Foxes and Hedgehogs Going into labour

Ebay seller avoids jail after £200k tax fraud 

Former Ironman Dean Mercer dead at 47 after cardiac arrest

Almost half of public servants want to quit in the next 12 months


The new Obama’: will Abdul El-Sayed be America’s first Muslim governor?

A GOP senator wrote a bill to protect Robert Mueller. Trump called him to try to kill it. Vox

“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing,” asserted the Greek poet Archilocus sometime back in the seventh century BC.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin picked up this fragment and developed it further in 1953, arguing that many of history’s great thinkers could be seen as either a fox — someone who draws on a wide range of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea, including people like Aristotle, Shakespeare and Goethe — or a hedgehog, seeing life through a specific lens — Plato, Dante, Nietzsche or Hegel.
It’s a categorisation that aligns in many ways with the generalist/specialist divide within the public service. Maria Katsonis from Victoria’s Department of Premier and Cabinet, whose work often involves being dropped into social policy portfolios to fix problems and shake things up, posed this question at Public Sector Week: should public servants be foxes or hedgehogs?


Like balloons, humans must change altitude in order to change direction in the winds of life http://bertrandpiccard.com/balloon-flight?width=1280#3 …
Going into labour: four trends reshaping the public sectoAlmost half of public servants want to quit in the next 12 months

Model Leaders

Following up on last week's post, Oei, Hemel On 'Robot Taxes':  MIT Technology Review, San Francisco Will Consider a Tax on Robots:

When robots steal our jobs, should they be made to pay taxes? That’s something residents of San Francisco are being asked to think about by Jane Kim, who represents the city's District 6 on its board of supervisors. She wants to find cash to help folks out with retraining or a universal basic income when robots take over their toils, and the suggestion for generating that money is a tax on robots.

In reality, it’s not clear what the best way to impose taxes on automation is. Earlier this year, the Economist weighed what such a thing might look like. Taxing capital investment in robots or the increased profits as a result of their installation, the two obvious ways to go about it, don’t seem to be a perfect solution, according to the magazine’s analysis.

New York Times, Will the Republican Tax Bill Be Aimed at the Economic Past, or the Future?:

Congress and the Trump administration are said to be hard at work creating a tax bill, aiming for a signature economic policy achievement in the months ahead. As they do so, there is a fundamental tension they will have to resolve: Is this tax legislation about the past, or about the future?

The reality of blockchain in Australia, lots of plans but waiting for big hit


Small Business: Chris Jordan


GST 15 year anniversary Deborah Jenkins


“Imagine if U.S. companies’ compliance costs could be reduced, by billions of dollars. Imagine if this could happen without sacrificing any transparency to investors and governments. Open data can make that possible. This first-ever research report, co-published by the Data Foundation and PwC, explains how Standard Business Reporting (SBR), in which multiple regulatory agencies adopt a common open data structure for the information they collect, reduces costs for both companies and agencies. SBR programs are in place in the Netherlands, Australia, and elsewhere – but the concept is unknown in the United States.






Algorithms in the Criminal Justice System – Assessing the Use of Risk Assessments in Sentencing, August 25, 2017 Download from DASH Authors: Priscilla Guo, Danielle Kehl, and Sam Kessler.
“In the summer of 2016, some unusual headlines began appearing in news outlets across the United States. “Secret Algorithms That Predict Future Criminals Get a Thumbs Up From the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” read one. Another declared: “There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.” These news stories (and others like them) drew attention to a previously obscure but fast-growing area in the field of criminal justice: the use of risk assessment software, powered by sophisticated and sometimes proprietary algorithms, to predict whether individual criminals are likely candidates for recidivism.


President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) Report – Securing Cyber Assets – Addressing Urgent Cyber Threats to Critical Infrastructure, August 2017.
“Executive Summary: Imperative Takeaways

Kyle Rozema (Chicago), Tax Incidence in a Vertical Supply Chain: Evidence from Cigarette Wholesale Prices:

I investigate how the burden of consumption taxes not borne by consumers is shared between upstream firms that produce a taxed good and downstream firms that sell the goods. First, I study a simple theoretical model of tax incidence in a vertical supply chain and show that the tax pass through rates to wholesale prices, consumer prices, and posted retail prices serve as a sufficient statistic for the split of the firm share of the tax burden. Second, I use novel data on monthly brand-level cigarette wholesale prices in six states to estimate the tax pass through rate to wholesale prices, and estimate the tax pass through rates to consumer and posted retail prices from Nielsen Homescan Data.