We think the devil comes in the back door, that he comes in with your enemies, but the truth is that we ourselves open the door to him the moment we trust someone.
99 million-year-old flowers found perfectly preserved in amber bloomed at the feet of dinosaurs CNN
Does the Mafia hire good accountants?
Yes, or so it seems:
We investigate if organized crime groups (OCG) are able to hire good accountants. We use data about criminal records to identify Italian accountants with connections to OCG. While the work accountants do for the OCG ecosystem is not observable, we can determine if OCG hire “good” accountants by assessing the overall quality of their work as external monitors of legal businesses. We find that firms serviced by accountants with OCG connections have higher quality audited financial statements compared to a control group of firms serviced by accountants with no OCG connections. The findings provide evidence OCG are able to hire good accountants, despite the downside risk of OCG associations. Results are robust to controls for self-selection, for other determinants of auditor expertise, direct connections of directors and shareholders to OCG, and corporate governance mechanisms that might influence auditor choice and audit quality.
That is from a new paper by Pietro A. Bianchi, jere R. Francis, Antonio Marra, and Nicola Pecchiari
The DOJ has charged Heather Morgan, who uses the stage name Razzlekhan, with attempting to launder thousands of bitcoins alongside her husband, startup founder Ilya Lichtenstein.
NDIS fraud accused may be charged with offences against ATO
Four men and a woman who allegedly stole $10 million in an NDIS scam could also be in hot water with the tax office with the ATO in the process of passing on information to federal police, a court heard.
Research by tech firm Tenable indicates that cybersecurity incidents increased during 2021. According to their findings, over 40 billionrecords were exposed from 1,825 data breach incidents. More than double the 730 incidents identified in 2020. Of the incidents in 2021, 236 occurred within APAC, resulting in the exposure of some 3.5 billion records. This makes up 8.6% of the global findings. Problems with ransomware and unsecured cloud databases were found to be the major contributors to this problem, accounting for about 41% of APAC breaches.
Tax organisations urged to better safeguard client information
TPB: ATO releases new guidelines to combat identity theft
- “Well, I see metaphysics as ‘lifestyle’” — Wilhelm Dilthey is “interviewed” by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
- “‘Love Letters’ tells the tale of a white college [philosophy] professor named Anna Stubblefield and the black family whose lives she turned upside down when she helped teach their disabled son a controversial typing technique known as ‘facilitated communication’ but then took things too far” — writer Andrew Bluestone has won a Humanitas Fellowship to work on this script
- “Much of our reasoning under uncertainty involves negotiating an accuracy-informativity tradeoff, and that this helps to explain a variety of patterns in the things people tend to guess, believe, and assert” — Kevin Dorst (Pitt) & Matthew Mandelkern (NYU) on whether the conjunction fallacy is really a fallacy
- The song has lyrics from Wittgenstein and is dedicated to Rosalind Hursthouse — it’s by New Zealand’s Karl Steven (of Supergroove), who took a break from his musical career to get a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge (via Yuri Cath)
- Amartya Sen on the memories that shaped his research — in an interview on the radio show “Marketplace”
- “The philosophy of mind is not, pace so many of its contemporary exponents, an ethically neutral or ideologically innocent study. The philosophy of mind is a part of “human science”; politics has everything to do with it” — Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open U.) argues that consciousness is both gendered and sexed
- “A life in VR could be just as meaningful as a life in the physical world” — David Chalmers (NYU) in conversation with Evan Selinger (RIT)
This article appears in The American Prospect magazine’s February 2022 special issue, “How We Broke the Supply Chain.” Anyone old enough to remember the Cold War is familiar with a scene routinely depicted on U.S. television at the time: the Soviet breadline. Warning Americans about life under communism, these clips showed Russian citizens lingering forlornly outside businesses for hours to obtain basic goods—indelible proof of the inferiority of central planning, and an advertisement for capitalism’s abundance. Breadlines, the Big Book of Capitalism assured us, could not happen in a market economy. Supply would always rise to meet demand, as long as there’s money to be made.
Only deviating from free-market fundamentalism—giving everyone health care, for example—could lead to shortages. Otherwise, capitalism has your every desire covered. Yet we have breadlines in America today, or at least just off our coasts. They consist of dozens of ships with billions of dollars of cargo, idling outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the docks through which 40 percent of all U.S. seaborne imports flow. “Ships” barely conveys the scale of these giants, which are more like floating Empire State Buildings, stacked high with multicolored containers filled to the brim with toys and clothes and electronics, produced mostly in Asia. The lines don’t end there, with worn-down physical infrastructure and the lack of a well-compensated, stable labor force impeding cargo from getting unloaded at the yards, transferred to trucks or railcars, stored in warehouses, and transported to shops or mailboxes across America. As a direct result, for the first time in most of our lifetimes (provided we didn’t live in the former Soviet Union), we’re experiencing random shortages.
One day you can’t find bicycle parts; the next day it’s luxury watchesor L.O.L. dolls; then it’s cream cheese in New York City. You might walk into a Burger King and see a sign that says “Sorry, no french fries with any order. We have no potatoes.” Or the fries will be soggy, because there’s not enough cooking oil. Common lab materials like pipette tips or the special plastic bags used to make vaccines may not be sold at the corner store, but shortages in these items arguably have an even greater impact on our lives in the age of COVID. Even if you missed the shortages, it’s unlikely that you’ve missed the clamor about increased prices.
Inflation in the U.S. reached a 39-year high in December, eating into wage gains, straining people’s pocketbooks, and causing existential political headaches for the Biden administration. Prices in Europe, the U.K., and elsewhere are also surging, and will surge for the indefinite future, as companies struggle to rescue goods from the maw of what we all know as the supply chain. You could read hundreds of stories about this phenomenon, about the stress of longshoremen and supply chain managers and government officials, the consequences for consumers and small businesses and retailers, and superficial attempts at explaining why we got here.
Many will tell you that the pandemic changed consumption patterns, favoring physical goods over services as barhopping and travel shut down. Some will blame fiscal-relief programs, large deficits, and loose monetary policies for making inflation worse. Nearly all will frame the matter as a momentary kink in the global logistics leviathan, which is bound to work itself out. Anyway, everyone got their Christmas gifts this year, so maybe it was overblown to begin with.
Almost none of these stories will explain how these shortages and price hikes were also brought to life through bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed. We spent a half-century allowing business executives and financiers to take control of our supply chains, enabled by leaders in both parties. They all hailed the transformation, cheering the advances of globalization, the efficient network that would free us from want. Motivated by greed and dismissive of the public interest, they didn’t mention that their invention was supremely ill-equipped to handle inevitable supply bottlenecks. And the pandemic exposed this hidden risk, like a domino bringing down a system primed to topple…”
Wired: “You’ve seen them a million times. You might be wearing one right now. But do you know how they work to block a potentially virus-carrying respiratory blob? It’s 2022, and by now we’ve all been wearing masks for nearly two years. And unless you are a surgeon or a construction worker who was already wearing them daily, in those two years you’ve probably learned a lot about them—which ones you like best, where to get them, and whether you have any extras stashed in a coat pocket or somewhere in your car. But do you know what makes the prized N95 mask so special? Let’s find out…”