Amazon US Customers Have One Week to Opt Out of Mass Wireless Sharing
Last week we wrote about Apple’s Airtag, with its intended mesh network of tracking devices that collect massive data. Yesterday we found out that yet another private surveillance ‘mesh’ joins the ever proliferating number of businesses attempting to corner data on the minutiae of customers’ everything.
Amazon is planning to utilise existing gadgets to create a similar network. Moreover, these networks, and the data collected from them, can be accessed by both a range of government agencies, enforcement departments and inevitably – with reasonable probability – hackers.
Is the Big Brother net of surveillance slowly closing around consumers, as they are boiled, frog-like, through a series of shiny gadgets and perceived conveniences?
Controversial New Guidelines Would Allow Experiments On More Mature Human Embryos
Issues and questions related to bioethics are on the rise, be they concerning genetic modification or this dialogue on tenor of embryo experimentation.
While the newly proposed guidelines have clearly been carefully weighed, they appear to leave much open to regulatory bodies at various universities and other research institutions, as well as laboratory research teams, to interpret. In view of the considerable downside of guideline abuses, shouldn’t there be more checks and balances in place?
The other elephant in the room is the likelihood of guideline compliance by a host of countries keen to exert dominance at any cost. How far would they go to acquire knowledge, advances or allow misuses on this front (be the guidelines 14-days or longer)?
Covid Vaccine Crisis May Be The Last Straw For The Postwar Economic Consensus
Trust is at the heart of unity, and its decline at the geopolitical level is a key driver in the fragmentation we’ve been expounding upon since 2019.
Here Mohamed El-Erian sets out a thoughtful analysis of how tech advances in vaccines across developed countries have exposed an underlying ‘me first’ mindset when confronted with sharing, even as those self-same economies preach openness, trust and responsible behaviour (for others, that is): “Yet while the postwar international system grants the advanced economies disproportionate influence in global affairs, its credibility and basic functioning ultimately depend on whether its stewards conduct themselves responsibly.” And that doesn’t take into account the significant resources he extracted while he was running WeWork.
If, as the ones on whom fortunate is smiling now, those economies don’t show compassion and some sacrifice, how do they expect to be treated when inevitably they are no longer at the top of the pile? Commensurately, what kind of incentive structure does such a ‘me first’ approach set up for countries to reach the top, then remain there?
WeWork Founder Adam Neumann Received $445m Payout In Exit Package
A salutary lesson in the dangers of dual class shares and the unquestioning lionisation of start-up founders: “In addition to the $245m grant, Neumann received $200m in cash, was able to refinance $432m in debt on favorable terms, and allowed a finance company controlled by the former chief executive to sell $578m in WeWork stock. Neumann’s ability to negotiate such rich terms was helped by the fact that his shareholdings controlled 10 times the votes of a normal shareholder, and he was able to argue for a higher price to cede control.”
One wonders at the skill of the legal team representing Softbank and its investors, that someone with Neumann’s track record of massive value destruction could manage to get the upper hand in a negotiation offering many bells and whistles for leverage.
‘Silicon Six’ Tech Giants Accused Of Inflating Tax Payments By Almost $100bn
Tax ‘optimisation’ has not only bred an industry all of its own, but companies practicing it have been lauded as clever, optimising their cashflows and balance sheets for profit.
Those days are soon going to come to an end, as the global tax net looks to tighten considerably. How will tech company valuations and the ecosystem that services this optimisation emerge post a global tax agreement? And in retrospect, how will such clever companies be judged, as what is societally acceptable evolves with the advent of these new standards?