Meta settles

“Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted,” according to the office of the attorney general of Texas. 

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It's against Texas law to capture biometric identifiers without the person's consent. The attorney general filed suit in February of 2022, and it's just been settled. 

Meta is going to pay $1.4 billion to the state over five years, a deal negotiated through the lawyers nearly two months ago. Attorney General Paxton calls it a "victory for Texan privacy rights."

Google's owner, Alphabet, is being sued by Texas as well for "illegally collecting biometric data from millions of Texans."

Giga Texas

Gigafactory is a good term for it: the largest factory building in the world by volume, it's fifteen city blocks long with 70,000 solar panels on the roof. This is the new Tesla factory in Austin, Texas, and it just opened.

As Elon puts it, raw materials go in one end of the building, a lot of stuff happens, and then new cars come out the other end. He calls it the "most advanced car factory the world has ever seen," and it's packed with energy-saving and water-saving technology.

Half a million Model Y's will be produced here annually, and the brand new cyber truck will be made here next year.

Fifteen thousand were expected at the big celebration, "Cyber Rodeo," and Elon (wearing a black cowboy hat) drove himself onto the stage to deliver the keynote.

from Fortune

U-Haul LA to TX

Prices in a mostly free market system like ours (U.S.) are determined, as you know, by "demand" and "supply." If high demand (lots of people want it) combines with low supply (there's not enough of it to go around), the price for the product or service goes up. 

Why? Because it's very valuable to the people who want it most, so they pay more to get it first.

U-Haul has a situation like that. Demand for truck rental going one way from California cities to Dallas TX is very high. 

Looking at the price of this one-way haul, the desire of people wanting to move their goods by U-Haul from California to Texas seems to be very, very high. Compare to the price of the rental one way from Dallas to California. Especially for San Francisco.

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Move to Texas

Big technology companies and thousands of technology start-ups are at home in California's "Silicon Valley," a region at the south end of San Francisco Bay. But California's reputation as the global center of technology innovation may be dimming a bit. Some executives are pulling out and heading to the state of Texas.

Last December Oracle announced the move of their headquarters to Austin, four decades after its 1977 founding in Santa Clara. That same month Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced their move to Houston. 

And just this week, headline-grabber Elon Musk announced that Tesla headquarters is also going to relocate to Austin. The Fremont (California) factory will remain in place, but big growth is the plan and Elon says there's a limit to how much they can scale up in the Bay area.

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Yang Tang, chief technology officer at Expedi, has made that move to Texas himself. He believes that he gets it: "I think Texas is positioned to outpace California . . . Houston presents endless opportunities and is a melting pot for new ideas and the spirit of ingenuity."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Texas can do it

You've noticed gas prices going up in the last year. Most people (except oil stock holders) don't like rising gas prices or the rising prices of other things that will result from it, and it's not good for politicians currently in office either. 

OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) has great influence on gas prices. They often increase oil production to decrease prices, or decrease oil production to increase prices.

Last week the White House asked OPEC to raise production levels so global economic recovery from the pandemic could grow better--and prices would go down. OPEC's answer: they don't think it's  necessary. 

Then the Texas governor offered a solution to the White House. As the producer of 20% of the world's total oil production, Texas can do it.

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