Famous whistleblower and ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden clapped back at the self-styled Bitcoin creator Craig Wright on Monday, after the latter accused Snowden of being a traitor.
Edward Snowden Calls Out Craig Wright for Being a Fraud
Japan to citizens: Get a digital ID or health insurance gets harder The Register
As the royal commission into the controversial robodebt begins, a Centrelink whistleblower has lifted the lid on the scheme, revealing what it was like from inside the department.
The former Centrelink staffer who was taking calls from vulnerable Australians has spoken to A Current Affair about how badly they believe the scheme was implemented.
"I would cry maybe two or three times a week because I just felt like I was a monster," the anonymous whistleblower told A Current Affair.
Centrelink whistleblower speaks out as robodebt royal commission begins
Dozens of tax agents deregistered but overall complaints to watchdog down
The murdered journalist’s family has braved harassment, government resistance, and a longstanding culture of impunity. But “there is no time to grieve,” her sister says.
Every national tragedy is also a human tragedy.
Five Years After Daphne Caruana Galizia’s Murder, The Battle Against Impunity in Malta Continues
Lesson From The Tax Court: Fake It Till You Make It
‘A Brazil of Hope’ as Leftist Lula Defeats Far-Right Bolsonaro in Presidential Runoff
Lula is BAACK! A big night for Brazil!
THE END OF THE WORLD AS TWITTER KNOWS IT: “It’s Pearl Harbor, Dealey Plaza, and 9/11 all wrapped up in one planet-shattering crisis for the terminally online journo community.”
On the flip-side: I spent all morning gathering dozens of the absolute best Elon-Twitter memes for you. Enjoy.
Center for Data Innovation: “The Economisthas created a visualization illustrating irregularities in dictatorships’ reported economic growth. The visualization groups countries by the level of freedom in their political system, with free countries appearing as yellow circles, partly free countries appearing as pink circles, and not free countries appearing as red circles. It then uses satellite data to estimate countries’ real gross domestic products (GDPs), and contrasts these figures against countries’ reported GDPs from 2002 to 2021. According to the visualization, the less free a country is, the more likely it is to report a false GDP.”
The Economist: “In a peer-reviewed article that will be published this month, Luis Martinez, an economist, investigated dictators’ GDP-growth figures.
Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class – An Essay-Review in Memory of Barbara Ehrenreich, 1941-2022
A takedown of the pretenses of the professional managerial class.
A woman was arrested for feeding homeless people in Arizona. Now she’s suing the city. USA Today DCBlogger: “criminalizng kindness
Mike Davis, California’s ‘prophet of doom’, on activism in a dying world: ‘Despair is useless’Guardian
Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Where it came from, what it all means, and why it still matters. “There was a moment not so long ago when I thought, “What if I’ve had this crypto thing all wrong?” I’m a doubting normie who, if I’m being honest, hasn’t always understood this alternate universe that’s been percolating and expanding for more than a decade now.
If you’re a disciple, this new dimension is the future. If you’re a skeptic, this upside-down world is just a modern Ponzi scheme that’s going to end badly—and the recent “crypto winter” is evidence of its long-overdue ending. But crypto has dug itself into finance, into technology, and into our heads.
And if crypto isn’t going away, we’d better attempt to understand it. Which is why we asked the finest finance writer around, Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion, to write a cover-to-cover issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, something a single author has done only one other time in the magazine’s 93-year history (“What Is Code?,” by Paul Ford). What follows is his brilliant explanation of what this maddening, often absurd, and always fascinating technology means, and where it might go. —Joel Weber, Editor, Bloomberg Businessweek”
The article is divided into four subject areas: Ledgers, Bitcoin, Blockchains; What Does It Mean?; The Crypto Financial System; Trust, Money, Community
Coin Telegraph: “…No matter how much attention the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or Commodity Futures Trading Commission gets in the crypto industry, for individual traders and investors, it often comes down to the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) position — and how much tax one owes. Last week, the IRS last week released a draft bill featuring a well-defined digital assets section that outlines if and how taxpayers will account for the use of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Page 16 of the draft defines digital assets as any digital representations of the value recorded on a “cryptographically secured distributed ledger or any similar technology.” 2021’s tax form required taxpayers to indicate whether they had received, sold or exchanged in “virtual currency” — with this term changing in the yet-to-issued 1040 tax form for 2022.
Taxpayers are required to answer the digital assets section of their income tax return whether or not they have engaged in digital asset transactions during the tax year. A number of situations will require American taxpayers to indicate yes to the question on digital assets of Form 1040 or 1040-SR. This includes receiving as a reward, award or payment for property or services or sold, exchanged, gifted or disposed of a digital asset in 2022…”