Pages

▼

Monday, August 19, 2019

The fittest survive: “See it, say it, fix it”.

The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest — weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive.
— Charles Fort, born  in 1874



"Historically the Tax Practitioners Board has regulated the industry with the brutal application of a fluffy pillow, but in the last year incoming CEO Michael O'Neill and new chairman Ian Klug have introduced some revolutionary concepts, beginning with the idea the accountant who handles your return should be up to date with their own tax returns. Crazy talk.

Tax accountants face the fluffy pillow - Financial Review 


Jeremy Hirschhorn on certainties of taxes 


(Jeremy Hirschhorn - Chess Games - Chess Tempo)



Warning over fake ATO text offering people thousands of dollars
Evans has a mantra he encourages all teams to make part of their culture, “See it, say it, fix it”. 

Wolff says, “Encouraging everybody in the organisation to speak up and point out shortcomings and deficits has been instrumental in making us successful”.

He believes the openness and lack of blame culture is a key to keeping the team together.

“We actually encourage people to say their opinion because it’s important for their own development.  We keep our values up very high.  It’s a place where there are no internal politics.  Integrity is most important.  It is an environment where people dare to speak up.”

So it’s no accident that both the All Blacks and the Mercedes Formula One team have made winning an art form.

Both organisations have flourished by getting their workplace environments sorted out.

That’s called culture and the by-product of that culture is winning.”


THE GREATNESS WITHIN YOU - 


Brene Brown willingness to be vulnerable


Related: When Rulers Despise The Ruled. “If the rulers feel neither loyalty nor empathy toward the ruled, the ruled can be expected to return the favor.”



Manly luxury property developer Benjamin Ensor jailed for six years

Daily Telegraph‎ 
The discharged bankrupt was using the Australian Taxation Office like an ATM, illegally pocketing $3.4 ...

Daily Telegraph


All-Crypto Retirement Accounts Will Be Fined: Australian TaxOffice


CoinDesk‎ 


 The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has sent out warning letters to investors who have placed the majority ...
Australian tax authorities warn against investing a lot of retirement ... AMBCrypto
Warnings issued to Aussies betting 90% of retirement funds on crypto Micky News 

  Don't reply to this text: Urgent warning is issued over tax office scam ...

Daily Mail‎ - 5 hours ago
The victim gets a text message saying they are about to receive an Australian TaxOffice (ATO) direct ...
Australian tax Authority Warns Retirees Against Risky ... BTCMANAGER


Why am I self-publishing? Aside from the obvious publishing world bias against anyone to the right of Trotsky (this is particularly true for fiction; there are several good conservative venues for non-fiction), I have real reasons for having decided, after all these years and books, to self-publish. And not just because it’s clearly the wave of the future.
I believe in free markets and self-publishing is entrepreneurial. You get a greater hand in your own creative destiny, even if it’s more of a gamble.    
The author foregoes a publisher’s advance for a significantly larger piece of the revenue pie and control of production, pricing, and marketing. Of course, that means paying for everything yourself from the cover design to formatting to ads.
Speaking of which, I recall asking (begging) publishers for ads on more than one occasion and being told: “Ads don’t sell books.” When I replied, “But what about using my [in those cases stellar] reviews?” I was informed, “Reviews don’t sell books.” Then I queried, “What sells books?” Silence.
Enough of that. I’ll make that call for myself from now on, thank you.
Surprisingly, and more importantly, self-publishing tends to make the book itself better — at least it did for me. How’s that? Don’t publishers have editors? Yes, and often good ones, but they don’t, in the end, hold a candle to the “beta readers” you assemble when self-publishing. (“Beta readers” are as they sound — people who read and comment on early versions.)

As Glenn likes to say — well, this is the 21st century you know. Roger was a pioneer blogger and Internet videomaker; it makes sense that he’d eventually carry that DIY attitude to longer form mediums as well. Read the whole thing, then check out The GOAT at Amazon.


Lifehacker – “When your wifi is bad, you know it—oh, do you know it. And getting it working well again isn’t always as simple as unplugging and replugging your router, one of our favorite troubleshooting techniques for all things technological. You don’t have to memorize every setting in your router to set up a killer wireless network at home, but there are quite a few things you’ll want to know about wifi in order to get the best possible performance on your many devices. To help you out, we’ve put together a special page—Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Wifi—that you can bookmark and refer to whenever you’re messing around with your wifi (or find that your connection feels slower, but you have no idea why) …”

Washington Post – “The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns. Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country’s gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be. There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the 165 shootings in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include domestic shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers… 
…This tally begins Aug. 1, 1966, when a student sniper fired down on passersby from the observation deck of a clock tower at the University of Texas. By the time police killed him, 17 other people were dead or dying. As Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff wrote, the shooting “ushered in the notion that any group of people, anywhere — even walking around a university campus on a summer day — could be killed at random by a stranger.”

Swiss Category 1 Bank Enters NPA 



On August 5, 2019, DOJ Tax announced here another nonprosecution agreement (NPA) with a Category 1 Swiss Bank, LLB Verwaltung (Switzerland) AG, formerly known as “Liechtensteinische Landesbank (Schweiz) AG” (LLB-Switzerland).  The announcement has links to the NPA, here, and the Statement of Facts, here.


Michael Dorf (Cornell), Malcolm Gladwell Mangles Casuistry:
The fourth season of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History includes a great deal of material of relevance to lawyers. Episodes 1 and 2 critique the LSAT and time-pressured law school exams on the ground that they reward quick thinkers at the expense of slower-but-deeper thinkers. There's much in those episodes with which I agree. For just about all of my 27 years in law teaching I have given either 24-hour or 8-hour take-home exams rather than 3-hour in-class exams for exactly the reason that these episodes underscore: The real-life practice of law often puts time pressure on attorneys, but (except perhaps during a trial when an attorney must make split-second decisions whether to object to proffered evidence) rarely does actual legal practice involve the kind of time pressure that the LSAT and in-class exams place on test-takers.
That said, these episodes overclaim. For example, Gladwell contrasts chess grandmasters who are the best speed players with those who are the best players at a normal pace. Fair enough, but Gladwell fails to recognize that even those he calls tortoises are better at speed chess than nearly everyone else in the world, while even those he calls hares are better at normal-pace chess than nearly everyone else in the world. And likewise in law. Time pressure is a source of variation in performance, but it's not the only source and rarely the most important. Time pressure will affect the performance of various excellent lawyers differently. Some excellent lawyers are truly outstanding under time pressure; others are excellent; some are merely very good. By contrast, incompetent lawyers will be incompetent at any speed.
In the balance of this post, I want to focus on another set of flaws in Season 4 of Revisionist History. Episode 5 begins a three-part mini-series on casuistry--a method of moral reasoning closely associated with the Jesuits. The word casuistry is sometimes used as a synonym for sophistry or fallacious reasoning, but Gladwell uses it in its original and literal sense, as case-by-case reasoning rather than deductive reasoning from general principles. (Casuistry derives from the Latin casus, meaning case). I share some of Gladwell's appreciation for this form of reasoning, but I think his key illustrations misfire badly.

Howard Wasserman (Florida International), More on Malcolm Gladwell


at