Russia Thins Out Its Embassy in Ukraine, a Possible Clue to Putin’s Next Move.
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Why are so many defectors from North Korea to South Korea women?
Bloomberg, IRS Targets Your Side Hustle In Crackdown on Transactions Over $600:
It just got harder to hide from the IRS.
Starting this month, users selling goods and services through such popular sites as Venmo, Etsy and Airbnb will begin receiving tax forms if they take a payment of more than $600. One by one in recent months, tech giants have been warning users of the coming changes and asking them to provide tax information.
“Until this year, the threshold was much higher ($20,000 and 200 transactions) so it didn’t affect nearly as many people,” Venmo told users in its messages about the change. “This requirement only pertains to payments received for sales of goods and services and does not apply to friends and family payments.”
The moves have sparked outcry on social media. For one thing, the lower threshold comes as more and more Americans bet on themselves: a record 5.4 million adults applied to form their own business last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released this week. That’s partly because it’s easier than ever to use apps to sell crafts, provide services or rent out a second or third home online.
- CNBC, No, the IRS Isn’t Taxing Your Venmo Transactions
- CNet, Unless You Have a Side Hustle, Your Venmo and Paypal Transactions Probably Won't Be Taxed
Arvind Sabu (Capital), Realization's Vexations: Taxing Cryptocurrency Hard Forks, 61 Jurimetrics J. 379 (2021):
A cryptocurrency hard fork seems to increase a holder’s fortunes—those who held Bitcoin, for example, nominally received an equivalent amount of Bitcoin Cash as a result of a famous hard fork. But this Article argues they should not be taxed based on the time of the fork, nor would they then be taxed under existing authorities.
Cryptocurrency hard forks represent innovative experimentation with changes to a cryptocurrency’s protocol in the rich modality of commons-based peer production—the modality responsible for Wikipedia and Linux. The tax system should not stifle this ex¬perimentation and the growth of the cryptocurrency commons by taxing hard forks based on when they occur. Relatedly, the indeterminate value of newly forked cryptocurrencies weighs against taxing hard forks based on when they occur.
Furthermore, hard forks are unlikely to result in the realization of income under foundational Supreme Court authorities, which in part key to concerns over valuation. The Internal Revenue Service’s ruling on this issue does not alter this conclusion; it il¬lustrates rather than resolves the vexing question of whether a hard fork results in the realization of income.
‘It’s mind-boggling’: the hidden cost of our obsession with fish oil pills Guardian. Iceland is also a big supplier. Fish oil companies were on sale for the corporate equivalent of bupkis during its financial crisis.
So: “Lover, Lover, Lover”; Cohen wrote it in 1973, during a spell with the Israeli troops in Sinai during the Yom Kippur war. When he sings the chorus “Lover, Lover, Lover come back to me” his voice is pained and plaintive. As Freedman points out, the lyrics fit within a tradition where the Divine is posited as lover with whom union is sought. But what was Cohen really doing in the desert? He was estranged from his wife, the mother of his young children. “Because it is so horrible between us I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet,” he wrote to her at the time. Nobody can hear the word “lover”, sung as Cohen sings it, and not also hear a man calling out to a woman. Printed, this word is nothing. Sung, it is everything.
The Reunion Dublin Review of Books: “For Leonard Cohen fans.”
SIGNS OF SANITY: Great Britain, Czech Republic, and Israel Back Away From Vaccine Passports.