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Thursday, December 19, 2019

What is the Difference between a Bohemian Conclusion and an Irish Fact?

“The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia  


He runs the Cassidy crime family. Little people with enormous heads, every one if them. And they’ve all have been shot in the head, and they never die They believe it’s the luck of the Irish—they walk around thinking they were all born lucky—and it never occurred to any them yet that if they were that f****** lucky, they wouldn’t keep getting shot
- Pete Dexter


4 Nov 2019 · Tax Office second commissioner Andrew Mills will leave the job at the end of the year, a year before ...

6 May 2019 · Jeremy Geale, CTA and Deputy Commissioner for Review and Dispute Resolution at the ... Twitter by Jeremy Geale
Keltic Krust,site of many authorial conversations [photo: Robert Birnbaum]Bobek, Michal, 

Kerouac was reading along, too. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s very, very good,” Glassman recounted in her 1983 memoir.

That breakthrough review, written by Gilbert Millstein in the “Books of the Times” column, changed the course of literary history and the career of Kerouac, who died 50 years ago this fall, on Oct. 21, 1969. If not for that review, Kerouac might have remained a minor writer and the Beat Generation so fully associated with his name may never have flourished as it did. After all, seven years earlier, Kerouac had published his first book, “The Town and the City,” to modest reviews, which were not enough to propel him to fame.


Moscow wonders where winter has gone as temperatures hit 133-year high

Data Protection, Anonymity and Courts (September 1, 2019). 26 (2) Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 183 (2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3483543
“Is anonymisation of judicial decisions necessary for protection of personal data of the parties (physical persons)?”


“People are living longer. This makes retirement expensive and planning for it agonizingly complex. To make matters worse, stock markets are volatile. That adds to the risk that asset portfolios may decline in value just when retirees need money the most. Retirees may also face sudden financial shocks because of illness or other unexpected expenses. How can these risks be managed over a period of 25 to 30 years?
Preparing for a safe and secure retirement requires an integrated approach, notes Wade Pfau, author of Safety-First Retirement Planning: An Integrated Approach for a Worry-Free Retirement. In a conversation with Knowledge@Wharton, Pfau discusses strategies retirees can use to minimize anxiety in their golden years…”

ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson on the big stories, the blowback and the lure of China Share


Further cuts to the Australian Public Service are no surprise
Erichson, Howard M., What is the Difference between a Conclusion and a Fact? (August 1, 2019). Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 41, 2019, Forthcoming; Fordham Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 3439489. Available at SSRN:https://ssrn.com/abstract=3439489orhttp://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3439489

“In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, building on Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, the Supreme Court instructed district courts to treat a complaint’s conclusions differently from allegations of fact. Facts, but not conclusions, are assumed true for purposes of a motion to dismiss. The Court did little to help judges or lawyers understand the elusive distinction, and, indeed, obscured the distinction with its language. The Court said it was distinguishing “legal conclusions” from factual allegations. The application in Twombly and Iqbal, however, shows that the relevant distinction is not between law and fact, but rather between different types of factual assertions. This essay, written for a symposium on the tenth anniversary of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, explores the definitional problem with the conclusion-fact distinction and examines how district courts have applied the distinction in recent cases.”

Scott Morrison facing online criticism for pre-Christmas family overseas holiday - ABC News

Kerouac waited by a newsstand all night for a forthcoming review of his book. “Its publication is a historic occasion,” the review began. It only got better 

Artificial Lawyer – “Despite the much discussed theory that as more tech enters the legal profession the number of lawyers will decline, there is no evidence for that – yet. In fact, the most recent data shows that, in a market such as the UK – which is well-known for tech adoption – the number of lawyers continues to climb at a healthy rate. In a new report byTheCityUK on the current state of the legal sector, the data shows that the number of lawyers in the UK is steadily expanding – despite the Baby Boom era lawyers now heading for retirement…”


Tannenwald (2016)The Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship has announced the winners of the  2019 tax writing competition:

First Prize ($5,000):
Christine Davis (Florida), More Anti-Simplification: PTI and GILTI After the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Adam Waytz, via the Kellogg School of Management
Machines are taking on more and more new responsibilities at work. But are some jobs better left to humans?



Multinational companies like Google, Apple and Facebook face heftier tax hit in biggest global overhaul for decades 
 Governments will get more power to tax big multinationals like Google, Apple and Facebook doing business in their countries under a proposed overhaul of decades-old rules. The drive for a global rule book has received new urgency as countries unilaterally adopt plans for a tax on digital companies over frustration with current rules

More than 130 countries and territories agreed that a rewriting of tax rules largely going back to the 1920s was overdue and tasked the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to come up with proposals. The overhaul would have an impact of a few percentage points of corporate income tax in many countries with no big losers apart from big international investment hubs.

Not all countries that are considering taxes of this nature are planning to or have imposed them in the same manner. In general, according to Tax Foundation, policies that tax digital transactions using existing consumption tax regimes are superior to ones that apply special taxes on revenues associated with certain digital services. Source: Financial Post, Multinational companies like Google, Apple and Facebook face heftier tax hit in biggest global overhaul for decades,  and Tax Foundation, A Wave of Digital Taxation,



Merriam-Webster – They, plus quid pro quo, crawdad, exculpate, and 7 more of our top lookups of 2019 – “Our Word of the Year for 2019 is they. It reflects a surprising fact: even a basic term—a personal pronoun—can rise to the top of our data. Although our lookups are often driven by events in the news, the dictionary is also a primary resource for information about language itself, and the shifting use of they has been the subject of increasing study and commentary in recent years. Lookups for they increased by 313% in 2019 over the previous year…
It’s no surprise that impeach is among the top words of 2019, with the largest single spike following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of an impeachment inquiry on September 24th. Overall, the word had a 129% increase in lookups over last year. Impeach is defined in several ways, including “to charge with a crime or misdemeanor” and “to cast doubt on.” The former of these carries the additional specific meaning of “to charge (a public official) before a competent tribunal with misconduct in office”; the latter is often narrowed as well, with the meaning “to challenge the credibility or validity of.” Although frequently thought of as meaning “to remove from office,” impeach has a precise legal use in cases such as this, in which the action describes a step in removing an official from office, but does not refer to the removal itself. Impeach came to English from the French word empecher (“to impede”), itself from the Latin word impedicare (“to fetter”)—which is also the root of the English word impede…” 

‘I AM THEIR VOICE’

"I am now in a free world," Zumrat Dawut, a Uighur woman who spent three months in one of China’s detention camps, said. Dawut told us about the constant surveillance, the mobile phone tracking, and the strict regimen she was forced to keep. She was also sworn to secrecy after being let out of the camp. Although she is out, others remain locked away. “And I choose to be their voice," she said.

US RESPONDS

United States lawmakers took a strong stance against China’s treatment of Uighurs and other minorities. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted in support of a bill to sanction senior officials responsible for human rights abuses. The bill also calls on the Trump Administration to prohibit the sales of goods and services to the Chinese government.

THRIVING JOURNALISM

“In a region where press freedom is a daily battle, these [news] sites are proof that investigative journalism can thrive in the Middle East against the odds,” Forbidden Stories editor Sandrine Rigaud told us. We caught up with Sandrine at the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism’s conference last month. The annual event brings together reporters from the Middle East and North Africa.

Responsible Operations: Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries


OCLC – Thomas Padilla – “Responsible Operations is intended to help chart library community engagement with data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) and was developed in partnership with an advisory group and a landscape group comprised of more than 70 librarians and professionals from universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other organizations. This research agenda presents an interdependent set of technical, organizational, and social challenges to be addressed en route to library operationalization of data science, machine learning, and AI. Challenges are organized across seven areas of investigation:
  1. Committing to Responsible Operations
  2. Description and Discovery
  3. Shared Methods and Data
  4. Machine-Actionable Collections
  5. Workforce Development
  6. Data Science Services
  7. Sustaining Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Collaboration