I know a fellow who's as broke as the Ten Commandments.
NSW Transport Minister David Elliott has used his valedictory speech to reveal he got gout last year
Inside a radical new project to democratize AI MIT Technology Review
Additional post actions Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping
The Age of Social Media Is Ending - The Atlantic: “It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon. Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment…”
Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) & Ari D. Glogower (Northwestern; Google Scholar), The Trouble with Targeting Tax Shelters, 74 Admin. L. Rev. 69 (2022) (reviewed by Michelle Layser (San Diego; Google Scholar) here):
Abusive tax shelters—complex transactions that produce tax benefits that Congress never intended, but that may resemble legitimate business deals—frequently escape IRS detection. For the past 20 years, the federal government has attempted to bolster the IRS’s ability to detect these transactions by requiring taxpayers and their advisors to disclose “reportable transactions” to the IRS Office of Tax Shelter Analysis. While mandatory disclosure rules can serve valuable tax enforcement functions, including deterrence of abusive tax planning, they are also subject to significant limitations, especially when applied against high-income and wealthy taxpayers who have access to sophisticated legal counsel. In July 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court introduced an additional potential obstacle as a result of its decision in CIC Services, LLC v. Internal Revenue Service—the reportable transaction rules may now be subject to preemptive administrative law challenges without being barred by the Anti-Injunction Act.
This Article argues that in the wake of CIC Services, policymakers should look beyond simply reforming the IRS’s process of issuing tax shelter notices to avoid potential administrative law challenges. Instead, they should reconsider more generally the government’s primary reliance on “activity-based rules” to combat abusive tax planning. This Article brings new perspective to the challenges of targeting tax shelters and explains how they result from the government’s activity-based approach.
Tariq Ali, Assassination Time Again New Left Review
Documents Reveal Wagner’s Golden Ties to Sudanese Military Companies
District Court holds in Tax Perjury (§ 7206(1)) Case That Defendant Can Introduce Evidence that IRS Failed to Pursue Civilly
In United States v. Anderson-Trahan (E.D. La. 22-2 Order and Reasons Dkt. # 94 8/22/22), TN hereand CL here, in a tax perjury case under § 7206(1), the Court denied the Government’s motion to prevent Anderson-Trahan from “introducing any evidence or argument concerning the fact that Defendant was prosecuted criminally rather than subjected to civil audit or collection activities by the IRS.” The reasoning and scope of the holding is (footnotes omitted and bold-face supplied by JAT)
Washington Post, A $100 Million Campaign Aims to Fix Jesus’ Brand From Followers’ Damage:
A $100 million effort launched this year is blanketing cities and the web, aiming to redeem Jesus’ brand from the damage done by some of his followers.
Billboards with messages like “Jesus let his hair down, too” and “Jesus went all in, too,” have been posted in major markets like New York City and Las Vegas. And ads featuring black-and-white online videos about Jesus as a rebel, an activist or a host of a dinner party have been viewed more than 300 million times, according to orgnizers.
