Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (w/ Susan Neiman) Chris Hedges
NEW JERSEY, WHERE ASKING TAXPAYERS ABOUT A TAX HIKE CAN GET YOU INVESTIGATED: Apparently, some bureaucrats think elected officials should be seen and not heard, especially when the subject is your money. Thankfully, FIRE fought back, and this absurd complaint is now history
Why the Ukraine War Is Just the Start of a Global Power Struggle Forum Geopolitica
Trump’s America Is FOR SALE | Anne Applebaum on Putin, Kushner, and the Business of PowerRobinson Erhardt. “Trump loses another neocon.”
Treasury Follows Through on “Too Good to Be True” ETF Tax Strategies
In July, Treasury officials warned that they were scrutinizing a burgeoning category of tax-aware investment strategies. At the time, Treasury stopped short of issuing guidance. Well, the agency now has taken the “first concrete steps” to curtail thesenovel financial products.
At the end of September, Treasury and the IRS released Notice 2026-62, a broad warning about potentially abusive investment-fund strategies, alongside Rev. Rul. 2026-20, which directly attacks an increasingly popular deployment of § 351 to defer gain on appreciated securities through an exchange-traded fund, or ETF.
Will these efforts put a damper on the “tax alpha” boom? Details and commentary, below the fold.
How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes
Kashmir Hill, Jesse Drucker, Eli Tan & Mike Isaac (New York Times): How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s A.I. push is a tremendous success. “Our investments in A.I. are accelerating every major part of our core business,” he has told investors. “Every sign that we’re seeing in our own work and across the industry gives us confidence in this investment.”
But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service a different story. It claims that its A.I. data centers are a giant experiment that could fail, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s operations.
It does this so it can tap into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data center expansion.
How ChatGPT Targets Ads To You Based On Your Prompts, Phone Number, and Email
404 Media: “OpenAI lets anyone inject ads into ChatGPT users’ sessions, targeting specific groups of people based on their email address, phone number, or a unique identifier on their phone, according to 404 Media’s own tests of ChatGPT’s advertising ecosystem. While the ad targeting available in ChatGPT is somewhat standard practice across the advertising industry, the chatbot’s one billion monthly active usersmay not understand they, in some cases, are being specifically targeted because of their personal data the advertiser has uploaded to OpenAI. ChatGPT’s ad targeting is also novel in that it is also based on the prompts users enter into the chatbot, prompts that users may assume are private but which, as 404 Media has previously shown, may be reviewed by humans. Or in this case, used for ad targeting purposes.
OpenAI’s advertising products are operating just like most other massive companies which start to monetize their audiences — they are boiling the frog and hoping their users won’t notice the privacy implications from their new ads,” Zach Edwards, co-founder of DecryptAds, a company that collects online advertising data for research purposes, told 404 Media…”
