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Under a five-year contract with Periscope Holdings, the OregonBuys Marketplace will standardize purchasing across all the state’s agencies, from procurement to payment, giving Oregon a better view into buying activity.
Xavier Becerra, California Attorney General, said at a press conference in San Francisco regarding how Facebook has been resisting and ignoring California’s attempts to get information about the company’s data use. Facebook has not responded to the subpoena Becerra’s office issued. (NPR — November 6, 2019)
The amount of money one L.A. firefighter received in overtime pay alone. According to an audit released on Wednesday, over 90 percent of L.A. police and fire employees received overtime pay last year, with the average being $27,737. Eighteen of those that earned overtime earned more than $200,000 in OT pay.
Acting Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar declared the new voting system “was carried out statewide with little incident.” A GOP official said Boockvar’s description was “disingenuous at best.”
A ransomware attack in May left Baltimore government disoriented for months. The Cybersecurity and Emergency Preparedness Committee met for the first time on Wednesday to begin a cyber-preparedness plan.
The three-year agreement will help Charlotte incorporate technology into everyday city life to benefit the community. This is Microsoft’s second smart city deal — the first was the May partnership with Houston, Texas.
City tech leaders and cybersecurity experts confront the tension between elected officials beholden to the public and IT bosses whose primary concern is limiting the information available to bad actors.
Oil from the state’s wells is expected to surpass 300 million barrels this year, which means an unprecedented wave of oil and gas revenue, generating $1 billion-plus budget surpluses in the last two years.
Texas is one of seven states without an income tax. The state and its local governments derive most of their revenue to fund services like health care and education from sales taxes and property taxes.
Proposition CC would have let the state keep any tax revenues above the state spending cap — money that the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights currently guarantees as refunds to taxpayers. The measure was rejected by Colorado voters.
The referendum passed with 68 percent of the vote, allowing for $3.5 billion in borrowing by Houston’s Metro, based on future transit agency revenues from the 1 percent sales tax it controls.
Democrats scored gains in numerous once-Republican suburbs in state and local races Tuesday, most notably in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Republican strategists are nervous about that trend continuing into 2020.
Including operational costs, this is the estimated cost for each flight of SpaceX’s Starship. When it comes to space flights, this is an extremely cheap price tag: SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk boasted “This is much less than even a tiny rocket.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson explained how online communities can promote qualities of tribalism. The Internet allows these small groups to foster ideas that traditionally may have been marked as absurd or crazy: “If you have some idea that’s a little bit crazy but you don’t think it’s crazy, you type it in and up comes everybody else who shares that exact idea.” (The Hill — November 6, 2019)
Programs that monitor students' social media and email, which have grown in popularity in recent years, are seen as a means of heading off the next tragic shooting. New legislation would dramatically expand their use.
Just like many others, astronaut Drew Morgan applied for an absentee ballot this past spring. However, he was the only one to request that the absentee ballot get sent to “International Space Station, low Earth orbit.”
After concerns with electronic voting computers, Guilford County re-introduced paper ballots for Tuesday’s elections. Voters manually completed the paper ballots, then fed them into a computerized tabulator to count.
Mark Zuckerberg continues to defend his company’s proposed cryptocurrency and the House Financial Services Committee continues to push back with skepticism. “Why should Congress, regulators and the public trust you?”
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles said it “inappropriately shared” personal information of 3,200 customers to several outside agencies. Two hundred included Social Security numbers, could trace to citizenship.
Unlike other federal and state offices, there’s still ‘wiggle room’ for ticket-splitting in contests for governor. Tuesday’s result in Kentucky means there will be a dozen governors whose party lost the last presidential election in their state.
California law states that any language minority that makes up 3 percent of the voting-age population in that precinct must have ballot materials in those languages at polling places.
The Philadelphia-based seller thinks the numbers are impossible: “I would have had to have done at least $15 [million] to $20 million in sales to get a bill like this.”
Lawmakers are raising serious concern over a controversial $4 million grant provision included in this year’s $39 billion budget. But Gov. Bill Lee assures the money will be spent on “opportunities to improve communities.”
Companies are mining data from online users and policy is lagging on how to manage it. Government officials implement new legislation, only for companies to find a workaround, leaving the consumer defenseless.
With the 2020 elections just around the corner, election officials are getting extremely nervous about the implications of doctored videos that are spreading misinformation. “There is no reason to think they won’t be used in this election.”
With 15,000 Connecticut state workers eligible for retirement in 2022, state departments are turning to online applications and artificial intelligence to quickly fill potential labor gaps.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which oversees metro Boston’s public transit systems, wants to electrify its major rail lines to boost passenger service and reliability. But left unanswered is the proposal’s cost.
The rollback of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts in 2017 produced a state budget surplus that ballooned to $1.1 billion – a sharp turnaround after years of shortfalls. But state spending is now beginning to catch up.
According to the state auditor, El Cerrito, Richmond, Oakland and San Jose rank among the worst cities at risk for financial distress. It’s now up to residents, city administrators and elected officials to figure out what to do about it.
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