We round up this year’s winners at awards for achievements that ‘first make people laugh and then make them think’
Piff and his colleagues found that upper-class drivers were more likely to cut other cars off at junctions and ignore pedestrians at crossings. Wealthier people also appeared more willing to lie at work. In one experiment, volunteers were left alone with a jar of sweets ostensibly meant for children. When the researchers returned, upper-class people had snaffled nearly twice as many candies as lower-class people.
“The general pattern seems to be that with wealth and rising power, you become less engaged with the needs of others and less burdened by the needs of social relationships,” Piff said. “Taking candy from children might be the least of our worries but it’s emblematic of the tendency to prioritise one’s own needs over those of others.”
Woman Who Exposed FBI Official for Working With Russian Oligarch Found Dead
Accused Russian spies Kira and Igor Korolev purportedly captured on prison audio
Cady Stanton, “IRS Funding Up in the Air Ahead of Deadline” (Tax Notes, August 31, 2026):
The levels of both mandatory and discretionary funding for the IRS face an uncertain future as Congress returns from its August recess, and the fate of the agency’s annual funding likely won’t be determined until the end of the year.
Lawmakers have a September 30 deadline for fiscal 2027 government funding when they return from the summer break, with the passage of a short-term extension of funding at fiscal 2026 levels into December serving as the most likely scenario. But language in the final version of that stopgap bill plays a role in forecasting additional cuts to the agency’s boosted operations support funding.
Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Capital gains tax revenues make the case for the Taxing Wealth Report
The naysayers about my Taxing Wealth Report have always said that some of my suggestions, such as equalising the tax rates on income and capital
Read the full article…
Trump is staking out extreme positions on White House secrecy, legal experts say
CNN: “At this point more than two months before the midterm elections, Democrats retaking control of Congress and its subpoena power is far from certain. But President Donald Trump is already laying down legal markers for how he’ll fight any attempt by lawmakers to investigate him.
In a Justice Department memo and legal filings, the Trump administration is arguing that the president can keep secret not just the conversations he has with his advisers within the White House, but that his dealings with individuals outside the government can be shielded as well.
The White House is also saying in court that even disclosing the identities of the people who worked on significant policy efforts would infringe upon the presidential confidentiality to which Trump is entitled. And the administration has taken the stance that it can ignore a Watergate-era law prohibiting the destruction of White House documents. The posturing comes as Trump, in his second term, has been notably reliant on a constellation of business moguls, non-government attorneys and old friends to help shape his agenda.
“There has been an unprecedented amount of interaction between the Executive Branch — particularly the White House — and the private sector that Congress has made clear is going to be the subject of oversight,” said Jamie Bair, a partner and head of congressional investigations at the law firm Crowell & Moring…”
Source (Slip Opinion) DOJ Office of Legal Counsel – Applicability of Executive Privilege to Presidential Communications with Private Advisers. Executive privilege can apply to presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential.
August 10, 2026 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE COUNSEL TO THE PRESIDENT.
The President’s authority to withhold certain sensitive information for the public good, today referred to as executive privilege, is “peculiar to our system of separation of powers” and “derive[s] from the supremacy of each branch within its own assigned area of constitutional duties.” United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 705 (1974); see also Congressional Re- quests for Confidential Executive Branch Information, 13 Op. O.L.C. 153, 154 (1989) (“Congressional Requests”). You have asked whether that privilege, and particularly the presidential communications component of it, permits the President to protect communications that he has with advisers who do not work for the Executive Branch. Determining whether the privilege applies to any specific communication would require additional information about the facts and circum- stances surrounding that communication.
But as a general matter, executive privilege can apply to presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications (1) relate to official presidential decisionmaking, (2) involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and (3) are confidential…”
Investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning, collaboration in OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
METR – Redaction summary statement:Except where explicitly noted in this post, OpenAI redacted no additional information that was important to our conclusions. Two METR staff members (Hjalmar Wijk and Ajeya Cotra) and a Redwood Research staff member contracting with METR (Ryan Greenblatt) worked on premises at OpenAI over a total of six days to attempt to form an independent understanding of model behavior observed during the recent incidentin which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned “message board.” Our investigation focused mostly on the period between July 7th and July 13th. The earlier incidents from training and the subsequent compromise of OpenAI infrastructure described in OpenAI’s recent Black Hat presentation were out of scope, as was OpenAI’s investigation process and planned remediation. Per our standard policy, we did not take payment from OpenAI for this independent assessment.