Aerial view of a proposed Burial Belt. ... on exhibition at the Oslo Architecture Triennale, in Norway
Disrupting death: The billionaire who wants to extend our lifespans
Ancestor Worship with Mother Nature: How Indigenous Death Rituals Illuminate the Web of Life
“For almost all oral cultures… the body’s decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born.”
Yue Dai (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, School of Law), Taxing the Sharing Economy and Digital Platforms, 95 Tax Notes Int'l 511 (Aug. 5, 2019):
This article examines how companies like Uber and Airbnb present themselves to tax authorities, how different jurisdictions respond to and tax the sharing economy, and the unique challenges of taxing platform businesses in China, the United States, and around the globe.
Conclusion. As platform businesses grow increasingly diverse, establishing whether they are principals or intermediaries and determining how governments can properly tax the different business models pose ongoing multijurisdictional challenges. Proper profit allocation should factor in the value of users and the data they generate for a business — a tall order when it remains unclear what that value is, how to measure it, or where it is created. In addition to profit allocations among jurisdictions, another challenge is protecting taxpayers’ fundamental rights in the data-selling arena.
There is a great deal of work to be done. But the solutions will be more effective if they come from within an international framework for tax cooperation.
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 28, 2019 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weisshighlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: ‘Perfectly real’ deepfake videos are 6 months away: report; ‘Nightmare’ for global postal system if Trump pulls out, U.N. body says; Most Health Data Breaches Expose Sensitive Information; and The Extended Corporate Mind: When Corporations Use AI to Break the Law.
Now’s the time to spread the wealth, says Thomas Piketty FT
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 28, 2019 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weisshighlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: ‘Perfectly real’ deepfake videos are 6 months away: report; ‘Nightmare’ for global postal system if Trump pulls out, U.N. body says; Most Health Data Breaches Expose Sensitive Information; and The Extended Corporate Mind: When Corporations Use AI to Break the Law.
Now’s the time to spread the wealth, says Thomas Piketty FT
Jonathan H. Choi (NYU), An Empirical Study of Statutory Interpretation in Tax Law, 95 N.Y.U. L. Rev. ___ (2020):
A substantial academic literature considers how agencies should interpret statutes. Yet few studies have considered how agencies actually do interpret statutes, and none has empirically compared the methodologies of agencies and courts in practice. This Article conducts such a comparison, using a newly created data-set of all IRS publications ever released, along with an existing data-set of court decisions. It applies natural language processing, machine learning, and regression analysis to map methodological trends and to test whether particular authorities have developed unique cultures of statutory interpretation.
It finds that, after Chevron, the IRS has increasingly made rules on normative policy grounds (like fairness and efficiency) rather than merely producing rules based on the “best reading” of the relevant statute (under any interpretive theory, like purposivism or textual-ism). Moreover, when the IRS does apply interpretive criteria, it has grown much more purposivist over time.
