- Meredith R. Conway (Suffolk), And You May Ask Yourself, What Is That Beautiful House: How Tax Laws Distort Behavior Through the Lens of Architecture, 10 Colum. J. Tax L. 165 (2019)
- Kartikeya Singh (PricewaterhouseCoopers, Washington D.C.) & Aparna Mathur (American Enterprise Institute), The Impact of GILTI and FDII on the Investment Location Choice of U.S. Multinationals, 10 Colum. J. Tax L. 199 (2019)
- Iryna Malakhouskaya (J.D. Columbia, 2019), Note, The Partnership Audit Rules of 2015: The Implications for Misvalued Private Funds and New Partners, 10 Colum. J. Tax L. 227 (2019)
AT&T Exec Predicted the Smartphone in 1953
In an April 1953 newspaper article in the Tacoma News Tribune, Mark Sullivan made an uncannily accurate prediction about the future of the telephone.
In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent, and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk.
The curious use of the word “users” made me think this was a hoax, but Snopes says it’s genuine. Anyway, Nikola Tesla beat Sullivan to the punch with his 1926 wireless vision of the world:
We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
How to Buy Drugs
The London Review of Books is not normally where one turns for advice on how to cop, but Misha Glenny (author of DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia and Callum Lang recently wrote a piece for them called How to Buy Drugsthat summarizes how the the customer-facing segment of the global drug market presently functions, with a special emphasis on distribution via the dark web. The improvement in customer service driven by dark web markets is fascinating:
The internet has dramatically improved the experience of drug buyers. The market share of a dark web outlet depends almost entirely on its online reputation. Just as on Amazon or eBay, customer reviews will describe the quality of purchased products as well as reporting on shipping time and the responsiveness of vendors to queries or complaints. If drugs that a buyer has paid for don’t turn up — as once happened to Liam, the Manchester student — a savvy vendor will reship the items without asking for further payment, in the hope of securing the five-star customer reviews they depend on.As a consequence, the drugs available to the informed buyer are of a higher quality than ever before. They are also safer. The administrators of DNStars.vip — a site on the open web which you don’t need Tor to visit — pose as ordinary users in order to buy samples of popular drugs from major vendors. They then have the drugs chemically tested to see whether they match the seller’s description.
The dark web demonstrates the promise and peril of technology (and capitalism tbh) in a nutshell: lower prices & better quality goods for some (or even many) people but all sorts of hidden nastiness behind the scenes doing real and often unacknowledged harm to society.
This is the Christmas Panto in the Tivoli in Copenhagen:
As they say:
You could not make it up.
Except we did.....