Wednesday, July 04, 2018

Who needs humans?

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
~ George Orwell, born in 1903



CHANGE: A town in Mexico overthrew their local government. Things couldn’t be going better.



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.



All extremes are futile whether left or right ... US ambassador to Estonia resigns over Trump policies and provocations Guardian



SALENA ZITO: “If you engage in politics on Twitter it is sometimes hard to reconcile the vicious vitriol you see, feel, and experience with what you see in your world outside of the social media platform.”

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. 

Climbing without fear

McKinnon_BR-1


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 ...

'ATO operates its systems to target revenue collection': Kate Carnell

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 ...


St Andrew's Cathedral School principal Dr John Collier: 'We're not your servants'

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.

↩︎ New York Magazine



Personal information of voters compromised after Typeform data breach
"The names, addresses and date of birth of around 4000 voters has been compromised after a hacker stole information from a company used by the Tasmanian Electoral Commission." (The Advocate)

 


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.

Scientists Are Sharing The Worst Stock Photos Of Their Jobs And They’re Hilarious  IFLScience



Former ICE chief lawyer in Seattle gets 4 years for ID theft AP


This is Australian-style sexism brought to you by a senator and Sky News

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.



Catherine King calls Leyonhjelm an 'utter d--k' over Hanson-Young comments

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 ...





New York Times, The New Tax Form Is Postcard-Size, but More Complicated Than Ever:

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!”

 Feds ran a bitcoin-laundering sting for over a year The Verge. Confirming our “prosecution futures” thesis.


Megan Garber, “How To Look Away”:

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.