FinCEN Adopts Immediately Effective Final Rule Omitting the Regulations Statement of the 2004 Willful Penalty Prior to the 2004 Statutory Amendment
A whistleblower from global auditing giant PwC has told a Senate inquiry into job securitythat the firm targeted “unambitious” migrant workers to work 80 to 120 hour weeks from an unbranded Sydney office.
In an anonymised submission to the inquiry, “Worker X” said that in their time at the “Skills Hub”, where routine work for the firm’s 500-plus audit clients was completed, of the 82 accountants hired all were from non-English speaking and migrant backgrounds.
PwC targeted ‘unambitious’ migrant staff for grunt work: whistleblower
Lewis Hamilton Teaches A Winning Mindset
Washington Post – Vaccines, variants and supply chain woes: A look back at the past 12 months….our point is not that 2021 was massively better than 2020. Our point is that at least it was different. A variant, so to speak. And like any year, it had both highs and lows. No, we take that back. It was pretty much all lows, as we will see when we review the key events of 2021, starting in …” [For those not familiar with Dave Barry, this is humor and parody…sadly enough, along with a large dose of truth.]
- “Going There, the gossipy tell-all from news anchor Katie Couric, has very little in common with a volume that bears the name Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics. Look closer, though, and a few themes emerge” — the latest from Joel David Hamkins (Oxford) is on Bloomberg’s “best books” list, aimed at “the executive class”
- “Again and again Rorty reveals a perspective on current work to which I had been oblivious, including on topics I thought I had mastered” — Daniel Dennett on Rorty’s “On Philosophy and Philosophers”
- “Since things we can easily imagine are especially pleasing to us, men prefer order to confusion, as if order were anything in nature more than a relation to our imagination” — Baruch de Spinoza interviewed at 3:16AM
- On “the conflict between holding fast to our beliefs about what we think is just and appropriate for society, and giving our political opponents the respect they deserve even if we disagree with their beliefs about justice” — Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) in conversation with Lilly J. Goren (Carroll)
- “Why does this guy David Chalmers keep following me around? Every time I look in the mirror, he’s there. That’s kind of freaky” — NYT interview with Dave Chalmers (NYU) on the nature of reality, meaningful lives, consciousness, and The Matrix
- “If the university has grown inhospitable to the humanities, perhaps scholars can smuggle them out, book by book, one affordable seminar at a time” — philosophers and others venture beyond the ivory tower to help people develop and pursue their love of learning (via Scott Newstok)
- What we can—and can’t—learn from increasingly detailed maps of the neural connections in brains — using connectomes to predict behavior, and other developments in connectomics
Is Natural Immunity More Effective Than the COVID-19 Shot?
Stunning footage of the construction of New York’s Empire State Building in color
Via YouTube: “This film is a compilation of restored, enhanced & colorized film footage involving the construction of the Empire State Building (ESB) in New York nearly a century ago. It shows how the base of the building is laid, how all parts are produced in nearby steel works, how steel parts are riveted together, the dangers of working at such high construction altitudes and the completion of the ESB. What many people probably do not know is that the ESB was built on the spot where the famous first version of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel used to be at 5th Avenue (opened in 1897). In 1931 the hotel re-opened in a new location at Park Avenue. The ESB started with the destruction of the hotel on 22 January 1930, after which the actual construction started on 7 March 1930. It was completed at record speed after only 13.5 months on 11 April 1931 and officially opened on 1 May 1931. The building was designed in Art-Deco style, is 381 meters high and has 102 floors. Achieving such a height was only possible because of the use of a steel framework.
As an important symbol of New York City, the building has been named as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The various original B&W footage has been motion-stabilized, speed-corrected, restored, enhanced and colorized with contemporary Artificial Intelligence software.”