Monday, April 20, 2020

One World: Together At Home

 ““Just realised my soap wasn’t working because it’s literally a block of cheese,” she wrote.”


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From their home to yours: Lady Gaga redefines the crisis concert


"What experience isn’t weird at the moment?" Keith Urban muses ahead of his performance for One World: Together At Home.

 Gaga of Tiffany fame 
“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.” Kierkegaard on nonconformity
7:44 pm - 18 Apr 2020
Kierkegaard on Nonconformity, the Individual vs. the Crowd, and the Power of the Minority
“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs w…


  UK moves to drop Huawei as 5G vendor, citing China coronavirus transparency. “The mood in the parliamentary party has hardened.”

Time op-ed:  What the States Need From Congress Now Is Cold, Hard Cash, by Daniel Hemel (Chicago), Ruth Mason (Virginia) & Gladriel Shobe (BYU):

CoronavirusSince the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, Americans have looked to their elected officials for guidance and comfort. And with President Trump passing the buck to states, governors have–for the most part–risen to the occasion. Several, including New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Ohio’s Mike DeWine, have emerged as inspiring national leaders, foils for the President’s lies and bluster.Polling shows that 72 percent of Americans approve of their governor’s COVID-19 response, compared to only 45 percent who say the same of the president.







Khrista McCarden (Tulane), Offshore Tax Enforcement and Divorce, 80 Ohio St. L.J. 521 (2019):

High-net-worth taxpayers continue to hide assets offshore, and offshore tax enforcement remains an immense problem for the United States. In 2016, the Panama Papers revealed another previously unnoticed reason that high-net-worth tax cheats place assets offshore: to hide them from their spouses during divorce proceedings. Typically, these offshore tax evaders also will refuse to disclose their offshore accounts during divorce proceedings even though required to do so. The individuals hiding offshore assets in this manner are predominantly males. Ultimately, their wives are forced to hire forensic accountants to trace an extensive maze of offshore ownership during the divorce.
Jennifer Bird-Pollan (University of Kentucky, United States) and Tina Ehrke-Rabel (University of Graz, Austria) present tax papers online at Indiana today as part of the concluding session of the Tax Policy Colloquium Series hosted by Leandra Lederman:

Tina Ehrke-Rabel (University of Graz), Big Tax Brother Watching You?–Defining the Lines Between Efficiency and Personal Autonomy:

EhrkeOur modern societies are founded on the idea of individuals being free and of the state intervening only where it is necessary for the functioning of our society. This freedom has been acquired in hard struggles, wars, revolutions. And in this concept of individual freedom society and the State have accepted that people have secrecies that nobody knows, under the assumption of freedom we even accepted that people cheat the laws. As long as information is analog and local, the laws of the physics create an automatic zone of privacy.

Data analytics allow to combine the huge mass of data on a human being available out there and “stored”/ “held” by different places/institutions in a way a single human being would not be able of. Everyone needs to accept that people watch him when he acts in public. Every trace we leave on the internet is a public footprint. We need accept that this footprint is being watched.

But there is a difference between watching and processing. At the moment these footprints get combined with each other, combined with other sources of information and feed then into a decision based on evaluations, it is not pure observation anymore, it becomes surveillance. Since the State is only allowed to intervene, when provided by law, there need to be clear rules! In a digital world, privacy requires explicitly designed institutions, laws and technologies, or norms about which information flows are permitted or prevented and which are encouraged or discouraged.


 David Cay Johnston (New York Times), Michael C. Cooper, Convicted in Tax Scam, Dies a Prisoner at 66:

For decades Michael C. Cooper ran small-time investment and marketing scams in Topeka, Kan., repeatedly clashing with securities and consumer protection agencies. He mocked their actions as inconsequential and ineffective.

Then, in 1997, as Senate hearings in Washington were dramatizing supposed abuses of taxpayers by the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. Cooper saw an opportunity to profit from public resentment of the tax system — and to move up from a local flimflam artist to a national one.

He launched Renaissance/The Tax People, a tax-avoidance business that ultimately ensnared about 50,000 Americans — until a Kansas state judge shut the firm down in 2001, ruling that it was an illegal pyramid scheme of a “fundamentally deceptive nature” that had cost customers and investors at least $84 million.

Tried, convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, Mr. Cooper never got out. He died on April 3, the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed without stating a cause.





Ariel Jurow Kleiman (San Diego), Tax Limits and the Future of Local Democracy, 133 Harv. L. Rev. 1884 (2020):

Property tax limits are state-level laws that place caps on local governments’ tax rates and revenue. These statutory limits, which put pressure on already strapped cities and counties in forty-six states, present an inexorable dilemma for local policymakers. On the one hand, they may cause cuts to vital services, bankruptcy, and reliance on regressive revenue sources. At the same time, however, tax limits may reflect genuine concerns about government profligacy and nonresponsiveness. While much research has focused on the first side of the dilemma — examining the laws’ fiscal consequences — this Article explores the second, probing how tax limits affect the distribution of political power between local voters and policymakers.




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