December, 2019

What kind of an animal is this? https://t.co/oQSExXIxDV

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2019

At $433/share, TSLA's market cap is now $77.8 billion. This makes it bigger than OEM giants Hyundai ($22BN), Ford ($37BN), General Motors ($52BN), BMW ($52BN) and Daimler ($60BN). Said otherwise Tesla, which sold 350,000 cars in the past 12 months, is now "bigger" than Hyundai, which sold 4.6 million cars in 2018, and General Motors, which sold 3 million cars last year, combined.

In fact, there is now just one OEM that is bigger than Tesla: Germany's carmaking giant Volkswagen (which employs roughly 270,000 workers in Germany alone), and which recently overtook Toyota as the world's largest automaker in terms of sales...

“Two-thirds of all white guys voted for Trump. That means anytime you see three white guys walking at you, down the street toward you, two of them voted for Trump. You need to move over to the other sidewalk because these are not good people that are walking toward you. You should be afraid of them,” Moore warned...

"The Philippines is immediately ordering the Bureau of Immigration to deny US Senators Dick Durbin and Patrick Leahy — the imperious, uninformed, and gullible American legislators who introduced the subject provisions into the 2020 budget — entry to the Philippines," presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo told reporters Friday...

Reports have emerged depicting long lines in front of a physical gold sales location in Germany, in view of pending legislation which would once again lower the anonymous purchase limit, this time from €10,000 to €2,000. The last drop happened in 2017 when the limit was set at €15,000. A draft bill from the German finance ministry is being pointed to as the reason for the change, which is scheduled to take effect from Jan. 10, 2020...

"The surest path to victory is to prevent Trump from playing the victim or anti-establishment outsider - and to ensure that we never let him infect our message with his invective."...

It was only a matter of time before witnesses spotted Lyuyou Liao at 6:50 a.m. Thursday walking around a perimeter fence and entering the military facility from the rocks along the water. They warned Liao that he was trespassing in a restricted area, known as the Truman Annex, as he took photographs of government buildings near “sensitive military facilities,” according to a federal criminal complaint filed Thursday.
[...]
Liao agreed to waive his Miranda rights and told the agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in broken English that “he was trying to take photographs of the sunrise,” according to the complaint affidavit. But when Liao provided the pass code to his cellphone and allowed the agent to look at the images, he “observed photographs of Truman Annex on the camera.”...

Email from the Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW, demanding deletion of dissenting engineering assessment: “Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive]... And please
remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA”https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/8yojf8teFC

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 27, 2019

The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong, in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran. Deplorables are the antidote to arrogant globalist socialists...

Imus passed away on Friday morning at Baylor Scott and White Medical Center in College Station, Texas, after being hospitalized on Christmas Eve, a representative said. The cause of death was not given.

Hanks frequently spends his summer vacation on the Greek island of Antiparos and his wife, actress and producer Rita Wilson, is of Greek and Bulgarian ancestry.

Under Greek law, honorary naturalization may be granted to people “who have provided exceptional services to the country or whose naturalization serves the public interest.”...

Remotely piloted with enhanced surveillance capabilities, the Global Hawk is optimized to scan large areas for both stationary and moving targets with high resolution, day or night, in all weather.

The high-altitude aircraft transmits data including imagery from an altitude of roughly 20 kilometers at near real-time speed and has a combat radius of 3,000 kilometers, so it has the Korean Peninsula and some areas beyond it within its range.

South Korea will now be able to independently gather intelligence on mainland North Korea, especially areas close to the capital of Pyongyang. Seoul has been heavily reliant on the US for that information until now.

The agency has 30 days to do so, according to newly enacted measure.

Twelve deaths were recorded in 2019, 10 by suicide, by people who had been prescribed Roaccutane, according to data from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The figure is up from five fatalities the year before and is the highest since records began in 1983...

The electric car maker said it has also signed agreements for an unsecured revolving loan facility of up to 2.25 billion yuan, adding that both the loans will be used for its Shanghai car plant...

Knowing China, they now have the potential of stealing Tesla's design and start selling their "own version" to other countries for a fraction of Tesla's cost. But besides that, Tesla now has the factory in the US producing for the Americas (and RoW for now) in China for China (and the rest of Asia eventually), and they just broke ground on the German factory to supply Europe, picking up some assistance from the Chinese and German govts. A nice risk diversification and insulation against the current trade wars.

The US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Amazon on Thursday for a touchless scanning system that would identify people not by their faces but by characteristics associated with the palms of their hands, including wrinkles and veins...