Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The “democratic” part of “democratic socialism” was never anything more than a ruse to fool the masses, to be disposed of once enough bear pit latitude of power was seized.
Champagne for supper, murder for breakfast, romance for lunch and terror for tea, This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time the world has gone to hell.
(Some can take it, and some cannot.) All they have to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even do that. Sanctity of handshakes in the lunatic asylumn: White House Says ‘Great Momentum’ on North Korea as Intel Reports Indicate Problems. “‘I made a deal with him. I shook hands with him. I really believe he means it,’ Trump said, adding it’s ‘possible’ things don’t work out.”
When you next see any one of these people engaged in moral posturing, pinch yourself and remind yourself that they are all – especially, the politicians – in show business. If things do not work out try deep bloggers' latest monograph: Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
Multinational companies are trying to beat a new tax called the BEAT.
The BEAT is the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax, a complex minimum tax meant to prevent the world’s biggest corporations from shifting profits from the U.S. to other countries. Turned from idea into law last year as part of the tax-code revamp, the BEAT is now frustrating corporate executives and spurring fresh tax-avoidance strategies.
Western Union, Accenture and Conduent, among others, have told investors that they could be hit by the tax, which penalizes corporations for large cross-border payments made to related foreign affiliates.
1. Over the last two decades, the Irish stock of inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) has risen dramatically from roughly 60 percent of GDP to 275 percent (Figure 1).Several features of Ireland’s economy, including a skilled, English-speaking workforce, membership in the European Union (EU), and a probusiness institutional environment, help attract investment. In addition, Ireland’s relatively low and stable corporate income tax (CIT) rate on active trading income has played a key role in attracting foreign capital.
Who
needs humans? Google's DeepMind algorithm can teach itself to see
Taking inspiration from infants, scientists at Google's
DeepMind have created a system that can start to teach itself to see and
understand a spatial environment. Published today in Science, the algorithm is an important step for computer vision
research. This field aims to give these tools the power to analyse image and
video, much like a human can ...
Staff-based performance targets aimed at pushing individual tax officers to collect revenue is causing the Australian Taxation Office to lack a fair approach to ...
A PRINCIPAL of an elite Sydney private school that costs 30000 a year has
lashed out at reptilian parents who treat teachers like their personal
servants.
In case you forgot: Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the seven last presidential elections.
They had the furtive look and gestures of hunted animals. By years of brutal treatment, by the murder of relatives, by the constant fear of death, all that was human had been taken away from them. We went into the dormitories where they were eating — the collected their food from the kitchen and brought it back to devour in relative privacy: nothing would persuade them to eat in communal dining-rooms. I noticed a man who was trying to eat but was too weak to finish his food. Three boys were staring at his plate. I had once seen the same look of burning yet cautious intentness on the Russian steppes. When the sick man pushed his plate away a thin arm shot out and seized the lump of meat left on it. The lad who had secured it slid out of the room, like a starving dog with a bone.
There is no beginning, no end; no background of birth and parentage; no chronology of events; no category of friends and acquaintances. Instead, at the end, you have a rich tapestry of a full life, a life savored, shared, enjoyed to the utmost. You pick up facts, and weave them into the pattern, with no illusion of importance as to where and when they belong. You meet as intimates — or as passing acquaintances–the people that enliven today’s literary world, artistic world, theatrical world. There is humor–and poetry–and appreciation–and keen commentary on the passing scene–and it’s grand reading from first page to last.
David
Leyonhjelm's sexist insult to Sarah Hanson-Young played well on a Sky
News show known for being outrageous, writes Guardian columnist Gay
Alcorn.
Q&A
came to Melbourne on Monday night - a fresh city, with a fresh host,
Hamish Macdonald, and a fresh, enthusiastic guest, Cory Bernardi. The
senator from ...
The
Trump administration’s new “postcard” tax form still must be mailed in
an envelope, unless you want your neighbors to see your Social Security
number. It will save a little bit of time for some taxpayers but could
add pages more paperwork for millions of others.
A
draft copy of the new version of the standard 1040 income tax form,
obtained by The New York Times, shows the administration has succeeded
in its goal of shrinking the form that most Americans send to the
Internal Revenue Service every year. The new form eliminates more than
half of the 78 line items from the previous form, reducing it from two
full pages of text to one double-sided half page.
Visualizing Data Without Coding
Center for Data Innovation: “MIT Media
Lab, an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, has published a free data visualization and
exploration tool called DIVE that allows users to create
visualizations without knowing how to code.
Users can select fields in their data
they want to visualize and DIVE recommends visualizations relevant to their
dataset, which users can aggregate to create visual narratives. Additionally,
users can do statistical analysis, such as regressions, in DIVE to explore
relationships between variables.”
In discussing another odd woman, the novelist Evelyn Scott, Gornick quotes a letter from Louise Bogan that I will take the liberty to reproduce in full:
Dear May:
I had a sad and rather eerie meeting, early this week, with poor old Evelyn Scott. I sad old advisedly, since she really has fallen into the dark and dank time–the time that I used to fear so much when I was in my thirties. She is old because she has failed to grow–up, in, on … So that at 62, she is not only frayed and dingy (she must have been a beauty in youth) but silly and more than a little mad. She met me only casually, years ago, with Charlotte Wilder [sister of Thornton Wilder], but now, of course, she thinks I can do something for her–so transparent, poor thing. She is not only in the physical state I once feared, but she is living in the blighted area of the West 70’s, near Broadway: that area which absorbs the queer, the old, the failures, into furnished or hotel rooms, and adds gloom to their decay. It was all there! She took me out to a grubby little tea-room around the corner, insisted on paying for the tea, and brought out, from time to time, from folds in her apparel, manuscripts that will never see print. I never was able to read her, even in her hey-day, and her poetry now is perfectly terrible. Added to all this, she is in an active state of paranoia–things and people are her enemies; she has been plotted against in Canada, Hampstead, New York and California; her manuscripts have been stolen, time and time again, etc., etc. –We should thank God, that we remain in our senses! As you know, I really fear mad people; I have some attraction for them, perhaps because talent is a kind of obverse of the medal. I must, therefore, detach myself from E. S.. I told her to send the MS to Grove Press, and that is all I can do. “But I must know the editor’s name!” she cried. “I can’t chance having my poems fall into the hands of some secretary….” O dear, O dear….
Love from your hasty Louise
Yet Bogan herself spent her share of decades as an odd woman, in what she called the faubourg of Morningside Heights. And she could write, in a notebook quoted in her posthumous autobiography, Journey Around My Room,
When we have not come into ourselves we say, in solitude: “No one loves me; I am alone.” When we had chosen solitude, we say, “Thank God, I am alone!”
In a democracy, if the people are to have a meaningful say over the world and its workings, those people are, fundamentally, obligated to look. And, much more fundamentally, to see. To avert one’s eyes is a privilege that those of us who have the power to act cannot afford to exercise, even when we are complicit in the images. Especially when we are complicit
Navigating
regulatory shifts with better data
Following increasing consumer concerns over data
privacy, regulators globally have introduced a number of new regulations to
give individuals more control over their personal data. As new regulations take
effect, companies that are not prepared will probably need to invest in
additional resources to better manage the changes.
The Role of
Bitcoin in Crime: Tax Evasion
Tax evasion involving Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
is still a concern. Making a meaningful impact in this regard will be extremely
challenging, mainly because governments and tax agencies make their guidelines
rather unclear. Even in the US, there is a lot of confusion as to what is going
on exactly and how Bitcoin users should go about filing their taxes
The
Tyranny of Metrics; and the Dark Web
Quotas, rankings, ratings and lists – metrics
dominate our modern lives. But is that a healthy thing? Could a fixation with
metrics distract and divert us from the real work at hand.
The NSA’s surveillance efforts appear to route through eight AT&T-affiliated buildings in major US metro areas.
Wall Street Journal, New Corporate Tax Goal: Beat the BEAT:
IMF, The Impact of International Tax Reform on Ireland, in Ireland: Selected Issues 18-44 (June 2018):
