Friday, May 18, 2012

The Trouble with Restructures


The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we are ready for it 。。。 RF&RM

Wouldn't it be great to know when we're being lied to? It is better not to rely on any one signal. You'll be more successful if you look for clusters of behaviors (three or four body language cues that reinforce one another) 12 ways to spot a liar at work

Australian printing entrepreneur embroiled in $610m fight with one of richest US men. TO HIS friends and supporters, the secretive Australian inventor and entrepreneur Kia Silverbrook is a genius, possibly the most prolific patent holder in the world who stands alongside the likes of Thomas Edison. To his enemies, which include a foundation owned by one of America's richest men, George Kaiser, Mr Silverbrook and his partner Janet Lee are liars and cheats, who induced them over the course of a decade to invest $US610 million in a revolutionary printing technology but are stymying its commercial development. The next Edison, or a scoundrel? ; THE old saying goes that if you are unlucky in love, you are lucky at cards. But the colourful gambling identity and brothel owner Eddie Hayson can't seem to take a trick in either. Antipodean Kate Mcclymont

Zelenak - Green on David Foster Wallace Zelenak: The Great American Tax Novel

Lawrence Zelenak (Duke), The Great American Tax Novel, 110 Mich. L. Rev. 969 (2012) (reviewing David Foster Wallace, The Pale King David Foster Wallace — author of the celebrated novel Infinite Jest and among the most acclaimed American fiction writers of his generation — killed himself in 2008 at the age of forty-six. He left in his office hundreds of pages of The Pale King, an unfinished novel set in the fictional Peoria, Illinois, regional examination center ("REC") of the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS" or "the Service") in 1985. Although many chapters of the novel were seemingly complete, Wallace left no indication (other than what could be gleaned from the chapters themselves) of the order of the chapters (pp. vi-vii). Michael Pietsch, who had served as the editor of Infinite Jest, assembled the chapters into a surprisingly coherent — although more or less plotless — novel, and the book was published to considerable critical acclaim in early 2011.

As assembled by Pietsch, The Pale King focuses on a dozen or so income tax examiners — including a fictional David Foster Wallace — working at the Peoria REC. The examiner's job is to decide whether income tax returns (selected for the examiner's consideration by computers) should be referred for audit (Chapter Twenty-Seven). The novel describes how the featured employees came to work for "the Service," as it is generally referred to by its employees (p. 244), and how they deal with the boredom of their jobs, as well as their attitudes toward the Service and toward the tax system itself. Although some of the chapters can stand on their own as self-contained stories, the book as a whole has no real plot. Some of Wallace's notes, included by Pietsch as "Notes and Asides" at the end of the book, suggest Wallace had plans for an overarching plot, based on a power struggle between IRS traditionalists favoring the continued use of human examiners and reformers wanting to replace human examiners with computers, but only a few hints of this conflict appear in the published novel. It is possible that even a completed version of The Pale King would have been essentially plotless. As Pietsch points out in his "Editor's Note," one of Wallace's notes describes the book as "a series of setups for things to happen but nothing ever happens." I am not a literary scholar or critic, nor am I pretending to be one in this Review. Rather, I am an academic tax lawyer (and a former temporary employee of the Internal Revenue Service), and the Review is written from that perspective. For many creative works, a review of this sort would be inappropriate. It does not much matter, for example, whether the film version of The Wizard of Oz accurately depicts life on a Kansas farm in the 1930s. But The Pale King is different. The book devotes a significant percentage of its pages to detailed explanations and discussions of tax civics, tax policy, and tax administration, and it is every bit as serious about those topics as Moby-Dick is about whaling. The Pale King is not merely set in a tax administration facility; it is also, in very significant part, about taxes and tax administration. It is a Moby-Dick of taxes, aiming to educate its readers about a highly specialized field of endeavor, and using that field of endeavor to explore some of the profoundest themes. On the assumption that a whaler’s review of Moby-Dick would have served a useful purpose, I offer this tax lawyer’s review of The Pale King.

Pale King ; Moby-Dick is about whaling ; Cold River; A popular myth swirling around Washington, DC, and throughout the media these days is that many Americans do not pay taxes, and are therefore free-riding off of our society without contributing themselves. The Truth about Taxes: Just About Everyone Pays Them [On 9 July, possibly hundreds of thousands of people around the world may find that they will no longer be able to connect to the Internet. For on that day, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) plans to shut down a network of more than 100 rogue Domain Name System (DNS) servers that it seized last November during an operation against a group of primarily Estonian cyber criminals Will You Lose Your Internet Connection on the 9th of July?; School of Hard Knocks ]

• · Statistics are wonderful things to sift through and misinterpret, which is why I believe anecdotal evidence is much more compelling and useful. Having lived in London for more than 20 years, I’ve been able to count on one hand the number of people I know first hand who’ve been mugged. There have been plenty of friends who’ve had their bags or wallets lifted at pubs and cafés, the odd break-in (I count myself in this group), bikes nicked and car windows smashed but thankfully no muggings or similar random acts of violence Stats ; Let’s stipulate that there may have been some manner of price-fixing here, perhaps even arranged in “private rooms for dinner in upscale Manhattan restaurants,” as the complaint darkly charged. The Justice Department is entrusted with, among other things, protecting the interests of American consumers and, given a narrow focus on price, its move on the publishers make sense Fifty Speeds of Cold River - The margins are low and there is almost no flow

• · · Special Report from The Economist, As manufacturing goes digital (and 3D), it will change out of all recognition. And some of the business of making things will return to rich countries. Multiple articles – let me know if you have trouble accessing anything. A third industrial revolution; Leaders can learn a lot from the late Apple CEO, but not all of it should be emulated. Applying his leadership style to the wrong strategy, market, or product could sink a company The Steve Jobs way

• · · · Growth, cloud, social, mobile and analytics among this year's top HR trends Human capital trends 2012, ; Introducing the Digital Engagement GuideMinister worried about AGIMO’s ability to deliver

• · · · · If there is a battle over the future shape of the internet – and society as a whole - then hacktivist groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, Wikileaks and the file-sharing site Megaupload.com are among the frontline battalions. John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the well-known advocacy group Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), says the over-arching motivation of such efforts, whatever tactics are used, was to shift the nature of society Hacktivists in the frontline battle for the internet ; In its paper Match making: Using data-matching to find people missing out on government assistance the Australia Institute says data-matching is a valuable tool for finding welfare cheats and overpayments in the welfare system but it could also be used to improve the delivery of social security assistance payments Data-matching for unmatched data ; Service delivery reform is about redefining our relationship with the people of our Commonwealth: with all the rights and responsibilities that citizenship brings.Speech: Five hundred one-stop shops for Australians

• · · · · · How to Hide the Data on your Computer; Will future mobile devices see through walls?