What Makes Work Meaningful and Why Economists Should Care about It.

“We must collect taxes without causing unnecessary burden to citizens. Just as a flower is not hurt when the bee draws nectar from it, so also should the king not disturb the taxpayer when he collects taxes.”.

~ Kautilya (c. 350-275 BCE)

Can you hear the death rattle of the skyscraper? It’s the sound of the free candyfloss cart being wheeled past the rows of empty desks, and the lonely drip of the beer-keg tap by the water cooler. 

The big idea: Is the era of the skyscraper over?

A new home for Saturday’s good reading and listening guide

Priti Patel considering removing right to anonymity on social media to stop ‘relentless’ abuse of MPs

‘We can’t carry on like this’: Home secretary speaks out on ‘cruel’ comments directed at elected representatives

It’s OK to be angry. How else will we change the world?

I wrote this on Twitter yesterday: I thought there was some risk in saying this. The anti-angry brigade is everywhere right now. I am often

We can be angry when we see something that is wrong. We should be. And we should show it. All that we must not be is two things. The first is violent, of course. And the second is to think that the person with whom we are angry is inherently evil, because I do not believe that simply because thinking in that way suggests that there is no power to argument, and there is. It is my belief that a person can be persuaded to change their mind. Otherwise, why do I spend so much time trying to persuade people that they are wrong and that there are better options?

Read the full article…

ATO boss slams tax dodgers with $33.5 billion missing

After 30 Years Of Mediocrity, This Senior Public Servant Still Cannot Convert PDFs To Word Docs

Does Covid Cause Significant Brain Harm? Maxim Lott takes a deep dive into research on “long Covid.” He concludes that it’s real but has been, as usual, badly exaggerated by the media, and notes that the long-term effects may not be much worse than the long-term effects from the ordinary flu.

Tax Office data reveals extent of hidden worker

Oct 22, 2021 – 4.04pm

The Tax Office processed 287 returns for working holidaymakers in the year ended June 30, down from almost 100,000 pre-pandemic, highlighting Australia’s massive, yet hidden, worker shortfall.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg would not be drawn on whether foreign workers would be allowed back by Christmas, but said the government was working on a plan behind the scenes.

“The first step is with Australians and, of course, the next step is then with students and with skilled workers and then with tourists,” Mr Frydenberg told Nine’s Today program.

Status Page for monitoring your websites and applications with beautiful graphs

IZA – Institute of Labor Economics DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES ISSN: 2365-9793IZA DP No. 13112

The financially motivated FIN7 cybercrime gang has masqueraded as yet another fictitious cybersecurity company called "Bastion Secure" to recruit unwitting software engineers under the guise of penetration testing in a likely lead-up to a ransomware scheme.

"With FIN7's latest fake company, the criminal group leveraged true, publicly available information from various legitimate cybersecurity companies to create a thin veil of legitimacy around Bastion Secure," Recorded Future's Gemini Advisory unit saidin a report. "FIN7 is adopting disinformation tactics so that if a potential hire or interested party were to fact check Bastion Secure, then a cursory search on Google would return 'true' information for companies with a similar name or industry to FIN7's Bastion Secure."

Hackers Set Up Fake Company to Get IT Experts to Launch Ransomware Attacks

What Makes Work Meaningful and Why Economists Should Care about It. APRIL 2020. Milena Nikolova University of Groningen, Brookings and IZA, Femke Cnossen, University of Groningen: “We demonstrate why meaningful work, i.e. job-related activities that individuals view as purposeful and worthwhile, matters to labour economists. Building on self-determination theory, which specifies the roles of autonomy, competence, and relatedness as preconditions for motivation, we are the first to explore the determinants of work meaningfulness. 

Specifically, using three waves of the European Working Conditions Survey, we show that autonomy, competence, and relatedness explain about 60 percent of the variation in work meaningfulness perceptions. Meanwhile, extrinsic factors, such as income, benefits, and performance pay, are relatively unimportant. Meaningful work also predicts absenteeism, skills training, and retirement intentions, which highlights the concept’s economic significance. We provide new insights that could help organise the future of work in a meaningful and dignifying way and propose concrete avenues for future research on meaningful work in economics.

“Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published their blockbuster report detailing over 100 judges that had likely violated the Ethics in Government act. To do their work, the Wall Street Journal reporters had exclusive access to our database of financial disclosures. Today we are making the database available to all. Included in the database are:

• Over 250,000 pages of financial records dating from 2003-2020, with complete coverage of every judge, justice, and magistrate between 2011 and 2018.
• Over 1.5 million investment records.
• Around 12,000 sources of income outside of regular investments.
• More than 1,700 gifts received by federal judges. And a lot more. We have made a huge effort to gather every possible disclosure. Read our coverage page for caveats and details.  Starting today, this data is available in two new ways. First, we have integrated this data into the CourtListener website, where you can look up any judge and see their disclosures. For every judge that you look up, you will see a detailed page with all the data we have extracted, including their investments, gifts, spousal income, other sources of income and more…”

Idiocracy: how the decline in human intelligence is undermining democracy

Science increasingly suspects the proliferation of harmful nerve toxins in recent decades is to blame for a downturn in our IQ levels — and this is threatening not just our health but our very system of governance