Some additional details: The proposal was submitted by an individual shareholder.
She requests that the Board "commission a report assessing the implications of siting Microsoft cloud datacenters in countries of significant human rights concern, and the Company’s strategies for mitigating these impacts."
She specifically cites the 2024 completion of a Microsoft datacenter in Saudi Arabia, citing a "State Department report [that] details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity."
The Board opposes the proposal because it believes Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy. They also re-iterate the need to comply with local laws and legally binding requests for customer data.
The proposal is non-binding, so the Board doesn't have to act on it even in the unlikely event it gets majority support (ESG proposals rarely do, especially in this environment). In practice many Boards do choose to act on majority-supported non-binding shareholder proposals, though, because many shareholders will vote against directors the following year if they don't.
> Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy
Where can one find those extensive disclosures, especially for year 2024/2025? I'd love to hear how Microsoft are protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in a country like Saudi Arabia, which has a track record of excelling at whatever you'd call the opposite of those two things.
> Norway’s $2 trillion wealth fund said on Sunday it would vote for a shareholder proposal
> Microsoft management had recommended shareholders voted against the motion.
Ok, cool, but what about the reasons for those actions? What kind of lazy journalism is this? I guess it's nice that we know that something is happening, but what about reaching out to people and asking them why so people can actually understand? For the love of Adam Smith, at least mention the involved countries!
Thank you for providing actual source! Ever thought of creating and running an alternative to CNBC?
Funny how most of the comments in this submission assumes it's about Israel, telling in more ways than one. This is why reporting has to be accurate :)
Yeah it does seem there’s some confusion. Here is the similar proposal referencing Israel from earlier this year (perhaps a source of some of the confusion):
ok I actually wanted to look up what antisematism actually means since the only context I've seen it is israel, so I looked up what sematism is which lead me to one who has sematic qualities which is:
Semitic
of, relating to, or constituting a subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic language family that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic
Saudi Arabia is arabic so technically they're correct?
"semitic" has this broader meaning, yes, but the specific term "antisemitism" is only used to refer to Jews, not to Arabs (or, for that matter, Amharic-speaking Ethiopians).
It also doesn't specifically refer to the State of Israel, but to Jews everywhere.
I'd like to see them pull all support for Bitcoin and crypto related "companies". As we all know, bitcoin's only use cases are scamming little old lady's out of thousands of dollars at atm's and speculation. It is not an investment vehicle, it is not a currency.
If someone at the NWF is reading this, please take this into consideration. Let's start to take action against the fraud and grift, and try to make humanity a little better, one step at a time.
Wing-nut? Is that now the census for the majority of the world outside of the US and UK? If we’re looking at legal precedent, then not taking action could see massive legal challenges that could destroy Microsoft for complicity in genocide.
And that isn't what should happen in a democracy. What percentage of Norway would really be willing to sacrifice their pensions for this? I don't know but I would bet a lot it's single digit percentage at most.
So this show is exactly what should happen in a democracy, isn't it?
I think you subestimate the mount of decency it exist in Norway. But i do agree that Far Right Players always focus on the feelings of pepple, and the less educated react strongly against scarcity. Easy targets.
> What percentage of Norway would really be willing to sacrifice their pensions for this? I don't know but I would bet a lot it's single digit percentage at most.
Luckily, even if their MS investment goes to 0, it wouldn't be "sacrificing their pensions". Around 2.5% of the wealth fund is invested in MS, so it seems to line up pretty well with your "single digit percentage at most."
The government is led by the Norwegian Labour Party (which is, obviously, opposed to fascism like all left-leaning parties). Its Prime Minister was born in 1960. There is no meaningful sense in which you can say that Norway's current government supported the Holocaust, even if some past iteration of the Norwegian state did so.
After deporting all its Jews to certain death and stealing all their property, these people continued managing the norwegian government, police force, etc.
This was common in the entirety of Europe with their mass amnesia, where everyone was in the resistance, and the actual perpetrators were the germans or the "nazis", never the local men on the ground.
Now it is not surprising when Europe who has collectively created the myth of "someone else responsibility" is now working on pinpointing the blame for genocide to the Jews themselves, creating the final work of scapegoating jews as was a cultural tradition in the continent.
So when Jews are massacred in the land they fled to after your own police force deported them to death camps, and your own government stole their properties making them refugees, why not go for the final stroke?
These people?
Are you referring to people in the current Norwegian government?
Or do you generalize Norwegians (including people from the past) to have a single mindset like a racist would do?
Since it doesn't say it in the article, the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Palantir are all providing cloud and AI services to Israel which it uses it the genocide in Gaza and the continued military occupation of Palestine.
> the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.
Yes, let’s go after US Steel because some guy with a gun shot up a school.
Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service and claim that millions of users use azure cloud to serve websites and content, the dance will go on.
I don’t think punishing the steel maker for a gun maker who sold it to a distributor who then sold it to a nut job should be liable for the nut job. This is the same for tech. Sub contractors for Israel government got Azure hosting and subbed it out to Palantir to plant their platform inside (gun maker) and then sold it to Israel (nut job).
> Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service
Doesn't the article you linked contradict that? It sounds like they're claiming they only provided general purpose blob storage.
> First, we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians. We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades. This is why we explained publicly on August 15 that Microsoft’s standard terms of service prohibit the use of our technology for mass surveillance of civilians.
The Norway wealth fund is a co owner of Microsoft, like everyone with shares. Google says they own 1.35%, worth 50 billion.
If they want Microsoft not to provide "general compute" to the Israeli army then they can try to get a majority of Microsft owners to go along with it.
I think that's not the same as pressure on Microsoft from the outside.
Any export increases of gun metal grade, high carbon steel should be a red flag these days to stateside corporations operating in war zones. Structural steel is a low carbon steel that has more 'give' and is easier to weld. It's obvious which is which.
In Sweden's case, however, even pre-war they were already exporting 40% of Germany's demand for raw ore which increased to 50% during wartime iirc. So Germany already had the infrastructure necessary to process the raw materials into steel, and at scale scale beforehand.
In modern warfare, those same foundaries would make easy aerial targets due to the massive heat output from the bessimer process required to make steel from raw ore.
Yes, its general purpose compute. But if you or me use Azure for illegal purpose (pirated content, tax evasion, violence etc etc..), for sure Microsoft won't be sitting idle.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund are not "online radicals", and many genocide scholars, UN bodies, etc. have also found that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
If you want to dispute that claim, fine; reasonable people can disagree about the definition of "genocide" and about what standard of proof is necessary. However, reducing the opposing opinion to "online radicals" is inaccurate.
Actually we should as well, given the shady deals some of them make with politicians, which create a set of cascading events that end up in school shootings as if they were good old saloon fights.
If the number of people killed by guns made at home with 3D printers or CNC mills gets to the same ballpark as those killed by commercial guns, sure, it's a conversation to have.
It's relevant because Microsoft, like all big companies, have Human Rights Pricinples and such that are part of the company. It's basically impossible to get big institutional investment without it.
The issue is that they were caught not following their practices, and then lying about it. So the shareholders are asking that they produce a report about whether they are following their own human rights principles.
And Satya is resisting it, because it is very clear that they are not following them, as workers [1] have been calling out for years now. Many leaked documents have shown that Microsoft actually embeds employees directly with the IDF and makes millions in service contracts with them. [2]
For anyone that is still green on company politics, all company principles are check boxes that form part of an HR circus of yearly compliance trainings, and marketing for young employees that are naive enough to think they mean anything.
Perhaps this reflects your experience, in your part of the world. In some parts of the world, principles and ethics do count, and don’t change on a dime (as they do in the US).
Isn’t it though? When AI is used against the people and fake media is used to cover up war crimes, what’s not to stop there? When your feeds have been polluted with outside foreign influencers that you explode from within, what’s not to stop there? It’s war alright. Just not the kind of war Spielberg thinks would make a great film.
Nice to see Norway taking a principled stand against the genocide. Unlike my own government which has allowed arms export to Israel to quadruple over the past years. It's embarrassing.
With a 1:16:29 runtime, could you at least share what parts are relevant to this submission, the very least timestamps? Even if I'd speed it up by 4x it'd take 30 minutes to listen to all of it.
No parts of it are relevant to this submission, because (as others explained to you elsewhere in the thread) the submission is about Norway objecting to Microsoft doing business with Saudi Arabia, whereas GP is about attacking Microsoft's ties to Israel.
(For some reason, doing business with Saudi Arabia is not counted as evidence against the "Zionist", "genocide" etc. etc. narrative.)
Or you ask Gemini to do this for you (timestamps were removed when formatting into markdown)
Based on the podcast "Microsoft: Powering Israel’s Genocide? | Hossam Nasr," here are the main human rights issues alleged against Microsoft:
1. Complicity in Military Operations
- The podcast claims Microsoft is a key tech provider for the Israeli military, specifically using the Azure cloud platform to run combat and intelligence activities.
- It alleges Microsoft sells AI services (including OpenAI models) to military units like "Mamram," which are linked to automated targeting systems used to accelerate lethal strikes.
2. Surveillance and Infrastructure
- Microsoft is accused of hosting roughly 13.6 petabytes of data used for mass surveillance.
- The "Al-Munassiq" app, used by Palestinians to manage movement permits, reportedly runs on Azure and is described as a tool for collecting vast amounts of surveillance data.
- The company reportedly sells technology directly to illegal settlements in the West Bank.
3. Internal Labor Rights & Suppression
- The speaker alleges a double standard and discrimination against Palestinian and Arab employees.
- Microsoft is accused of "weaponizing" HR policies to fire workers (including the podcast guest) for organizing vigils or protesting the company's military contracts.
4. Historical Context
- The discussion references Microsoft's history of providing tech to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the US as part of a broader pattern of supporting "systems of oppression."
They probably need to maintain fluidity at any given moment, given this is a retirement fund. So no crazy but risky returns in portfolio. And this issue here is likely also about risk mitigation.
Not sure if you're American, but investment funds in other countries, especially those with "hints of socialism" usually don't put "profit above all else" like is common in America, hence "good enough" is usually just that, good enough.
Seems they're doing exactly what is expected of them, staying around the benchmark index, so that sounds pretty good:
> The fund has outperformed the benchmark index set by the Ministry of Finance by 0.24 percentage point since 1998.
Some additional details: The proposal was submitted by an individual shareholder.
She requests that the Board "commission a report assessing the implications of siting Microsoft cloud datacenters in countries of significant human rights concern, and the Company’s strategies for mitigating these impacts."
She specifically cites the 2024 completion of a Microsoft datacenter in Saudi Arabia, citing a "State Department report [that] details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity."
The Board opposes the proposal because it believes Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy. They also re-iterate the need to comply with local laws and legally binding requests for customer data.
The proposal is non-binding, so the Board doesn't have to act on it even in the unlikely event it gets majority support (ESG proposals rarely do, especially in this environment). In practice many Boards do choose to act on majority-supported non-binding shareholder proposals, though, because many shareholders will vote against directors the following year if they don't.
> Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy
Where can one find those extensive disclosures, especially for year 2024/2025? I'd love to hear how Microsoft are protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in a country like Saudi Arabia, which has a track record of excelling at whatever you'd call the opposite of those two things.
> Norway’s $2 trillion wealth fund said on Sunday it would vote for a shareholder proposal
> Microsoft management had recommended shareholders voted against the motion.
Ok, cool, but what about the reasons for those actions? What kind of lazy journalism is this? I guess it's nice that we know that something is happening, but what about reaching out to people and asking them why so people can actually understand? For the love of Adam Smith, at least mention the involved countries!
https://collaborate.unpri.org/group/35676/stream
Saudi Arabia
Thank you for providing actual source! Ever thought of creating and running an alternative to CNBC?
Funny how most of the comments in this submission assumes it's about Israel, telling in more ways than one. This is why reporting has to be accurate :)
Yeah it does seem there’s some confusion. Here is the similar proposal referencing Israel from earlier this year (perhaps a source of some of the confusion):
https://collaborate.unpri.org/group/35681/home
I think this kind of article is written by a bot these days.
> For the love of Adam Smith, at least mention the involved countries!
Nobody wants to be called an antisemite, so they won't mention the involved country.
[flagged]
It’s because Israel isn’t relevant here, it’s Saudi Arabia
ok I actually wanted to look up what antisematism actually means since the only context I've seen it is israel, so I looked up what sematism is which lead me to one who has sematic qualities which is:
Semitic
of, relating to, or constituting a subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic language family that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic
Saudi Arabia is arabic so technically they're correct?
"semitic" has this broader meaning, yes, but the specific term "antisemitism" is only used to refer to Jews, not to Arabs (or, for that matter, Amharic-speaking Ethiopians).
It also doesn't specifically refer to the State of Israel, but to Jews everywhere.
I'd like to see them pull all support for Bitcoin and crypto related "companies". As we all know, bitcoin's only use cases are scamming little old lady's out of thousands of dollars at atm's and speculation. It is not an investment vehicle, it is not a currency.
If someone at the NWF is reading this, please take this into consideration. Let's start to take action against the fraud and grift, and try to make humanity a little better, one step at a time.
Thank you.
[flagged]
Casually throw 1.5 billion Indians under the bus. Along with antisemitism and conspiracies
HN does need a flag comment button
[flagged]
Wing-nut? Is that now the census for the majority of the world outside of the US and UK? If we’re looking at legal precedent, then not taking action could see massive legal challenges that could destroy Microsoft for complicity in genocide.
And that isn't what should happen in a democracy. What percentage of Norway would really be willing to sacrifice their pensions for this? I don't know but I would bet a lot it's single digit percentage at most.
So this show is exactly what should happen in a democracy, isn't it?
I think you subestimate the mount of decency it exist in Norway. But i do agree that Far Right Players always focus on the feelings of pepple, and the less educated react strongly against scarcity. Easy targets.
> What percentage of Norway would really be willing to sacrifice their pensions for this? I don't know but I would bet a lot it's single digit percentage at most.
Luckily, even if their MS investment goes to 0, it wouldn't be "sacrificing their pensions". Around 2.5% of the wealth fund is invested in MS, so it seems to line up pretty well with your "single digit percentage at most."
[flagged]
"Being for human rights is bad" sure is a take..
Where moral superiority means condemning genocide.
Alleged genocide.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/05/israels-war-in...
as usual, just a bunch of opinions mixed with fake hamas data
Did you create an account just to troll?
Thoroughly-documented officially-declared genocide.
by a government that supported the actually real genocide that got all the jews there
The government is led by the Norwegian Labour Party (which is, obviously, opposed to fascism like all left-leaning parties). Its Prime Minister was born in 1960. There is no meaningful sense in which you can say that Norway's current government supported the Holocaust, even if some past iteration of the Norwegian state did so.
After deporting all its Jews to certain death and stealing all their property, these people continued managing the norwegian government, police force, etc.
This was common in the entirety of Europe with their mass amnesia, where everyone was in the resistance, and the actual perpetrators were the germans or the "nazis", never the local men on the ground.
Now it is not surprising when Europe who has collectively created the myth of "someone else responsibility" is now working on pinpointing the blame for genocide to the Jews themselves, creating the final work of scapegoating jews as was a cultural tradition in the continent.
So when Jews are massacred in the land they fled to after your own police force deported them to death camps, and your own government stole their properties making them refugees, why not go for the final stroke?
These people? Are you referring to people in the current Norwegian government? Or do you generalize Norwegians (including people from the past) to have a single mindset like a racist would do?
Since it doesn't say it in the article, the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Palantir are all providing cloud and AI services to Israel which it uses it the genocide in Gaza and the continued military occupation of Palestine.
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/09/microsoft...
- https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveilla...
- https://afsc.org/newsroom/unprecedented-investor-action-dema...
- https://countercurrents.org/2025/11/microsoft-ignites-protes...
> the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.
That's what I thought initially too, but seems this is about a different human rights issue, particularly in Saudi Arabia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097244
Yes, let’s go after US Steel because some guy with a gun shot up a school.
Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service and claim that millions of users use azure cloud to serve websites and content, the dance will go on.
I don’t think punishing the steel maker for a gun maker who sold it to a distributor who then sold it to a nut job should be liable for the nut job. This is the same for tech. Sub contractors for Israel government got Azure hosting and subbed it out to Palantir to plant their platform inside (gun maker) and then sold it to Israel (nut job).
Palantir on the other hand…
> Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service
They did: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/09/25/update-...
Doesn't the article you linked contradict that? It sounds like they're claiming they only provided general purpose blob storage.
> First, we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians. We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades. This is why we explained publicly on August 15 that Microsoft’s standard terms of service prohibit the use of our technology for mass surveillance of civilians.
The Norway wealth fund is a co owner of Microsoft, like everyone with shares. Google says they own 1.35%, worth 50 billion.
If they want Microsoft not to provide "general compute" to the Israeli army then they can try to get a majority of Microsft owners to go along with it.
I think that's not the same as pressure on Microsoft from the outside.
Any export increases of gun metal grade, high carbon steel should be a red flag these days to stateside corporations operating in war zones. Structural steel is a low carbon steel that has more 'give' and is easier to weld. It's obvious which is which.
In Sweden's case, however, even pre-war they were already exporting 40% of Germany's demand for raw ore which increased to 50% during wartime iirc. So Germany already had the infrastructure necessary to process the raw materials into steel, and at scale scale beforehand.
In modern warfare, those same foundaries would make easy aerial targets due to the massive heat output from the bessimer process required to make steel from raw ore.
If Microsoft were providing "general purpose compute to Iran" the US would sanction them.
I definitely agree with you.
Yes, its general purpose compute. But if you or me use Azure for illegal purpose (pirated content, tax evasion, violence etc etc..), for sure Microsoft won't be sitting idle.
providing compute to someone online radicals happen to not like is not an illegal purpose
What about providing compute to a criminal with an arrest warrant by the ICJ?
Norway's sovereign wealth fund are not "online radicals", and many genocide scholars, UN bodies, etc. have also found that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
If you want to dispute that claim, fine; reasonable people can disagree about the definition of "genocide" and about what standard of proof is necessary. However, reducing the opposing opinion to "online radicals" is inaccurate.
Actually we should as well, given the shady deals some of them make with politicians, which create a set of cascading events that end up in school shootings as if they were good old saloon fights.
Should we start regulating 3D printers and CNC mills next?
If the number of people killed by guns made at home with 3D printers or CNC mills gets to the same ballpark as those killed by commercial guns, sure, it's a conversation to have.
Probably yes, if everyone starts building guns with them.
Thoughts and prayer will surely work this time.
It's relevant because Microsoft, like all big companies, have Human Rights Pricinples and such that are part of the company. It's basically impossible to get big institutional investment without it.
The issue is that they were caught not following their practices, and then lying about it. So the shareholders are asking that they produce a report about whether they are following their own human rights principles.
And Satya is resisting it, because it is very clear that they are not following them, as workers [1] have been calling out for years now. Many leaked documents have shown that Microsoft actually embeds employees directly with the IDF and makes millions in service contracts with them. [2]
[1] https://noazureforapartheid.com/ [2] https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-azure-israel-top-cu...
For anyone that is still green on company politics, all company principles are check boxes that form part of an HR circus of yearly compliance trainings, and marketing for young employees that are naive enough to think they mean anything.
Perhaps this reflects your experience, in your part of the world. In some parts of the world, principles and ethics do count, and don’t change on a dime (as they do in the US).
Several European countries.
Regardless of the part of the world, corruption happens when the right price gets negotiated.
It can be money, a favour, need to help someone in need, needing to meet specific sales KPIs,...
Shhhh, you’ll scare away the new hires that have to pay the interest on the loans they were told would get them there.
>Many leaked documents have shown that Microsoft actually embeds employees directly with the IDF.
Are you sure it's not the other way around?
[flagged]
That's the yardstick people use to measure Sweden, yes. Similarly applicable here.
Sweden was under threat of invasion and still helped the allies, what's Microsoft's excuse?
Apples and Oranges comparison here. This isn't a world war we are talking about.
Isn’t it though? When AI is used against the people and fake media is used to cover up war crimes, what’s not to stop there? When your feeds have been polluted with outside foreign influencers that you explode from within, what’s not to stop there? It’s war alright. Just not the kind of war Spielberg thinks would make a great film.
Have you seen pictures of Gaza? Scenes like this haven't been seen since WW2, maybe the Korean War or the Cambodia campaign.
They like money.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner Von Braun."
Are you seriously comparing "general purpose compute" to ballistic missiles?
It’s more akin to an arms manufacturer knowingly supplying a genocidal regime.
As for targeting Palantir instead, boycott, divestment, and sanctions is most effective when it targets all the complicit players.
Nice to see Norway taking a principled stand against the genocide. Unlike my own government which has allowed arms export to Israel to quadruple over the past years. It's embarrassing.
It looks like they divested from a 11 of 65 Israeli companies it holds shares in August.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/norway...
If you'd like to know more about Microsoft's human rights issues, I had a lead campaigner discuss it with me on my podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A95asBbCNZo
With a 1:16:29 runtime, could you at least share what parts are relevant to this submission, the very least timestamps? Even if I'd speed it up by 4x it'd take 30 minutes to listen to all of it.
No parts of it are relevant to this submission, because (as others explained to you elsewhere in the thread) the submission is about Norway objecting to Microsoft doing business with Saudi Arabia, whereas GP is about attacking Microsoft's ties to Israel.
(For some reason, doing business with Saudi Arabia is not counted as evidence against the "Zionist", "genocide" etc. etc. narrative.)
Or you ask Gemini to do this for you (timestamps were removed when formatting into markdown)
Based on the podcast "Microsoft: Powering Israel’s Genocide? | Hossam Nasr," here are the main human rights issues alleged against Microsoft:
1. Complicity in Military Operations - The podcast claims Microsoft is a key tech provider for the Israeli military, specifically using the Azure cloud platform to run combat and intelligence activities. - It alleges Microsoft sells AI services (including OpenAI models) to military units like "Mamram," which are linked to automated targeting systems used to accelerate lethal strikes.
2. Surveillance and Infrastructure - Microsoft is accused of hosting roughly 13.6 petabytes of data used for mass surveillance. - The "Al-Munassiq" app, used by Palestinians to manage movement permits, reportedly runs on Azure and is described as a tool for collecting vast amounts of surveillance data. - The company reportedly sells technology directly to illegal settlements in the West Bank.
3. Internal Labor Rights & Suppression - The speaker alleges a double standard and discrimination against Palestinian and Arab employees. - Microsoft is accused of "weaponizing" HR policies to fire workers (including the podcast guest) for organizing vigils or protesting the company's military contracts.
4. Historical Context - The discussion references Microsoft's history of providing tech to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the US as part of a broader pattern of supporting "systems of oppression."
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A95asBbCNZo
Prompt: “ According to this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A95asBbCNZo
What are the main human rights issues of Microsoft?”
Used Gemini 3 (Thinking) via WebUI
Norway's wealth fund's annualized return is only 6.6% since 1998. https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/returns
Is this poor performance due to this kind of active management?
"Only" 6%?
Bonds (a safe investment) are usually at ~2%.
A conservatively allocated growth fund doing 6% is pret-t-y good.
They probably need to maintain fluidity at any given moment, given this is a retirement fund. So no crazy but risky returns in portfolio. And this issue here is likely also about risk mitigation.
Not sure if you're American, but investment funds in other countries, especially those with "hints of socialism" usually don't put "profit above all else" like is common in America, hence "good enough" is usually just that, good enough.
Seems they're doing exactly what is expected of them, staying around the benchmark index, so that sounds pretty good:
> The fund has outperformed the benchmark index set by the Ministry of Finance by 0.24 percentage point since 1998.
haha, LOL, OP talks nonsene: The 6.6% is actually quite good for such a hevicle!
Perhaps the people of Norway value certain behaviors over maximum returns