Wednesday, April 12, 2017

ATO Alumni of IMF Fame


Forty-eight Australians who earned more than $1m in 2014-15 paid no income tax



Pickpockets? Seoul Says North Korean Hackers Stole Millions of Their Bitcoin 


South Korean media outlets are reporting that $88000 worth of bitcoin have been stolen by North Korean hackers every month from 2013 to 2015 ...


The IRS Is Using Private Debt Collectors Again. It May Not End Well


World Economic Outlook 2017 – “Emerging market and developing economies have become increasingly important in the global economy in recent years.







Escape
© Mohammad Alnaser, Saudi Arabia, 3rd Place, National Awards, 2017 Sony World Photography Awards

 They now account for more than 75 percent of global growth in output and consumption, almost double the share of just two decades ago World Economic Outlook, April 2017 - IMF


World Economic Forum: “A great deal has been written in recent years about the perils of automation. With predicted mass unemployment, declining wages, and increasing inequality, clearly we should all be afraid. By now it’s no longer just the Silicon Valley trend watchers and technoprophets who are apprehensive. In a study that has already racked up several hundred citations, scholars at Oxford University have estimated that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in the next 20. “The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame,” notes a New York University professor. “But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next.” I admit, we’ve heard it all before. Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place. After all, if you look at the year 1800, some 74% of all Americans were farmers, whereas by 1900 this figure was down to 31%, and by 2000 to a mere 3%. Yet this hasn’t led to mass unemployment. In 1930, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that we’d all be working just 15-hour weeks by the year 2030. Yet, since the 1980s, work has only been taking up more of our time, bringing waves of burnouts and stress in its wake. Meanwhile, the crux of the issue isn’t even being discussed. The real question we should be asking ourselves is: what actually constitutes “work” in this day and age?..”