French Nuclear Operator Warns U.S. of ‘Imminent Radiological Threat’ at Chinese Nuclear Plant.
S/he moves in mysterious ways
The mystery of Salvator Mundis, a question of attribution, provenance, and the careful shifting hundreds of millions of dollars around the world. Via The Guardian. There are estimated to be several billion dollars worth of art tucked away in these shadowy facilities. More reading: Inside the Luxembourg free port storing riches for the super-wealthy; Behind Closed Doors: A Look At Freeports; The Role of Freeports in the Global Art Market / other things. The Periodic Table of Factory Records / The Flood is a monumental artwork by John Simpkins commissioned by George R. Stroemple / a proper internet rabbit hole awaits: from the excellent 50 Years of Text Gamesnewsletter, the story of 1992’s Silverwolf, a game that encompasses and epitomises the (deliberately) blurry mythos of St. Bride’s School, a quasi-mystical strand of feminism and Victorian romanticism (the RTÉ Archivesare an absolute treasure trove, by the way) / the Monty Hall Problem / a tour of Charles Jenck’s Cosmic House, sonon to open as a museum / we missed this: Lucy Sparrow’s Bourdon Street Chemist / some music blogs: Gorilla vs Bear; We Love That; Obscure Sound.
Over a billion records belonging to CVS Health exposed online
ZDNet: “In another example of misconfigured cloud services impacting security, over a billion records belonging to CVS Health have been exposed online. On Thursday, WebsitePlanet, together with researcher Jeremiah Fowler, revealed the discovery of an online database belonging to CVS Health. The database was not password-protected and had no form of authentication in place to prevent unauthorized entry. Upon examination of the database, the team found over one billion records that were connected to the US healthcare and pharmaceutical giant, which owns brands including CVS Pharmacy and Aetna. The database, 204GB in size, contained event and configuration data including production records of visitor IDs, session IDs, device access information — such as whether visitors to the firm’s domains used an iPhone or Android handset — as well as what the team calls a “blueprint” of how the logging system operated from the backend. Search records exposed also included queries for medications, COVID-19 vaccines, and a variety of CVS products, referencing both CVS Health and CVS.com…”
How to cheat on your taxes (permalink)
Some things are hard to understand because they're complicated, but when it comes to finance – and finance crimes – we enter the realm of things that are complicated so they'll be hard to understand.
The Propublica Secret IRS Files leaks reveal the wealthy pay infinitesimal amounts of tax and the ultra-rich often pay no tax at all.
Propublica is careful to note that all of this is legal – that it's how the system is supposed to work.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest
But that's not the whole story. A string of leaks from high-powered tax-evasion specialists have revealed that the richest people of every nation, up to prime ministers and "national treasures" avail themselves of fraudulent accounting to duck tax.
From the Paradise Papers to the Panama Papers to Luxleaks to Swissleaks and beyond, we have a wealth of evidence that many of the "legal" deductions the super-rich deploy are actually grounded in accounting frauds.
Even when there's no fraud, some tactics are in such bad faith, reliant on such absurd readings of the law that they're outlawed once they're discoveredThis comes in up Disney heiress Abigail Disney's frank account of the workings of dynastic wealth.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste
"My grandfather Roy O. Disney…was so determined to prevent the government from taking any of the money he wanted to leave to his family that…what he did back then was so effective that most of it is illegal today."
The New York Times: Each year, hundreds of thousands of workers churn through a vast mechanism that hires and monitors, disciplines and fires. Amid the pandemic, the already strained system lurched. “What happened inside shows how Jeff Bezos created the workplace of the future and pulled off the impossible during the pandemic — but also reveals what’s standing in the way of his promise to do better by his employees…In contrast to its precise, sophisticated processing of packages, Amazon’s model for managing people — heavily reliant on metrics, apps and chatbots — was uneven and strained even before the coronavirus arrived, with employees often having to act as their own caseworkers, interviews and records show. Amid the pandemic, Amazon’s system burned through workers, resulted in inadvertent firings and stalled benefits, and impeded communication, casting a shadow over a business success story for the ages…”
See also Fast Company – 9 devastating takeaways from NYT’s massive report on Amazon workers during the pandemic
A new web site, and much more.
The site has many fine pieces, here is Marc Andreessen “Technology Saves the World.”
A look back at how Watergate scandal began Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Breaking of Stephen Colbert National Review
Amazon blames social media companies for sales of fake Amazon reviews Ars Technica
History As End Harper’s
What Data About You Can the Government Get From Big Tech?
The New York Times: “The Justice Department, starting in the early days of the Trump administration, secretly sought data from some of the biggest tech companies about journalists, Democratic lawmakers and White House officials as part of wide-ranging investigations into leaks and other matters, The New York Times reported last week. The revelations, which put the companies in the middle of a clash over the Trump administration’s efforts to find the sources of news coverage, raised questions about what sorts of data tech companies collect on their users, and how much of it is accessible to law enforcement authorities. Here’s a rundown..”
YOU’VE GOT TO BREAK A FEW EGGS TO MAKE A HALAL OMELET*: Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Tunnels.
* As Orwell said of the Soviet Union, “Where’s the omelet?”