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A young IRS auditor was excited to track down high-powered tax evaders.
Anxious for his first high-powered audit, he was a bit dismayed when his assignment was to audit a Rabbi.
Looking over the books and taxes were pretty straight forward, and the Rabbi was clearly very frugal, so he thought he’d make his day interesting by having a little fun with the Rabbi.
“Rabbi,” he said, “I noticed that you buy a lot of candles.”
“Yes,” answered the Rabbi.
“Well, Rabbi, what do you do with the candle drippings?” he asked.
“A good question,” noted the Rabbi. “We actually save them up and when we have enough, we send them back to the candle maker. And every now and then, they send us a free box of candles.”
“Oh,” replied the auditor somewhat disappointed that his unusual question actually had a practical answer, so he thought he’d go on, in his obnoxious way.
“Rabbi, what about all these matzo purchases? What do you do with the crumbs from the matzo?”
“Ah, yes,” replied the Rabbi calmly, “we actually collect up all the crumbs from the matzo and when we have enough, we send them in a box back to the manufacturer and every now and then, they send a box of matzo balls.”
“Oh,” replied the auditor, thinking hard now how to fluster the Rabbi. “Well, Rabbi,” he went on, “what do you do with all the foreskins from the circumcisions?”
“Yes, here too, we do not waste,” answered the Rabbi. “What we do is save up all the foreskins, and when we have enough we actually send them to the IRS.”
“The IRS? What would the IRS do with them?” questioned the auditor in disbelief.“I don’t know the details, but about once a year, they send us a little prick like you,” replied the Rabbi.”
ATO pursues Griffith spud king over tax fraud deal
Using legal techniques not available when the ATO struck its deal with Mr Rennie in late 2012, ...
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The Australian
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What – And Who – Inspires Scottish Novelist Ali Smith?
Toni Morrison, of course, and Helen Oyeyemi, and books that make her laugh, and The Beatles. Also, Smith on how useless it is to try to rate books or authors. – The Guardian (UK)
Over the years, the Center’s approach to these indicators has evolved along with the industry, carefully considering the metrics, sectors and format in which the data appear. Instead of a single summary report, our approach is to roll out a series of fact sheets showcasing the most important current and historical data points for each sector – in an easy-to-digest format – a few at a time. (State of the News Media reports from 2004-2018 are archived as PDFs and available here.)..”
Gizmodo – “Thanks to the internet and all the apps and services that run on top of it, we can now ping someone on the other side of the world instantly—but that person doesn’t necessarily want to hear from you in the middle of the night. The same goes for social media sharing, because the time when inspiration strikes may not be the best time for sharing. Enter the magic of scheduling: Scheduling emails, instant messages, texts, and social media posts. You’ve now got a choice of native tools and add-ons for this, which means you don’t need to wake up your boss in the middle of the night or distract your friends in the middle of the working day…”
The Philadelphia Inquirer – “You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you? Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web. This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software. [emphasis added] Lately I’ve been investigating thesecret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really gets up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop.
It made me decide to ditch Chrome for a new version of nonprofit Mozilla’s Firefox, which has default privacy protections. Switching involved less inconvenience than you might imagine. My tests of Chrome vs. Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of absurd proportions. In a week of Web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by Firefox. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality. Chrome welcomed trackers even at websites you would think would be private. I watched Aetna and the Federal Student Aid website set cookies for Facebook and Google. They surreptitiously told the data giants every time I pulled up the insurance and loan service’s log-in pages. And that’s not the half of it….” [Note – one more time – Switch to Firefox and DuckDuckGo – and close out of Chrome and Gmail when you are using another browser!]…”
A Washington Post video story – This is how Google’s Chrome lets the cookies track you, imagined in real life – “Chrome has become like spyware for the company, allowing more tracker cookies than any other browser. The Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler imagines how that might feel in real life, and gives advice for more privacy-conscious web browsing…”
NSA improperly collected US phone call data after saying problem was fixed USA Today
Amazon Is Watching OneZero
A Major Police Body Cam Company Just Banned Facial Recognition NYT
