“I know it’s not true but it could be true”

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t even like  

– Will Rogers of Latitude fame

Joyce’s Dublin, Dos Passos’ New York, Woolf’s London, Proust’s Paris, Kafka’s Prague: Howwriters don't merely describe a city but reconstruct it

Think of genius not as an isolated individual, but as the spirit of circumstance. Genius is contingent — precarious, rare,  magical 

Three ways in which democracies die: Coups, catastrophes, and technological takeovers. None of those are inevitable, but none have solutions 

Australian Tax Office overhauls fraud and evasion procedures

The Australian Financial Review

ATO facing investigation over garnishee orders which let tax ...

When the Times called to tell Alice Dreger that she's part of a powerful alliance — the "intellectual dark web" — she laughed. Then she got   one’s financial fortune comes not from building a business or helping improve the human condition, but from taking commissions in the finance sector? (15 minutes).

Why we should bulldoze the business school – Martin Parker, the Guardian.
On Iran and North Korea, Trump prepares to screw everything up – Paul Waldman, The Washington Post

Fact check: Is Australia’s tax to GDP ratio lower now than it was throughout the Howard years? – Josh Gordon, ABC News

Investment Boom From Trump’s Tax Cut Has Yet to Appear – Matt Phillips and Jim Tankersley, The New York Times

Trump becomes more dovish toward North Korea, but surrounds himself with hawks – David Nakamura and John Hudson, The Washington Post

There’s No Escape From Australia’s Refugee Gulag – Mark Isaacs, Foreign Policy

Malcolm Turnbill has become a de-facto climate denier – Giles Parkinson, RE New Economy
Crooked Trump? – Noah Feldman, The New York Review of Books
Why Trump supporters don’t mind his lies – Daniel A Effron, The New York Times
On ABC Saturday Extra:
A peaceful revolution in Armenia could lead to opposition MP Nikol Pashinhyan becoming Prime Minister, a man who has previously been jailed for arranging street protests. (Olesya Vartanyan) Why has Turkey’s leader Recep Erdogan just announced early elections?  (Fadi Hakura and Dr David Tittensor) Scene-setter for the weekend elections in Malaysia (James Chin) Investigations into Australian banks have raised many questions including the role of boards and whether they need to be more proactive in seeking our problems before they become a crisis.   (Allan Fells, Diane Smith-Gander and Stephen Mayne) If the nature of combat has changed, what are the expectations of the modern soldier? Lucas Grainger-Brown, winner of the 2018 Calibre Essay prize. On the 200^thanniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, what do his theories offer us today?  (Bernd Ziesemer)  http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/

 

Deadliest day in four years may trigger outright war in Gaza as nations hit out at Trump

ATO staff told take a VR or face 'performance improvement': union

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The Tax Office has denied using voluntary redundancies to target out-of-favour staff after a union said some have been told they would be performance ...

Professional chameleons – Why Big 4 smart suits and offices should not be allowed to hide greed & malice

Posted on May 14 2018

This is a guest post from Professor Atul K. Shah reviewing 'Beancounters – The Triumph of the Accountants and How they broke Capitalism' by Richard Brooks, 342pp, Atlantic Books, £18.99

EU Commission’s Proposal on Public Sector Data Is Good, But Could Be Better

Center for Data Innovation: “The European Commission has published a package of measures entitled “Towards a common European data space,” which aims to promote the sharing and re-use of data in the European Union. The only legislative component of the package is a proposal to revise the Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive, which requires member states to allow individuals and organizations to re-use publicly-held data. The proposed changes are all positive in that they would boost the reuse of public sector data, but it would be better if member states agreed to a general obligation to make the data available by default. The PSI Directive, which was adopted in 2003 and last amended in 2013, requires member states to ensure publicly-held data can be reused for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, such as by permitting re-use in content licenses and by using open standards. However, the Directive is neither an open data law nor a freedom of information law, because public bodies do not have to publish anything or let citizens access anything (unless national law says otherwise), and can screen each request to reuse the data they do make available. As the Center for Data Innovation pointed out in a recent report, only a couple of EU member states perform particularly well in open data, and some even lack functioning freedom of information laws. The Commission’s proposed amendments would not establish a general obligation to release data either, but they would require member states to ensure that “high value datasets,” of which the Commission will publish a list, are available for free, are machine-readable, and are accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs), which allow third parties to more easily integrate data into their own applications and tools.