Summary: Sleek like an eel, the so-called ‘founder’ and his pathologically-lying right-hand man have turned the company into a multi-headed hydra that offloads debt from one shell to another while refusing to cover financial liabilities

MONTHS ago it was becoming apparent that Sirius would not survive for much longer. Public filings (we’ve already included some PDFs and screenshots of them^*) made that rather clear. Even the company admitted it was having difficulties. It held online meetings with staff in order to discuss this. Well, the company is quite frankly broke and not worth suing for severance (it would likely have nothing to pay out, even after losing, according to our lawyers^**; so the short story is that layoffs or resignations would be similar).

Just to be very clear on this matter, the company does not wish to issue compensation. It said that in letters. It thinks it can dodge its obligations and has constructed a chain of shell companies, which further complicate litigation. The company wanted to make it all seem legitimate; so it meticulously issued or manufactured some false pretexts, even bogus scenarios (months in the making already). It probably reckoned it would be cheaper to start a witch-hunt than to do things properly. We still have them saying on the record (audio/video) that compensation would be considered, but that was just what HR told them to say. There was probably no intention to ever consider that. We have those bits on record (compensation mentioned several times^***).

To avoid repetition, the company has engaged in a lot of chronic lying and false promises in 2022^****. There were contradictory statements (like claims of recruitment in the US, later refuted by what the managers told me upon asking). It’s hard to even keep track of the lies. Many didn’t try to keep track; they were too busy trying to cope with a sort of ‘jet lag’ — an integral part of the job. We’re talking about technical people who are idle a lot of the time because they work overnight, devoted to complex tasks of monitoring many things and responding accordingly — all this while paid laughably little. Some cooks who work in daytime (9 to 5) get paid more. It’s worth noting that they use us for marketing in their site. They use or even exploit our credentials, even more than a month after we left. The company wouldn’t get away with it several years ago. To remind readers, there’s also programming done, but that falls under “projects” and has another pay grade. For projects, the staff needs a proper daytime job (without distractions such as alerts; they’re not sysadmins) and with decent pay.

Speculations aren’t as good as facts, but at Sirius speculating was often required due to a lack of transparency. The footnotes below contain a mixture of facts and speculations.

____
^* We’ve also shown PDFs with names and balances redacted; some demonstrate the nepotism, which we’ll revisit later this week. Sirius is basically run like a family thing. Incorporation of the current shell is dated “16 Oct 2017″ (with “Starting value 1 pound (minimum)”). We’ve long assumed this shell was meant to help dodge liability to the soon-divorced wife. The ‘founder’ has had two failed marriages with 2 daughters from each. The second wife was very much in control of the ‘founder’ (say former insiders who worked in the office and saw it firsthand). The ‘founder’ is (openly) a Donald Trump fan (there are Trump support tweets). Not a huge deal, but does help explain a thing or two at times. Jobs were advertised by him and the company’s account in Twitter a few years ago; that said the company was also US-based and said laughable things like us being American leaders in the area (we have had almost no clients and staff there!); the salary is very low for the skills level required and is shown in USD (currency) as well as GBP. The official Sirius Twitter account used to say US/UK; this is no longer the case. No idea why (possibly aborted plans), but the plausible explanation is that the company was just inconsistently presenting itself to potential/prospective clients, depending on what they wanted to hear or believe.

^** To give some more hypothetical scenarios, let’s say we found a way to sue the company (it is hiding). The lawyers told us a legal case of this nature can take 12 months to conclude and if by that point the debt collectors decide which liabilities are paid first, then the news isn’t good; a court case (legal bills and so on), even if a resounding loss for the company, would be at the bottom of the priorities, the bottom of the list (or liabilities to pay off). So it would be a pyrrhic victory for us, no financial and moral damages paid, not even our legal fees covered. This hopefully helps explain the decision to resign. The resignations gave us more freedom to speak out too (no agreement to keep silent). One notable issue is, the company can pretend to be broke in one shell while hiding some assets in another. There’s this ‘monkey business’ modus operandi which is to separate companies into profitable and non-profitable, then pick one part with no liability and throw out the rest. Maybe this is applicable here. We’ve found no compelling evidence though.

^*** We started making our own recordings because the management lied about providing recordings of particular meetings in 2019. It lied about such transparency, so I started making my own recordings of such meetings.

^**** Last year we had this meeting for “re-infrastructuring”, followed by several more meetings. They pretended things would be OK but were planning to dismantle the company and turn it into a kind of ‘consultants’ reseller, looking not to pay staff, seeking advice for back-stabbing (from external HR firm, months before spying on us).

Video download link | md5sum b7092ce567dc2abaaf29741f7fd87ae2
Sirius Stuck in Clown Computing
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Sirius does not know what it’s doing. How can Sirius advise clients on hosting when it cannot even do its own hosting right? Colleagues tried to push “AWS” to clients, but I kept standing in the way, saying it would cost a fortune and erode security/privacy (over time I was vindicated as bills constantly soared)

THE VIDEO above is relatively long but it could be far longer. I have a lot of things to say about the shortcomings with clown computing, based on firsthand experience for over a decade. The short story is, avoid clown computing any time it’s possible to shun clown computing. The clown computing pushers (marketing) are untrustworthy; they “appeal to authority” and they’ve long targeted gullible non-technical managers.

Disregard their misleading vocabulary (like “serverless”). Call it “clown computing” and don’t say “on-prem”; they’ve utilised this for upselling, exploiting a new buzzword for what was done, correctly, for decades already! A lot of that isn’t even “self-hosted” (another relatively new term); it’s like getting a subdomain in GitHub(.com), which is proprietary and controlled by just one company. There’s that same subdomain mentality of Slack, as it gives false impression (illusion) of control, like “guilds” for chat. All that centralisation is corrosive and very risky. It’s also expensive in the long run (I give the example of FeedBurner, which almost literally burned its own users). When the hosting is controlled by one company the user is at the mercy of this one company; moving from one company to another is often impossible or very expensive. This entrapment is exploited by raising prices ad infinitum — to the point where it becomes so unbearable that the providers lose more clients than they gain in additional surpluses (price hikes). In the case of GitHub, the hosting is controlled by one company; the platform and code are also controlled by that same company (Microsoft).

People need to talk about these issues in abstract and topological terms, only to be challenged by weak-minded folks who speak in buzzwords and brands (like “AWS” and “Amazon”). I’ve sadly found myself unable to communicate these issues with people who act like salesmen rather than software engineers.

Putting aside financial aspects, AWS has technical issues and occasional downtimes, as noted in passing above (in the video). Lots and lots of examples of that could be given and presented in full. Moving from one’s own servers to Amazon (et al) is as technically sanitary as giving up on toilets at home, choosing to use public toilets instead (“as a service”).

All in all, the video above tells some stories “from the trenches” that we don’t plan to write about (they’re not that scandalous anyway). It does not merely repeat what was covered in the article earlier on.

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ management was dumb enough to replace the in-house infrastructure with overpriced (and outsourced) junk that did not even work as expected

THE report we deposited over a month ago already covered the fiasco of outsourcing (gradual) where I had worked for nearly 12 years. We don’t want to repeat what was already covered. I discussed this in person with the main individual responsible for the awful decision. He said they envisioned it would save money, but based on bills that I saw it was beyond insane to suggest so! Why would any sane company throw about 10,000 pounds down the drain every year? A modest second-hand server can be purchased for just 1,000 pounds and we didn’t need to buy any. We already had servers!!! We had an ISP, too.

When the company’s “cloud” (or “clown”) bills keep blowing upwards (upward to almost a thousand pounds a month), for something that started very small (the vendor lock-in relies on this sort of illusion, before exit barriers are raised), you have to wonder about the judgment of short-sighted decision-makers like Mr Kink. Who’s going to be held accountable? Or when?

As a reminder, AWS operated at a loss for years and Azure still seems to be operating at a loss (they just call everything “Azure” now). They are enticing people to enter the trap. Microsoft loses money and so does Google. Billions in losses! I brought this up over the phone, speaking to the CEO for about an hour almost a year ago! But they don’t want to listen!

As a reminder, Microsoft is laying off staff, cancelling and shutting down datacentres, as they overprovisioned for something that never came (or resulted in massive losses). Microsoft basically misleads shareholders by rebranding many things “cloud” and/or “Azure”, so even if it’s not growing Microsoft can claim otherwise. There’s no proper definition of “cloud” or “Azure”.

On the phone about a year ago I suggested small self-hosted machines (the CEO called this “hobbyist”). It’s worth reminding ourselves that we lost staff that looked after our servers. That too was the fault of the management, for reasons we explained before.

It would be so much cheaper and safer to run our own infrastructure, as we already did for decades. And yes, we covered this in the report and earlier in this series. This is a no-brainer.

To give one example of what moving to AWS caused Sirius: OTRS, a ticketing system, needed us throwing more and more resources at it (partly because of bad design, partly due to workers sending megabytes of text in E-mails, as they top-post — the “Microsoft Way” basically — and don’t bother trimming/snipping what they respond to). Each time you add resources the bills go up by a lot! That’s the “magic” of “the clown”! It’s getting very expensive very fast!

Remember that we used to self-host all the E-mail of the company; now the company uses phony encryption as a tenant on someone else’s servers (Amazon). I challenged my colleagues about this. I argued with management. They could not even defend their decision. They saw no need to defend what they had done! We’ve had arguments over this internally in 2022. Of course it was risky for me to bring this up, but at this stage it was the moral thing to do, even a moral obligation. At Sirius, colleagues felt like their efforts and contributions were ignored/discarded by the cabal (family), so they quit caring. This is how nepotism dooms companies. Some colleagues left, some remained but without much desire to go beyond the basics. And this aspect too we’ve covered here before.

Regarding E-mail hosting in “the clown”, here’s a 2020 story. To quote an Evening Shift handover: “Spent most of my evening tracking down missing emails. I was rather perturbed by xxxxx’s handover email disappearing and I’m guessing that because the server was underpowered it started to behave strangely and misclassified legitimate emails as viruses and deleted them. Fortunately each email is given an unique id by the system which is useful for searching the logs. Managed to get a list of deleted ones and sent it to xxxxx, xxxxx, and xxxxx suggesting that they identify their clients or ones they recognise and email them with the time + 1 hour asking to resend. I found one from xxxxx and emailed and xxxxx kindly sent his email again.”

Wonderful! What a mess.

“Ironically,” Ryan Farmer notes today, “”Cloud Hosting” only makes sense if your needs are so small that it’s hardly worth setting anything up yourself.”

In some cases useful virtual machines were turned off to “save money”. Even if they took little space and CPU. If self-hosted, they would cost almost nothing to leave on.

Clown computing is a trap. To quote one new (days-old) cautionary tale (already in Daily Links): “Turns out that Revue is getting shut down. This means that I won’t be able to use it anymore (and I stopped using it because it wasn’t getting much traction vs the amount of work I put into it).”

So maybe outsourcing isn’t such a wise long-term strategy after all.

At one point by far our biggest client relied on VMware for clown hosting; of course VMware shut the whole thing down and in a hurry we needed to get all the servers out of there. Clown computing: it’s here today, but gone tomorrow. You’re not part of the decision! It does not matter if you have critical services on there and they give you a very short notice (to vacate).

New video:

Description:

Excess deaths, different countries and different age groups

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/latest-release

In 2022

144,650 deaths that occurred by 30 September

(and were registered by 30 November),

which is 19,986 (16.0%) more than the historical average

(compared to 2015-2019)

Same period

8,160 deaths due to COVID-19 that were certified by a doctor

Non covid excess deaths
= 11,826

Week ending 30 December 2022 (Week 52)

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/latest

9,517 deaths were registered in England and Wales

(393 mentioned “novel coronavirus, COVID-19)

The number of deaths was above the five-year average

Private homes, 36.9% above, (684 excess deaths)

Hospitals, 14.8% above, (537 excess deaths)

Care homes 20.4% above, (371 excess deaths)

Other settings 0.2% above, (1 excess death)

Total excess deaths, week 52 = 1,593

Percentage change compared to 5-year average (2016 to 2019 and 2021) for week 52

20.1%

Week ending 23rd December England and Wales, (week 51)

All-cause deaths registered 14,530

(COVID-19 accounted for 429, 3.0%)

Number of deaths was above the five-year average

Private homes (37.5% above, 1,120 excess deaths)

Hospitals (18.8% above, 1,031 excess deaths)

Care homes (10.5% above; 282 excess deaths)

Other settings (7.0% above, 61 excess deaths) in Week 51 in England and Wales.

Total excess deaths, week 51 = 2,492

Excess deaths in all UK age groups

https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiYmUwNmFhMjYtNGZhYS00NDk2LWFlMTAtOTg0OGNhNmFiNGM0IiwidCI6ImVlNGUxNDk5LTRhMzUtNGIyZS1hZDQ3LTVmM2NmOWRlODY2NiIsImMiOjh9

Data goes up to 18th November 2022

Investigating cause of excess deaths

In 1965, English statistician Sir Austin Bradford Hill

Causal relationships

Strength

The larger the association, the more likely that it is causal

Consistency, (reproducibility)

Consistent findings, different persons in different places

Specificity

No other likely explanation

Temporality

The effect has to occur after the cause (often with a delay)

Biological gradient, (dose response relationship)

Greater exposure should lead to greater incidence of the effect

(or indeed lower incident of effect)

Plausibility

A plausible mechanism between cause and effect

Coherence

Between epidemiological and laboratory findings

Experiment

Occasionally it is possible to appeal to experimental evidence

Analogy

Analogies or similarities between the observed association and any other associations

Reversibility

May work if there is no permanent damage

fter two more days of failure to respond (for the second time already, spanning over one week!) I’ve decided to name and shame Aviva.

It is almost impossible to contact them [1, 2]. Their ‘apps’ and ‘Web sites’ are useless junk, so they’re in effect faceless banksters.

Even their online chat “app” never works.

I tried this on three different days, with multiple browsers, and it’s just hanging. Nobody is there.

What is this, a prank?

Maybe it’s time to report Aviva to regulators. They did not respond to my request to move my pension to another provider. They also failed to respond to a formal filing of a complaint. They never ever send any letters. It’s like a black hole for money.

Very sharp increase in total deaths just 3 years later. Where’s the government investigation?

2022

2019:

With numbers like these, only the gullible and deeply misinformed would think the pandemic is “over”.

This morning at around 10am (GMT) this page was updated.

A month ago:

First week of January:

Second week of January (this morning):

When does the the Office for National Statistics (ONS) plan to add the missing deaths? And will ONS carry on lying? Sarah Caul has some explaining to do.

As we can see elsewhere too, at this point the British government lies to the public (fake data) to cover up the fact COVID-19 and/or mass vaccination have had implication for cardiac health.