” stationary electric truck Nikola – did not manage to get into 30 Under 30, but he got into 12 Under 40, the list of the youngest billionaires from Forbes.
But in a sense, it all looks extremely logical. After all, pathological lies, theft and fraud, in fact, simply increase the volatility of the results: you can go to jail very quickly, or you can become “the youngest promising billionaire.” The end point of the convergence of this strategy, however, still looks rather unvaried…
The mask was given the green light for microchipping people
Elon Musk’s Neuralink company used to implant chips only in all sorts of monkeys and pigs, and now it allowed start testing in humans. If Musk succeeds, and he really makes a convenient interface for direct interaction between the human brain and a computer, then this can lead in the future to all kinds of colossal breakthroughs in a whole bunch of areas.
For example: remember news of recent months about the fact that neural networks have learned to read the thoughts of people placed in an fMRI unit? We’ve been making the reservation there all along that these fMRI machines are hefty and impractical, so it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to abuse such tricks right now. So, if each person has several thousand electrodes connected to a smartphone inserted into the brain, then inciting a neural network to interpret this data looks like a completely trifling task …
The state can confiscate kryptans (but only the bad ones, don’t worry!)
Last week we are with you discussed scandal over Ledger hardware crypto wallets – in which a feature was suddenly revealed for remotely pulling private keys from the crypt from the bowels of the device by the manufacturer.
Since then, Pascal Gauthier, CEO of Ledger, in an interview said two things. Firstly, all this hype around the alleged “vulnerability” of the ledgers is greatly exaggerated, there is absolutely nothing to worry about! And secondly, if some state requests access to someone else’s crypt on a hardware wallet by a court decision or other authorized bodies, then, of course, they will have to give them all these secret keys, what a conversation …
But it’s definitely not worth worrying about anything anyway – you’re not a drug dealer or a terrorist, right? Why would there be no one state to be interested in you personally, right? [падме.jpg]
Good news of the week
From June 1 in Russia resume accepting applications for chipped passports with a validity period of 10 years. By the way, if you didn’t know, in Russia you can have a couple of active foreigners at the same time. So, if you have one, then I would strongly recommend that you order a second one, just in case, regardless of its remaining validity period.
Because who knows where you will be located physically and geographically in a year or two, whether you will have the opportunity to come to the consulate for a new passport, and what will be the situation with passport chips. And with an expired passport and without the opportunity to get a new one abroad, it can be very uncomfortable.
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