Thursday, May 07, 2020

Phoning it in: Pandemic forces Supreme Court to hear cases in a new way

If you are a creative person and you’re honest, you realise how little you know. The depth of your ignorance is something you are constantly aware of – knowledge is a bottomless pit and you keep finding new things. I’m forever coming up against a question I can’t answer. And that’s what keeps me going.
 - Desmond Morris


 

Deaths of Despair Boston Review 

 

UK COVID-19 contact tracing app data may be kept for'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Want to opt out of that part? No chance, says NHSX chief






Opening statement from Commissioner Chris Jordan to Select Committee on COVID-19, 07 May 2020
Commissioner's speeches 07-May-2020

Before I do, I will briefly refer to today’s media about fraudulent activity in relation to early release of superannuation. I can confirm that some limited fraudulent activity has been identified and immediately acted upon. It is now an operational matter with our colleagues at the AFP and so I cannot comment further today. I would remind all Australians to be vigilant in keeping their personal information secure and private
Senate Select Committee, COVID-19 (Australian Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic) Live:

Australian Federal Police investigating superannuation early ...ABC News In a statement, the Tax Office said a small number of people appear to have had their details used illegally in a bid to scam the program. The ABC understands ...
AFP investigates early-access super fraud The Australian Financial Review
Australian Tax Office detects 'fraud' over early superannuation ... NEWS.com.au
SUPER SCANDAL: ATO confirms govt's early access ... Sky News Australia
Australian Federal Police have been called in to investigate ... Daily Telegraph


'I hadn't signed up' for smear politics: Constance withdraws from byelection


The decision comes less than 24 hours after he declared he would run for the marginal federal seat of Eden-Monaro.



'Distraction at worst possible time': Knives out for Andrew Constance

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian will face pressure to dump Andrew Constance from her cabinet.



High-rise tower catches fire in United Arab Emirates


The blaze at the 48-storey Abbco Tower in Sharjah saw flaming debris shower neighbouring dusty parking lots and left metal siding littering surrounding streets.


 Infamous property developer Nati Stoliar has re-entered Sydney's real estate industry with his involvement in a boutique eastern suburbs apartment block after being jailed in the US for multimillion-dollar fraud.
The entrepreneur, 70, who was synonymous with some of the city's most palatial waterfront homes, including "Boomerang" at Elizabeth Bay, returned to Australia in 2017 after he was imprisoned in Nevada for two years for his part in a fake biofuel credits scheme that netted $US40 million.
 Former jailed developer Nati Stoliar back on Sydney real estate scene






As it happened: Global death toll nears 251,000; 4.5 million download COVIDSafe app; Trump administration forecasts higher death rate


Surprise surprise! Hostile states are hacking coronavirus vaccine research, warn UK and USA intelligence

Just ask us if you need help, urge NCSC and CISA 


WESTERN DEMOCRACY: Agencies must be open and upfront with how they collect and use people’s information, says the NSW privacy commissioner 

Salim Mehajer pleads to be let back on social media while on ...

Daily Mail

... asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to relax his bail conditions so he could pay off a bill from the Australian Taxation Office. But a judge rejected most of his ...

Salim Mehajer reveals $20m debts as judge slaps down ...


Salim Mehajer's asbestos bid to delay declaring bankruptcy

Asbestos in the eye a very Salim   excuse

The Daily Telegraph by Steve Zemek


Phoning it in: Pandemic forces Supreme Court to hear cases in a new way Reuters


Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

But a rather purple tester put paid to that inflation-baiting bug 

Pete Recommends Weekly highlights on cyber security issues May 2, 2020 – 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 Weiss highlights 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: Managers turn to surveillance software to ensure employees are (really) working from home; Coronavirus impact: Meat processing plants weigh risks of prosecution if they’re blamed for spreading infection; How Cybercriminals are Weathering COVID-19; Zoom or Not?; and NSA Offers Agencies Guidance for Choosing Videoconference Tools.

 

April’s dumbest and most dangerous coronavirus declarations The Hill 



WELL, THEY HAVE TO EARN A LIVING:  Out-of-work chefs are leaving NYC to cook for billionaires.



Lesson From The Tax Court: The Eye Of The CDP Needle

Tax Court (2017)If Jesus had been a tax practitioner, he might have said “I tell you it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a taxpayer to contest a tax liability in a CDP hearing.”  That is the lesson we learn from two recent Tax Court decisions: (1) Jason E. Shepherd v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2020-45 (Apr. 13, 2020) (Judge Guy); and Patrick’s Payroll Services, Inc. v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2020-47 (Apr. 14, 2020) (Judge Urda).  Mr. Shepherd wanted the Tax Court to review the merits of a Trust Fund Recovery Penalty assessed against him.  Patrick’s Payroll Services wanted the Tax Court to review assessed employment tax liabilities



How Cybercriminals are Weathering COVID-19 Krebs on Security. BC: “Fascinating info, especially the last paragraph that scammers are feeling ethical pangs (honor among thieves) against stealing from healthcare providers or using COVID19 as a part of a scam.”


ZDNet – Drowning out the pandemic with streaming tunes – “With many of us stuck in our home offices during the pandemic, the silence gets pretty boring. You may require tunes to work — or maybe you need to drown out the distractions. Either way, while there are numerous music streaming services well worth paying for, there’s also plenty of stuff that you can access for free…”


This report by SimpliFlying “maps out over 70 areas on the day of travel and summarizes them in key stages of travel. Special sections featured in the report:
  1. The Touchless Cabin
  2. In-flight janitor
  3. The end of the 30-minute turn
  4. End of the printed in-flight magazine
  5. All bags to be “Sanitagged”
  6. The THA: Transport Health Authority..”

New York Times op-ed:  In God We Divide, by Thomas B. Edsall:
A steady religious realignment has reshaped the white American electorate, turning religious conviction — or its absence — into a clear signal of where voters stand in the culture wars














Communism still matters liberty still matters

Those who grew up in East Germany seem to have a harder time cottoning to the realities of capitalism:
We analyze the long-term effects of living under communism and its anticapitalist doctrine on households’ financial investment decisions and attitudes towards financial markets. Utilizing comprehensive German brokerage data and bank data, we show that, decades after Reunification, East Germans still invest significantly less in the stock market than West Germans. Consistent with communist friends-and-foes propaganda, East Germans are more likely to hold stocks of companies from communist countries (China, Russia, Vietnam) and of state-owned companies, and are unlikely to invest in American companies and the financial industry. Effects are stronger for individuals exposed to positive “emotional tagging,” e.g., those living in celebrated showcase cities. Effects reverse for individuals with negative experiences, e.g., environmental pollution, religious oppression, or lack of (Western) TV entertainment. Election years trigger further divergence of East and West Germans. We provide evidence of negative welfare consequences due to less diversified portfolios, higher-fee products, and lower risk-adjusted returns.
That is from a new NBER paper by Christine Laudenbach, Ulrike Malmendier, and Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi.
But if you are looking for a contrary point of view, consider this new paper by Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, and Ludger Woessmann:
German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, World War II and the subsequent occupying forces affected East and West differently. Third, a selective fifth of the population fled from East to West Germany before the building of the Wall in 1961. In light of our findings, we propose a more cautious interpretation of the extensive literature on the enduring effects of communist systems on economic outcomes, political preferences, cultural traits, and gender roles
That said, I still believe that communism really matters, and durably so, even if the longer history matters all the more so.  And now there is yet another paper on East Germany and political path dependence, by Luis R. Martinez, Jonas Jessen, and Guo Xu:
This paper studies costly political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, 40% of the designated Soviet occupation zone was initially captured by the western Allied Expeditionary Force. This occupation was short-lived: Soviet forces took over after less than two months and installed an authoritarian regime in what became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We exploit the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within the GDR to show that areas briefly under Allied occupation had higher incidence of protests during the only major episode of political unrest in the GDR before its demise in 1989 – the East German Uprising of 1953. These areas also exhibited lower regime support during the last free elections in 1946. We argue that even a “glimpse of freedom” can foster civilian opposition to dictatorship.
I take the core overall lesson to be that the eastern parts of Germany will experience significant problems for some time to come.
And speaking of communist persistence, why is it again that Eastern Europe is doing so well against Covid-19?  Belarus is an extreme case, with hardly any restrictions on activity, and about 14,000 cases and 89 deaths.  You might think that is a cover-up, but the region as a whole has been quite robust and thus it is unlikely to be a complete illusion.  And no, it doesn’t seem to be a BCG effect.
Does communism mean there is less of a culture of consumption and thus people find it easier to just stay at home voluntarily?  Or have all those weird, old paranoid communist pandemic ministries persisted and helped with the planning?  Or what?
Double credit on this one to both Kevin Lewis and Samir Varma, neither less excellent in his conjunction with the other.