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Monday, January 31, 2022

Society has to create the framework in which business works — not the other way around

The TikTok time bomb: The nascent social media app is feeding us junk food news nonstop

TikTok is an inadequate, possibly even harmful salve to the pain of a prolonged pandemic


Society has to create the framework in which business works — not the other way around

Business leaders — and the politicians that enable them —  must be put on notice that they must serve society, not the other way around. 

By John Menadue Jan 24, 2022


On exercise: “To strive, to struggle, to sweat, is to be a human being in the fullest sense of the word” ... sweat  


The modern cynic is miserable, tormented by worldly corruption. The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy — secure in their interior world   cynic  

Inside a Secret (but Shoppable) Antiques Museum on the Seine

If you thought the antiques business was on the decline, you only need to step inside the Galerie Kugel to realise you might have had it wrong. Familiar with Paris? You’ve likely ogled at this mansion on the banks of the Seine a dozen times before, and yet never dared to assume you could simply…


Top Stories
 
Europol, FBI taken down Virtual Private Netwok VPL Lab used by cybercriminals and ransomware operations; took down 15 servers

Interpol hits Nigerian BEC group Silver Terrier; targeted 50,000; user names and passwords of 800,000 located; 11 arrested
 
FBI warn of malicious QR codes used by crypto scammers

Russia's FSB arrests those operating REvil ransomware; took in $200 million
 
Review and Recommendation:  The Glorious Cause, by Robert Middlekauff. This volume of the Oxford History of the United States covers the American Revolution through the drafting and adoption of the Constitution.  It is a very interesting and enthralling account of the ideals, incredible bravery, and long odds that faced early America. This stands in sharp contrast to snarky history too often based on Howard Zinn. (And no, the Revolution was not to preserve slavery.)
 
BBB Studies. Here are links to the study topics of my studies: puppy fraud, romance fraud; BEC fraud, sweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraud, romance fraud money mules, crooked movers, government imposters, online vehicle sale scams, rental fraud, gift cards,  job scams, and online shopping fraud.
 
Virus ScamsFraud News Around the worldHumor FTC and CFPB  Virus Benefit TheftBusiness Email compromise fraud Bitcoin and cryptocurrencyATM skimmingJamaica and Lottery FraudRomance Fraud and Sextortion


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FTC: US consumers lost $770 million in social media scams in 2021 up 18x from 2017

The modern workplace: Will remote tech workers tolerate being monitored? - ZDNet

ZDNet – “The same technologies that enable people to work from home can be used to watch them work. A survey finds widespread use of monitoring software and not everyone is told it is there…For work at home advocates the future looks rosy. With the current jobs boom it looks certain that they’ll get what they want – either at their current employer — or somewhere else.  But will workers agree to allow their employer to monitor their home office activities? Is it something that can be refused or not? How is the home different from the office where people can be seen to be working at their desks, engaged in meetings, and logging into their IT systems? 

 Do remote workers have a right to refuse to be monitored?  Digital.com released a survey late last year that found widespread use of remote worker monitoring software especially in IT (77%) and advertising (83%).  One in seven workers hadn’t been told about it. Working from home might not be such a wonderful thing when you consider that people worked harder – a 10% boost in productivity was reported in the survey after the software was installed…”



“Consumers in 2021 reported losing about $770 million to fraud initiated on social media—about one fourth of all reported fraud losses for the year and an 18-fold increase from 2017, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s latest Consumer Protection Data Spotlight. Of those who reported losing money to fraud in 2021, more than 95,000 indicated that they were first contacted on social media—more than twice the 2020 number. Investment scams topped the list of total reported dollar losses, followed by romance scams. The largest number of reports came from people who lost money to online shopping scams. Most of the reports about online shopping scams involved someone who ordered a product they saw marketed on social media that never arrived. Consumers who listed the social media platform where the undelivered products were marketed most often named Facebook or Instagram. To learn more about how to spot, avoid, and report scams—and how to recover money if you have paid a scammer—visit ftc.gov/scams. If you spot a scam, report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. The Federal Trade Commission works to promote competition, stop deceptive and unfair business practices and scams, and educate consumers. Report fraud, scams, or bad business practices at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Get consumer advice at consumer.ftc.gov. Also, follow the FTC on social media, subscribe to press releases, and read the FTC’s blogs.”


State Of Fintech 2021 Report

CB Insights: “It was a record year for global & US fintech funding, mega-rounds, unicorns, M&A exits, and more. Global fintech deals and dollars reached record highs in 2021. Funding more than doubled year-over-year as private market deal activity soared across sectors and geographies. In our State Of Fintech 2021 Report, we dive into global investment trends to spotlight takeaways including:

  • Fintech accounted for $1 in every $5 of global venture funding
  • The metrics behind $100M+ mega-rounds, how mega-rounds compare against total global fintech funding, and which region had the highest number of mega-rounds
  • The record unicorn count, unicorn birth trends, and the highest-valued unicorns to close out the year
  • Which sector, from payments to digital lending to banking, saw the highest funding growth
  • Which region saw the most fintech funding growth in 2021, and which accounted for almost 50% of total 2021 funding
  • How 2021’s M&A, IPO, & SPAC exits & exit valuations compare to previous years
  • The deal stages experiencing the most dramatic YoY median deal size expansion
  • And much more..
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Covid is Over?

It all started with a wedding a super spread event … With a year’s worth of data, researchers have amassed ample evidence of some chief ingredients of superspreading events: prolonged indoor gatherings with poor ventilation. Activities such as singing and dancing, which produce many of the tiny infectious droplets that can be inhaled by others, are also common components.


The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly
— Anton Chekhov, born on 29th January  in 1860


Researchers are asking why some countries were better prepared for covid. One surprising answer: Trust.


YEP:  Samizdata quote of the day.

It’s time to say No More! and Never Again!


NSW records 13,026 new COVID-19 cases and 27 deaths


Mild COVID-19 cases still lead to attention and memory issues: study Reuters. 


Covid Is Over

For those who are aware of all internet traditions.
You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter is about to drink in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says, “Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won’t die.”

So, we all started to clap. I clapped so long and so hard that my palms hurt and they even started to bleed I clapped so hard. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, “That wasn’t enough. You did not clap hard enough. Tinkerbell is dead.” And then we all started to cry. The actress stomped off stage and refused to continue with the production. They finally had to lower the curtain. The ushers had to come help us out of the aisles and into the street.


“The two doses, they're not enough for omicron," Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said

Had positive result on Sunday. Not too many symptoms but Husky voice and never ending sleepiness.

There is some lingering issue in the respiratory system and I hope it is goes away, but who knows what happens to a 63 year young  man with asthma.

I think that having two jabs was the main reason for  lack of high fever and violent chest pain and just strange surreal feeling of tiredness. Everybody go get the shots so you do not end up in SG.


Jane received her booster with the PM. Her fellow residents had to wait


Data released by the federal government on Friday night showed there had been more deaths from COVID-19 in Australian aged care facilities recorded in January than throughout the whole of 2021.


Covid has spread like wildfire’: 703 aged care homes across Australia battle fresh outbreaks


A Poor Knock: Colbeck carousing at the cricket amid aged care crisis just tip of incompetence iceberg


Aged care minister accused of ‘arrogant complacency’ for attending cricket match


Australian music promoter Glenn Wheatley has died of COVID-related complications. He was 74.

Music promoter Glenn Wheatley dead at 74


WHO: In 10 weeks, omicron surge causes COVID cases to soar

Where did Omicron come from? Three key theories Nature


On top of Zobor above former Czech Slovak Army Barracks

Richard Fleischer’s “Soylent Green” is a good, solid science-fiction movie, and a little more. It tells the story of New York in the year 2022, when the population has swollen to an unbelievable 80 million, and people live in the streets and line up for their rations of water and Soylent Green. That’s a high-protein foodstuff allegedly made from plankton cultivated in the seas. But is it?


The world we live in is starting to look more and more like the one in the movie Soylent Green.  “Soylent Green is people”


If fate is unavoidable, why struggle to stop or question fate when by its very definition it cannot be stopped?


The winning entries in the Environmental Photographer of the Year for 2021 highlight the ways in which our planet’s climate is changing and how humans are (and are not) adapting to those changes. From top to bottom, photos by Kevin Ochieng Onyango, Simone Tramonte, and Michele Lapini. (via dense discovery)


What you need to know about the fast-spreading BA.2 omicron variant.


Promising COVID-19 antiviral pill, Paxlovid, in scarce supply, as doctors, patients compete for access ABC

* * *

The Coronavirus Will Surprise Us Again The Atlantic


Thank goodness we did all the work Virology Down Under. Savage irony and well worth a read. That’s Australia





Father and son die after being swept off rocks at Little Bay



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ATOmate’s integrated client communication



“Omertà — the brown code of silence” — says Steve Turner, searching for a way to describe what happens to organisations when cronyism takes hold. In the mid-2010s, Turner was working on patient safety projects as an independent consultant to an NHS trust, a healthcare provider in the UK’s public health system. The work was rewarding, but some things bothered him. Nurses confided to him that they had been bullied for highlighting risks and comments that clinical incidents were not investigated thoroughly. On one occasion a governance team member pressed him to downgrade an amber risk warning. He refused. After raising his concerns with various executives, he says the chair responded: “I don’t want to hear anything bad.” In 2014 he approached the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the sector regulator, which instructed the trust to undertake an external review. He says he has never been told what it concluded, either by the CQC or the trust, which stopped answering his emails. “There was a group of managers that stuck together rigidly around an unwritten rule that to progress they must protect the organisation’s reputation at all costs, regardless of patient safety,” he says.

How cronyism corrodes workplace relations and trust When a group is under threat, the instinct can be to close ranks rather than act in the best interest of the organisation


Companies allegedly forged documents to bring unapproved RATs into Australia, TGA says


NSW Police have launched a new operation to target organised crime networks across Sydney. Operation Hawk 2022 is a two-day high-visibility police operation which is aimed to disrupt the ongoing gangland war between the Alameddine and Hamze crime families and outlaw motorcycle gangs operating in the city. The operation began at 6am today with more than 600 officers deployed.



The Dallas County tax office has suspended face-to-face transactions because of sick employees and to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The move comes as the Commissioners Court is considering a new leave policy for employees who get sick and must isolate.


Germany's domestic intelligence service says the Chinese hacking group APT 27 has launched cyberattacks on businesses. The group has long been suspected of attacking Western government agencies.



ATOmate’s integrated client communication update feature is available now. To find out more about how the ATOmate platform is transforming how accountants manage the ATO documents and client communications, click here. 

  • ATO holds firm on push towards digital-only communication 
  • Tax agents can prepare now by stopping paper correspondence
  • ATOmate platform streamlines compliance processes, allows firms to update communication preferences in bulk & shift to digital communication
  • More digital transformation to come, now is the time for practitioners to prepare.


The man, who has been named as Joshua Matheson by the ATO, was sentenced at the Adelaide District Court following an investigation by the ATO. ATO investigation sparks warning to those cheating tax system


Death threats, ghost researchers and sock puppets: Inside the weird, wild world of dodgy academic research


Underworld figure and one-time ‘biggest illegal gaming operator’ in NSW dies


ECUADOR: An Entire Country Switched to Bitcoin and Now Its Economy Is Floundering.


The benefits system that is Irish

by  Tyler Cowen

A dead man was brought to a post office this morning in an attempt to collect his pension in one of the most bizarre incidents that gardaí have ever seen.

The shocking incident in which the deceased male was propped up by two other men happened at the post office on Staplestown Road in Carlow town…

No money was handed over and it is understood that the deceased man is well known to the two men who moved his body.

A local woman living beside the post office told how her daughter witnessed two men carrying a man into the shop.

“She was leaving my house at the time and said the man looked unwell as his feet were dragging the ground,” she said.

The woman, who did not want to be named, said there was a queue outside of the post office at the time.

“It’s a small shop and you’re only allowed three at a time with social distancing. People were in shock as they thought he was after having a heart attack,” she said.

Here is the full story, note that the postal workers became “immediately suspicious.”

Here’s where nature is, in fact, healing. - Vox: “About 100 miles west of Chicago, Illinois, a tallgrass prairie teems with life. Here in this 3,800-acre piece of land, you can walk among brightly colored fields of wildflowers, hear the song of cerulean warblers and the hoot of short-eared owls, and, if you’re lucky, glimpse rare box turtles. It wasn’t always this way. Over the past two centuries, the Prairie State lost all but about 0.01 percent of its original prairie. This particular region, now known as the Nachusa Grasslands, was covered in part by neat rows of corn and soy, and that left little habitat for monarch butterflies, bison, or any of the thousands of plants and animals that depend on prairie ecosystems. That started to change in the 1980s, when a crew of volunteers and scientists began reviving the land — planting seeds, carrying out controlled burns, and reintroducing native species. The ecosystem bounced back, and today, the Nachusa Grasslands are home to 180 species of native birds, more than 700 species of plants, and a small herd of bison. In an age of extinction and climate change, you don’t often hear this kind of success story. Yet the Nachusa Grasslands of the world can help people find hope that the Earth isn’t doomed. 

Last summer, Thomas Crowther, an ecologist at ETH Zurich, launched Restor, a mapping tool that shows where in the world people are doing this sort of restoring or conserving of ecosystems. Think of it as the “nature is healing” memefrom the early pandemic, but serious. We should be angry about climate change and the destruction of ecosystems, Crowther told Vox. “But without optimism, that outrage goes nowhere,” he said. 


Examples of people restoring land give us all something to root for, and now there’s a spot to find a whole bunch of them — tens of thousands, actually. Restor joins a trove of new environmental initiatives that focus on ecological “wins.” Last summer, for example, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — which oversees the official “red list” of threatened species — came up with a new set of standards to measure the recovery of species, like the California condor. Perhaps it’s a sign that people want to look beyond what we have to lose, especially when there’s so much to gain…”

Dutch Government Will Buy A Rembrandt For €175 Million From An Offshore Tax Haven, Angering Public And Lawmakers

The Standard-Bearer (1636) is being purchased from the Rothschild family via a trust in the Cook Islands which is owned by a holding company in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — this while the government's official policy is (supposed to be) to crack down on tax avoidance. 



On the benefits of deliberate ignorance. "It's a way to maintain our beliefs about ourselves and others, it can be a mechanism for fairness or to remove bias, or a way to avoid overwhelm when bombarded with information."

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