Wirecard and shopping bag of money

DC Pastor Allegedly Used Coronavirus Relief Funds To Buy 39 Cars And A House. “Brooks also allegedly used the PPP funds to buy 39 use[d] automobiles, including a 2017 Mercedes Benz S Class, two 2017 Infinity Q50s, a 2015 Cadillac Escalade, a 2005 Bentley Continental, a 2018 Tesla Model 3, a 2014 GMC Yukon XL and several older model luxury vehicles.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:  Worrying new clues about the origins of Covid: How scientists at Wuhan lab helped Chinese army in secret project to find animal viruses.

Federal government tears up four Victorian government deals with foreign nations leading to rebuke from Chinese embassy abc.net.au From a couple of days ago but big consternation.

Wirecard employees removed millions in cash using shopping bags FT

Welcome to the YOLO Economy NYT

Hard Drive and SSD Shortages Could Be Imminent If New Cryptocurrency Blooms Tom’s Hardware. Big if true.

Nailed by Dob-in Spies

 “Law Professor May Be Fired After Personal Blog Post Criticized Chinese Government.”  It does make you wonder if USD has some financial reason to come down hard on criticism of the Chinese government.

An Argument Against Our Meritocracy

It is obvious that “not everyone is born with the same academic gifts,” deBoer writes, but among teachers and educational officials there is a “prohibition against talking plainly about differences in academic talent.” The “cult of smart”—deBoer defines his title on page five—is “the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence the only true measure of human worth.” What we need, instead of our unjust, so-called meritocracy, is “a society where you can fail at school and still be okay.” – American Affairs Journal

How Xi’s China has gone full Navag Dilbert.

Wuhan Lab Connected to Chinese Military, Documents Reveal.

MARK JUDGE:  The Fears of Autumn: How America’s Best Spy Novelist Pulled Me Out of a Honey Trap.

A great conversation between Roxane Gay and Monica Lewinsky about writing about trauma, at Vanity Fair

THIS IS TROUBLING, SINCE WE’VE HAD SOME OF THOSE IN KNOXVILLE:  Magnitude 4 earthquake rates may forecast larger future earthquakes.

At Home among the Birds: An Interview with Jonathan Meiburg Paris Review

Credit Suisse shareholders seek removal of risk chief after twin scandals FT

Growth, coal and carbon emissions: economic overheating and climate change (PDF) Bank of International Settlements

State-Supported “Clean Energy” Loans Are Putting Borrowers At Risk of Losing Their HomesProPublica

Minnesota gasps at the financial damage it faces from the Texas freeze WaPo 

 

Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

 

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor - 

~ Truman Capote

Study finds ride-sharing intensifies urban road congestion MIT News

She Noticed $200 Million Missing, Then She Was Fired ProPublica

Help! Am I Oversharing With My Colleagues?

Freakonomics: How To Manage Your Goal Hierarchy (Ep. 458)

Harvard Business: What Does It Mean To Be A Manager Today?

Chronicle of Higher Education, Stop Ignoring Microaggressions Against Your Staff:

Three ways that professors and administrators, intentionally or not, put staff ‘in their place.’

“You don’t behave enough like staff,” I was told derisively by the tenured professor who was then my supervisor. Despite my Ph.D., my years of experience at various levels of higher education, and my long list of successes as a faculty developer, this supervisor insisted on pointing out my place within the academic hierarchy. I sat there, in silence, swallowing my anger and shame. ...

Nowadays there’s a name for such slights — they’re called microaggressions. I’ve been dealing with them for my entire academic career — first as a graduate student and an instructor and then when I shifted from a faculty role to an academic-staff member. ...

But so far, little attention has been paid to the daily microaggressions directed at those of us who fall into the highly diverse yet nebulous category of staff members — that is, anyone who is not in the “prestige” ranks of faculty member or administrator. Outside of David M. Perry’s 2020 essay on “Title Policing and Other Ways Professors Bully the Academic Staff,” I’ve seen little commentary on the treatment of staff members. And there is an appetite for that discussion. When I asked on Twitter what one of my next topics should be in this series of essayson campus staff, the most common answer was microaggressions. ...

My aim in what follows is to describe three of the most common types of microaggressions directed at staff members, based on my own and other staff members’ experiences.

 

Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass 

Julia Carrie Wong – A Guardian investigation exposes the breadth of state-backed manipulation of the platform. “Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing. The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff. The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America. “There is a lot of harm being done on Facebook that is not being responded to because it is not considered enough of a PR risk to Facebook,” said Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked within the company’s “integrity” organization to combat inauthentic behavior. “The cost isn’t borne by Facebook. It’s borne by the broader world as a whole.” Facebook pledged to combat state-backed political manipulation of its platform after the historic fiasco of the 2016 US election, when Russian agents used inauthentic Facebook accounts to deceive and divide American voters. But the company has repeatedly failed to take timely action when presented with evidence of rampant manipulation and abuse of its tools by political leaders around the world…”

How to record separate audio for each person in a Zoom call

Tech Republic – “Recording a Zoom meeting can be helpful for lots of reasons, and creating separate audio files for each participant can make post-meeting editing much easier than trying to parse one big file. Let’s say you’re in a Zoom meeting. Someone says something profound or important about the topic at hand, but the moment passes without any record of what was said. Hopefully someone wrote it down, but if not, there could be an important piece of institutional knowledge lost the moment it was uttered.  Luckily, Zoom has the option to record meetings, both in audio and video format. There are a lot of reasons why someone would want to do so—creating a permanent record, easing the work of whoever is taking meeting minutes, giving participants or other employees the chance to watch it at another time or any number of additional cases…”

Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community

Office of the Director of National Intelligence: “This annual report, April 2021 of worldwide threats to the national security of the United States responds to Section 617 of the FY21 Intelligence Authorization Act (P.L. 116-260). This report reflects the collective insights of the Intelligence Community (IC), which is committed every day to providing the nuanced, independent, and unvarnished intelligence that policymakers, warfighters, and domestic law enforcement personnel need to protect American lives and America’s interests anywhere in the world.This assessment focuses on the most direct, serious threats to the United States during the next year. The order of the topics presented in this assessment does not necessarily indicate their relative importance or the magnitude of the threats in the view of the IC. All require a robust intelligence response, including those where a near-term focus may help head off greater threats in the future, such as climate change and environmental degradation. As required by the law, this report will be provided to the congressional intelligence committees as well as the committees on the Armed Services of the House of Representatives and the Senate.Information available as of 9 April 2021 was used in the preparation of this assessment…”

 

GSA: Distributed work makes government teams happier, more productive and inclusive

 

govfresh – “The U.S. General Services Administration’s 18F has a great post on why distributed government is critical to highly-functioning public service teams, emphasizing a ‘distributed first’ approach to work. The post touches on key issues that make work cultures great and how distributed operations facilitate these, including issues related to:

• Inclusivity
• Accessibility
• Trust and patience
• Staying present
• Making space for everyone
• Communicating
• Respecting time…”

CRIV Blog – CRIB Blog – Prepare to Practice, New and Notable: The Ever-Growing Collection of Practice Ready Tools from Bloomberg Law, Lexis, and Westlaw – “At this time of the year, as the spring semester winds down (how is that already possible?!?), my mind always seems to wander to thoughts of law students heading off to their summer jobs, putting their legal analysis, writing, and research skills to the test in a real-world setting. These thoughts then naturally drift to the many practice-focused products legal information vendors offer. In this post, I highlight the new and notable products from Bloomberg Law, Lexis, and Westlaw…”

A Mystery to Itself: What is a brain? London

 Chronicle of Higher Education, Stop Ignoring Microaggressions Against Your Staff:

Three ways that professors and administrators, intentionally or not, put staff ‘in their place.’

“You don’t behave enough like staff,” I was told derisively by the tenured professor who was then my supervisor. Despite my Ph.D., my years of experience at various levels of higher education, and my long list of successes as a faculty developer, this supervisor insisted on pointing out my place within the academic hierarchy. I sat there, in silence, swallowing my anger and shame. ...

Articles of Note

Modern work culture puts such a premium on comity that some crucial is often missing: open disagreement... New office 

April 6, 2021 | In Peter the Great's Russia, the bureaucracy was all. And no one chronicled its pompous, careerist, status-obsessed types better than Nikolai Gogol... media Gogol 

A Mystery to Itself: What is a brain? London Review of Books 

Tiger Mother in trouble? Amy Chua was disciplined by Yale Law School for hosting “boozy parties.” There’s more to the story  ... trouble 

April 5, 2021 | Intimacy was not Helen Frankenthaler's strong suit. She could be insensitive, manipulative, obtuse, competitive, and mercilessly self-absorbed... more »

Senate Holds Hearing Today On Creating Opportunity Through A Fairer Tax System

Is there a reason politicians wouldn't want as many people as possible to be employed?

It's a genuine question.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was a lively conversation among economists about the theoretical possibility of "full unemployment"

Why Australia isn't aiming for 'full employment' anymore

The HMRC progresses its ten year tax reform strategy on how law, administration, and simplification could make a “…better experience for individuals and organisations…opportunities to further reduce the tax gap…greater resilience and responsiveness…”.

Tax Data Management

The Senate Finance Committee's Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth holds a hearing today on Creating Opportunity Through a Fairer Tax System at 2:30 PM ET (live video here):

• Abigail E. Disney (CEO & Co-founder, Fork Films, New York, NY)
• Cheryl Straughter (Owner, Soleil, Boston, MA)
• David Gamage (Professor, Indiana University, Maurer School of Law)
  Creating Opportunity Through a Fairer Tax System: The Case for Taxing Extreme Wealth Holdings and “Real” (Book) Corporate Profits and for Improving IRS Funding:
  I am primarily devoting this written testimony to discussing the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2021 and the broader case for levying a federal tax on extreme wealth holdings. As is well known, both wealth and income inequality have exploded over recent decades, with the gains from economic growth disproportionately going to the richest Americans. Meanwhile, as I will explain, our tax system is broken as applied to the ultra-wealthy, with many harmful consequences. A new federal tax on extreme wealth holdings, like the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, should be a central component of reforms for fixing this disgraceful state of affairs.
  Secondarily, I will more briefly write in support of both the Real Corporate Profits Tax Act of 2021 and proposals for improving IRS funding and for making it and other tax enforcement funding less dependent on the annual appropriations process. All of these proposals go together as reforms for raising revenues needed for public investment while helping to fix some of the ways in which our tax system is currently broken and easily exploited by tax gaming by ultra-wealthy individuals and families and by large corporations. For the reasons I will explain, I strongly support all of these reform proposals.

• Scott A. Hodge (President, Tax Foundation)
• Jeff Hoopes (Professor, University of North Carolina, Kenan-Flagler Business School)
• Kyle Pomerleau (Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute)
• 
  

OECD on Data

God and Laughter:

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  God Is in the Punch Line, by Mike Kerrigan (Hunton Andrews Kurth, Charlotte, NC):

G.K. Chesterton closed out Orthodoxy, his 1908 masterpiece of Christian apologetics, with a radical thought. He proposed that the one thing too great for God to have shown us when he walked on the earth was his mirth. This suggests that the idea of a blissfulness we can’t even imagine was important to Chesterton. The mere possibility it’s true, that one thing our mortal minds can’t begin to fathom about God’s nature is his joyousness, offers me consolation beyond measure.

Steve Wilkens (Azusa Pacific), What's So Funny About God?: A Theological Look at Humor(2019)

Deborah L. Borman (Arkansas-Little Rock), 'You Should Smile More,' Academic Catcalling, and Women-on-Women Crimes, 65 Vill. L. Rev. 1065 (2020):

Within the legal academy women “catcall” other women in an attempt to control the emotions of colleagues.

Money-Lust - Back To The Office Anxieties

The Stasi became a highly effective secret police organization. Within East Germany it sought to infiltrate every institution of society and every aspect of daily life, including even intimate personal and familial relationships. It accomplished this goal both through its official apparatus and through a vast network of informants and unofficial collaborators (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), who spied on and denounced colleagues, friends, neighbours, and even family members.

Does that sound a bit familiar? Something like the media-social-media complex we face today? The left-leaning Matt Taiibi thinks so.

Back To The Office Anxieties

Blind blog Workspace Insights: “Anxiety over returning to the office is very real. Blind, an anonymous community of verified professionals with 4 million+ users, began running a survey gauging if professionals were anxious about returning to the office and why. 65% of professionals on Blind are anxious about the office reopening, according to results. 4,200 users across different industries share their cause of concerns as offices announce reopening dates. Of those experiencing anxiety, 47% are “very concerned” about the health risks associated with returning to the office. 15% anticipate never returning to the office.

Say hello to the new multilateral boss Saker. Note we featured some other takes on this speech.

Michael Hudson: Plato, Aristophanes and Aristotle on Money-Lust, 399-380 BC

While Plato, following Socrates, saw money as leading to hubris, Greek philosophers didn’t care much for working men either.

 ‘Are you making things up on the run?’: Sidoti’s honesty challenged in ICAC witness box

These sneakers are woven by robots and have 3D-printed soles Boing Boing.

Biden Seeks $80 Billion to Beef Up I.R.S. Audits of High-Earners

Encryption Lava Lamps Atlas Obscura

• Toyota faces Thai bribery probe over tax dispute (20 Apr 2021)
• To tackle inequality, Labour must lead the fight for a progressive tax system (19 Apr 2021)
• ABN Amro reaches €480m anti-money laundering settlement (19 Apr 2021)
  
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• Biden tax changes could be 'significant' for Ireland (19 Apr 2021
• Golden age of rich America’s tax evasion may be drawing to close (18 Apr 2021)
• Tax 'Avoiding' Firms Like Amazon Should Not Benefit From Post-Covid Subsidy, MPs Say (18 Apr 2021)
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• The race to the bottom on cutting company tax rates has failed (17 Apr 2021)
• The war against money-laundering is being lost (17 Apr 2021)
  
• Taxcast Extra, The Whiteness of Wealth: conversation between Professor Dorothy Brown and political economist Keval Bharadia, April 2021 (12 Apr 2021)
• Stopping corporate tax dodging is just as important as a higher tax rate(12 Apr 2021)
• Joe Biden: Could his tax plan affect US investment in Ireland? (12 Apr 2021)

How humble Quaker origins inspire James Turrell’s otherworldly light art Aeon and An Exclusive Look at James Turrell’s Roden Crater Smithsonian Magazine 

EARTH RESTORED Toby Ord 

Watch the Navy’s new drone fly using just sunlight and hydrogen Popular Science

Algorithm Detects Deepfakes by Analyzing Reflections in Eyes Futurism

The future looks bright for infinitely recyclable plastic PhysOrg

Putin warns West of ‘red line’ as thousands protest to back Navalny Agence France Presse

 

In Quotes: Putin Speaks on State of the NationMoscow Times

How Banks Profited Off The Pandemic David Sirota, The Daily Poster

 

Paid in Full Real Life. “The emerging dream of an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction.” And every transaction has a rent.

 

The idea the state has been shrinking for 40 years is a myth FT

The road from Rome Aeon