Monday, August 29, 2016

Information is Power, Trends in 213 slides: To read a Three sets of books is to hire an assassin

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
~ Vaclav Havel

 Speaking of Havel, note the GORBACHEV’S AMBIGUOUS LEGACY...

 By the way, Are Index Funds Communist ...?

While political donation flow from Communist tap like Morava River, Chinese hackers behind defence Austrade security breaches 

  The link between politics and personality maybe isn’t that strong

 US awards $5 million to bhp billiton whistleblower 

 “18F, which is part of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service, is building an authentication platform to make online interactions with the U.S. government simple, efficient and intuitive. This platform will be a service shared by agencies to streamline logging in and to allow the public to securely access personal information and federal government services. Federal agencies will be able to integrate our platform with their existing services as they choose…”

 Danish MP: EU a bigger threat than Russia The Local
Mary Meeker, analyst with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – her annual Internet Trends Report – 2016 – 213 slides
“Given that the public has paid for the gathering of government information, who owns the information? Is it the private province of the government official, or does it belong to the public at large? I would argue that information gathered by public officials at public expense is owned by the public — just as the chairs and buildings and other physical assets used by government belong to the
public.” Joseph Stiglitz, Jan. 27, 1999. The Nobel prize-winning economist and former chief
economist at the World Bank said this in an Oxford lecture, “On Liberty, the Right to Know, and Public Disclosure.”

Russ Fox, Three Sets of Books Isn’t Better than One:

Mr. Nowak gave his tax professional the second set of books that left out about $4 million in cash receipts. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that there was also a third set of books; that set compared the true and skimmed versions of books.
That third set must have been very handy for the auditors.

Robert Wood, Real Housewives Get Real Tax Liens, As IRS Moves To Collect. “Tax liens–the IRS’s way of making sure that the IRS gets paid no matter what–are public and can be embarrassing

 Seven Sets of blockchains in Eight ( 8 ) charts

 In tough times, people want more in a leader than intelligence, integrity, or the ability to build really tall walls. They want someone who can make a compelling pitch and inspire a sense of urgency—someone with charisma. For decades, scholars have struggled to define this X factor, but they are developing a better idea of how it works.  The Charisma Effect How to bend people to your will 

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death
— Edna Ferber, born on this date in 1885

Australian gambling statistics 1989-90 to 2014-15 

Making culture count politics cultural measurement of East Lattitude

Clinton’s Campaign Manager Defends Foreign Foundation Money Bloomberg

Deloitte is being sued after failing to flag up more than $200 million of money laundering 

kingfisher links

At CalPERS’ latest Investment Committee meeting, the committee chairman, Henry Jones, cut our public comment off illegally, over the objection of board member JJ Jelincic. This action took place despite the fact that the California agency has been put on notice repeatedly that it has not taken the steps under the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act to allow it to restrict the time of public remarks. In addition, a three-minute limit is substantively questionable. The matters before CalPERS are complex and the arbitrary three-minute limit that CalPERS currently imposes is often insufficient to present information to the board in adequate depth. CalPERS’ move is even more surprising given the chairman occasionally allows speakers more than the three minutes for comments limit and we were in the midst of offering helpful advice. CalPERS Board, General Counsel Illegally Silence Naked Capitalism Even as We Try to Help

 A special task force has been set up to try and stop the drones from dropping off contraband to prisoners

Consultant Raised Cash for Hillary Clinton, Used Access for Meeting with Coal Giant, Emails Reveal Intercept

Emails Show Clinton Foundation Donor Reached Out To Hillary Clinton Before Arms Export Boost International Business Times






In the latest update by the IRS for the period of 2013 to 2014, California exported a net 57,900 citizens, whose average incomes were $7,100 higher than the state’s average.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) just released its July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014 migration data, which “approximates the number of individuals” who moved between states in the U.S.

California was the third largest net exporter of citizens behind Illinois (82,000) and New York (126,800). ...



Arkansas Little RockRobert Steinbuch (Arkansas-Little Rock), The Slow and Painful Death of Academic Freedom:
A now-former university president once said to me:  “the most important title in academia is professor.”  Professors are supposed to be given appropriate deference and respect to make critical decisions regarding teaching, research, and service.  Schools are places of inquiry and experimentation.  Professors individually manage their spaces.
I have seen recurring instances of a growing problem in academia, however, wherein administrators view their roles more like kings than deans.  Under this model, administrators not only advise, but also dictate.  I’ve seen this phenomenon, and it’s not good. ...


Tax Court Logo 2Tanzi v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2016-148 (Aug. 9, 2016):
During the first half of 2011 the Tanzis were employed by Seminole State College. Dr. Tanzi taught math and communications classes as an adjunct professor, and Mrs. Tanzi was employed as a campus librarian.  
Dr. Tanzi is highly educated—he holds a doctorate in communication. As he explained at trial, individuals holding such terminal degrees bear a lifelong burden of “developing knowledge, finding knowledge, exploring, [and] essentially selfeducating”. Dr. Tanzi therefore insists that all expenses paid in adding to his “general knowledge” should be deductible as unreimbursed employee business expenses. ...


This public survey, drawing on a representative
sample of British residents, asked five key
questions about the relationship between the
public and private sector. Key results are
summarised below:
●
73% say that the practice of ministers
accepting corporate boardroom appointments
should be banned
●
75% say that the practice of senior civil
servants accepting corporate consultancies
should be banned
●
62% say that inviting corporations into
government to help shape the regulation of
business should be banned
●
68% say that Private Finance Initiatives (PFI)
arrangements for funding public projects
should be banned
●
Where frauds occur in the contracting out of
public services, 57% thought that both
government and the private company involved
should be held accountable for such frauds
Redefining corruption: Public attitudes to the relationship between government and business

Congress is getting richer.
The median net worth of lawmakers was just over $1 million in 2013, or 18 times the wealth of the typical American household, according to new research released Monday by the Center for Responsive Politics.
And while Americans’ median wealth is down 43% since 2007, Congress members’ net worth has jumped 28%.

How we can fix our broken nations, economies, societies and cultures

A pot of money: Oregon collects $25.5M in marijuana taxes

A Day in the Life of a Digitization Expert Via the iris – Betsy Brand and Sarah Waldorf, August 17, 2016: “Hundreds of thousands of artworks, objects, books, and records in the Getty’s collections have been photographed and posted online. But how do objects go from the physical world to your screen? People. Holly McGee is one of them. Here’s what a typical day in her life at work iThe s like. A trained librarian and archivist, on any given day Holly is either photographing a single book or performing image processing. She can typically digitize two books a week from cover to cover.


"We don’t pretend to be, nor do we want to be, the final word on any subject. We would like to be a starting point, though. In cases where clickability and virality trump fact, we feel that knowledge is the best antidote to fear." — Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski  

The wittiest British writer? Saki, aka Hector Hugh Munro. His writing is full of lunatic clarity: cows could be murderers; ferrets, gods ...
To read a Saki story is to hire an assassin. There have been many attempts in the last hundred years to re-create that specific Saki feeling; the pleasures of laying waste to convention combined with the quickening promise of something wilder in its stead. Nobody has yet managed it entirely, but in the pursuit of Saki a great deal of gleeful choler has been produced. If you were feeling ungenerous, you might compare the writing of an introduction to an animal marking out territory (the same could be said of writing essays for literary publications), and so it is with the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has in a hundred. Saki is often said to ring through the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, but Wodehouse turns his raw material into something far gentler than Saki did; there is kindness in Saki but not sweetness, and in a truly Sakian Wodehouse story, Bertie would be trapped under a piece of vintage furniture and torn apart by the dog Bartholomew. The wittiest British writer? Saki

Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies WSJ

Unusual Wikipedia pages.  Time sink

Politico, Poll: 62 Percent of Republicans Want Trump's Tax Returns:
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