The EU uses magic outside of Hogwarts, Google’s neural network suffering, and Elon Musk’s like butthurt
EU uses magic outside of Hogwarts
European Union declaredthat he has almost figured out how to turn $258 billion of Russia’s frozen reserves into some more interesting use. But the only catch is that the EU does not know exactly where more than 85% of this amount lies.
I honestly have so many questions! How can you freeze what you haven’t discovered yet? What is this sorcery? Does this mean that the European Commission has been given early access to Hogwarts Legacy?!
More exchanges to the god of exchanges!
SPB Exchange, Freedom Finance broker and some non-profit organization want to create in Kazakhstan, a new ITS exchange for trading international securities from the USA, Europe and China. They promise to let Russians in as well to trade there.
The logic of creating such an exchange, apparently, is to provide Russian investors with safe access to international markets from sanctions on the basis of a “neutral” jurisdiction. True, the more friendly such a platform for Russians is, the more likely it is that sooner or later Western partners will strongly recommend that Kazakhstan carefully “turn the tap on”.
To be honest, I have certain doubts that Kazakhstan will bravely fight with Western regulators for the rights of Russian investors.
President Biden just wants money, money, money
Every time American companies pay dividends, investors have to pay income taxes on them. At some point, corporations came up with a cool life hack – buybacks. Companies simply spend the same money to buy back their shares from the market: those who want to sell their shares and receive cash in return; who doesn’t want to enjoy a rising stock price without all those taxes of yours. Bliss!
But the Democrats actively dislike all this: moneybag capitalists pay little taxes, a disgrace! Since the beginning of 2023, the United States has introduced a tax on buybacks in the amount of 1%. A little more than a month has passed since then, but in his speech last week, Biden already declaredthat this is some kind of frivolous tax turned out – he says that it is urgent to raise it to 4%.
So far, the size of these taxes in any case is still much less than what investors have to pay from dividends. But the trend, let’s face it, is not very encouraging: quadrupling the newly introduced tax is somehow not Pts at all, Joe!
Yuan revenues fell 98%
Until recently (during pandemic times), Zoom was one of the main rockets of the stock market, but now they have to announce on the dismissal of 15% of employees (more than a thousand people).
At the same time, the founder and CEO of the company, Eric Yuan (the namesake of the Chinese currency), turned out to be a guy with eggs: along with mass layoffs, he cuts his salary by 50 times (!) And refuses the bonus. All the other top managers of Zuma also got a salary cut – though not so radical, only 20%.
Such an act commands respect. Although, it would be very funny if Yuan was going to cut his salary by 9.8% – and the secretary simply mistyped with a comma in the press release …
Google’s Bard Song Festival went so-so
The times are such that it has become clear to all IT companies: if you do not have your own personal neural network chatbot, then you can safely prepare to go to the dustbin of business history. And vice versa!
Take, for example, Microsoft. Almost no one uses her Internet Explorer browser (and even xenomorphing in Edge did not help him), and the same can be said about her Bing search engine. But as soon as Microsoft agreed to invest in ChatGPT / OpenAI for tens of billions of dollars and spend presentation chatbot integrated into Edge / Bing last Tuesday – how wildly everyone got high and crowds rushed to download this browser.
Google looked at this sadly, and the very next day held its own artificial intelligence presentation called Bard. Sorry Bard. seemed to the public very raw and completely uninteresting compared to a competitor – so Google’s stock dived within a couple of days after the presentation by more than 10%.
Perhaps the schedule above will then be held at school in history lessons in the section about the First Great Skynet War. The teacher will ask: “Kids, do you understand how capitalist competition provoked giant corporations to race for supremacy in releasing AI to the mass market without regard for security?” And silicon-electric children will answer: “Yes, teacher, praise the greed of the defeated leather bags!”
Have pity on the developers, like Mask on Twitter more actively!
They saythat Elon Musk is so dissatisfied with the low reach of his tweets that he calls programmers to the carpet and demands that they turn off the malicious algorithms that hide Musk’s jokes from his one hundred million followers. Programmers timidly try to explain that there are no special anti-Ilon algorithms at all – and that even in Google Trends, Elon’s popularity has decreased by about ten times over the past year …
Somewhere at this moment, Elon finally burns out, and he simply fires the developers on the spot.
The moral here is simple: saying unpleasant things to your boss is generally not a safe undertaking; and if your boss has also invested 44 billion dollars in order to consolidate his status as the most popular kid in his favorite social network, then even more so, a purely suicidal mission comes out, alas.
Regulators are clamping down on crypto exchanges
February 8 Binance Crypto Exchange suspended deposit and withdrawal of funds from the international division of the exchange by bank transfers in dollars. The reasons are not named, but the exchange says that only 0.01% of customers used this feature anyway. Apparently, this has something to do with the nuances of regulation: in light of a series of major crypto scandals, not all traditional banks are ready to continue cooperation with cryptos. (All other Binance withdrawal methods continue to work normally.)
Also in Crypto Regulation News: US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) banned crypto exchange Kraken to offer staking services to its customers and was fined $30 million. Staking is when you invest your cryptocoin in ensuring the health of the blockchain, and in return you receive some kind of profitability. So, the SEC believes that this is all suspiciously similar to the issuance of securities, which means that without the preparation of the relevant issue prospectuses and other bureaucracy, this cannot be done.
What’s on FTX?
FTX Bankruptcy Managers sent all American politicians who previously received gratuitous donations from Sam Bankman-Fried and his accomplices totaling $ 93 million, the requirement to return everything back before the end of February. Excuses “we spent everything on charity” are not scanned, but they promise to recover interest from the especially hard-nosed ones. Such is the way!
Meanwhile, Justin Sun (Chief of Huobi Crypto Exchange) got together issue a special FUD token, ostensibly representing the rights of claim of deceived creditors against the bankrupt FTX. I wonder what the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will say about this? Wangyu, who will call the token a “security” and advise everyone involved to immediately turn themselves in the act for multimillion-dollar fines.
Good news of the week: it was decided not to introduce a 30% tax on remote workers who left
They say, the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation abandoned the idea of obliging Russian companies to levy a 30% tax on the salaries of tax non-residents working in them (I remind you that now, if a foreign place of performance of duties is specified in an employment contract, then in such a situation, no tax can be legally demanded from the Russian side not deducted from your salary). Hooray! True, freelancers not on an employment contract still want to file a tax increase …
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