We boast of scientific investigation, and yet we’re the only supposedly civilized country in the world where thousands of supposedly sane citizens will listen to an illiterate clodhopping preacher or politician setting himself up as an authority on biology and attacking evolution.
Covid: Australia to reopen borders to international travel BBC
A handful of NFT users are making big money off of a stealth scam. Here’s how ‘wash trading’ works Fortune
Hemel: How Treasury And The IRS Have Allowed High-Net-Worth Taxpayers To Exploit Stepped-Up Basis On Intergenerational Wealth Transfers
FBI Confirms It Obtained NSO’s Pegasus Spyware Guardian
Federal prosecutors in Switzerland are reportedly seeking more than $45 million in compensation from Credit Suisse over its alleged failure to prevent money laundering by a Bulgarian drug ring.
Credit Suisse is set to face more legal challenges with the latest move by Swiss federal prosecutors to seek more than 42 million francs ($45 million) in compensation over «serious organizational shortcomings» in preventing money laundering, according to a «SonntagsZeitung» (behind paywall, in German) report citing a 500-page document.
According to the prosecutors, the drug mafia – led by Evelin Banev, an ex-wrestler nicknamed Bulgaria's «Cocaine King» – deposited around 55 million Swiss francs at Credit Suisse, much of it via suitcases with unbundled notes delivered by hand.
Prosecutors are also targeting a former Credit Suisse for her role in the affair.
When rulers despise the ruled: Glenn Reynolds.
Christopher Dykzeul (Deputy City Attorney, San Francisco), Turbulent Times at Treasury: Applying the Appointments Clause to IRS Appeals Officers, 17 Hastings Bus. L.J. 33 (2021) (Honorable Mention, 2019 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition)
The ability to work well remotely isn’t a fixed preference or personality trait, but a skill you can develop
Inc. – This Is the Mindset You Need to Be Successful at Remote Work, According to a New Cambridge Study. “A simple change in how you think about remote work can make your days instantly more productive and pleasant. What does it take to make remote work successful? For both employees and entrepreneurs, a good tech setup and relatively distraction-free space is certainly essential. So are techniques to keep endless Zoom calls from destroying your productivity (and sanity). A modern approach to management that focuses on what people produce rather exactly how and when they produce it helps too. But even with these basics in place, some people thrive in remote work while others struggle. Why is that? The nature of a team’s work clearly has something to do with it (experts say innovation is tougher at a distance), as does individual personality and seniority (young people benefit from the passive education of being around colleagues). But, according to a fascinating new study out of the University of Cambridge recently published in Human-Computer Interaction, there’s another hidden factor that’s essential for remote work success — the right mindset…”
Medieval Versions of Contemporary Corporate Logos
I love these medieval versions of familiar logos by Ilya Stallone, available on his Instagram account.
Vice: “One of the world’s largest publishers of academic papers said it adds a unique fingerprint to every PDF users download in an attempt to prevent ransomware, not to prevent piracy. Elsevier defended the practice after an independent researcher discovered the existence of the unique fingerprints and shared their findings on Twitter last week. “The identifier in the PDF helps to prevent cybersecurity risks to our systems and to those of our customers—there is no metadata, PII [Personal Identifying Information] or personal data captured by these,” an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. “Fingerprinting in PDFs allows us to identify potential sources of threats so we can inform our customers for them to act upon. This approach is commonly used across the academic publishing industry.” When asked what risks he was referring to, the spokesperson sent a list of links to news articles about ransomware.
However, Elsevier has a long history of pursuing people who pirate or share its paywalled academic articles. In 2015, Elsevier sued SciHub, the “Pirate Bay of Science,” which hosts millions of journal articles, including those from Elsevier. In the past, the company has faced criticism for acquiring other academic platforms that distributed papers for free in an attempt to corner the market. Some universities have boycotted Elsevier in the past, and the company has used legal threats against other sites that host academic papers online. The company has had cybersecurity issues before. In 2019, it left a server open to the public internet and exposed user email addresses and passwords…”
Academic Journal Claims it Fingerprints PDFs for ‘Ransomware,’ Not Surveillance
Tiny nanoplastics are floating in the air—and you’re breathing them in
Fast Company: “By some estimates, people have discarded 4,900 million tonnes of plastic have into the environment. Once in nature, that plastic starts to degrade, fragmenting into microplastics about the size of a sesame seed, which are inadvertently ingested by humans and animals through eating them in seafood and drinking them in water. Some reports suggest that we all consume five grams a week–about the weight of a bottle cap. But, we may be taking more plastics into our systems through our respiratory systems. There’s been less investigation of nanoplastics: particles smaller than microplastics, so small that they can move huge distances in the air and be more easily inhaled into the bloodstream. A new study looks at the travel of those lighter particles, finding them abundant in the atmosphere, and carried, via aerosol transmission, even to remote areas. As far as the scientists know, it’s “the most accurate record of air pollution by nanoplastics ever made.” These nanoplastics—smaller than 200 nanometers in size—are microplasticsthat have broken down even more over time, as well as tiny particles that our everyday plastics, like clothing, shed into the atmosphere. At that microscopic size, the plastics become airborne. “They are so small that they can be transported like normal aerosols in the air,” says Dominik Brunner, a researcher at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and an expert on atmospheric transport modeling…”
Open Culture: “…Now declassified and freely available on the Homeland Security website, the manual the agency describes as “surprisingly relevant” was once distributed to OSS officers abroad to assist them in training “citizen-saboteurs” in occupied countries like Norway and France. Such people, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, “might already be sabotaging materials, machinery, or operations of their own initiative,” but may have lacked the devious talent for sowing chaos that only an intelligence agency can properly master. Genuine laziness, arrogance, and mindlessness may surely be endemic. But the Field Manual asserts that “purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature” and requires a particular set of skills. The citizen-saboteur “frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage.”…
Managers
- In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
- Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
- To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
- Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
- Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do...”