Whew, what a week!

Thank goodness it’s Friday. 

The people in my unit who were put on admin leave last week have NOT been reinstated. They still cannot access emails. The unions asked the judge for relief. The overlords said that the people put on leave and not reinstated don’t qualify as employees, they are contractors. 

I got mad at someone on the internet who said USAID had given the University of Auckland $1b. I asked him what they gave it for and he just said the university was very well funded. In less than a minute I discovered it was complete BS. The amount was closer to $350,000, it was over years, and it was for helping USAID do educational programming more effectively. Less than one minute. 

1) Expenditures. We are not allowed to pay organizations money that we owe them for work they’ve already done. Our Department of Agriculture is doing the same thing to American farmers and many of them will lose their land if they don’t get relief soon. In our case these charities and companies will go bankrupt. Not paying them is illegal. 
2) Stop work orders. We had to send everyone notices to stop all work immediately. This and the nonpayment are why so many people have been laid off. This is why children are not getting fed, people are not getting medicine, etc etc. The overlords say they issued waivers and one overlord is pretending to be mad at the organizations for not resuming work. They got specific instruction to stop work. They need specific instruction to start work again, they need to be told what work they can start again. There is a whole lot of bureaucracy involved and that bureaucracy both drives me nuts and prevents the corruption they are pretending they have found. They also NEED TO BE PAID.
3) Now we are terminating their contracts. This further hurts the charities and the companies and it means that, if we survive, it will be a really long time before we have new contracts to start providing help again. 

Today companies filed a lawsuit. 

Which companies got termination notices? It sounds like the ones chosen for the first group were ones that had key words in them. I used to work for one of them. Green Powered Technology. We think the offending word was “green.” The owner named it after himself. His last name is Green. 

We spent hours working as a collective on a document to persuade the overlords to keep us. All the billions of dollars of investment American businesses will not get our help with. It is logical. It is persuasive. The effort assumes someone with power will read it. 

What do you mean it isn’t Friday yet?

Here is a marvelous news story of things going well thanks to foresight and long hours. Ukraine’s largest bank has been able to continue to serve citizens, and possibly save the economy, because it moved to the cloud, in record time. It reminds me of Y2K. Everyone in governments and businesses took it seriously, invested heavily, and worked for years, and the system did not collapse. In fact, everyone did so much, so well, that some people joke and don’t realize that it was a very serious thing that did not happen BECAUSE people took it seriously. 

“Ukraine’s largest bank preserved economic stability for 20 million customers amid an ongoing war with Russia.
LAS VEGAS — In February 2022, the Ukrainian government made the decision to migrate terabytes of critical government data, property records and information to the Amazon Web Services cloud, hoping to preserve integral digital services for its citizens with Russian forces invading.


The effort ultimately proved “priceless,” according to Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Federov, providing the Ukrainian government continuity and resiliency amid bomb strikes and cyber attacks.


As revealed Tuesday at AWS’ re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank, undertook a similar data migration and modernization effort — also with AWS — that may have saved its economy, and at a minimum provided financial stability for 20 million Ukrainian customers. With the bank’s primary and backup data centers “at risk” in a warzone, chief operating officer Mariusz Kaczmarek told reporters a well-positioned Russian strike could have knocked out a financial system that provides more than half of Ukraine’s ATM cash withdrawals.
“When tensions start, what do citizens usually do? They go withdraw money,” Kaczmarek said. “We were thinking about what we could do to make the country stable. We decided we had no other option but to migrate to the cloud.”


Liam Maxwell, AWS’ director of government digital transformation, called the cloud migration that commenced a likely “record” for a financial institution, condensing what would have been a “1.5 year migration to less than 45 days.””


“The head of Russia's powerful Orthodox Church said in remarks published late on Tuesday that "weirdos" were trying to spread paganism in the combat zone in Ukraine…”