The Australian Taxation Office has won a major battle over a tax avoidance scheme used by companies associated with Sydney’s Binetter family, founders of Nudie Juice.
ATO victorious over Binetter tax scheme’s ‘extraordinary deceit’
The problem with PWC and the Big 4 – treason is the business model
PwC’s tax scandal victims pile up
The firm’s decision to name the four former partners on Monday had an air of casual brutality, more like throwing chum from a shark boat.
The latest PwC scandal isn’t even the first time that the Big Four consultants – Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC – have been caught doing exactly this. In 2015, the British parliamentary Public Accounts Committee found that, after staff from each of the Big Four had been seconded to the Treasury to provide technical advice on tax, including drafting legislation to prevent multinational corporations avoid tax by artificial means known as transfer pricing, they went on to “use their insider knowledge of legislation to sell clients advice on how to use those rules to pay less tax”.
Profiteering without conscience
A hacker gained access to hundreds of cryptocurrency wallets belonging to the Russian special services, and may have transferred stolen bitcoins to Ukrainian aid organizations, cryptocurrency experts now believe.
Hacker drains Russian special services wallets, transfers funds to Ukraine
Russo-Ukrainian War: Dam! Big Serge. Excellent on the Dnieper watershed
Kakhovka dam breach is a perfect crime Indian Punchline
Postmortem Analysis on Kakhovka Dam BreachSimplicius the Thinker(s)
Nord Stream revelations should chasten Ukraine dam ‘hot takes’ Responsible Statecraft
Highlight on cyber security issues, June 3, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.
Four highlights from this week: New EPIC Report Sheds Light on Generative A.I. Harms; Don’t Store Your Money on Venmo, U.S. Govt Agency Warns (or PayPal); FTC Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers, Failed to Stop Hackers from Taking Control of Users’ Cameras; and Twitter withdraws from EU’s disinformation code as bloc warns against hiding from liability.
DEA: Chinese organized crime laundering money for Mexican drug cartels NBC
Bodies of eight call centre workers found in bags after they tried to quit their job
- “Psychologists have overlooked the extent to which ordinary people make decisions by taking onboard their evidence because they have focused on first-order evidence alone. They have ignored higher-order evidence.” — “Bad Beliefs” by Neil Levy (Oxford), a defense of human rationality, is the subject of an open-access symposium at Philosophical Psychology
- “The session began to feel far more like a meeting of co-conspirators than a traditional philosophy talk” — Zara Anwarzai (Indiana Bloomington) on a recent APA event about organizing academic labor
- Stanford University researchers created 25 virtual agents (?) with backstories, the capacity to form new memories, and a kind of LLM-based capacity for “actions” — Simon Goldstein (Dianoia) and Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini (Rutgers) guide us through the questions this raises
- “Candide” was the result of Voltaire’s engagement with Leibniz. Who was his “Micromégas,” about? — two figures, says Adam Roberts: one an object of satire, another an object of admiration
- “Skeptics insist the public pose of objectivity is a ruse that conceals… subjectivity… What they don’t grasp is that the public protocol, the ‘front stage’ performance, has power. — Neutrality may be a fiction, says Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU), but its performance creates a world-changing reality—for the better
- “I am not against prestige in professional philosophy…,” says Eric Schliesser — “But from the perspective of the epistemic (and social) needs of the discipline and profession, it is a mistake to have excessive selectivity in philosophy journal publication help produce or coincide with that prestige.”
- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) joins the blogosphere as one of the writers at Crooked Timber — her first post is on the right to abortion