IRS Whistleblower: Now live for all: Substack Notes

Remember if  you care about your rights, you should care when other people are stripped of theirs.

Gatto-linked firm a winner in Andrews building boom

David Marin-GuzmanWorkplace correspondent

Apr 26, 2023 – 5.00am

An Indigenous labour hire firm linked to underworld figure Mick Gatto has emerged as a big winner from a $222 million Victorian government road upgrade project.

Too big to be charged with tax fraud 

NY Times: IRS Whistleblower Claims Administration Is Mishandling Probe Of Hunter Biden

Back in 2006: New tax commissioner Michael D'Ascenzo has promised a tough response to cases of blatant abuse, while defending the decision by the Australian Taxation Office not to lay charges against former Reserve Bank board member Robert Gerard.

Dean Presents Surrey's Silence: Subpart F And The Swiss Subsidiary Tax That Never Was At The OMG Transatlantic Tax Talks And Princeton

Tax Knowledge And Tax Manipulation: A Unifying Model

A History of the World According to Getty ImagesColossal

When Will I Retire? How About Never WSJ. Shuffleboard is a death warrant

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy ReputationsThe Intercept. From 2014, still highly germane.

Why Earth’s giant kelp forests are worth $500 billion a year Nature. They’re not. They can’t be priced.

Now live for all: Substack Notes

“Today we’re launching Notes to everyone. Notes is a new space where you can publish short-form posts and share ideas with other writers and readers on Substack. Try Notes – Notes helps writers’ and creators’ work travel through the Substack network for new readers to discover. You can share links, images, quick thoughts, and snippets from Substack posts. 

As well as being lightweight and fun, we hope that Notes will help writers grow their audience and revenue. Notes lives in a tab beside Inbox at substack.com and in Substack’s mobile apps. Unlike an Inbox post, a Notes post does not get sent to subscribers by email. Notes also marks the next step in our efforts to build our subscription network—one that puts writers and readers in charge, rewards great work with money, and protects the free press and free speech. 

This work is at the core of the Substack model, and we believe it will be an important part of a new economic engine for culture. But what you see today is just the beginning. Notes is a long-term project, and success will ultimately be determined by the trust expressed by writers and readers over the course of years. We do not take that trust for granted.  This release is an early version of the product that we have been testing with a small group of writers in recent weeks. 

We expect it to have bumps, bugs, and imperfections, and for it to evolve rapidly in response to feedback. If you have ideas, please let us know—preferably in Notes!  We think that Notes can become a powerful driver of subscriptions. Historically, having worthy posts get shared widely is one of the major ways that writers find growth on Substack. Notes will help posts find a valuable audience of writers and readers who are already invested in the Substack ecosystem and are just one click away from a subscription.”

Schnadower Mustri, Eduardo and Adjerid, Idris and Acquisti, Alessandro, Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation (March 23, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4398428 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4398428 

“The value that consumers derive from behavioral advertising has been more often posited than empirically demonstrated. The majority of empirical work on behavioral advertising has focused on estimating the effectiveness of behaviorally targeted ads, measured in terms of click or conversion rates. 

We present the results of two online within-subject experiments (Study 1 and Study 2) that, instead, employ a counterfactual approach, designed to assess comparatively some of the consumer welfare implications of behaviorally targeted advertising. Participants are presented with alternative product offers: products advertised in ads displayed to them on websites that commonly show behaviorally targeted ads (ad condition); competing products from the organic results of online searches (search condition); and random products (random condition). 

The alternatives are compared along a variety of metrics, including objective measures (such as product price and vendor quality) and participants’ self-reports (such as purchase intention and perceived product relevance). 

In Study 1 (n = 489) we find, first, that both ads and organic search results within our sample of participants are dominated by a minority of vendors; however, ads are more likely to present participants with less popular (and therefore lesser known) vendors. 

Second, we find that purchase intentions are higher in the ad and the search conditions than in the random condition; the effect is driven by higher product relevance in the ad and search conditions; however, in absolute terms, product relevance is low, even in the ad condition. Third, we find that ads are more likely to be associated with lower quality vendors, and higher prices (for identical products), compared to competing alternatives found in search results. Study 2 (n = 493) replicates Study 1 results. In addition, Study 2 finds that higher purchase intentions and higher relevance in the ad condition are driven by participants having previously searched for the advertised product. 

Furthermore, we use a latent utility model to estimate differences in consumer surplus (a commonly used measure of consumer welfare) across conditions. In our sample of participants, the random condition is associated with the lowest surplus. After accounting for differences in vendor quality, the search condition is associated with slightly higher surplus relative to the ad condition.”

See also The New York Times – If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It. Here’s Why.