In August 2005, when John Brogden resigned as NSW Liberal leader after humiliating himself at a function a month earlier, he stood up at a press conference and took responsibility. He also blamed Alex Hawke.
Brogden accused Hawke, then a 28-year-old staffer and president of the federal Young Liberals, of circulating dirt on him, which Hawke emphatically denied. At any rate it was extraordinary: the Opposition Leader naming and shaming a Young Liberal functionary as central to his downfall.
Alex Hawke: The political animal who became Morrison’s machine man
UK ‘laughing stock’ for failure to stem ‘dirty money’, says Lord Faulks QC, who was told to drop register by Theresa May’s No 10
A group of Sydney parents have been living through a nightmare for the last six months after a cyber criminal assumed their identities and stole their life savings.
At least 17 sets of Year 12 parents from an eastern suburbs high school have fallen victim to a sophisticated ‘SIM swap’ hack leaving them collectively hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket.
Sophia* thinks the “mess” started when a fraudster got hold of a class list sent around to parents which contained all their names and contact details.
Sydney couple lose $37k after leaked class list exposes them to scammers
Follow On Cases After Criminal Tax Convictions--Daugerdas and Larson
Construction-related businesses have built up a mountain of unpaid tax bills during the pandemic, threatening a wave of failures this year that could take otherwise-healthy creditors down with them, insolvency practitioners warn.
Outstanding debts to the Australian Taxation Office soared by almost one-third to $58.8 billion last year over the two years affected by the pandemic, while over the same time court wind-ups of businesses – half of which are typically triggered by the ATO – fell by three-quarters.
I wrote this article for AccountingWEB, of which I was once an editor. It was out yesterday: You can read the whole thing here.
Clint Wallace (South Carolina; Google Scholar), Democracy Avoidance in Tax Lawmaking, 25 Fla. Tax Rev. __ (2022):
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the most significant tax law in more than three decades, but the strategy for getting it enacted included a variety of maneuvers to avoid public scrutiny. As a result, many taxpayers did not know how they would be affected until they filed their own tax returns more than a year later. This Article identifies this lack of transparency as part of a persistent pathology of avoiding and constraining democratic inputs and responsiveness in U.S. federal tax lawmaking. Indeed, some scholars and policy makers have sought to channel tax lawmaking away from democratically grounded decisions and towards prescribed outcomes, justifying these moves with strands of public choice theory that are expressly critical of democratic decision making. I critique this democracy avoidance approach to tax lawmaking, and make the case that tax law should be a product of mechanisms that provide greater transparency, accountability, and responsiveness to advance democratic legitimacy.
IRS Probed for Stimulus Checks Sent to Terrorists, Murderers.
‘Crypto Ruined My Life’: The Mental Health Crisis Hitting Bitcoin Investors Vice It’s called having a gambling addiction.
NYSE Moves Closer To NFT Trading With Trademark Application Reuters
Bernie Sanders sarcastically congratulates billionaires for making America an ‘oligarchic form of society’ Business Insider
NYC Restaurants Brace for a Potential Avocado Shortage Grub Street
Saudi Arabia: 28,000 apply for 30 female train drivers’ posts Al Jazeera
- Tips on negotiating an assistant professor salary — from an economist, but not just for econ positions
- “We can find up to eight dates associated with a publication” and “this gets worse when each publisher interprets the meaning of each… differently” — When is a paper “published”? (via Retraction Watch)
- How to teach a course that is mainly or exclusively composed of less commonly taught philosophical traditions — suggestions from Helen De Cruz (SLU)
- “Love is something that exists on the maximal outer limit of our agency’s thinkability” — Alexandra Gustafson (Toronto) on the sublimity of love, even when it’s unrequited
- Bang the head Socratic — a review of “The Republic”, an instrumental “post-metal” album about Plato’s dialogue by the band Thumos (via Jeremy Skrzypek)
- “It should give us pause that some eighteenth-century histories of German philosophy did indeed include more women than what we today find in standard histories of the nineteenth century…” — Kristin Gjesdal (Temple) interviewed about her work in the history of philosophy and how histories of philosophy emerge
- “The evolutionary lineages in the universe closest to our own [human] lineage are those found here on earth. And since none of them underwent the three major transitions that happened in our lineage, we have no reason to think they might occur elsewhere” — on why intelligent life in the universe is rare (via The Browser)
Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. Discussion welcome.
What Was the TED Talk? Some Thoughts on the “Inspiresting”
The Drift: “…Though no longer at its cultural apogee, the public speaking platform is more active than ever. New TED talks are constantly being delivered and then uploaded and viewed on TED’s website and YouTube channel, which has 20.5 million subscribers. There are TED podcasts, a TED newsletter, a TED Ideas blog, and a TED publishing arm, which prints “short books to feed your craving for ideas.” Before the end of this year, TEDx events will be held in Barcelona, Tehran, Kabul, Hanoi, Wuhan, Anchorage, Jakarta, Algiers, Lagos, and Tomsk, the oldest university town in Siberia. People are still paying between $5,000 and $50,000 to attend the annual flagship TED conference. In 2021, the event was held in Monterey, California. Amid wildfires and the Delta surge, its theme was “the case for optimism.” There were talks on urban possibility (“finding new, smarter ways to live together”), a tech comeback (how genetic technology and NFTs “make the case for rousing the techno-optimist in us”), and climate confidence (“How we might beat this thing!”). I recently watched some of the talks from this conference on my laptop. They hit like parodies of a bygone era, so ridiculous that it made me almost nostalgic for a time when TED talks captivated me. Back then, around a decade ago, I watched those articulate, audacious, composed people talk about how they were building robots that would eat trash and turn it into oxygen, or whatever, and I felt hopeful about the future. But the trash-eating robots never arrived. With some distance, now, from a world in which TED seemed to offer a bright path forward, it’s time to ask: what exactly is TED? And what happened to the future it envisioned?..”