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Nikola's Bad Quarter: Company's Deal For General Motors Ownership Stake Goes Sideways

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The trouble for Nikola Motor Company began only in September, a couple of months ago. That's when a hedge fund very publicly called out the company and its founder, Trevor Milton, for essentially fooling people with doctored video of its electric semi-truck product to get them to invest in the company. This led to rumors of federal investigations, the resignation of Milton, and the company idiotically trying to use copyright takedowns to silence its critics. All of this was likely in the service of trying to save a very public $2 billion deal with General Motors that was due to be closed upon in early December.Well, what was Nikola's bad month is turning into a very bad quarter, as the General Motors deal has gone fairly sideways.

Nikola (NKLA) won’t have General Motors (GM) as an investor, at least for right now.The electric truck maker said on Monday it has revised the terms of a prior deal with GM, and that the auto giant won’t be taking a stake in Nikola. The two companies will not work together to produce Nikola’s pickup truck, the Badger. Nikola’s shares were down more than 21% in pre-market trading.
The Badger was supposed to be a consumer pickup truck made in partnership with GM, utilizing GM's manufacturing and logistics operations alongside Nikola's electric batteries and drivetrain. But now, the general consensus is that this deal going under with GM has rendered the Badger completely dead.
EV and hydrogen truck start-up Nikola's deal with General Motors has fizzled, the EV startup revealed, after several weeks of speculation about a deal that would have seen the Michigan auto giant produce the Nikola Badger truck. Nikola indicated that it had reached a non-binding memorandum of understanding with GM regarding collaboration on GM's hydrogen technology for large trucks, but that the pickup aimed at private consumers was not currently contemplated with GM backing. In fact, the Badger now appears entirely dead, with Nikola indicating that it will refund deposits for the EV truck.
For its part, Nikola is pointing to the deal with GM not being completely dead. Instead, the company is going to focus on producing semi-trucks that GM will make the fuel-cell technology for. The deal is now essentially a basic supply partnership, but the real impact of the change of deal terms is that GM has backed away from taking an ownership stake in Nikola.
But Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities writes in a new note that the “headline” from the new agreement is that GM won’t be taking a stake in Nikola — and that news “will be viewed as a clear negative.”“This went from a game changer deal for Nikola to a good supply partnership but nothing to write home about and the Street will be disappointed accordingly along with lingering lockup worries,” Ives wrote.
All because the company's founder wanted to pretend like it had a produced a product that did something that it absolutely did not. It sure seems like it would have been better for the company overall if it had just told the truth.

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posted at: 12:00am on 04-Dec-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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After Being Notified Of Info It Should Have Already Been Aware Of, LAPD Bans Clearview Use By Investigators

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The Los Angeles Police Department is shutting down a very small percentage of its facial recognition searches. Last month, public records exposed the fact that the LAPD had been lying about its facial recognition use for years. Up until 2019, the department maintained it did not use the tech. Records obtained by the Los Angeles Times showed it had actually used it 30,000 times over the past decade.The most recent development in the LAPD's mostly dishonest use of this tech is that it will not allow personnel to mess around with certain third-party offerings. As Buzzfeed reports, the LAPD has forbidden the use of Clearview by officers following the release of information the department already should have already been aware of.

Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News showed that more than 25 LAPD employees ran nearly 475 searches with Clearview AI over a three-month period beginning at the end of 2019.[...]LAPD officials confirmed that investigators were using Clearview AI but declined to say which officers and which specific cases it was used for. They also refused to say whether the facial recognition software has led to arrests of any suspects.
Now that the public knows what the LAPD already should have known, the department is changing its policy to exclude Clearview… and probably not much else.
The Los Angeles Police Department has banned the use of commercial facial recognition systems, following inquiries from BuzzFeed News about its officers' use of a controversial software known as Clearview AI.
Have to love the fact that the LAPD needed to be apprised of what its own investigators were doing by journalists. That's the level of internal oversight we've come to expect from the nation's law enforcement agencies. If you don't look for anything, it's almost impossible to find misconduct and abuses of power. No news is the best news. And it can easily be achieved by doing nothing at all.This ban only affects "commercial" software which means investigators will still be able to use (and misuse) more official products, like the facial recognition system owned by the county -- the same one the LAPD spent years denying it used.And, although it's an incremental change that seems to only forbid the use of one particular facial recognition product, it's still good to see another law enforcement agency kick Clearview to the curb. Clearview's unproven AI trawls a database of photos scraped from the internet, making it a highly questionable addition to any government agency's surveillance repertoire. And Clearview has been highly irresponsible in its marketing and distribution of its tech, making unverified claims about law enforcement successes while encouraging government employees to test drive the software by feeding it faces of friends, family members, celebrities, etc.If more agencies uninvite this third-party interloper, law enforcement critical mass will make Clearview's business plan untenable. It's already ditched most of its private customers in response to lawsuits. If the potential customers it has left refuse to do business with it, it will soon become little more than a horrible memory.

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posted at: 12:00am on 04-Dec-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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