Doesn't that depend on when they acquired the gold and at what price? It has roughly tripled in just 10 years, and increased tenfold since the early 2000s.
Gold is gold. There is no such thing as suspect gold. It can always be subject to a purity test. Those who buy much gold, e.g. Apmex, always do it. The fact that France was able to sell the gold validates that it was gold.
Do you have a reference for this? There's been a lot of talk from ministers about reviewing contracts when break clauses allow, but I haven't seen anything definitive and this still seems to be a matter for individual departments.
Not before handing over an enormous cache of NHS patient data to them during the pandemic. If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.
If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.
Does anyone have a verifiable source for that? It would be extremely controversial if true and even among the big civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups in the UK I have never seen anyone make that claim.
The defence to using Palantir by British government departments and public services has typically been that Palantir only provides the technology and the data itself is still held and processed in the UK under the native organisation's control. Even this is still controversial because of issues like the CLOUD Act and the general reputation of Palantir.
But that is a long way from allowing the mass export of sensitive personal data to a US firm without the data subjects' knowledge or consent. That looks just plain illegal under our existing data protection legislation. Green lighting it - even in the panic phase during COVID - would probably be controversial enough to end a few political careers at least. It might even leave enough of a cloud over the party in government at the time to affect a future election.
Are you referring to the same UK that only a week ago gave Palantir access to the entire data lake of the FCA, the financial regulator and crime watchdog?
I wonder if there's a critical failure mode / safety feature of our species for some percentage of the population to always dislike whatever some other large percentage of the population likes.
As if it's to prevent the species from over-indexing on a particular set of behaviors.
Like how divisive films such as "Signs", "Cloud Atlas", and even "The Last Jedi" are loved by some and utterly reviled by others.
While that's kind of a silly case, maybe it's not just some random statistical fluke, but actually a function of the species at a population level to keep us from over-indexing and suboptimizing in some local minima or exploring some dangerous slope, etc.
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