Robert Gottlieb RIP - Kyle Harper’s Plagues Upon the Earth

“Engineers have more words for screwing up than the Inuit have words for snow.”
- Pierce Nichols

2 (unidentified) secret Chinese police stations in Australia!

Why the public service is missing – or ignoring – rorts and wrongdoing

Anatomy of a Cover-Up: whistleblower warned PwC and Lendlease of $1b tax scam

by Michael West | Jun 19, 2023

PwC advised Lendlease on the billion-dollar tax scam which is now subject to Australian Tax Office audit. As Lendlease whistleblower Tony Watson fights the giant in court over his dismissal, documents obtained by MWM show how Watson warned a PwC tax partner and group finance chief Tarun Gupta the tax scheme was a rort. Michael West reports.

Working from home last year made the average worker less productive and more anxious, depressed and lonely, according to academic research that also found these impacts were lessened by good managers.

Less productive, more depressed: the problem with working from home

       Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023) 

       Editor Robert Gottlieb, of Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, has passed away; see, for example, coverage in The New York Times and Publishers Weekly 
       In an appreciation in The New Yorker, David Remnick writes that he: "may have been the most important book editor of his time". 
       The Paris Review has also taken down the paywall, for now, for Larissa MacFarquhar's Q & A, Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1. 

A key part of the Australian Tax Office’s (ATO) spirited defence before Senate Estimates this month was that, sure, there was an outrageous breach of confidence, but it didn’t matter too much because our super-vigilant tax sleuths were quick to shut down the schemes and no revenue was lost because of PwC’s malfeasance.

Except that the Google Tax hasn’t stopped blatant multinational tax minimisation.

Netflix could make a hot mini-series about international accounting skullduggery and tax avoidance.

Michael Pascoe: IKEA and Netflix tax scandal overshadows shameful PwC saga 

How Much Did Congress Lose By Defunding The IRS? Way More Than We Thought.

The Big Four consultants have captured universities 

Kyle Harper’s Plagues Upon the Earth is a remarkable accomplishment that weaves together microbiology, history, and economics to understand the role of diseases in shaping human history.

Reviewed 

“The percentage of profits appropriated by the [Sicilian] Mafia ranges from 40% for small firms to 2% for large enterprises.”

Bud Light executives sat in stunned silence after they were handed this devastating news - Renewed Right

Talitrix Prison-Monitoring System Tracks Inmates Down to Their Heart Rate Wired

Drive Thru Data: Using NLM APIs to Access Information Fast, Recorded: June 13, 2023. 58 min. Speaker – Mike Davidson

Drive Thru Data: Using NLM APIs to Access Information Fast

• Transcript of audio
• Handout
• Slide presentation

State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report – “This annual report represents the collective voice of the global employee.

From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You 

A spreadsheet on ad platform Xandr’s website revealed a massive collection of “audience segments” used to target consumers based on highly specific, sometimes intimate information and inferences.” – By Jon Keegan and Joel Eastwood

“If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, The Markup has analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr. 

The trove of data indicates that advertisers could also target people based on sensitive information like being “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy test kits, having an interest in brain tumors, being prone to depression, visiting places of worship, or feeling “easily deflated” or that they “get a raw deal out of life.” 

Many of the Xandr ad categories are more prosaic, classifying people as “Affluent Millennials,” for example, or as “Dunkin Donuts Visitors.” Industry critics have raised questions about the accuracy of this type of targeting. And the practice of slicing and dicing audiences for advertisers is an old one. But the exposure of a collection of audience segments this size offers consumers an unusual look at how they and their families are packaged, described, and categorized by ad companies. 

Because the segments also include the names of the companies involved in creating them, they also shed light on how disparate pools of personal data—collected by tracking people’s online activity and real-world movements—are combined into bespoke, branded groups of potential ad viewers that can be marketed to publishers and advertisers…”

Opinion | The good, the bad and the ugly in media coverage of Trump’s classified documents case

The federal courthouse where Trump was charged Tuesday didn’t allow electronics, so CNN got crafty.

June 15, 2023

  

Poynter

Why the public service is missing – or ignoring – rorts and wrongdoing