Read this Thursday’s edition of the FolhaMercado newsletter (06) – 07/06/2023 – Market

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Tax must be voted today

With a zero rate for items in the basic basket, a lock against the increase in the tax burden and transitions in the change to the new system, the text of the PEC of the tax reform was presented this Wednesday night. The vote must be today (6).

In the previous version of the text, the products in the current basic basket would have a 50% discount on taxation, raising fears of an increase in the burden —which was denied by the government and the World Bank.

One of the conditions for voting on the text came after the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans), withdrew from his position against the Federative Council.

Understand: the agency will be responsible for collecting and transferring the IBS (Tax on Goods and Services) to states and municipalities – the value-added tax that will replace the state ICMS and municipal ISS.

As the charge is now made where the products and services are produced and the reform provides for it to be made at the places of consumption, the biggest criticism was of the states where there is a greater presence of factories or that are more connected to the agro.

Nowthe governors admit the maintenance of the Federative Council, as long as there is a change in the composition rules of the body.

• Their idea is to prevent the interests of regions with a greater number of states from prevailing over others.

• One of the ideas under discussion is to link the voting power of each entity to a population criterion.

• The details did not appear in the text presented on Wednesday, but should come in a new version this Thursday.

More on tax reform:

• See here which are the eight main impasses of the proposal.

• Reform resolves 95% of legal disputes on consumer taxes, calculates Insper.

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Threads is live

Meta anticipated the launch of Threads, a network created to compete with Twitter, and users already have access to the app in the Apple and Android app stores since last night (5).

How it works: It is very similar to the bird’s net. You can post content, respond to messages publicly, and repost or quote messages from other users.

• Publications can have texts of up to 500 characters, photos and videos of up to 5 minutes. As soon as you publish, your…Thread? Wire? Message?… Already appears on the timeline.

• Access to the platform is via the user’s Instagram account, which can choose to follow all of their contacts and import photos and bios to the new platform.

• Published content can be shared to the story or as an Instagram post.

• Anyone who accesses the platform sees publications from those who already follow them on the photo network, but also messages from other people who have “go viral” in the short time the network has been on the air.

Out: users from European Union countries do not have access to Threads.

On Tuesday, the Irish Data Protection Commission – the body that regulates the subject in the EU – stated that Instagram would not launch within the block due to inadequacy of the block’s privacy law.

Open social network: Meta said it plans to make Threads interoperable with other open social networks such as Mastodon.

• The idea is that users from different platforms can interact, similar to the email format (users from one provider can write to another).

This, however, raises questions about content moderation. Would there be a risk that publications that would not pass the Meta scrutiny could appear on Threads from other open social networks? There is still no answer for that.

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AI is already used in weapons

AI (artificial intelligence) is already present in military weapons and in wars, but it is not yet possible to know whether its use reduces the number of unwanted causalities or increases it, says the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The hypothesis is defended by the think tank NSCAI (national security commission focusing on AI), linked to the US government, by arguing that autonomous weapons are more accurate.

The CCIV, however, claims that there is not enough data to make such a claim.

Where is AI in wars: in addition to autonomous weapons, which recognize certain people and objects from software and act without human intervention, other uses of technology for the military apparatus are cyber attacks and espionage – through satellites equipped with AI.

More about technology

Volkswagen’s advertising piece to commemorate the automaker’s 70th anniversary in Brazil, in addition to announcing the new version of the Kombi, generated commotion on social media for including, through AI, daughter Maria Rita in a duet with mother Elis Regina, died in 1982.

How was it done? The technique used was that of deepfake, which uses AI to change a person’s face and voice in a video, in an extremely realistic way.

• In this case, an actress impersonated the singer and had her face altered by the technology, which was trained specifically for Elis Regina’s facial recognition.

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The big dream of the vietnamese VinFast

The 35-year-old Brazilian engineer Luis Gustavo Lemes Pereira is at the forefront of one of the boldest bets in the automotive sector: turning an automaker founded in Vietnam six years ago into a rival of Tesla in the production of electric vehicles in the US.

According to the Financial Times, VinFast started focusing on zero-emission cars only last year, after spending three years producing petrol models.

Still, the Vietnamese government-backed automaker says it can produce 250,000 vehicles a year and has filed plans for a $23 billion IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

Yes but… VinFast’s image took a hit when a first shipment of 999 cars arrived in the US last December.

In May, the first cars sent were recalled after the sector’s regulatory agency in the country warned that a software error in the dashboard display prevented the display of critical safety information and “could increase the risk of an accident”.

• The trade magazine Car & Driver said VinFast’s flagship VF 8 model “proves that building cars is hard”.

The IPO plans also had to be revised, in which the company blamed market conditions.

• Now, the automaker will be listed on the Stock Exchange in a SPAC (blank check company, understand here), with a contribution of US$ 2.5 billion from its founder.