Posts Tagged ‘taxes’
Weekend Links!
* Big fair use decision: specific commentary on the original work is not required for a fair use defense.
* Finding common ground with Senator Coburn: To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude major professional sports leagues from qualifying as tax-exempt organizations.
* Gasp! Many students stay away from online courses in subjects they deem especially difficult or interesting, according to a study released this month by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The finding comes just as many highly selective colleges are embracing online learning and as massive open online courses are gaining popularity and standing.
* “What we’re saying is that bargain-basement (clothing) is automatically leading towards these types of disasters,” John Hilary, executive director at British charity War on Want, told Reuters.
* Bad Robot will adapt 11/22/63.
* Canada gets it right: “The legal test for a true volunteer arrangement looks at several factors, but merely agreeing to work without pay does not in itself make you a volunteer,” Ministry of Labour spokesperson Jonathon Rose wrote in an email. See also Natalia Cecire:
Like the hypothetical minimum-wage high schooler whose income serves as pocket money, non-essential and destined for “fun,” the youthful volunteer, who may very well intrinsically enjoy the work, authorizes a category of labor exploitation that is not only okay but also okay to take as the norm for the labor of cultural preservation. “I can get you a twenty-year-old!” is, in that sense, not a labor solution but its opposite: a commitment to the norm that this work will be unpaid.
* Whitewashing and manwashing cinema.
* Mother Jones profiles the great Tig Notaro.
* What BP Doesn’t Want You to Know About the 2010 Gulf Spill.
* And 66 behind-the-scenes photos from the filming of The Empire Strikes Back.
Tuesday Afternoon!
* PSA from Charlie Stross: Ignore the news.
Just a brief reminder that news is bad for you. No, seriously: publicly available news media in the 21st century exist solely to get eyeballs on advertisements. That is its only real purpose. The real news consists of dull but informative reports circulated by consultancies giving in-depth insight into what’s going on. The sort of stuff you find digested in the inside pages of The Economist. All else is comics. As there’s an arms race going on between advertising sales departments, the major news outlets are constantly trying to make their product more addictive. And like most other addictive substance, news is a depressant, one fine-tuned to make you keep coming back for more.
* As if you needed a reason: Tetris may treat PTSD.
* Inequality and the New York City subway.
* Why you can’t have nice things: pro-austerity economicists are liars or incompetents (take your pick). How Much Unemployment Was Caused by Reinhart and Rogoff’s Arithmetic Mistake? It’s great that when challenged they retreat to the more defensible claim that their work is actually irrelevant, but many policymakers and pundits seem to feel otherwise.
* “What companies like is just-in-time learning that gives somebody a skill they need at the time they need it,” says Mark Allen, a Pepperdine University business professor and author of The Next Generation of Corporate Universities. ”What traditional universities do to a large extent is just-in-case learning.”
* Our bubble-headed, zombie-creating reliance on high-stakes testing.
And contrary to the claims of test-makers, the tests aren’t getting better. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, they’re getting worse.
* Universities Need to Innovate, But Put Down the Sledgehammer.
* The birth of critical university studies.
* The Chronicle profiles David Graeber as academic in exile.
* Software to detect student plagiarism is faced with renewed criticism from the faculty members who may confront more plagiarism than do most of their colleagues – college writing professors.
* Lost Generation: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment.
* Is nothing sacred? NC governor takes aim at addiction on campus.
* New App Prevents Icelanders from Sleeping With their Relatives.
* And your 2012 tax receipt. Enjoy those fighter jets!
Even More Tuesday Links
* “More toyetic”: The cast and crew of Batman and Robin explain what went wrong.
* Preposterously bad idea watch: Breaking Bad Spin-Off With Saul Goodman In The Works. Has to be a very dry joke on Vince Gilligan’s part.
* What is the political situation in the Mario universe? It is a never-ending condition of war within and war without, fraught and constantly changing as one faction or another vies for control, riven along racial and ideological fault-lines and held together only by the intervention of foreign interlopers, propping up the dominant superpower and whose ultimate motivations are shrouded in secrecy.
* Kim Stanley Robinson on postcapitalism.
* A much larger revenue stream comes from federal student loans—$108,641,000 in 2011. In 2010, NYU had $659 million in total student debt, a figure bigger than the gross domestic product of twelve countries, and it is a national leader in the debt carried by its graduates, at 40 percent more than the national average. According a recent Newsweek ranking, NYU is now the fourth “Least Affordable School” in the United States. And in the latest Princeton Review college rankings, its financial aid and administration ranked first—for being the worst. The projected $5 billion expansion plan is certain to increase the student debt burden. Most of current student loans are federal money, so we can add these on to the public inputs received by this private university at a time when public universities are being put to the sword.
* For Full-Time Instructors, Work Off the Tenure Track Has Become Its Own Career.
* Reframing the statement “don’t go to graduate school” to one that fully addresses the attack on tenure helps us to see and recognize each other, and our labor. I think it also helps us to identify new partners who might be able and interested in challenging or modulating some of the forces at work in educational restructuring.
* Rebecca Schuman responds to her critics, and a critic responses to the response.
* North Carolina seeks to criminalize muckraking of animal abuse while doing nothing about animal abuse. Outstanding.
* Guess Who Waits Longest to Vote? You’ll never guess!
* Authorities are still investigating how the younger child obtained the .22-caliber rifle: New Jersey 4-year-old shoots 6-year-old neighbor in the head.
* Ringling Bros. Elephant Shot in Mississippi Drive-By.
* Taxodus: the tax avoidance game.
* Why Bitcoin “millionaires” could accidentally become tax felons.
* And I think I remember this movie: Lockheed Martin Harnesses Quantum Technology.
Tuesday Links
* “‘The best way to interview is nonpregnant and ringless,’” that respondent said, adding she was only able to land a job after she kept her family secret during the interview process.
* Cheating on a quiz I can understand, but cheating in a quiz bowl? Oh, Harvard.
* Mad Men characters reimagined as Muppets.
* Ideology and fact-checking at the New Yorker.
As I pointed out in “Anderson Fails at Arithmetic,” this allegation misleads the reader in two ways. Inequality has been reduced enormously under Chávez, using its standard measure, the Gini coefficient. So one can hardly say that in this aspect, Venezuela remains the “same as ever.” Making Anderson’s contention even worse is the fact that Venezuela is the most equal country in Latin America, according to the United Nations. Anderson’s readers come away with exactly the opposite impression.
* The Jobs Crisis at Our Best Law Schools Is Much, Much Worse Than You Think: At some top tier schools, more than a fifth of students are underemployed.
* Investigators say Wilson County Deputy Daniel Fanning on Saturday was showing his weapons to a relative in a bedroom of his Lebanon home when the toddler came in and picked up a gun off the bed. Sheriff Robert Bryan says the weapon discharged, hitting 48-year-old Josephine Fanning. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
* High school students in Newark will walk out of classes today at noon, marching to Rutgers Law School to attend a State Assembly budget hearing on education funding.
* Marvel Phase 3: Ant-Man and Doctor Strange.
Thursday Links
* North Carolina update: holy smokes. I mean really. I mean really.
* This is quite incredible. Even if a college uses all of its extra tuition revenue to increase the financial aid it awards, that money is not, on average, being used for low-income students. Instead, it’s used to attract other students the college wants.
* Between 2004 and 2012, NYU added 25 more administrators than faculty. Amateurs.
* Sweating the Details of a MOOC in Progress.
* Alas, Iain Banks. Just terrible. A tribute at Salon. And another at the Guardian.
* Exxon’s Duck-Killing Pipeline Won’t Pay Taxes To Oil Spill Cleanup Fund.
* A first-time narcotics offender, father to three, sold pain pills to a friend. His punishment: 25 years in prison. It’s just the latest evidence that U.S. drug policy is madness.
* In New York City, nearly 90 percent of the people arrested for marijuana possession are blacks and Latinos. In Chicago in recent years, only five percent of the people arrested for possession were whites. In many cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, police have arrested blacks for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites, and Latinos at three to four times the rate of whites. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, where 90 percent of the residents are blacks and Latinos, the marijuana arrest rate is 150 times higher than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Mayor Bloomberg lives where the 90 percent of residents are white.
* Presenting the absolute worst person in the world.
* What could possibly go wrong? Nonprofit that ‘Empowers Neighborhoods’ By Handing Out Free Guns is Coming to Dallas.
* Good news everyone! The LAPD is researching precrime.
* May 26th shall forever be known as Arrested Development Day.
* Robot finds accidental haiku in the New York TImes.
* And your historic grassroots insurgency successfully managed to keep Hillary Clinton from becoming president…for eight years. Mission accomplished.
Sunday Night Links
* Pay student athletes: Louisville’s Kevin Ware suffers gruesome leg injury. Will Ware be stuck with the bill?
Louisville sophomore Kevin Ware’s injury today in the Midwest Regional finals of the NCAA tournament will likely be remembered alongside Joe Theismann’s career-ender as one of the most tragically gruesome in sports history. But that’s not the only tragic and gruesome part of this episode, because unlike Theismann, who was working under a guaranteed contract, Ware was an NCAA athlete helping to generate millions of dollars for the NCAA, but not even guaranteed a four-year education scholarship. As in so many other similar cases, that means his injury in service to the NCAA’s multimillion-dollar machine could spell the end of his financial aid and massive healthcare bills to boot.
* Why conservatives hate college.
* The hunt for Herman Melville.
* From the comments on this New York Times piece on the forgotten legacy of slavery in American capitalism: During college at UNC I studied slavery often in my English major classes but it was never mentioned during an Economics course.
* The idea that men are naturally more interested in sex than women is ubiquitous that it’s difficult to imagine that people ever believed differently. And yet for most of Western history, from ancient Greece to beginning of the nineteenth century, women were assumed to be the sex-crazed porn fiends of their day.
* Is it fair to force low-income children to bear the burden of fiscal adjustment? According to data available on the economist Emmanuel Saez’s invaluable Web site, from 1993 to 2011, average real income for the bottom 99 percent of the population (by income) rose by 5.8 percent, while the top 1 percent experienced real income growth of 57.5 percent. The top 1% captured 62% of all income growth over this period, partly owing to a sharp rise in returns to higher education in recent decades. (On average, those with only a high school education or less have few good income prospects.)
* The angels have lost their desire for us: Hurricane Sandy has cost Ocean and Monmouth counties more than $5 billion in property taxes tax ratables. (ED: Whoops.)
* BREAKING: Everything got worse in 1981.
* The Los Angeles Review of Books considers George R. R. Martin.
* Brian K. Vaughn teases Under the Dome.
* There’s got to be a better way! Scenes from infomercials.
* And just because: How to make a “Bells of St. John” wifi name.
Thursday Night Links
* The New York Times has a pretty devastating retort to Tesla’s critique of their reporting.
* Low-Income Students Should Be Able to Graduate Debt-Free, Report Says.
* Why Employers Won’t Fire People If We Raise The Minimum Wage To $9. But the picture isn’t all rosy:
1. Improving efficiency. An increase in the minimum wage may lead employers to encourage employees to work harder, since they’re now being paid more. Such an adjustment may be preferable to “cutting employment (or hours) because employer actions that reduce employment can ‘hurt morale and engender retaliation.’” A review of 81 fast-food restaurants in Georgia and Alabama found that “90 percent of managers indicated that they planned to respond to the minimum-wage increase with increased performance standards such as ‘requiring a better attendance and on-time record, faster and more proficient performance of job duties, taking on additional tasks, and faster termination of poor performers.’”
Only the brutal immiseration of low-wage workers can save us now!
* Netanyahu said Iran was 3-5 years away from nuclear capability– back in ’95!
* Facebook Paid No Corporate Income Tax Last Year, After Making More Than $1 Billion In Profits. I know, I know: Facebook makes money?
* FreedomWorks outdoes itself. Wow.
* And via @zunguzungu: The future of higher education. It simply couldn’t be clearer.
$127 Billion
If we took the state and federal money already being spent on providing higher education and the state and federal money that is lost each year due to higher education tax credits, deductions, and shelters, we could make public higher education free for millions of Americans. Via @zunguzungu.
Why Hasn’t Somebody Made Sunday Reading an Internet Tradition?
* Less than 24 hours after last night’s Powerball drawing, reports confirmed that the two winners of the $587 million jackpot are both already divorced from their respective spouses, alienated from their friends and families, and completely bankrupt.
* Calvin and Hobbes search engine. Get it before it’s DCMA’d!
* Vandana Singh interviews Ted Chiang.
Finally, can you tell us something about what you’re working on now?
I don’t want to talk too much about what I’m working on, so I’ll just say that it’s a story about memory and the written word.
Sold!
* Kurt Vonnegut’s term paper prompt.
As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”
* Another round of analysis from Yves Smith on the Rolling Jubilee tax issue.
If Rolling Jubilee’s tax position is incorrect, the consequences would be ugly. In many cases, the people it claimed it was helping would be worse off than if it had done nothing.
The forgiven debt would be treated as taxable income. If the individual is a non-taxpayer (as in has too little income) the debt forgiveness could push them into owning taxes, and for anyone who was a taxpayer in the year the debt was forgiven, would result in additional taxes owed.
The worst of this is that in many cases, the debt forgiven by OWS would be invalid debt: past the statute of limitations, discharged in bankruptcy, disputed, paid off but for some reason not removed from a bank’s systems. In these cases, if Rolling Jubilee’s tax view turns out to be incorrect, the borrower will be considerably worse off, since he could have disputed the invalid debt (and debt collectors tend to roll easily) but will now have to disprove the validity of the debt to the IRS. The result is that this shifts the burden of proof: in debt collection matters, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff, the debt collector, to demonstrate the validity of the debt and the amount owed. In disputes with the IRS, the burden of proof is with the taxpayer.
In addition, even if Strike Debt is correct in its gift argument, it would in some cases owe gift taxes. It does not appear prepared for this eventuality. Nor would winning on the gift question save it from running afoul of the private benefit question. Even a gift to an individual is a private benefit. If it were to lose its 501 (c)(4) status, Rolling Jubilee would owe additional taxes and penalties.
* Rejected jokes submitted to a kids’ jokes site.
* Thomas Jefferson: American Fascist? The third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite. And the very worst thing you’ll read today:
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
* A growing if largely invisible community hard-hit by Sandy faces a unique challenge: Undocumented immigrants must get help to fix illegal apartments.
* The Sports Tax That Everyone Pays.
* People on the Internet are going to have to start self-diagnosing themselves with something else: Asperger’s Dropped As Separate Condition From DSM-V.
* And the mint is considering eliminating $1 bills entirely. Yes, again!
Tuesday Night Links
* Nation’s Uncles Enter Last Stage Of Prep For Thursday’s Thanksgiving Debates.
WASHINGTON—Sequestered in their homes today to review talking points on a range of topics from gay marriage to Gaza to the wisdom of purchasing a hybrid car, the nation’s uncles have reportedly entered their final stages of preparation for Thursday’s highly anticipated sit-down Thanksgiving dinner debates. “Now, now—now Bob—Bob!—you can’t just go saying… Hold on—you can’t just go saying that without considering the consequences,” said the loudmouth contrarians, talking into their mirrors as they vigorously rehearsed various interruptions and smug denunciations on subjects such as political bias in the media and whether or not underage nephews should be allowed to have a few sips of wine on a holiday. “If you thought about—thank you, Mary, it was delicious—if you thought about the consequences for one second, you’d realize how completely wrong that plan is. That’s exactly what these congressmen think, and that’s why we’re headed off a fiscal cliff. You see?” Sources confirmed the nation’s uncles are drafting their closing remarks around the theme of how the crust on the pumpkin pie could be “a little flakier.”
* 21 Pictures that Sum Up the Whole History of Science Fiction.
* Astronomers discover a planet so massive it defies classification.
* Forty years from now, America will be twice as rich on average as we are today. But most of that wealth will go to the very richest households. We only have a budget crisis if they refuse to pay higher taxes.
* And there goes my absolute last shred of hope for humanity: It’s almost impossible to believe, but authorities along the northern Gulf of Mexico are having to investigate a rash of violent attacks on dolphins after bodies were found with gunshot wounds, cuts, and missing tails.
All the Midweek Links
* Both In Focus and The Big Picture visit the 2012 Paralympics.
* Michelle Obama did great last night, but the story of a sick little girl named Zoey whose ability to live was saved by the ACA hits a bit closer to home.
* Who’s going to be the lesser evil in 2012 2008 2004 2000 1996 1992 1988 1984 1980 1976 1972 1968?
* On reporting poverty. Related: Melissa Harris-Perry talks poverty on MSNBC.
* Mitch Hurwitz Talks to Vulture About Reviving Arrested Development.
* The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block.” These results have since been confirmed.
* The real affirmative action: Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.
* How many people have died because Walter White got cancer? And a Breaking Bad Fermi problem: What is a good approximation of how much money Skyler had in the storage unit when she showed Walt how she stopped counting it?
* A portrait of David Foster Wallace as a midwestern author. And more. Words David Foster Wallace’s Mom Invented.
* Report: Student Debt Is Holding Back The Housing Recovery. Are you interested in student debt now, old people?
* In North Carolina, Obama’s 2008 Victory Was Ahead of Schedule.
* Getting spicy: Hacker Group Claims to Have Romney’s Tax Returns.
* BREAKING: Rachel Carson Didn’t Kill Millions of Africans.
* BREAKING: Social Security Administration to arm illegal immigrants with hollow-point bullets to murder taxpayers. Wake up, sheeple! The truth is out there.
* Erin DiMeglio is a third-string high-school quarterback.
* And for the kids: How We Got to Mars. The lives of the cosmonauts. HTML5 Map of the Firefly ‘Verse. And a lost interview with Ray Bradbury:
Sunday Night Links
* Famous movies, behind the scenes.
* Austerity doesn’t work, Iceland edition.
* Time to Get Angry Again: All About Pussy Riot.
* Missouri’s next senator, ladies and gentlemen.
Senate Candidate and Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) told a local television station on Sunday that “legitimate rape” rarely produces pregnancy because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Akin cited conversations with unnamed doctors for the bizarre claim.
Nate Silver says there’s hope this lunacy could erase Akin’s lead overnight. Growing Number Of Conservatives Call On Akin To Withdraw After ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comments.
* Elsewhere in American politics: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.” I mean really.
* The headline reads, “Inmates forced into Gladiator-style fighting by St. Louis jail guards.” WHAT THE HELL AMERICA.
* College Degrees Cost 1,120 Percent More Than They Did 30 Years Ago.
* At home with Alison Bechdel.
* The birth of critical university studies.
* Lenin’s Tomb tries to split the baby on Assange.
* More Mitt Romney tax return follies: he still hasn’t released his full returns for 2010. And another why-won’t-he-just-release-them theory: voter fraud!
* A Lesson Is Learned but The Damage Is Irreversible is coming back. Amazing.
* When Robert Wood Jr. disappeared in a densely forested Virginia park, searchers faced the challenge of a lifetime. The eight-year-old boy was autistic and nonverbal, and from his perspective the largest manhunt in state history probably looked like something else: the ultimate game of hide-and-seek.
* The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin.
Over the years, Bourdin had insinuated himself into youth shelters, orphanages, foster homes, junior high schools, and children’s hospitals. His trail of cons extended to, among other places, Spain, Germany, Belgium, England, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Bosnia, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia, France, Sweden, Denmark, and America. The U.S. State Department warned that he was an “exceedingly clever” man who posed as a desperate child in order to “win sympathy,” and a French prosecutor called him “an incredible illusionist whose perversity is matched only by his intelligence.” Bourdin himself has said, “I am a manipulator. . . . My job is to manipulate.”
More from MeFi.
* And Sir Patrick Stewart, soliloquy on the letter B. I almost feel better.
