Lamy of Memories with MT: Fascinating ride that included revolutionary GST changes...

Good luck to a wonderful Boss who has a soft spot for cats and Lamy! 

It was wonderful working with you. We'll miss your bright and cheerful face around here. Wish you much happiness in all that you pursue! Let us know where the road takes you. . .

Like the rest of the dream team, we are grateful for your many kindnesses and unwavering support during all the years that we worked with you ...

31 January 2020 AD

"How lucky we are to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” 
-A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)



“This is not a goodbye, my darling, this is a thank you.”
 -Nicholas Sparks (Lamy Message in a Bottle)

  “Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.” 
-Henry David Thoreau of East Latitude fame

20th Anniversary of the GST in Australia: Where policy meets reality of service ...

 

(My next book will be entitled " HOW TO GET TALL TOWER TO NOTICE YOU IN 2,024  EASY STEPS — PLUS TWENTY  YEARS OF YOUR LIFE." )

 

Anthony Infanti delivers a lecture on Our Taxing Selves at Pittsburgh today :

In this inaugural lecture for the Christopher C. Walthour, Sr. Professorship of Law, I reflect on my two decades of work at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in the fields of comparative tax law and critical tax theory. I connect my personal “outsider” story to these two fields, both of which themselves embrace “outsider” perspectives on the law, albeit in somewhat different senses of the word. In doing so, I draw on my most recent book, Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves (The MIT Press, 2018).

Our Selfish Tax Laws builds on my past comparative tax work by providing case studies that demonstrate the expressive function of tax law, showing how the choices made by different countries in constructing their tax laws send messages about what and whom they value that are woven into their cultural fabrics.

Diane Ring (Boston College) presents Falling Short in the Data Age (with Shu-Yi Oei (Boston College)) at Duke today as part of its Tax Policy Workshop Series hosted by Richard Schmalbeck and Lawrence Zelenak:

Humans are imperfect and do not always comply with the law, but the reality is that we are sometimes permitted to fall short of law’s requirements without consequences. This informal space to fall short and not be held accountable—which may arise from a confluence of information imperfections, resource constraints, politics, or luck—exists in addition to formal legal provisions that allow flexibility and discretion (such as tiered penalties or equitable provisions allowing leniency under specified circumstances). Fall-short spaces often pass unnoticed, but are in fact quite significant in intermediating the relationship between humans and the law.

This Article examines how the increasing access to data and information will change the availability and shape of law’s fall-short spaces. We introduce a taxonomy of how leeway arises, outlining the reasons it exists and the different ways it is deployed. Applying this taxonomy, we show how increasingly ubiquitous data and information have caused and will continue to cause the availability of leeway to contract, and we highlight the risk that we will see disparate contraction for different populations.

Stephanie R. Hoffer (Ohio State), Tax Theory and Feral AI:

This essay is a sci-fi thought experiment about the significance of personhood in income taxation, meant to explore the validity of currently prevailing justifications for the tax. Assume that the year is 2050. Developers, human or otherwise, have created non-sentient artificial intelligences (AIs) capable of transacting in digital currency. Assume, perhaps improbably, that some of these AIs are “feral.” A nonsentient AI might be feral in the future because it was never the property of a human, because it was abandoned by a human, or because it “escaped” into the wild. Imagine that non-sentient feral AIs create new value in the economy by doing things like writing, designing, securities and currency trading, planning, and 3D printing. They monetize that new economic value as active participants in the economy who sell goods or services to consumers. Intuition suggests that the value newly created by these independent economic actors should be included in the tax base and, in particular, the income tax base. Under current law, it is not.

The rise of the microinfluencer

The ranks of “influencers" are growing as the number of social media followers required to pique brands' interest shrinks. A new era of marketing is upon us, and it has upended ideas about what is an ad and who is a celebrity. Your social profiles could be next. How the Washington Post pulled off the hardest trick in journalism Columbia Journalism Review. No time to shred this today – so I leave it up to you, dear readers, to do so. The Enemies of Writing The Atlantic WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Piers Morgan responds to call for his firing for making a joke after being told there are more than 100 genders. Virginia Woolf on Why We Read and What Great Works of Art Have in Common “Our minds are all threaded together… Any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides. It is only a continuation & development of the same thing. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.”   Cold river : the cold truth of freedom / Jozef Imrich | National Library Swimming Club: ... 5 ways to swim, not sink, as part of a ‘liquid workforce’  Technology is disrupting the way we consume entertainment, the way we shop, the way we move, and the way we work. The World Economic Forum predicts significant changes to the workforce in the next 5 years.  One way that organizations can be ready is adopting the concept of a ‘liquid workforce,’ or teams that are organized so that they can rapidly adapt and change depending on their environment, actively offering skills in demand for projects at hand.  In order to fit in as a worker, individuals must: o Understand where they are: instead of focusing on your current role, focus on the skills you have, and where these can bring you. o Understand what is happening in your industry, what new skills may be required, and where you want to be when change happens. o Set your direction, and ensure lifelong learning. Make a conscious plan on how to develop new skills that keep you competitive. o In a world where long-term employer-employee relationships are disappearing, consider a portfolio career: for example, combining a corporate job with freelancing or delivering classes in your area of expertise.   Accenture, The core of a liquid workforce: the right team at the right moment

 

A new poll shows a lack of consensus on disinformation solutions

Who should be responsible for curbing the spread of disinformation? 

 

We might start by looking at who is responsible for spreading it. Those of us who follow this topic closely know there are a number of answers to that question: nefarious foreign actors, irresponsible platforms, zealous partisans, politicians who lie with impunity, people who stand to make a buck off of misinformation and social media users who get duped into passing along falsehoods.

 

That lack of a single source also explains why it is so hard to identify a solution. There’s not just one place to look.  

 

Now a new poll on disinformation reflects the difficulty people have in assigning responsibility for addressing the problem. NPR, PBS NewsHour and the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion reported this week that a poll they conducted this month showed little consensus when it asked people to choose who should have the “main responsibility” for addressing the question: 39% pointed to the media, 18% to technology companies, 15% to the government and 12% to the public.

 

This is the second poll in a year in which the largest share of respondents said the media should have the primary responsibility for reducing the flow of misinformation. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early 2019, 53% of respondents said journalists have the most responsibility to fix the problem.  

 

In the new poll, it’s worth noting the partisan breakdown of respondents who said the media holds the main responsibility. As NPR’s Brett Neely notes, it is probably not surprising that 54% of Republicans said stopping the spread of disinformation is mainly the media’s responsibility, given President Donald Trump’s repeated claim that the media traffics in “fake news.” In contrast, 29% of Democrats put the main onus on the media.

 

There is also the question of whether it is realistic to ask people to assign the main responsibility for stopping the flow of disinformation to one entity, since the problem almost certainly needs a multi-faceted solution. To address politicians who lie, the solution may be more fact-checking to hold them accountable. Platforms that turn a blind eye to dangerous misinformation may need more regulation. To help users spread less false information, we might need more news literacy programs. 

 

At least people are aware that the problem is a difficult one. In the new poll, 59% of respondents reported that it is hard to tell the difference between factual and misleading information. That recognition could be an important step in getting more accountability – regardless of who people see as “mainly” responsible.

. . . technology

• A collaborative project between The New York Times and IBM has been working to see whether blockchain technology can make it easier for news consumers to understand the provenance of online photos.
• The upshot, wrote Hanaa’ Tameez for NiemanLab, was that “they determined that a lot of things would have to change structurally about how photos work online for any solution to be widespread.”
   
• Misinformation has been rampant in China since the confirmation of a new pneumonia-causing coronavirus. “A post circulating on the popular messaging app WeChat suggested that cities where patients had fallen sick should set off fireworks to kill the disease in the air,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
• The IFCN and fact-checkers from Taiwan are having a hard time obtaining information about eight people who were arrested in the city of Wuhan earlier this month for allegedly spreading false news regarding the virus. The group was taken into custody by police forces before it became clear that the region was actually seeing an outbreak of a new fatal flu. International media hasn’t covered the case. 

. . . politics

• Judd Legum’s Popular Information reported that Facebook “is allowing a major pro-Trump super PAC, the Committee to Defend the President, to run ads with lies.” This is contrary to its policy that political action committees and advocacy groups are subject to fact-checking even though politicians and parties are not. 
• “Over the last few months, the PAC has repeatedly used Facebook to advertise false claims,” Legum wrote.
   
• Reuters, meanwhile, has put together a helpful rundown of how each of the big platforms handles false or misleading claims in political ads.

. . . the future of news

• More than 500 people from 88 countries have applied to Global Fact 7, which means the next edition of the International Fact-Checking Network’s annual summit will be the largest and the most diverse in its history. 
• This year's event, scheduled to take place in Oslo from June 24-27, will have five tracks. One will be dedicated to editorial issues. A second will focus on media literacy and training. The third will host developers and tech enthusiasts. The fourth track will be for executives, and the last one for academics. Those who are interested in presenting papers or research should submit abstracts to Oslo Metropolitan University. Applications will be open until Feb. 14.

Mexican fact-checkers from Animal Politico usually deal with false information regarding immigrants on  the country’s northern border with the United States. This week, they caught Mexican officials, including President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in a number of falsehoods involving the way Mexican National Guard troops treated migrants on the southern border.

 

Over the weekend, violence broke out when a group of about 2,000 immigrants from Honduras arrived at the border between Mexico and Guatemala at the Suchiate River, in an attempt to get to the United States. Following López Obrador’s strict orders, the troops stopped the migrants from getting into Mexico. 

 

In an interview Tuesday, López Obrador said that “no human rights had been or would be ever violated” in the region. But fact-checkers from Animal Politico displayed a collection of images showing the opposite.

 

In a series of photos taken by AFP and the photo agency Cuartoscuro, fact-checkers showed how the Mexican border patrol ran after and jumped on people who tried to cross the river. In some images, it is clear that the troops are not offering the protection that the president mentioned in his interview.

 

The Mexican government said that no one was injured in the southern border and there “was nothing to be sorry about.” The Red Cross in Guatemala, however, told Animal Politico that seven people were hurt during the conflict.

 

What we liked: Animal Politico curated photos from different sources to show its audience what actually happened in a region that is not easily accessed by regular citizens. The fact that they also searched for information in Guatemala is a plus. 

1.     An Ohio pediatrician who used TikTok to encourage people to get vaccinated was the victim of a smear campaign by the anti-vaccination movement. 

2.     A journalist and free-speech advocate in Southeast Asia argued in a New York Times op-ed that Singapore’s anti-fake news law is being used to quiet dissent.

3.     Former Vice President Joe Biden sent an open memo to the media warning it to avoid spreading disinformation pushed by Trump and his allies. 

4.     Algorithms are directing ads by American brands like Geico Insurance onto Russian disinformation sites, NewsGuard co-founder Gordon Crovitz wrote in a New York Times op-ed. 

5.     Relatedly, some of the world’s biggest companies are funding climate misinformation by advertising on YouTube, according to a study from the activist group Avaaz.

6.     Fast Company interviewed Stanford misinformation researcher Renée DiResta about misinformation trends heading into the 2020 election. 

7.     The Washington Post has updated its database of Trump falsehoods. He has made 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years in office. 

8.     USA Today is seeking one-year reporting fellows to join its politics team as part of a fact-check program. 

9.     In the days before the holiday celebrating his life, conspiracies about Martin Luther King Jr.’s death spread on social media. Daniel traced and debunked them for PolitiFact.

10.  The Tampa Bay Times debunked a Facebook rumor about sex traffickers purportedly luring motorists by lying down in roads.

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Daniel, Susan and Cristina