That article is based off this one, so even though the submission was earlier, we merged the thread hither.

As phnofive pointed out, there was an earlier discussion --

Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 - Nov 2022 (25 comments)

-- but it never made the front page, so we won't count the current thread as a dupe.

Doctorow actually cites the BIG substack, but adds a bunch of other stuff. Unclear...

This is an interesting problem.

The normal state of news is that a story breaks and there are 300 near identical articles about it in 24 hours. Google News wouldn't have been successful if they hadn't developed a clustering algorithm that handles this.

Ordinary clustering algorithms don't work well for documents period in my experience and I am not sure if that's the right approach to topic identification. But if we're going to get past RSS readers having the same failing interface that has been failing since 1999 and get past the idea that social media is bad because "algorithms = bad" we need some algorithm to tame the many "me too" blog posts that come whenever a blog post breaks onto the front of HN.

Doctorow says "But there’s something we can do about this! The part of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that authorizes agencies to assess fees runs out in Oct 2023, and when Congress renews it, they could add an amendment to block Booz’s junk fees."

What exactly are "we" supposed to do about it?

I read both the Doctorov and Stoller articles but did not seen any proof that Booz-Allen receives the addon fees. Has an audit of their books revealed this?

Sorta - I noted this in that thread, since this came second: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834783