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Archive for December, 2022

Sirius Corporation: A ‘Tech’ Company Run by Non-Technical People

Video download link | md5sum cfd19bcb3213d2172eaf3999500f03b5
Sirius Closed Minded
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: This year’s Sirius ‘Open Source’ (or Sirius Corporation, the fake former company) isn’t run by geeks but by people who view geeks as a threat; this dooms the company irreversibly

THE management at Sirius ‘Open Source’ is almost the majority of staff now (yes, more administrators than cooks inside the kitchen!) and it has brought an element to the company that the company cannot leave behind. It is beyond redemption. The video above deals with the latest part of the report, which generally explains how a family of three adults (don’t say “threesome”, it’s a sensitive term) suggested lowering the already-low salary of long-serving technical workers. The more shocking revelations about Sirius are yet to come (mostly next month). We assume there are other companies out there that act similarly, so it is important to identify and meticulously explain the patterns.

A Toxic Company of Bedroom Politics

Sirius ‘Open Source': Three's Company

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has a severe case of nepotism and obscene case of hiring unqualified people based on ‘bedroom politics’; pointing this out to a friend outside the company is impressible, even if this endemic issue leads to technical issues and low employee morale

THE nepotism at Sirius was almost tolerable until colleagues found out they had been denied access to certain systems that far less qualified and barely-experienced colleagues were able to access. And why? Bedroom politics.

Bedroom politics is a recurring theme at Sirius and it’s further exacerbated by the fact that we’re talking about people without relevant qualifications and experience, having the audacity to suggest that people who work in daytime (like two bedroom partners) should be paid more than technical staff that’s on the beat all night long (with further disturbance to sleeping patterns owing to shift alternations about 6 times per month, akin to jetlag with all the lasting health implications).

The company’s management wasn’t willing to tackle the problem and instead viewed critics as the problem. Even if those critics merely discussed the matter outside of work without even naming the company or the people.

Sirius is going to find out that covering up abuses is a short-term strategy and a terrible technique/method for quelling dissent. It’ll all come out eventually. As noted in the report below, the company already has a history when it comes to that and it already resulted in major staff exodus; the reputation of the company cannot be redeemed by creating more and more “shells” as people inevitably find out who’s who (or where they came from).


As it stands, several employees have a romantic relationship and in spite of inadequate skills one trio of workers (with a very unconventional love affair, akin to a wife swap and love triangle) enjoy privileged access to some systems that more veteran colleagues cannot access. It’s perfectly clear that some people make all the decisions behind closed doors and some are denied any influence whatsoever because they are not part of the “clique” or the literal family. Career progression is not based on merits but a facade thereof. If it’s about who one knows who (or sleeps with who), then this degrades the image of the company, at least internally. One of the trio suggested lowering the salary of the nighttime Support Team, which her two other halfs aren’t part of. That’s rather offensive and can repulse those who really deserve double the salary for working overnight.

To quote or to paraphrase Roy and Rianne’s replies to threatening messages:

Dear all,

I believe I was unfairly treated on several grounds, including relevant protocols pertaining to several aspects. I will spare you the details but can elaborate if needed.

Here is the gist of the issues:

1. No due process
2. Verbal/oral distortion of claims
3. You misrepresented alleged evidence, but conveniently presented it as facts to my wife
4. No hard evidence presented (just a reference to a handbook we lack a copy of)
5. Rather gross accusation inflation against a person whom you did not even speak to

There are more points, but I shall keep this brief.

The company has a history doing this to couples, e.g. one blind colleague based in Germany; it was very serious and it went to court, based on a trusted source (it cost the company and/or its Directors — ???????? and ???????? — a lot of money, as went on for a long time; allegedly got settled at the end but injured the company).

We visited lawyers on Friday and on Monday. We spoke about the facts in length and have a good understanding of our rights.

We agreed that we don’t yet wish to escalate this matter and would rather settle amicably.

Regards,

Roy,

[Your longest-serving employee (aside from the founder)]


Actually, as we recently discovered, he’s not even the founder but more of an opportunist. As we shall show later (some time next month), it’s even worse than this.

Sirius will find out the hard way that Sirius should have stayed true to its mission instead of straying to Microsoft’s orgy territories.

Muck-raking by Sirius ‘Open Source’

Video download link | md5sum 8d8f65debd319f2ce20370cf6df32a32
Sirius Spooking the Sceptics
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Corporate bullying and false accusations/finger-pointing thrive when companies are failing and find themselves unable to blame the management; this is the story of the company my wife and I left this month (a company that only exploits the term “Open Source”)

THE surveillance by Sirius ‘Open Source’ (with even more surveillance in the pipeline) will be explained here next month, but today’s video deals with the low-grade muck-raking done by the company’s CEO instead of actually running the company.

Who is disgracing the company? This episode in the company’s history is shameful and it is embarrassing to staff. As geeks flee the company (a years-long exodus as noted in the video above) all that’s left in Sirius is a bunch of self-appointed managers who are neither trained nor qualified to act like leaders. They in turn resort to bullying for the sake of scaring sceptics or critics.

Sirius Corporation and Debt-Dodging or Liability Evasion

Video download link | md5sum f385fee779a251d54417ae0c9fb5297b
A Company Valued at One Pound
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The company known as Sirius Corporation (founded 24+ years ago as company number 03633198) is not really operational and it is carrying debt*; we seem to be dealing with a truly dodgy business here, albeit it goes by the name “Open Source” (which is a lie)

THE 27th of December is treated like Boxing Day this year (due to Christmas happening or falling on a weekend), but Christmas Eve was 3 days ago — just 1 day after Sirius Corporation — the ‘parent’ of Sirius ‘Open Source’ — had filed the annual papers about the financial state (as of March of this year). Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been racking up a lot of debt and the same is true for Sirius Corporation, which is discussed in the video above. There is another shell, albeit it is based in the United States and it probably has its own debt crisis.

The way things stand at the moment, Sirius Corporation seems like a collection of shells. As noted above, we were pretty much forced (not literally at gunpoint but blackmailed using threats) to move to a newly-minted shell without any legal advice (before, during, or after the signing). We’ll revisit this subject later this month.
____
* We’ve made local copies of two PDFs [1, 2].

Sirius loan
Jumping from one loan to the next [1, 2] (and one shell to another)

Sirius ‘Open Source’ Disregards the Rule of Law and Human Rights

Demolition Man ~ Violation: It's about sharing, not just taking

Summary: The company that I left this month is breaching several regulations and failing to follow the law; to make matters worse, pointing this out from within the company is impermissible and may very well instigate witch-hunts

THE HOLIDAYS are not over, but we’re still in a relatively quiet period of the year. People are resting. Nevertheless, we’re receiving additional information, which we plan to cover next month. As we shall show, under the guise of “manners” and the veneer of “professional” self-appointed enforcers are lying to people and lying about people. It is highly manipulative and it pits Sirius ‘Open Source’ in conflict with human rights, not just labour regulations and ethical codes.

Shown below is a portion of a month-old report (predating my resignation). It highlights the fact that the company where I worked for since early 2011 had gradually become more and more hostile towards its workers — to the point of false accusations and pathological lying.


Adherence to the Rule of Law and Human Rights

From what can be gathered thus far, the company is shooting from the hip, walking in the dark without any legal guidance. From what’s witnessed and what lawyers have made an assessment of, legal protocols are disregarded or simple breached; the managers don’t go through HR as they did before (impartial), probably due to cost-related overheads and a lack of budget/money in the company’s bank account, as can be seen by failure to comply with very basic legal protocols. Very, very basic stuff.

In a society based on the Rule of Law it is important to ensure, at all times, that laws are being followed, including the freedom of expression. A proper investigative process should be based on law-compliant guidelines rather than made up or twisted as one goes along, based on some personal preferences of a self-appointed investigator. Improvised ‘laws’ aren’t laws but kangaroo courts of theatrical nature with arbitrary routines.

Freedom of speech was in general respected, but only selectively (i.e. rules not equally and consistently applied). Inside work, for instance, some people were allowed to express political opinions, whereas others got reprimanded for making a harmless joke pertaining to Donald Trump (whom the company’s founder supports). Is it the case that some workers have the privilege to express political opinions, whereas some are denied that? Is kinship a recipe for immunity, not just a recruitment fast lane?

In the same vein, management can use very crude language at times, but even reasonably polite words used by ordinary staff are spun as “rude” and staff is forbidden from expressing opinions, based on false pretexts of “manners”.

The Fit-up Job at Sirius ‘Open Source’

Judge, jury, executioner

Summary: The CEO of Sirius ‘Open Source’ should have been fired for fabricating and trumping up ‘cases’ against long-serving staff; instead, he was allowed to persist, disgracing an already-disgraced organisation which lies to its own staff and clients

A frame-up (frameup) — or fit-up as it’s called in the UK — best describes what Sirius resorted to amid its demise, seeing that it’s unable to pay staff the compensation that it deserved. Heck, it could barely pay its own bills!!! The company kept changing its addresses (3 times in one month!!!) until both entities, the original and the shell, got registered with the address of a different company. One might hypothesise this was done to suffocate litigation attempts, foreseeing that some staff would sue the company.

Sirius is, at this stage at least, operating like a sham entity if not a scam. Watch out. Moreover, Sirius tolerates no criticism of its behaviour, even if it’s expressed only internally or discussed outside the company without mentioning anybody (not even the company) for the purpose of professional advice.

When companies are entrusted to bullies who lie to bounce off criticism it’s probably time to leave. If they try to shield themselves from litigation, maybe it’s time to consider reporting the matter to the authorities.

The koala reference will be shown next month when we present the frameup and the bullying by Sirius management. It’s alluded to in text below, but we can also show this visually.

The text below is from a report we handed in (internally) when we were still in the company.


What we see here resembles witch-hunting and is more like stalking and misuse of management time, stalking staff outside work instead of pursing actual clients (management should focus on CEO tasks, not spying; that’s the job of HR or equivalent).

Roy and Rianne feel like Sirius is trying to cover up and target criticism instead of actually listening to long-serving staff, who spent years warning about several legal and technical issues (some examples hitherto provided in this document).

Rianne is probably the biggest victim here. After bullying by a former manager, who used false accusations against her, the latest CEO is picking photos of her and completely unrelated material, including shamelessly using a charitable cause (supporting koala bears when fires killed them) to cause trauma to those who support them — that’s akin to bullying of the worst kind. To make matters worse, only days earlier Rianne told the CEO that her aunt, the only relative she has in the UK, had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and may need holidays to be confirmed (as many had been turned down) so that she can visit and look after her in these difficult times (she has no family to look after her). It seems cruel and merciless for a CEO to pick on a worker who is grieving, stressed over the health of a loved one, and moreover throw adorable koala photos as “evidence” of a supposed ‘crime’ (basically leveraging the agony of animals to chase down a worker quite so ferociously). It’s not reassuring to think that management adopts the mindset of brutes and ogres, picking on staff looking to raise money for animal charities while themselves supporting blind people’s and animals’ charities (for many years already). While management dwells or relishes in offensive, crude language, even polite terms used by “ordinary” staff gets painted as “rude” if the message itself isn’t convenient to the management. There are documented examples of these double standards.

Roy will soon be (or have been) 12 years in the company, but he has already endured some abuse from colleagues, usually bosses. It should be reasonable to expect Roy to be unhappy about lack of response from bosses (sometimes lying about not receiving his E-mails). What sort of company acts this way? As noted above, other colleagues had the same experience (deafness and silence). It’s crystal clear, for several purely technical reasons, that messages from Roy were being ignored, not lost.

So Far This Christmas More COVID-19 Patients Hospitalised Than Last Christmas

The official data for England only runs until the 19th, so let’s compare apples to apples:

2022 hospitalisations per day with COVID-19

19-12-2022 1,296
18-12-2022 1,176
17-12-2022 799
16-12-2022 834
15-12-2022 1,064
14-12-2022 963
13-12-2022 1,026

2021 hospitalisations per day with COVID-19

19-12-2021 926
18-12-2021 735
17-12-2021 743
16-12-2021 777
15-12-2021 805
14-12-2021 815
13-12-2021 794

2020 hospitalisations per day with COVID-19

19-12-2020 1,812
18-12-2020 1,672
17-12-2020 1,873
16-12-2020 1,796
15-12-2020 1,730
14-12-2020 1,746
13-12-2020 1,581

Meanwhile ONS says that due to some unspecified technical error it cannot publish the latest death toll/tally (for December), which seems awfully strange. How hard can it be to just count death certificates? No classification or further certifications of them is required, just a running sum/total.

The official government propaganda will likely say the above are not hospitalised for coronavirus but for something else, but how is that any different from last year (wintertime)?

In spite of very scarce testing, 28.8% more COVID-19 positives were registered in the latest week compared to the prior week.

COVID-19 is still with us and it kills many people. The media must not ignore this.

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