archive.today and archive.ph (also .is, .md, .fo, .li, .vn) are DDOSing a blogger (pic) who investigated them. They could also be Russian assets (js from mail[.]ru).

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: February 4th, 2026

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  • Ah yes, the good old candyman tactic: the first one’s free to rope you in.

    Homes for Ukraine was set up in in March 2022, less than a month after Russia’s full scale invasion.

    Through a website, backed by an IT system, those who had a rent-free space in their home or a separate residence could to offer it to refugees.

    In order to set this up quickly, then-Conservative government ministers accepted an offer from Palantir to build a system to administrate the scheme, based on its Foundry platform, for free for six months.

    In a 2023 blog post, Palantir described the challenge of combining data from multiple government systems containing tens of thousands of visa applications and hundreds of thousands of accommodation offers.

    Subsequent 12-month contracts were awarded - one worth £4.5m and another £5.5m, according to a National Audit Office report.

    The report notes the Government’s chief commercial officer informed Palantir of his concern about the firm’s practice of offering a zero- or nominal-cost initial offer to gain a commercial foothold.

    I’m not dismissing the work it takes to help refuges, but it still seems to me using Palantir for that is shooting cannons at sparrows. I wonder if they had other motivations beyond good publicity and what for Mr Thiel must be pocket money.






  • Fucking gig economy: all the extra work you put in - signing up for yet another platform, installing software, and waiting for the actual work to begin - all unpaid.

    Weeks of waiting for the “project” to begin. Then suddenly:

    My Slack would fill up with GO TEAM GO messages from someone who was just out of college, someone who has no idea that across the decades, people have died trying to establish labor laws that protect workers from the exact same conditions that he is now responsible for perpetuating, accompanied by numerous rocket ship emoji reactions.

    Not to speak of projects that never take off.

    The wages were dropping week by week. When I first started scrolling the contractor jobs in early 2025, companies like Mercor, Handshake, Turing, Task-ify and Outlier were offering $150 an hour for “experts,” $35 to $75 an hour for “generalists.” Today, Mercor says the average hourly rate on its platform is $105. But in my searches across the industry near the start of 2026, the experts were often getting $50 an hour, and the entry-level grunt workers were getting as low as $16 —less than California minimum wage. Contracts were now referred to as “sprints.” The work had to be done, asap, as fast as possible, for employment that might last 24 hours.