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Welcome to Talk Money Weekly - where I cut through the noise and curate the best money-related topics from the web.
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Markets & Business
TMW# 25: End of COVID, Stock Market Sell Off
In this episode of TMW, we do a market recap. What’s happening with bond yields? Why do you care?
How do bond yields affect the stock market? And why are decreasing COVID concerns affecting economic projections?
Facebook Outage, Twitter Wins
The world temporarily shut down on Wednesday when all of Facebook’s messaging platforms (What’s App, Instagram, Messenger) shut down. Who didn’t shut down? Twitter! As you can see above, this is one of the most liked/shared tweet that Twitter has ever had on the platform.
The argument for why this blackout is significant is because it showcases the dangers of having a centralized service that controls most of our communication. Employee access cards were not working and as a result, the issues could not be fixed of a period of time. It’s a good example of why people are so worried to have one company control so much and own not only our privacy, but our ability to communicate with each other.
Frances Haugen Blows the Whistle
Former Facebook employee called out the company on Wednesday, saying that there needs to be accountability. Facebook makes money first and foremost, despite potentially putting people in danger as a result.
If you’re a Facebook shareholder, you’re like, ok awesome. These folks know how to make me money. The bad news for Facebook is that everyone seems to be in agreement that something needs to be done about this. A large Facebook investor came on to CNBC and said that they’ve been trying to get the company to change their ways but Zuckerberg won’t budge.
Coincidentally, the messaging platforms all failed on the same day. What are the chances of that? Seriously, I’m not into conspiracy theories, but if anyone was to give an example of the risks of one very controlling centralized system, this would be it. The funny thing of about a capitalist system, is that Frances Haugen is going to make a lot of money, or has the potential to make a lot of money on the personal brand she’s creating. Can’t be mad at that. She spoke extremely well at the hearing.
Jobs and Zuckerberg, Two Peas in a Pod
Steve Jobs was a genius and totally changed our lives for the better. He wasn’t the nicest guy, but he was ambitious and got incredible things done. Zuckerberg is similar. Call him whatever you want, but Zuckerberg did change all our lives. There are parts that are great, and then of course there are parts that are terrible.
This is an incredible thread of a story of Jobs and his work with Facebook and his mentoring of Zuck. I love these stories. They are so personal and humanize these figures.
So An NFT is Just a JPEG Right?
This made me LOL. It’s hard to grasp. But one way to think about NFT's is that there’s an original Picasso, and then there are prints of that Picasso. One is the original and worth a lot of money. The others are not.
That's all the news from this past week!
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