Tag: Income

CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders

The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence [Turki bin Faisal Al Saud] among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June.

The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021.

Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely follows the data marketplace, told Motherboard in an online chat after reviewing the documents: “The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’” (The document doesn’t stop at churches; it mentions “places of worship.”)

Related:

Data Broker Is Selling Location Data of People Who Visit Abortion Clinics

Location data broker SafeGraph stops selling information on visits to abortion providers

SafeGraph Provides CDC and 1000+ Organizations With Data to Fight the COVID-19 Crisis

Google Bans Location Data Firm Funded by Former Saudi Intelligence Head:

On its website SafeGraph says “We believe places data should be open for all.” In April 2017, Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, the former head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, invested in SafeGraph as part of a $16 million Series A funding round. SafeGraph said it had “assembled the deepest policy thinkers.” Beyond Faisal Al Saud, SafeGraph said it had enlisted the help of former U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, author Sam Harris, Meghan O’Sullivan who ran Iraq and Afghanistan policy under President George Bush, former Deputy Chief of Staff to President Obama Mona Sutphen, and former German Minister of Defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, among others. Peter Thiel is also an investor in the company.

More investors: SafeGraph Raises $16 Million Series A

Venmo, PayPal and Cash App will now have to report transactions totaling more than $600 to the IRS as Biden plans to ramp up financial enforcement

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

*The new reporting requirement will ensure that small businesses that receive payments through those apps are paying their fair share in taxes on them

*Beginning Jan. 1, 2022, third-party payment processors were required to report such transactions

*The changes will be included during the 2022 tax season

*The payment apps were previously required to send users 1099-K forms if their gross income exceeded $20,000 or had more than 200 transactions per year

Venmo, PayPal and Cash App will now have to report transactions totaling more than $600 to the IRS as Biden plans to ramp up financial enforcement

The New National American Elite

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The New National American Elite

More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.

Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.

Related:

YouTube – Twin Problems: Social Media and Power Concentration by Economist Ashley Hodgson

Substack’s success shows readers have had enough of polarised media

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Substack’s success shows readers have had enough of polarised media

Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who in October resigned from The Intercept, the online media platform he co-founded, citing “repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity”, has between 20,000 and 40,000 paid subscribers to his newsletter, each contributing at least $5 a month. Once Substack has taken its standard 10 per cent cut, and after payment processing fees, I calculate that Greenwald is left with between $80,000 and $160,000 a month, or about $1m to $2m a year. Not bad for a mere hack.

“It’s a lot,” Greenwald tells me. “It’s obviously way more money than I’ve ever made in journalism before, or than I ever thought I would make.”

If only I could write, still.