Monday, December 23, 2019

Taxing Apologies: The dark side of Alexa, Siri and other personal digital assistants



“I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.”
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 



Reading between LM’s taxing lines ...  'People are going to lose out big time if we don't have tax reform. Really big time'


“... Ken, please go away and accept your punishment ... ok Boomer ...”


Ken Henry's tax review is gathering dust, but its ideas could kick-start Australia's economy - ABC News


Chinese slave’s plea for help hidden inside Tesco Christmas card ... MMXIX AD



Singer claims Opera Australia relied on evidence of paedophile to sack her
CHANGE: Congress slaps robocallers with $10,000 penalty—per call. “The new legislation allows federal authorities to seize the profits of robocall operators and assess an additional penalty of up to $10,000 per call. It also pushes telephone companies to implement SHAKEN and STIR, a suite of authentication protocols that will help the fight against robocalls.”
Good luck collecting from a bunch of criminal organizations in Pakistan or wherever, but maybe SHAKEN and STIR (cute) will do a better job of keeping robocalls from getting through.




The law of the garbage truck
One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport. We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches!
The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us. My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I mean, he was really friendly. So I asked, 'Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!' This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call, 'The Law of the Garbage Truck'.
He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they'll dump it on you. Don't take it personally, just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Don't take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.


The truth is, we know so little about life or appetite for life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during hisnow-legendary lecture on the shapes of stories. 


An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.




The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose dragon ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your dragon has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the dragon came back bringing seven wild dragons with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight dragons!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.” The following day his son tried to break one of the dragon, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The farmer steadfastly refrained from thinking of things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage, because one never knows… In fact we never really know whether an event is fortune or misfortune, we only know our ever-changing reactions to ever-changing events.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.



There are a lot of voices in the world causing confusion however, the Voice of the Blogging Spirit is still Unique ...Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.

It’s as easy to digest stories from a rich blogger as it is to read a poor one. 


Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.


In Plato’s Apology, perhaps the most famous philosopher of them all—Socrates—concludes that his wisdom lies in the fact that he knows nothing. Bloggers insist that there must be more to wisdom than humility and the ancient debate about wisdom or lack of it continues to this day.

After I'm dead, I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.




You can find anyone that will tell you what you want to hear, but the only one worth valuing is the one that tells you what you need to learn.
On the net, the majority is not always right, truth often enters through the narrow gate ... The truth is like Light, it can never be Hidden. Is a matter of time. 


You have no experience of Rising if you have not Fallen before


They are mad at me for teasing them – they can dish it out, but they can’t take it!



Anointing without a Character is a Disaster. The Altitude of Your Role doesn't matter but the Attitude:
So many characters easily criticise other people, but do not like it when other people criticize him or her ...

You should talk 

Look in the mirror 



 “The Art of Dying.” Elite-level writing from Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker.



  • Nieman Lab is talking to some of the smartest people in journalism, including Poynter’s own Doris Truong, to get their journalism predictions for 2020.
  • The Big Lead’s Bobby Burack is out with his sports media awards for 2019, including best radio show, best podcast and personality of the year.
  • One of my favorite parts about the end of the year is end-of-the-year lists. Here’s a good one. Kevin Fallon, senior entertainment reporter for The Daily Beast, lists his 20 best TV shows from 2019. (No. 3 was my favorite show of the year.)
  • Four veteran reporters from The New York Times — Peter Baker, Alison Mitchell, Eric Schmitt and Carl Hulse — talk about covering the impeachment. The Clinton impeachment, that is.
 

Crossing the River
.

The river maps its way

towards the expectant sea,

new channels drawn

by the growth of light

as free birds wander and feed.

Anonymous fishermen knock

at the tide’s rising door,

accompanied by those travel-stained clouds

erased and drawn again

within memory.

Nomadic seasons pausing

to reflect the view of liberated water,

a natural movement

learning the dialect of each

fresh pattern and sharpened line.


Are you sharing too much about your kids online? Probably


Fast Company – “To save Neverland, Peter Pan fought the pirates.


To save their childhood, youth today need us, their parents, to fight against our “sharenting” habits. Our kids need us to protect their privacy and, along with it, their protected space to play so that they can make mischief, make mistakes, and grow up better for having made them. “Sharenting” is so omnipresent that most of us don’t even realize we’re doing it.


Typically, this term refers to what parents post on social media. But “sharenting” is about so much more than social. It’s about doing all the things on all the digital platforms, from apps to smartphones to iPads to smartwatches to digital assistants and beyond.


More formally: “Sharenting” encompasses all those ways that parents (as well as grandparents, teachers, and other trusted adults) transmit, store, and otherwise use children’s intimate data via digital technologies. As a law professor and part of the Youth & Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, I’ve spent years studying the ways that parents’ use of digital tech impacts kids…And all of this sharenting is perfectly legal. The United States does not have any federal law that provides comprehensive protection for youth data privacy. Our legal system permits parents to share their kids’ private data, unless doing so would violate criminal law or another law of general applicability.


Despite its name, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) doesn’t provide blanket protection for kids’ online privacy because it doesn’t apply when parents share personal information about their kids—only when kids under 13 share personal information about themselves…


The Conversation: “Digital assistants can be found in your office, home, car, hotel, phone and many other places. They have recently undergone massive transformation and run on operating systems that are fuelled by artificial intelligence (AI). They observe and collect data in real-time and have the capability to pull information from different sources such as smart devices and cloud services and put the information into context using AI to make sense of the situation. Although we have come a long way in the design and execution of these AI technologies, there is still more work to be done in this arena.

Much of the data that these digital assistants collect and use include personal, potentially identifiable and possibly sensitive information. Can Alexa or other personal digital assistants violate the privacy and security of our data? Possibly. There is a dark side to these virtual assistants…”