Tag Archives: HR

The fear behind us

There is a setting, one that requires scrutiny and one that demands closer looks. You see, I do not completely agree with the setting that The Guardian gives us (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/26/how-to-replace-amazon-google-x-meta-apple-alternatives) with the illustrious title ‘Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more’ the first big thing is that there is no mention of Microsoft in that title. So that is the very first thing that comes to mind. Especially as CoPilot was mentioned earlier this week of sifting through our confidential emails. I can drop the ‘alleged’ as Microsoft admitted to this and basically said ‘Oops’ as an implied reason. So what gives?

It starts with “So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them.” OK, I can go along with this. And the sentence “many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them” gets a mention from me because some of these ‘culprits’ seemingly have no idea what innovation is, for the you have to look towards China, specifically Huawei and Tencent. So we get to the first hurdle. 

Google has cornered 90% of the search market for the past decade, but it is often no better, and sometimes demonstrably worse than its rivals, perhaps on purpose – Doctorow has called Google: “the poster-child for enshittification” citing its alleged strategy of worsening search quality so that users spend more time on the site. But changing the default search engine on any device is extremely easy. I’ve been using Ecosia for years. Instead of using your searches to fill corporate coffers, it uses them to plant trees. The Berlin-based company claims to have planted nearly 250m trees since it launched in 2009 (you can even get your own personal counter to feel extra virtuous). Ecosia commits 100% of its profits to climate action (over €100m so far), produces more clean energy than it consumes via its own solar plants, and collects minimal data on its users. Ecosia’s search results are not always as thorough as Google, admittedly (in the “news” category, for example), though the toolbar does give you options to search via Google and Bing if you need to.” The issue is that Ecosia is for all intent and matters Microsoft Bing. So this is seemingly a sales talk by a journalist because there is a massive problem finding anything by Microsoft reliable. And then we get the real stuff, Microsoft knows it is in hot waters, so we are given “The French company Qwant is similarly privacy-oriented (its slogan is “The search engine that values you as a user, not as a product”) and is now mostly independent (having started out based on Bing). It is now partnering with Ecosia to build a new “European search index”.” Yes but Microsoft is American ands as such your data will be copied and frowned on, browsed through to all their hearts content. If this is wrong, Ecosia and Qwant better clearly state that they are independent of Microsoft, because it is still the issue in Europe and for what they state the their DATA is completely secure, the issue becomes where are the backups? If they are on an American cloud or server, the setting of privacy is set to 0%. 

I can agree with the Browser chapter and even as I still rely on Google (it has never failed me), I get that no everyone is in that chapter of things. I get the Office part. I myself downloaded LibreOffice (download only, no installation yet) and I will look at it at some point, the Apple apps do their work brilliantly. So we are given “Many of them, including Austria’s military and local governments in Germany and France, are switching to LibreOffice, created by the Berlin-based, nonprofit, The Document Foundation. Businesses and individuals are doing the same. Ethical Consumer has used LibreOffice for some time, says Fraser. “It’s an open-source version of Word, and all of the Office tools. It works and looks basically the same.”” I personally reckon that this is the problem Microsoft has and getting the data from Ecosia might be their last handhold to European data, this is not a given, but I expect that this is the inside not Europe to some degree. And whilst everyone is concerned with the privacy of data, I reckon that similar to the setting of 1998-2002, no one is digging and questioning the stages of backups. But that might merely be me and as I am no longer living in Europe, I casually don’t care.

Then we see the mobile settings with a shoutout to Fairphone in the Netherlands. I have nothing against Fairphone, but it always makes me wonder if Fairphone had the same idea that Tulip had in the 90’s. That doesn’t make it wrong, it is merely a Business Ploy that should be considered. I am now and always have been a Google guy. So when we see “There is a catch: most of these phones still rely on Google’s Android operating system, but any phone can be fully “de-Googled” with the /e/OS operating system (it comes as standard with Murena phones), developed by the global, mostly European, nonprofit, e Foundation.” I can think of a way where Google can set this with their Pixels. When the consumer can select Google or A Linux version that does most of the stuff, Google clearly wins in several chapters. I reckon that these flower can merely snap market share because of this, when Google leaves it to the consumers, Google wins nearly automatically. Oh and in all this there is no mention of HarmonyOS in this and I reckon that these smaller players are adjusting to HarmonyOS as we speak, or cater to, or appease that branch. Not everyone in Europe is ‘China hating’ material. And that is merely the smallest setting of these parts. I am personally not touching the shopping side. I was raised as a follower of ‘Support your local hooker’ a phrase from the late 70’s. In that age we got malls, supermarkets and such and die to that escalation loads of local stores went through a foreclosure setting. In that same way I don’t order from Amazon. I have nothing against Amazon and they closed the gap of rural places having no way to get stuff to them having plenty of stuff and over 60% or Europe and 71% of rural USA is now served. As such Amazon did them right. I just believe that I should get to the local stores to get what I need. I only had to resort to Amazon twice in the last 10 years. So I am happy. And all these Amazon haters can go sit in a corner trying to work out the function of a cheese slicer (revelation: the red corners that are diminishing have figured it out).

But my issue is that Microsoft is shown in a ‘favorable’ light, they aren’t and they aren’t due that setting as I personally see it. The fear behind this is not the Big-tech, it is the policy that comes through the CLOUD Act (2018), it gives America too much ability to get to out data and in several cases non-American IP, which is even more frightfully. these hundreds of data centers have no reason to exist if the CLOUD Act (2018) what made illegal, that is how I see it and there is no saving Microsoft, because we get ‘blunder’ after ‘blunder’ and how long until we get another ‘Oops’ setting but now corporate IP was set in some AI hole? That is the larger fear that I see and there is no stopping it, whilst corporations are breathing the AI cloud through wannabe’s who want to move up in the world, that data is most likely to get compromised and as corporations are not setting the HR and data loops to any scrutiny, this is likely already happening and will continue to happen until the then valueless corporations see that they had to act a lot sooner than the day before all their data is in other hands. We already have Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence (2025), Bartz v. Anthropic (2025/2026), Disney & NBCUniversal v. Midjourney and the best case is United States v. Heppner (2026) where we see that documents drafted using a public, consumer-grade AI tool were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine. And that is the setting that people miss. Should someone at IBM use that setting this work becomes public, so consider that this is not IBM, but Microsoft using Copilot or OpenAI (ChatGPT) the work of your corporation becomes for all intent and purposes Public Domain, did you sign up for that?

There is plenty in the article that makes sense, but the ones that aren’t mentions are a larger fear creator than anything you are trying to hide from. Just an idea to consider. Have a great day this day.

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As evil goes

There is a setting that was inflicted upon us all by books like the bible, it goes like “the idea that humans are the source of their own suffering, whether through their actions, choices, or the inherent negative inclinations they possess” we refer to this like ‘the evil we create’ it is ‘told’ that it revolves around issues of free will and the connected moral responsibility we have. That and last week I went for a job interview. I was told that ‘older’ people are rejected as we lack certain views of adaptation and acceptance of new technologies. In a short saying, that is what my grandfather said when I was wrong until I unplugged his life support, showed him who was boss.

Anyway, something snapped in me and today it is the outcome of short sighted HR people, lazy It people and a dedicated techie who has little to lose, merely the effort that some have and the impact on a lazy business effort with the setting of “Well look at it next quarter” the right combination of issues and impact. And as it goes, places like Ukraine can release such a system on the larger Russian technology setting, so there is that. Although America makes much more likely a target than Moscow, Vladivostok, Saint Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, or Novosibirsk will likely be. 

The setting is that we have two parts. The first part is the automated setting of a standalone laptop with dedicated software that relies on its own (optionally with DML spaces), it is carried around by a drone, one that can hold up to 5Kg, as such a netbook and 3-4 battery packs for longer activities. I reckon that a setup like that would cost around $25,000. Now consider that it goes out looking for wireless enabled servers and in America it would be a lot, In Russia likely a lot less, but not zero. It infects these servers whilst flying around the buildings and in less then 2 minute per servers it does what it needs to do and in one swift control it gets activated, optionally all in one swoop and the location gets a load of DDOS attacks in under an hour. Consider what AWS did to the world, is done by third party players to the business industry. And without effort the business world goes down. So how’s that for an elderly person person without certain views you HR hack. 

As the US governmental settings are in shutdown it will take days to instigate anything and by the time others figure out that they were hacked remotely wirelessly others will destroy the evidence needed and nothing gets done yet again, until the next rounds of hacks come into the wireless connectors. 

So, as evil goes, I am doing quite well. I merely had it with the people deciding on what is possible and leaving me out to dry. Ill soak them all in hardship and terror in an instance. The too is the consequence of unleashed adaptability and considerable creativity. 

So is my idea likely? I am not sure, I think so, but it requires the engineer with effort to program a DML setting and there are other settings, so that they are on the ground hacking via the netbook in a drone so that they become the second hop and that is the unlikely setting, because the hacker needs to remain in an 8 block distance from the drone, not consider that setting that this hacker is drinking and working from a Starbucks at 233 S Wacker Dr, Chicago, or perhaps a coffeeshop in Pershing Square, Los Angeles. How many corporations and servers could be hacked in these 8 block radiuses? That is beside the settings in San Francisco, Houston, Phoenix, SanDiego, Dallas and Austin. Consider that before you write of IT people in their 50’s and 60’s. 

A simple setting and I combined a few simple variables with simple creativity. A setting others cannot dream of and I gave the world a new fear a fear where the world stops because of a simple setting that others (for greed reasons) left around for another quarter. 

That is the setting everyone seems to ignore. The setting that it comes to a halt because these places tend to be out for lunch at 21:00-23:00 hours and that gives the, something to be worried about and with the available IT people working remotely so they can tend to more corporations, that comes down to a grinding halt real quick.

So as such there is evil I can do and the world is not ready for my creativity, as such the HR wench that wrote me off because of age, have a nice day and consider what you unleashed unto the world. Time for me to consider hat else I have wreck havoc on, my creativity is going just fine, so have a great day and consider that the world is about to get more complicated in an instance. And with the police in shutdown to some degree, help might not be coming any day soon and in that same setting you bleed revenue every minute because you left something until the next quarter, which would be on you. 

Have a great day and enjoy the matcha today (apparently prices are currently soaring on that stuff).

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The wrong stuff

We used to get it, we used to see and then something went wrong. Don’t get me wrong covid changed the equation and at present the grey population is massively abundant. So at present when companies and corporations have a hard time finding people, why are they ghosting? Why do I see job openings that have been open for less than three weeks and well over 250 applications? It seems to me that HR departments and agencies are just unable to do their jobs. The problem is possibly two folded. Companies that do not know how to proceed, with one example showing me that they were looking for an 18 year old with 5 years of experience. Common sense lost much?

One source giving us “Australia’s labour shortage is expected to continue in 2023 with employers not expecting a great shift in available talent in the forthcoming year.” Yet the data I see gives another issue, especially with the ghosting going on. Employers have no handle and no clear vision as to what to do considering ‘talent’. They keep on playing the same game and merely fail more often. So why is that?

In the UK there is another factor. There we see “People opting to retire rather than return to work following the pandemic has led to a tightening of the labour market.” There are loads of people selecting early retirement over work and in some cases it was that the UK pushed for workaholics and now it is costing them. We see the news on how to (bla bla bla) and no one is looking at the number one issue, it is not the workers. There is a massive flaw on what HR departments (and agencies) do and not enough on what they SHOULD be doing and one side is clearly shown. When a company is ghosting with the shortages we see, they have lost the plot.

There is more but the fundamental need to change HR is key to this and they are not catching on. 

And whilst we hear noise like “But we need the best”, the fact that you put that demand with such shortages is nothing close to madness. What HR is setting (optionally by the bosses) of we need the best should have been ‘Whomever is good enough’ for well over 6 months.

Yes, we are in a downward spiral and it is hard to make choices, but that is why these people were given the big bucks. And that is before we get to the false jobs for some agencies ‘just’ to capture resume’s and no one is doing anything about this falsehood, people without jobs should be happy to find a job, but no one considered this day and age. People have had enough with the treatment they are getting and now companies cry. They cry to open immigration, they demand more workers so that they can get them cheap, but that day has passed and the workers are seeking another solution and is where corporations find themselves. Dousing job info with ‘most coveted employer’ or some other basic cry for ‘look, we are the place where you want to be’ and that is before you get to the interview and you are being told a different job than the one you applied for. The stage is that people have had enough for certain jobs, for certain tasks and whilst the company refuses to evolve, they merely set the stage to deceptive conduct. As if that was EVER a good way to get anyone.

So whilst you consider where you want to work consider what those agencies are claiming and those corporations are telling you. A stage that is now becoming increasingly important. That is how I see it, but then, some will claim I am wrong. I will let you decide to see who gets the staff members and who gets to live with shortages all over 2023.

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The other foot

A thought occurred, it happened earlier today, but my mind was not with the program that runs within me. You see we have a foot we prefer, almost like left handed and right handed, but the foot is less obvious, it is merely in the back of our minds, perhaps it is linked to instinct, perhaps it is less than that, but the setting exists. Yet what happens after? You see we are so of the mind that we walk we do that, and sometimes we run. Then we meet with people who tells us not to run, but to walk. Some have an actual concern. It can be safety, or merely the chance of danger. The other group gives us that setting do that we can be caught up to, we do not run faster than they do, it worries them. 

Yet there is another place. Where we rely on asymmetric gait, it is skipping. The interesting part is that skipping, even for 1-2 minutes a day strengthens you and increases your accuracy. Yet be honest. When was the last time you did that exercise? When do you no longer need to rely on increased strength and accuracy? You thought of that as a child’s game, did you not? 

The other foot is there too. What happens when you start concentrating on moving the other foot first? It is a simple question, did you ask yourself that? What happens when people state that there is no need, you are good as you walk and for a while you suddenly get compliments. Did you consider that someone does NOT want you to increase your mobility? In the 90’s my bosses did something similar. Convince me to NOT learn Oracle. It did not sit well with their exploitation of me, yet I did not learn that lesson until much later, too late actually. Yet in my twilight I have merely a few goals. Sell my IP and get a really nice stake in my retirement. And in good faith those who wronged me will never be allowed near my IP (Microsoft is not invited either). 

Yet the stage is not my IP, this stage is about you. When were you given a real option in the last two years? You see bosses are now no longer in charge (sort of). It is an employee setting and for the most they cannot get a good employee at present. EVERYONE is short of staff. As such this is the time to slam your fist on the table and set precise goals that they have to adhere to, although if you do that, you better deliver on their needs too. 

The AFR (at https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/why-we-don-t-have-enough-workers-to-fill-jobs-in-4-graphs-20220621-p5avcc) gives us in a first graph that the shortage increased by 30% in the last 2 years alone and it is not merely the ageing group. Bosses have short sold their staff for over a decade and now the invoice is due. In the blue collar stage it fluctuates between 20% and a whopping 74%. As such businesses on a global scale have a problem. Fortunately for them they have some options in other fields. Instead of relying on ‘Fake it until you make it’ they need to rely on ‘learn it until you lead it’ and there could be options all over the Commonwealth, Europe and even the US. Places like Oracle can start hiring trainees and after their first courses are passed they can be placed at their customers. Rotating every 6 month until someone ‘Shanghai’ them to become permanent employees. And this is not merely Oracle. There is Oracle, IBM, Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, end a few others.

The HR departments on a global scale need to alter their Modus Operandi it no longer works the way they think it does. The old days are over and you either adjust or you restrict your business. Of course players like Oracle need an alternative workforce, but there Universities and experienced oldies might be two streams of getting the workforce enabled. In addition they have the ability to enhance cyber knowledge all over the field making their people more enticing than the other ones. There the AFR had another view (at https://www.afr.com/technology/skills-shortage-a-handbrake-for-technology-companies-20220503-p5ai8r) and here we see ‘Skills shortage a ‘handbrake’ for technology companies’ which is merely the top-line. It is “The Australian Information Industry Association’s annual member survey found 75 per cent of technology companies are expecting their revenue to grow by at least 5 per cent this year but are concerned skills shortages will be a barrier to expanding their business.” And that is merely Australia. The commonwealth (especially UK and Canada) have growing issues and the US is in deep trouble and with their approach to everything it is now becoming the least interesting place to work. Plenty of California places (as well as the large players) have an option to syphon services via Canada, which is not a great solution, but better than nothing. In addition we see “AIIA chief executive Ron Gauci says his members are looking offshore to find specialist tech talent” and there we see the first problem, they rely on HR systems that did not evolve, that did not adjust and I see the same BS emails in my inbox to prove it, all half baked ‘invitations’ to come to Malta, they even pay the first month rent. Moving to a place where ‘others’ call the shots? You have got to be joking. When you are young and in the workplace we had 7 years ago, some people might give that a try. In todays setting it does not hold water and that is also a problem in Australia, the people who fell for that approach the last 6-10 years ago now have different stories and their friends are giving it a miss. But some places have options. They merely have to wake up and look at the equation from the other side to see that opportunities and options are there, merely for those willing to throw the gears in another speed setting and start with the other foot, it is seemingly that simple.

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They just won’t learn

That happens, people Incapable of learning. IT people listening to salespeople because these sales people know what buttons to push. Board members pushing for changes so that their peer will see that they are up to speed on the inter-nest of things (no typo) and there are all other kinds of variation and pretty much every company has them. Even as Australia is still reeling from the Optus debacle, Telstra joins the stupid range (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-04/telstra-staff-have-details-hacked/101499920). So explain to me why an HR system needs to be online? OK, you will get away with that and there is a need for some to access it, but in what universe does this need to be so open that EVERYONE can get to it? That is the question we see raised with ‘Telstra data breach sees names and email addresses of staff uploaded online’, a blunder of unimaginable proportions. On the other hand, Telstra will be bleeding staff members left, right and forward pretty soon. You see, this list is well desired by over a dozen telecoms in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. They all need staff all over the place and now their headhunters know EXACTLY where to dig. Even as the article gives us two parts. The first part is “a third party which was offering a rewards program for staff had the data breach in 2017” as well as “Telstra has not used the rewards program since 2017, the spokesperson said” in all this the question that matters are not asked. We get Bill Shorten trying to change the conversation back to Optus with: “get the information so I can stop hackers from hacking into government data and further compromising people’s privacy”. The massive part is “Why was a reward program not used for 5 years still linked to HR data?” It seems that ABC does not ask this and the others do not either. So even if we get “Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has said he will review Australia’s privacy laws and tighter protections could be brought in by the end of the year” Yet the larger question remains unanswered. How to protect these systems from STUPID people? A reward system that has a direct link to the HR data and was not used for 5 years is stupid, plain and simple stupid. As such this affects their IT and their HR department. Yet the people (politicians and media are not asking these questions are they? They let Labor loser Shorten change the conversation. Oh, do not worry we are not even close to done with Optus, but the setting that the conversation is pushed away from Telstra allegedly implies that Telstra has too large a hold on Media and politicians. So whilst the media allowed Telstra to hide behind “while the data is of minimal risk to former employees” they fail to see the larger picture. In an age brain drains these people are worth their eight in Lithium (more valuable than gold) and it seems to me that an employment database of 30,000 telecom people will be eagerly mined in the three earlier mentioned regions. These hackers were smart, they can get a million easily (over 10-15 customers) and these customers will not care where that data comes from, they need personnel and they needs them now. So it seems that certain people just ill not learn and there is no hiding behind “in an attempt to profit from the Optus breach” Telstra claims to be so superior, of that is so either the hack would not have affected them, or these systems are in a worse shape than ever before and that is also missing from the article. Two competitors successfully hit by the same flaw? It seems that too many people are asleep at the wheel. And no one is asking the right questions, not even the media, why is that?

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Setting sun of reality

There was a BBC story that struck a chord with me, it was about jobs and it is given to us by Andrea Murad. The article called ‘The computers rejecting your job application’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55932977) shows us new ways on how HR and recruiters are just a joke. Even as Andrea Murad (unintentionally) falsely gives us “Welcome to the fast-growing world of AI recruitment”, we see the initial failure, AI does not exist, not yet at least and that setting is the larger lie that HR’s and recruiters are spinning. As such whist we look at “While recruiters have been using AI for around the past decade, the technology has been greatly refined in recent years. And demand for it has risen strongly since the pandemic, thanks to its convenience and fast results at a time when staff may be off due to Covid-19” we get the following:

  1. AI does not exist.
  2. Demand for something that does not exist is a delusional lie.
  3. Convenience of what, something that does not exist?

The stage is slowly starting, you see games are games and these recruitment games are set to get rid of the ‘slow’ applications, then they look at the ones with the most errors and the most hesitations, you see everything is measured in these games. So even if the explanation is a little wobbly, as people are trying to figure things out, they get one shot. And that is not even close to the end.

So when we see “The questions, and your answers to them, are designed to evaluate several aspects of a jobseeker’s personality and intelligence, such as your risk tolerance and how quickly you respond to situations”, it is one that is loaded with issues, but the nice part is that it follows “Or as Pymetrics puts it, “to fairly and accurately measure cognitive and emotional attributes in only 25 minutes””, or as I put it, there is no fairly stage, you are set against others and the lower scores are basically cut off, a game does not measure emotional I attributes and any test that is set to seconds can never not now, not ever fairly measure emotions. I am not even touching cognitive, as I would see it, in the case of Pymetrics, it is like watching a slide ruler judge the precision of a calculator. It is the new way of HR divisions to set scores to the needs of bosses and it will backfire in the most disastrous of ways. 

This all gets to be worse when we look at “The audio of this is then converted into text, and an AI algorithm analyses it for key words, such as the use of “I” instead of “we” in response to questions about teamwork. The recruiting company can then choose to let HireVue’s system reject candidates without having a human double-check, or have the candidate moved on for a video interview with an actual recruiter”, it is a system where the older fail, they are not accustomed to zoom style interviews, a stage that is, as I personally see it, a way to legalise age discrimination. There is also the stage of the questions and how impersonal edged questions wash out even more people, people that would for the most be great candidates. And that is not all there are signs (unproven ones) that these systems are also used to categorise people, fake jobs and the creation of rainbow results, a fake version of something that does not even exist at present (AI that is).

Yet the article is still good, when we get to the latter part and we are given some issues by Prof Sandra Wachter, a senior research fellow in AI at Oxford University we see that there is a larger stage and the stage is debatable. It is seen in “All machine learning works in the same basic way – you go through a bunch of data, and find patterns and similarities. So in recruitment, looking at the successful candidates of the past is the data you have. Who were the chief executives in the past, who were the Oxford professors in the past?” In this we see the first issue ‘machine learning’ is a part of AI, it is NOT AI, and those relying on machine learning will lose a lot. To see this, I found an image by Daniel S. Christian, I believe it is incomplete, but it is a larger stage we see and optionally you will see how those claimants of AI are just wrong. You see the image misses, Datapoint Creation, category creation, new data comprehension and verification of data (new against old old), this is essential because if that I not done it is not AI, a person will always be in the mix to make calls making the data arbitrary and obsolete (read: useless) from the get go.

And all that is before we consider that those with a bad webcam will be judged unfairly, so the poor with indecent equipment will not be judged correctly against those with much better webcams, if that is not the case there can be no AI, because face recognition would be essential in emotional recognition, or not?

The worst part in all this is all these sources going on about ‘AI’, I wonder what kind of cool-aid they are drinking, it’s a set of fake values and as such the entire setting is fake, it is fake for all kinds of reasons, yet I personally feel it is so that these ‘wielders’ can indiscriminately discriminate the pool of applicants, it is merely my view on the matter, and there will be plenty of greed driven players calling my view foul, I will let you decide for yourself.

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