Wednesday, December 15, 2021

These Real Estate and Oil Tycoons Avoided Paying Taxes for Years

 Face Masks Help Jurors Tell Lies From TruthScienceBlog


Personal details of nearly 80,000 South Australian public sector workers accessed in cyber attack, government confirms


Tasmania Building a “Black Box” Recorder for Climate Change.


These Real Estate and Oil Tycoons Avoided Paying Taxes for Years ProPublica



The latest Tax Office transparency report shows the oil and gas juggernauts are, again, Australia’s biggest tax grifters. Callum Foote and Michael West report on the good and the bad in multinational tax-dodging land.


Dictionary.com: “2021 was a year defined by the many ongoing impacts of the pandemic and the polarization of 2020—and the various ways we continue to grapple with them. The vastness of such a year could never be fully summarized with a single word. But there is one word that’s intertwined with so many of the things we’ve experienced in 2021: allyship, our 2021 Word of the Year. allyship (noun): the status or role of a person who advocates and actively works for the inclusion of a marginalized or politicized group in all areas of society, not as a member of that group but in solidarity with its struggle and point of view and under its leadership. As our Word of the Year for 2021, allyship carries a special distinction this year: It marks the first time we’ve chosen a word that’s new to our dictionary as our Word of the Year…”


The Strange Career of Paul Krugman Tablet. From mid-November; still germane.


India is among the most unequal countries, says World Inequality Report Scroll

Billionaires’ share of global wealth soars during pandemic Yahoo News


Uber grapples with multiple challenges to business model in Europe FT


Earth Will Soon Have a Black Box to Chronicle Humanity’s Downfall

Singularity Hub: “If the world as we know it comes to an end (maybe even starting with an earthquake, birds and snakes and airplanes), future generations will have access to a vault containing duplicates of seed samples from the world’s crop collections, a frozen Noah’s Ark of animal DNA to bring species back from extinction, and if a new initiative pans out as intended, a black box to record how it all went down. This week saw the launch of Earth’s Black Box, a well-intentioned but somewhat morbid project of questionable value in Tasmania, Australia. An Australian marketing communications company called Clemenger BBDO is collaborating on the project with researchers from the University of Tasmania. Their stated intention is to hold the world accountable for Earth’s future by creating a device that records and stores data about how we handle the climate crisis. “If the worst is to happen and as a civilization we crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible box will be there and will record every detail of that,” said Jim Curtis, executive creative director at Clemenger BBDO. “So whoever’s left, or whoever finds it afterwards, learns from our mistakes.” Not to be too grim or anything…”