Tuesday, July 13, 2021

This Is Tax Evasion, Plain and Simple

5300 Years Ago Ötzi the Iceman from the Alps and Tatra Mountains did not have access to TV 


ABC celebrates 75 years of parliamentary broadcasting


Chodorow: The Charges Against The Trump Organization Are A Master Class In Tax Evasion


New York Times, Trump Organization Is Charged With Running 15-Year Employee Tax Scheme:

The Trump Organization, the real estate business that catapulted Donald J. Trump to tabloid fame, television riches and ultimately the White House, was charged Thursday with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with fringe benefits that were hidden from the authorities.


New York Times op-ed:  This Is Tax Evasion, Plain and Simple, by Gabriel Zucman (UC-Berkeley) & Gus Wezerek (Opinion):

In the decades after World War II, close to 50 percent of American companies’ earnings went to state and federal taxes. Economically, it was a golden period. Middle-class incomes grew at roughly the same rate as those of the richest Americans.

But as globalization gave companies the ability to choose where they recorded profits, Congress scrambled to keep their business by lowering corporate taxes. In 2018, American companies were taxed at an average effective rate of less than 14 percent, by our calculations.

Corporate tax breaks have helped business owners amass inconceivable amounts of money over the past few decades. Meanwhile, middle-class Americans have footed the bill, as Congress has propped up the budget by raising taxes on wages.






Outbreak.info is a standardized, searchable platform to discover and explore COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 data from the Center for Viral Systems Biology. Outbreak.info combines together data and metadata from a large number of data sources

  • About the API – This site is a collection of APIs developed from the Su / WuLabs at Scripps Research on COVID-19-related data and resources. These APIs provide all the data at outbreak.info, which is a resource to collect, share, and integrate COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 data critical to for scientific research.
  • Design – These APIs were built using BioThings SDK and follow the same design pattern of our official BioThings APIs (MyGene.infoMyVariant.infoMyChem.info, etc). These APIs are also pending to be integrated into the proper official BioThings API based on their entity type.
  • Docs – Since these APIs follow the same design pattern as our BioThings APIs, you may refer to the following MyChem.info API documentation as a guide on how to use these APIs. Additionally, you may try the live APIs on the Try It pages below…”


Google’s been recording you: 3 ways to delete your voice history

CNET – “Find your My Activity page and purge it of all those awkward Google Home or Google Nest voice searches. People were understandably freaked out when reports surfaced in 2019 that Google and Amazon were giving human contractors access to audio clips from their customers’ Google Home (now Google Nest) and Echo devices. Google has since made a change, requiring you to opt in to having voice searches recorded in the first place — and opting in also allows for human review, though audio is anonymized. (Google does this to improve personalization across its platform.) If you don’t remember whether you opted in or not, or if you opted in and now regret it, it’s worth taking time to see what Google’s recorded about you. Even though Google changed its stance on recording voice searches, the rest of your Google ecosystem activity might still be getting saved for posterity, no opt-in required. You can find all of your Google activity, from Google Maps navigation to search engine queries, in the My Activity section of your Google account. You can read a list in the Google Home app or actually listen to your own voice search history (if it has indeed been recorded). Fortunately, you can easily purge your account of all these recordings…”

 

 

Colonial espionage …

Two books about America’s first spy ring


Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that unfavorable views of China have reached historic highs in 17 advanced economies with large majorities also agreeing that Beijing does not respect the personal freedoms of its people. The findings came amid celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China where President Xi Jinping addressed an audience on Tiananmen Square. Casting the party as the country's savior, he said that the "Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us" and that "whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people

Forbes: Unfavorable Views Of China Have Reached Historic Highs [Infographic]



Discover: How Emotionally Intelligent Are You?


A New Kind of Ransomware Tsunami Hits Hundreds of Companies Wired


Smart technology is not making us dumber: studyPhys.org


Some major cities ranked by surveillance cameras per km

Not what I would have expected:

1. Seoul

2. Paris

3. Boston

4. NYC

5. Baltimore

6. San Francisco

7. Tokyo

8. London

9. Chicago

10. Philadelphia

11. Bangkok

12. Washington, D.C.

13. Milwaukee

14. Singapore

15. Seattle

16. Los Angeles

The difference here between Seoul and Los Angeles is almost 4x.  Mostly I am surprised that London and also Singapore are so low.  Here is the paper,


New map created by AI reveals hidden links between Milky Way and Andromeda galaxiesSpace.com


Christine Lagarde: Financing a green and digital recovery Bank of International Settlements. “So how can we capitalise on this opportunity?”

This is as good as it gets for the US economy FT


Conditions are ripe for repeat of 1970s stagflation and 2008 debt crisis Nouriel Roubini, Guardian


Hackers demand $70 million to restore data after massive US cyberattack France24. That’s all?