“Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”
– AristotleA Wiser Sympathy Lapham’s Quarterly: “Plant intelligence.”
When Neoliberals Declared War on the PoorCounterPunch
The New Irrationalism Monthly Review
The federal government will appoint a senior official within the Department of Home Affairs to lead efforts on cybersecurity amid growing attention to threats to consumers from attacks that steal personal data and put services at risk.
The government will announce the new post – the co-ordinator for cyber security – on Monday when it assembles business and government leaders for a meeting that aims to step up defences in corporate and public systems.
Cybersecurity to get national supervisor in wake of hack attacks
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Jonathan Turley: COVID lab leak is a scandal of media and government censorship
PETER DRUCKER ON EDUCATION, FROM 1969:
The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history…By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve…I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status…I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can…
History shows a frightening parallel to the way our education is going everywhere in the world today. It is the decline of the world’s most creative, most advance, and most exciting civilization, that of China in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Until then, China had led the world in the arts and the sciences, in medicine and in mathematics, in technology and in statecraft. The reaction against independent thinking and artistic creativity that followed the invasion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century imposed the Confucian system of purely literary and purely imitative “liberal education” to the exclusion of everything else. Within a century China had become sterile and had lost her capacity to do anything new, to imagine anything new, to perceive anything new. We are, I am afraid, on the same road–and we have traveled very far along it.
- The case for a land value tax is overwhelming (9 Feb 2023)
- Why energy companies are making so much profit despite UK windfall taxes (8 Feb 2023)
- Should our son renounce his US citizenship to reduce tax liability? (8 Feb 2023)
- Biden’s billionaire tax: White House economist Jared Bernstein defends plan to raise taxes on wealthiest Americans (8 Feb 2023)
- More than half of U.S. states are moving to cut your taxes (7 Feb 2023)
- BP sees biggest profit in 114-year history after oil and gas prices soar (7 Feb 2023)
- Register of Overseas Entities: What three luxury homes reveal about who owns UK property (7 Feb 2023)
- Windfall taxes are not the only option for fossil fuel profits (7 Feb 2023)
- BP scales back climate goals as profits more than double to £23bn (7 Feb 2023)
- Wealth taxes work. Just look at Argentina (6 Feb 2023)
- DP16652 Post-Corona Balanced-Budget Super-Stimulus: The Case for Shifting Taxes onto Land (5 Jan 2023)
- UK PLUNGES TO LOWEST-EVER POSITION IN CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX (31 Jan 2023)
- Corruption: My horror over the Nadhim Zahawi fiasco is that we just expect this stuff now (30 Jan 2023)
- The Tax List 2023: the UK’s 100 biggest taxpayers revealed (27 Jan 2023)
- Former PwC partner banned for 2 years in Australia for leaking information (26 Jan 2023)
- Jim Chalmers ‘furious’ after former PwC tax adviser found to have shared confidential government briefings with staff (25 Jan 2023)
- Crypto firms acted like banks, then collapsed like dominoes (24 Jan 2023)
- Shocking rise of 'something for nothing Britain': Over half of households get more from the State than they pay in tax... while top 10% of earners account for 53% of all income tax (23 Jan 2023)
IRS Needs to Complete Modernization Plans and Fully Address Cloud Computing Requirements
Information Technology: IRS Needs to Complete Modernization Plans and Fully Address Cloud Computing Requirements, GAO-23-104719 Published: Jan 12, 2023. Publicly Released: Feb 07, 2023. “The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) legacy IT environment includes applications, software, and hardware, which are outdated but still critical to day-to-day operations.
Specifically, GAO’s analysis showed that about 33 percent of the applications, 23 percent of the software instances in use, and 8 percent of hardware assets were considered legacy. This includes applications ranging from 25 to 64 years in age, as well as software up to 15 versions behind the current version.
As GAO has previously noted, and IRS has acknowledged, these legacy assets will continue to contribute to security risks, unmet mission needs, staffing issues, and increased costs. Modernization best practices call for documenting plans that include three key elements: milestones, work to be performed, and disposition of legacy systems.
As of August 2022, IRS had documented plans for the 21 modernization initiatives that were underway, including nine associated with legacy systems. All 21 plans addressed two key elements. However, the plans for six of the nine initiatives did not address the disposition of legacy systems (see table). Officials stated they would address this key element at the appropriate time in the initiatives’ lifecycle; however, they did not identify time frames for doing so.”
"To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well."
Isaac Asimov, Foundation (Foundation, #1)