🌏 A week of turbulent international events in the technology industry (2022.11.06~11.12)

This is a trial issue. After the paid subscription system is officially launched, a week of selected international news will be a benefit only for paid members.

This week's news picks:

• Opening of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27)
• No 'red tide' in U.S. midterm elections
• Facebook's parent company Meta "also" to lay off staff
• Russian troops withdraw from Kherson, Ukraine
• The curtain falls on the second largest cryptocurrency exchange FTX

🇺🇳 Opening of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27)

The 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) officially opened this Sunday (11/6) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and the event is expected to last until next Friday (11/18).

The United Nations Climate Change Conference has been held (almost) every year since 1995, and the main agenda for this session includes:

1. reduce carbon emissions
2. Helping countries prepare for climate change
3. Provide technical and financial support to developing countries to achieve the above goals

In addition, "compensation for countries more vulnerable to climate change" was included in the agenda of the conference for the first time on the first day. For example, Pacific island countries and other developing countries that are more vulnerable to climate change are prone to disasters caused by extreme weather in recent years. If this bill is successfully reached a consensus, there will be a new public fund in the future to compensate those who cannot avoid extreme weather. The " loss and damage " of the affected countries.

For the introduction of "loss and damage", you can refer to the article of "Central News Agency": "Loss and damage" compensation at the United Nations COP27 summit

🇺🇸 There is no "red tide" in the US midterm elections

This Tuesday (11/8) is the US midterm election. This election will re-elect:

• 35 seats in the Senate (out of 100 seats)
• All seats in the House of Representatives (435 seats in total)
• Another 36 states are re-electing governors, secretaries of state and other positions at the same time.

As of the deadline, the billing of some seats is still in progress. Or like Georgia’s senatorial reelection, the Democratic candidate (Raphael Warnock) and the Republican candidate (Herschel Walker) have a similar number of votes, and no one has more than half of the votes. It has been determined that a second round of voting will be held in December.

In general, the results of this mid-term election are not as expected by the outside world—the Republican Party will win over the Democratic Party, turning the majority of seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives into red, which is the representative color of the Republican Party, creating a "red tide" grand occasion. Although the results of the balloting are still in progress, whether the Republican Party can really win the majority of seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives is still variable. Even if the majority of seats in both houses are really won by the Republican Party, it is only a few seats away. That's all. So judging from the current situation, the Republican Party did not win a big victory over the Democratic Party. On the contrary, the Democratic Party did not vote too badly and did not lose uglyly.

The current analysis generally believes that today’s result is mainly related to:

1. Voters do care about abortion rights and will vote for candidates who are more liberal (basically Democrats) on the issue
2. Trump’s card is not as strong as expected by the outside world. Intermediate voters and Republican supporters with a more neutral and moderate stand do not like Trump’s style of discussion and the newcomers Trump supports. Therefore, if the Republican Party wants to win the 2024 presidential election, it really needs to think carefully about whether Trump can really play the role of the Republican hen.

In this mid-term election, it can be seen that the Trump card may not be able to attract votes from moderate supporters of the Republican Party. The Republican Party should have already determined that the party has a stronger hen in the 2024 presidential election——Florida Governor Dean Not only was Ron DeSantis re-elected successfully, but in 2018, Ron DeSantis, who only won a small 0.4% of the vote, actually won his opponent by 19.4% this time. It is worth keeping an eye on future developments.

🕊 Facebook's parent company Meta "also" has major layoffs

This Wednesday (11/9) Facebook parent company Meta ushered in the largest layoffs, about 11,000 employees, equivalent to 13% of the company's total number of layoffs.

Meta's big layoffs, on the one hand, are related to Meta's desire to be the leader of the "metaverse", but so far the things it has produced are not satisfactory, burning too much money, but there is no way to make a profit. On the other hand, it is related to the general environment-major technology companies in the United States are now laying off employees or suspending new hires because of: (1) economic slowdown, (2) inflation, and (3) the technology industry at the beginning of the outbreak , because everyone is at home, the demand for electronic products or online technology services has increased greatly, and the pockets are full. But now that we have entered the post-epidemic era, everyone has returned to physical offline life one after another. The growth rate of users in the technology industry is limited, and some adjustments are bound to be made.

Another of the most well-known examples of this wave of layoffs in the tech industry is Twitter. Twitter laid off half of Twitter's employees (more than 3,700 people) last Friday (11/4). Twitter's large layoffs were mainly related to the boss's replacement with Elon Musk.

🇺🇦 Russian troops withdraw from Kherson, Ukraine

On Wednesday (11/9), the Russian Ministry of Defense ordered Russian troops to withdraw from Kherson, a large city in southern Ukraine. 10,000 troops to the east bank), and the Ukrainian army also successfully entered the city of Kherson.

The withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson represented a major defeat for the Russian army. Because Kherson is the only major city (local capital) that has fallen into the hands of Russia since the start of the war, Russia also held a referendum on "joining Russia" here in September. Kherson is also an important gateway from mainland Ukraine to the Crimea Peninsula (Russia has annexed the Crimea Peninsula since 2014), which is quite indicative.

💸 The end of the second largest cryptocurrency exchange FTX

Since the cryptocurrency media CoinDesk revealed last week (11/2) that a cryptocurrency exchange owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the world's second largest cryptocurrency exchange FTX, or "SBF" for short, After the company Alameda Research (FTX and Alameda Research are two different companies) many company assets are FTX's platform currency FTT, it caused a lot of doubts from the outside world.

A few days later (11/6), Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, first stated that he would clear FTT, the FTX platform currency of his cryptocurrency exchange Binance, and warned, which caused the FTT to depreciate for a while. There are also many users who have transferred out the assets stored in FTX one after another. Later (11/9) CZ and SBF simultaneously published tweets about Binance’s intention to acquire FTX, but Binance’s official investigation found that there was a problem with FTX’s accounting, and announced within 24 hours that they would not acquire FTX.com, forcing FTX to dead end.

Finally, FTX announced on Twitter at 10:14 pm on Friday (11/11) Taiwan time that about 130 companies under FTX (including Alameda Research) have filed for bankruptcy in accordance with Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Law reorganize. If it goes well, maybe FTX may have a comeback. If it doesn’t go well... FTX will say goodbye to everyone.

In general, FTX will have an accident this time. Looking at the longer timeline, it is related to the collapse of Terra's algorithmic stable currency UST and sister currency LUNA a few months ago. The collapse of UST/LUNA led to the bankruptcy of Three Arrows Capital (3AC) and Voyager Digital, and Alameda Research temporarily avoided the limelight by relying on funds from FTX at that time, and it has not been known to the outside world until now. In a short period of time, there may be other cryptocurrency-related businesses or companies facing funding problems, caught in the storm.

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