A Google Employee, Ariel Koren, has been forced to resign by Google after she opposed a billion-dollar deal between Google, Amazon, the Israeli government, and the military.
Google Forces Employee to Resign for Speaking Against $1 Billion Israeli Project
Related:
Documents Reveal Advanced AI Tools Google Is Selling to Israel
by Yasha Levine
The latest outrage to hit the wire is that the board of Twitter has agreed to accept Elon Musk’s buyout proposal, which will give Elon full control of the company and allow him to take it private. There’s lots of howling all around, as if they sky is falling. If you ask me, Twitter — and social media in general — is garbage tech that mostly wastes our time and poisons our minds. But regardless of where you stand sale of Twitter to a Twitter-addicted oligarch, to me the deal just further proves the thesis of my book, Surveillance Valley. The Internet is an extension of the American Empire.
Elon Musk is Surveillance Valley (Archived)
Contractor vaccine mandate leaves room for companies to maneuver (Archive)
The mandate for workers to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will — for now — only apply to contracts for services or real property construction, not contracts for manufacturing goods such as ships, aircraft, vehicles and weapons.
Increasingly, this means contractors are able to hold the Pentagon hostage over a weapon’s lifetime, which means overcharges of just about every imaginable sort, including for labor. The Project On Government Oversight (where I work) has, for instance, been uncovering overcharges in spare parts since our founding, including an infamous $435 hammer back in 1983. I’m sad to report that what, in the 1980s, was a seemingly outrageous $640 plastic toilet-seat cover for military airplanes now costs an eye-popping $10,000. A number of factors help explain such otherwise unimaginable prices, including the way contractors often retain intellectual property rights to many of the systems taxpayers funded to develop, legal loopholes that make it difficult for the government to challenge wild charges, and a system largely beholden to the interests of defense companies.
Holy crap!
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 