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Monday, July 24, 2017

Gearing for Complexity: 'The Last King of Rome'

lion days
Start with white haze.
By midday you meet
A hammer of heat--
Whatever was sown
Now fully grown,
Whatever conceived
Now fully leaved,
Abounding, ablaze-
O long lion days!”

The language of tax avoidance cases
The opening line of single Supreme Court judgment in UBS v HMRC [2016] UKSC 13 from Lord Reed reads as follows:
“In our society, a great deal of intellectual effort is devoted to tax avoidance. The most sophisticated attempts of the Houdini taxpayer to escape from the manacles of tax”




 Canada Moves to End Tax Loophole Used by Doctors and Lawyers  

Unchaining one's media dragon story Scott’s mini-memoir

'Brain disorder research' scheme guilty of tax avoidance  


Read the Upper Tribunal Judgement - THE BRAIN DISORDERS RESEARCH LIMITED PARTNERSHIP (2) NEIL HOCKIN v THE COMMISSIONERS FOR HER MAJESTY’S REVENUE AND CUSTOMS


Read the First-Tier Tribunal Judgement - THE BRAIN DISORDERS RESEARCH LIMITED PARTNERSHIP (2) NEIL HOCKIN v THE COMMISSIONERS FOR HER MAJESTY’S REVENUE AND CUSTOMS 


Research: Moral Appeals Can Help Reduce Tax Evasion  


 
The millennial left’s war against liberalism WaPo. More on Chapo Trap House.
Du Bois and the “Wages of Whiteness” Adolph Reed, Nonsite.org (DB). Anything by Reed is worth reading 
A New Class Politics Counterpunch (Re Silc). The woes of the European left.



Aging in place contributes to historically low housing inventoryBaltimore Sun. Translation: Why won’t those old black folks go die in nursing homes so we can gentrify their neighborhoods?





  Tech Companies Push Offshore Cash Pile To A Record 

 Shell Companies: The US Is a Good Place for Bad People to Stash Their Money 

The tax trap: why a £70k family isn't much wealthier than a minimum wage

Gearing for Complexity




“The best managers are happy to hold two or more opposing views on an issue because they know the world is complex. And in business, it’s crucial to be able to react to the world in all its complex and paradoxical glory.” Spot on from one of my old academic acquaintances, Professor Sydney Finkelstein at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. 

As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously put it: "The ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function is the sign of a first-rate intelligence." Over the years, in business, I’ve called this power of paradox And/And. It’s about putting two unlikely ideas together and discounting neither.

Never was this truer because the chaos factor has ramped up across the board. Running a major company or country is quite the challenge these days, one where freight trains come at you out of nowhere. “That’s what I wake up to each morning. I get a thick book full of death, destruction, strife and chaos. That’s what I take with my morning tea.” – said President Obama, in an interview with Vox.

Turmoil is everywhere and impacts everyone. I often get asked how to rev up a start-up business amidst so much chaos. The acceleration point is as paradoxical as the decision points along the way. Don’t run from chaos. Run towards it. Hire a group who can not only manage change and complexity, but who actually enjoy chaos. You can only thrive in chaos if you bloody love it. To avoid being disrupted, point your trouble-makers at killer problems and get out of their way.

ps the image is from kissassfacts.com and their must-check-out article What's the Most Mind-Boggling Paradox You've Heard, they list 20.

By KEVIN ROBERTS 


The takedown went smoothly. Dash cam footage from the Italian Special Operation Squad shows police vehicles cutting off the gray car on a thin ribbon of country road. The car's one-eyed driver puts his head out the open window and ducks back inside when he sees men with pistols and semiautomatic guns bolting forward. Then Massimo Carminati - an underworld boss so powerful he called himself the "Last King of Rome," a career criminal who had already lost one eye in a gun battle with police - puts up his hands and surrenders. The December 2014 arrest was the first step in a massive sting aimed at public corruption in Rome's municipal machinery. Eventually, 46 criminals, business people and politicians were charged in a scheme to reroute public funds away from civic projects into private pockets, including housing developments meant for recent immigrants fleeing the Middle East. Extortion, fraud, theft and money-laundering were all among charges leveled against the defendants, who were dubbed the "Mafia Capitale" in the press.

'The Last King of Rome': How a one-eyed gangster conned the Italian ...


Thoroughly modern mafia: how organised crime embraced technology — but not female gangsters
at