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Thursday, July 25, 2019

The 100 Most Sustainable U.S. Companies

Charles Darwin noted in 1809 “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

ars technica – In Chrome 76, websites can no longer check FileSystem API to detect private mode – “Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed some websites preventing you from reading articles while using a browser’s private mode. The Boston Globe began doing this in 2017, requiring people to log in to paid subscriber accounts in order to read in private mode. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers impose identical restrictions. Chrome 76—which is in beta now and is scheduled to hit the stable channel on July 30—prevents these websites from discovering that you’re in private mode. Google explained the change yesterday in a blog post titled, “Protecting private browsing in Chrome.”…

Study: Immigrants Run Nearly Half Of American Fortune 500 Companies

According to a new study by New American Economy, immigrants and their childrenhave founded 45% of the Fortune 500 companies in the United States, generating $6.1 trillion in annual revenue last year. While the organization is admittedly a pro-immigration group, the numbers are pretty convincing. – Fast Company

Bad governance: How privatization increases corruption in the developing world (PDF) Regulation and Governance

IMF lowers global growth forecasts amid trade, Brexit uncertainties 
 

A woman denied a tax refund on $300,000 in income from a family business she paid back to her ex-husband, rather than paying back the federal government directly, has won a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in her case against the IRS [Mihelick v. United States, No. 17-14975 (11th Cir. June 29, 20190}.

“Inscribed above the main entrance of the Internal Revenue Service office in Washington, D.C., is a quotation from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: ‘Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society,’ ” Circuit Judge Robin Rosenbaum wrote. “An admirable outlook, yet even Justice Holmes would likely agree that it is uncivilized to impose taxes on citizens for income they did not ultimately receive. But that is precisely the result the government asks us to uphold today.” ...

Rosenbaum cut through layers of tax law and marital property nuances in the 24-page opinion, neatly simplifying a complex dispute.

Salmon  at Maroubra Beach. Picture: Glenn Duffus

Allison Christians (McGill) & Laurens van Apeldoorn (Leiden), The OECD Inclusive Framework:

OECDNations across the world are engaged in an ambitious project of tax cooperation that contemplates all participating nations included on an equal footing to implement and further develop mutually agreed baseline rules. The forum for this vision of equal participation in international tax policymaking is theInclusive Framework, an inter-governmental network convened by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. This paper demonstrates that the design and build-out of the Inclusive Framework demonstrates institutional learning about the need for inclusivity in authenticating a global tax policy mandate, and that achieving stated goals will be challenging in both logistical and geo-political terms.


The 100 Most Sustainable U.S. Companies
Barron’s – How much of a company’s journey toward sustainability is driven by the personal passions of its CEO? Based on the conversationsBarron’s had recently with several corporate chieftains, quite a lot. That’s one of the insights from oursecond annual sustainability rankingof public companies… To create the rankings, Calvert Research and Management analyzed the 1,000 largest publicly held U.S. companies (by stock market value) and scored them on more than 200 key indicators and 28 issues. Calvert then sorted the data into five key categories: shareholders, employees, customers, planet, and community. (The shareholders category might include executive compensation, for example, and the customers category might include data security or product safety.) Each corporation received a rating from zero to 100 in each category. Finally, Calvert produced a single rating for all of the companies, weighted according to how material each category is for their industry: Emissions are less critical for a bank’s score than they are for a trucking company’s, for example. It also excluded companies that didn’t meet the Calvert Principles for Responsible Investment…”

Global Rules for a Global Market Place? – The Regulation and Supervision of FinTech Providers


Public service super fund in 'risk' strife - PressReader

The $45 billion fund manager protecting the retirement savings of Australia’s top public servants and Defence Force personnel has been put on notice by the prudential regulator to “immediately” shore up its risk culture. The warning came after the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation failed to tackle an internal review with “sufficient challenge, granularity or evidential support”.


By Chris Vedelago, Sumeyya Ilanbey and Cameron Houston
The man linked to the toxic West Footscray warehouse that erupted in flames last year has illegally buried 50 million litres of chemical waste on farmland in western Victoria, threatening the water supply for the Wimmera district. The stockpile is buried on land owned by Graham Leslie White, who is currently in prison for serious firearms offences and has been linked to at least nine other chemical dump sites uncovered in warehouses in Melbourne’s north.

‘Our paychecks bounced’: US workers in limbo as coalmines suddenly close Guardian

Elite Anxiety: Paul Collier’s “Future of Capitalism” Notes on Liberty

The Risky Business of Bringing You Lunch

RIP Marylou Whitney, passing of an age.  The NYT obit is better yet.

Delivery apps like DoorDash are using your tips to pay workers’ wages The Verge

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General
I don't want to hear about hackers and keys, nerds – make it happen, or we'll pass a law making it happen
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