USAID collaborates in fighting for worker rights when they are in exploitation or near-slavery.
They likely have records of the people inside organisations who provide data for them. These people usually want to remain anonymous because they fear retaliation. And in many cases, we’re not just talking about being fired or legal actions as retaliation.
That might sound incredibly foreign to you, but this is the norm in many Nordic countries, see Norway, Sweden and Finland, for a start. Tax returns for everyone are public, and so are addresses through a national registry.
Yep! In Sweden, this is part of the constitution. I think it beautifully demonstrates that the state works for the public, and that all information held by the state should by default also be accessible to members of the public, unless there is an important exception, such as personal medical privacy or national security.
It acts as a great tool for journalists, who are able to obtain meaningful insight into the actions of the state at all levels. While of course there are downsides, I think this is a very important principle.
Here you get SWATted for "fun" by kids, and targeted by Right-Wing extremists with death-threats for "political speech", and targeted by criminals based upon your vulnerability. USA is sooooo not Sweden.
Addresses are not public information, you can opt out from having your info public. They are not even a national registry (one exists, not public) but your telco will put you in "the phone book" if you don't opt out.
Taxes are public information but only to a degree. You can opt out from having them shared en masse (primarily to the media) but you can still inquire someone else's paid taxes from the tax office but it requires you to know their full given name, year of birth and home town.
Salary is not public information, only the total amount of paid income taxes. You can correlate them to some degree but you won't be able to know how many jobs a person has or where their capital gains are from.
Access to this information can also be limited in exceptional cases (politicians, harassment victims, identity theft etc).
As a foreigner who moved to Sweden, it was quite shocking first to see all this info displayed online for everyone to see but there are definitely some good sides and bad sides to it.
One of the good side is that, you can look at the people living in a given area and decided if this is the kind of neighborhood where you want to live. Lower (declared income) can have a correlation with crime so if you just want to have a quite life, you may want to select an era that has loads of working people with a higher than average income.
One bad side, some people have used it in the past to harass people, think ex-lovers and so on. There is a procedure in place where if you are afraid of being stalked you can ask for your information to be removed from these registries or at least be hidden from public view.
Salary negotiations are a very simple example, you can easily compare your salary to that of your peers and to similar positions in other companies. If your boss tells you they pay you the industry average or company average or whatnot, you wouldn't be able to check whether that's actually true otherwise. You can also have a rough ballpark of what a company pays before you apply for a job there. In general, information like this being public empowers people, whereas in most countries companies hold all the cards and use this information asymmetry to their advantage.
Which works, until you have mass immigration from MENA-countries that results in a huge rise in criminality which makes everyone afraid because any criminal can look you up from the license plate or simply by searching for your name and instantly know where you are.
I hate this system. It used to be a good system when most people was law abiding and there was no gang criminals. But today? Jeez, you are like a fish just hoping not to get struck by the sharks and there is no protection available due to the failing state.
> Employers almost always know the salary and location of their employees.
Employers do, individual stockholders of the employing firm do not, generally.
> Government workers are (in theory) employees of the citizens.
No, they are in theory employees of the government, in which the citizenry are stakeholders. They are not, even in theory, direct employees of the citizens.
A US Attorney is not, in theory, your attorney just because you are a US citizen.
Hard to say. I only know the salary data ends up at less scrupulous data brokers (e.g. ones that sell directly to advertisers, though perhaps TWN does this too, idk)
Most of it already was, but normies don't go looking for public expenditure databases, so they assume it doesn't exist. Then DOGE comes along and pretends they're doing something new.
define "everyone" -- elected officials who are supposed to have oversight and insight into where our tax dollars are going? It's not like they're providing replicas over bittorrent.
A Chinese APT had unfettered access to the Treasury Department, discovered back in December. It's interesting that people are much more excited about new government employees accessing these systems as part of their duties than they are about this.
A foreign adversary hacking a governmental system isn't good, but it's also kinda expected that they'll try.
That "just an advisor (but not really)" Musk and his ragtag group of junior developers get god mode access to lots of governmental systems is less expected. There are legal ways for the president to direct these departments, so when he opts for the illegal path, it's definitely noteworthy.
So who is the head of Department of Government Efficiency? If it's Musk, like Musk and Donald has said lots of times, why is he not confirmed by congress?
Are you arguing that people are at risk because a comparison of Treasury and IRS records is going to reveal tax fraud or something? I don’t think that’s on the table. At any rate, Trump doesn’t need DOGE to do that, he can just order the IRS to do it like FDR did if that’s what he’s going to do.
It will only cold start the first time. You also need to make sure that if your lambda can reuse the existing db connection when receiving multiple multiple requests to save time.
Hey you should probably switch the behavior so that it uses history "replace" instead of "push".
After doing a few ratings I need to spam the back button to actually go back.
It doesn't create a fully functional remote control. All you can do is push content to a connected browser window. If the browser crashes, you'll need a keyboard or another remote access tool.
This tool is just a quick and simple way to make use of your extra screens. You can use a bookmarklet to make a webpage instantly appear on a screen, or with a tool using the REST API, you can make the screenshots you make instantly appear on an external screen.
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