Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Nude Pizza is the Home of Italian pleasure. Every pizza we serve you is jam-packed with flavour and freshness. We specialize in thin crispy pizza and deep-fried Panzerotti. Enjoy a great atmosphere and friendly staff just like in an Italian pizzeria.💙
What you have with a restaurant that you visit once or twice is a transaction. What you have with a restaurant that you visit over and over is a relationship.
My wife and I eat out at least once a week and we used to travel all over the city to try all sorts of different places, just-opened hot spots and old favorites alike. It was great. But now we mostly go to a bar/restaurant
around the corner from where we live and that’s even better. Bruni covers the experience pretty well, but I just wanted to share a couple of seemingly small aspects of being a regular:
1. Our local is popular and always crowded, especially during the dreaded 7-10pm hours and double especially Thu-Sat nights. But even when I go in by myself at a peak time, when the bar’s jam-packed, there’s always a seat for me. It might take a bit, but something opens up and they slot me in, even if I’m only stopping in for a drink and they could seat a two-top for dinner at the bar. (A regular in the hand is worth two in the rush.)
2. This is a totally minor thing but I love it: more than once, I’ve come in early in the evening, had a drink, left without paying to go run an errand or meet someone somewhere else, and then come back later for another drink or dinner and then settle my bill. It’s like having a house account without the house account.
3. Another nice thing about being a regular at a place that values regulars is that you meet the other regulars. This summer I was often left to my own devices for dinner and a couple times a week, I ended up at my local. And almost without exception, I ended up having dinner with someone I’d previously met at the bar. Routinely turning a solo dining experience into dinner with a friend is an amazing accomplishment for a restaurant.
On 11 September 2024, the Senate referred an inquiry into Australia’s taxation system to the Senate Economics References Committee for inquiry and report by 10 December 2024.
The Australian Taxation Office is to buy software to enable “unattributable exploration” of social media and of “surface, deep and dark” web properties.
The software is intended to build on work commenced last year to introduce open-source intelligence or OSINT tooling to assist in protecting Australia’s tax and superannuation systems.
The tax office said in tender documents overnight that OSINT had already allowed it “to take proactive steps to protect Commonwealth revenue and the integrity of the superannuation and taxation systems.”
At a time of intense political divisions, Americans across the political spectrum share enormous common ground on at least one problem facing our nation: the extreme CEO-worker pay gaps at our country’s largest corporations.
This report focuses on these big pay-gap companies. The 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median wages — the Low-Wage 100 — last year paid their CEOs an average 538 times what they paid their most typical workers, we found. Extreme pay disparities lower employee morale and productivity and raise turnover rates. They also widen gender and racial disparities, since women and people of color make up a disproportionately large share of low-wage workers and a tiny share of corporate leaders.
Can Americans transcend our differences and come together to tackle these obscene pay divides? Our Executive Excess report last year related how public outrage over corporate pay gaps is helping unions win strong new contracts at enterprises ranging from Detroit’s Big 3 automakers to major hotel chains. Employees at a Denver Live Nation concert venue have even cited our 2023 Executive Excess report as a powerful motivator for their successful union drive.
Policymakers are also taking steps to address widespread concerns over corporate pay patterns. But much more remains to be done. This year’s Executive Excess ends with a comprehensive policy menu for ensuring that corporate America more equitably shares the fruits of everyone’s labor.”
John Green addressed staff and partners at PwC – in two separate groups – as part of a listening tour, where he drew a line in the sand under the firm’s woes
PwC announced former lawyer and Macquarie Group banker John M Green as independent chair of its governance boardlast month, and after starting in the role in September, he’s been pounding the pavement.
Green recently addressed staff and partners at PwC – in two separate groups – as part of a listening tour, where he also seemed to be drawing a line in the sand under the firm’s damaging tax scandal.
Several attendees of the sessions relayed that Green told them now was not a time for them to sit and feel sorry for themselves, staff and partners needed to knuckle down and stay committed to lifting PwC out of its current position. Green stressed that he believed PwC was still a good firm, but it needed to lift its governance standards and improve culture.
It seems the message was if the firm could fix those issues, it could emerge from the all-enveloping tax scandal as a stronger entity.
Whichever way you look at it, though, it’s a long road ahead for PwC given the damage inflicted on the brand.
Green’s appointment came alongside plans for law firm Webb Henderson and former judge Tom Bathurst to run a review of the PwC’s “commitments to change”.
The scandal relates to allegations of misuse of confidential government information by PwC’s former head of international tax, Peter Collins, who was found to have shared briefings obtained from a private consulting process.
Green’s message to PwC staff and partners also included an anecdote from his time at a domestic law firm, when he recounted a rival was navigating a tumultuous time and reputational damage. He said his boss at the time told his team that it wasn’t a time to be complacent or throw stones, as the under-pressure firm still had good people and could emerge from its woes as a better and stronger organisation.
Green didn’t identify the firm in question, but he may have been referring to a string of disastrous events at Allen Allen & Hemsley during the nineties that tarnished the firm’s reputation. Among those was a scandal that emerged in 1991, when Allens detailed questionable financial deals in confidential letters that were leaked to the media.
Not long after, there was a damaging fallout when an Allens lawyer took $US8.7m ($13m) that belonged to the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust and lost it, through a complex series of transactions.
Green also endured a scandal at Macquarie when one of its most senior deal bankers, Simon Hannes, was arrested and charged with insider trading. He told this columnist in the book The Millionaires’ Factory that staff at the time thought it was “a life-threatening moment” for the organisation.
“Our entire business was dealing in confidential information and maintaining trust, so to have it alleged that one of our most senior people was not just abusing the trust, but doing it illegally, was shocking,” Green said in the book. Hannes was found guilty by two different juries and ended up serving jail time over the spurious options trading.
Despite Green’s pep talk, PwC’s local employees will be mindful that the hits keep on coming at the firm, and not just in Australia.
Just days ago, Chinese regulators slapped PwC’s mainland China division with a six-month suspension and a fine linked to the firm’s audit of failed developer China Evergrande Group.
The three independent members of PwC’s 10-person governance board have a lot riding on the task ahead. Joining Green as independents on the board are Australian Unity chair Lisa Chung and former Commonwealth Bank general counsel Carmel Mulhern.
Rattling the tin
Digital player Alex Bank has Barrenjoey Capital Partners working with it to assess strategic options, including raising capital and laying the groundwork for a potential initial public offering at some point over the next few years.
This column understands Barrenjoey is assisting Alex Bank with a capital raising that is seeking to bring in a large investor or two at a valuation of $80m. It is unclear if a current investor is vending shares or if the lender is issuing new shares, as it did in August last year at 83c a share.
Alex Bank already counts New Zealand’s Heartland Group and the Tozer family office among its investors.
But underscoring how tough it is for smaller banks in the current climate, a capital raising in May last year put a $130m pre-money valuation on Alex Bank.
The appointment of Barrenjoey is interesting given the firm was one of four investment banks that worked on Judo Capital’s ASX-listing. The others were Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse.
More than two years ago, Alex Bank had drafted in Jarden Australia to advise on its capital program. That relationship appears to have ended, with Barrenjoey clearly now front and centre for the lender.
Clinton Capital Partners – a long-standing adviser to Alex Bank since it was established in 2018. – remains in the advisory tent, too.
Business lender Judo has been navigating a tougher operating climate, leading to an increased focus on expense management, including the cutting of headcount across the bank. It flagged a reduction in staff numbers in May as part of a broader restructure. The lender is also thought to be closely reassessing the composition of parts of the loan book, with a focus on boosting the profitability of specific exposures.
The latest Australian Prudential Regulation Authority data shows Alex Bank had a loan book of $62m as at July 31. Deposits amounted to $61m.
A release by Alex Bank in 2023 showed that as at June 30 last year, it had lent more than $74m in personal loans to date, as settlements climbed.
It’s been a hard slog for the lender, even after APRA granted Alex Bank a fully-fledged banking licence in late 2022.
More broadly, the nation’s digital banks have been plagued by operational and scale issues, which led Volt to return deposits and cease being a bank about two years ago. That followed the demise of its digital counterpart Xinja.
Other digital players :86 400 and Up were acquired by National Australia Bank, and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, respectively.
Alex Bank has – to its credit – looked to keep coming up with ways to attract new customers.
In June, it rolled out a partnership with Qantas Frequent Flyer so that members could earn points on their banking products, starting with the firm’s term deposit.
Alex Bank also has relationships with mortgage broking aggregators including AFG and Loan Market, covering personal loans and asset finance.
Open Culture – Shows Which Cultural Figures Walked the Earth at the Same Time: From 1200 to Present -“We could call the time in which we live the “Information Age.” Or we could describe it more vividly as the era of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan. Whatever you think of the work of any of these figures in particular, you can hardly deny the impact they’ve had on our culture.
Were we living a century ago, we might have said the same of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald (though he hadn’t quite published The Great Gatsby yet), Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud. Were we living in the year 1225, our lives would’ve overlapped with those of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as both Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan. All this is laid out visually in The Big Map of Who Lived When, created earlier this year by a Reddit user called Profound_Whatever. As Big Think’s Frank Jacobswrites, the map reveals surprising instances of contemporaneousness, such as that current U.S. President Joe Biden “for about a year was alive at the same time as Nikola Tesla (1854–1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating current (AC) system that is used for distributing electricity.”
"(Back) when networks would commission a season of 22 episodes of a sitcom or drama, these rooms would often boast a dozen or more writers. … Today, with the rise of streaming platforms, studios increasingly rely on so-called mini-rooms with just four or five writers to create shows, often with fewer episodes." -
If faith in something as abstruse as literary theory seems absurd, consider a more familiar vehicle of human knowledge: the novel. As a form, “the novel” has the capacity to operate in two registers simultaneously, representing both the enormous breadth of the social world and the intricate minutiae of the individual life. - Public Books
For some, the delight of daydreaming can turn into a curse: The fantasies become such a successful form of escape that they take over the mind, becoming compulsive and preventing the dreamer from paying attention to important facets of reality—work, school, other people. - Nautilus
"Traditionally, we've thought of eye movements as a simple response to what's happening in front of us. But recent research shows that's not the whole story. Eye movements are as unique as personality traits. Some people focus more on faces, while others are drawn to text or other elements." - Medical Express
How do the offices, houses, hospitals, schools, neighbourhoods and spaces that we occupy day to day affect our health? Traditionally, our understanding of how architectural design affects the human body has centred around the transmission of communicable diseases. - Psyche
"We don’t necessarily need to repeal the laws of economics or solve Baumol’s cost disease to build as beautifully as our ancestors once did. We just need to see the world more humanistically and mystically, to regard ourselves as stewards and sub-creators once again." - The New York Times
We often joke about awkwardness; it’s a staple of contemporary comedy. The exclamation ‘Awkward!’ functions as a light-hearted deflection, defusing social tension. The reality is heavier. - Aeon
I might be overweight but I identify as slim! Especially when breakfasting at Three Blue ducks …
Václav Havel Library
New director Milan Babík acknowledges that, like American presidential libraries, the Václav Havel Library isn't a 'typical library' -- "We are civil society actors. We certainly do more than ordinary libraries do" --, and at Radio Prague International Ian Willoughby has a Q & A with him, Milan Babík: Heading Havel Library after 30 years in US.
Singapore Literature Prize
They've announced the (many) winners of this year'sSingapore Literature Prize -- impressive, because books in several languages are honored, with fiction winners in English, Chinese, Tamil, and Malay, for example. Some interesting-looking titles here, which will hopefully also find distribution abroad ..... And I am particularly curious about Shubigi Rao's Pulp-series, the third volume of which (out of a planned five) won the Creative Nonfiction in English prize.
Prime Minister's Literary Awards
They've announced the winners of this year's Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards, "the most substantial literary prize in the nation, with a tax-free prize pool of [A]$600,000". Anam, by André Dao, won the fiction category.
Czech author Daniela Hodrová has passed away; see, for example, the Novinky.cz report. The only one of her books under review at the complete review is her A Kingdom of Souls, but I have the full City of Torment (and Prague. I see a city ...) and expect to get to them.
Ehrenpreis des Österreichischen Buchhandels
They've announced the winner of this year's Honorary Prize of the Austrian Book Trade for Tolerance in Thought and Action, and it is David Grossman. They've awarded this since 1990; it has an ... interesting list of previous winners: Philippe Sands got it last year; other winners range from Simon Wiesenthal to Peter Ustinov to H.C.Artmann.
Longtime Barnes & Noble head Leonard Riggio has passed away; see, for example, Hillel Italie's AP report.
I grew up near the 105 Fifth Avenue flagship store -- before B & N became a superstore empire -- and it was a favored haunt (along with the Sales Annex across the street ...) in my teen years. The 'superstores' were, over the years, of very uneven quality, but at their best at least some of them were pretty good.
The September/October issue of World Literature Today is now out, with a feature on 'Contemporary Women's Literature in Japan' -- and, of course, the extensive book review section.
