Category: ECP Educational CyberPlayGround

Mark Twain Knows What Putin Really Wants

What Putin Really Wants Russia’s strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He’s really just a gambler who won big.

Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. Victor Minin, who has close ties to Russian intelligence, runs hacking competitions at universities all over Russia—his way, he says, of preparing future generations.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/

As Samuel Clemens cultivated his career as a successful writer and lecturer, he became more keenly aware of world politics. His attitude toward Russian monarchy shifted. Although he had devoted little attention to Russian politics between 1867 and 1881, a reading he delivered at the Hartford Monday Evening Club on March 22, 1886 indicates his opinion of the Russian aristocracy changed:

Power, when lodged in the hands of man, means oppression — insures oppression: it means oppression always: … give it to the high priest of the Christian Church in Russia, the Emperor, and with a wave of his hand he will brush a multitude of young men, nursing mothers, gray headed patriarchs, gently young girls, like so many unconsidered flies, into the unimaginable hells of his Siberia, and go blandly to his breakfast, unconscious that he has committed a barbarity …(2).

Clemens’s original manuscript indicates he was much more vehement in his call for assassination of the Czar than his published version. He urges Russian mothers to teach their children:

When you grow up, knife a Romanoff wherever you find him, loyalty to these cobras is treason to the nation; be a patriot, not a prig – set the people free (22).
http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/revolution.html#ref22

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INFLUENCE OF GEORGE KENNAN

A continued hardening of Clemens’s attitude against the Russian aristocracy, and indeed most of America’s, can be traced to a series of articles commissioned by Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.
http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/revolution.html

Boston Daily Globe, December 25, 1890, p. 3 CHRISTMAS GREETINGS … Mark Twain It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage, may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, escape [sic] the inventor of the telephone. MARK TWAIN. Hartford, Dec. 23

http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/DarkestRussiaPosterLOC.jpg

Arizona State University: Fighting fake photos, one social stream at a time. “In 1855, an English photographer named Roger Fenton traveled to Crimea to document the war there. British troops dubbed one spot on the Sevastopol peninsula the ‘valley of death’ because it was under constant shelling. Fenton photographed the spot, a shallow defile littered with cannonballs. The photo (above), titled ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death,’ became famous as one of the first and most well-known images of war. The problem is it’s faked.”

#Loophole that allows @jeffBezos #Amazon get away with NO #TAXES

Jeff Bezos 2018 Richest billionaire on the list

Jeff Bezos  – Amazon –  $112 billion doesn’t pay taxes

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/03/06/jeff-bezos-unseats-bill-gates-forbes-2018-richest-billionaires-list/398877002/

and he uses Philanthropy for more tax write offs.

Davos 2019: Historian Rutger Bregman berates billionaires at World Economic Forum over tax avoidance

Trump tax cuts to surge debt past 90% of GDP by 2024, says IMF report

Why This ‘Patriotic’ Millionaire Wants to Raise Taxes on the Rich | NowThis

BUSINESS, BANKS, POLITICIANS HAVE BUILT A 170 BILLION DOLLAR TAX HAVEN

Historian Rutger Bregman
Industry had to “stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes”, he said, and cited the high tax regime of 1950s America as an example to disprove arguments by business people at Davos such as Michael Dell that economies with high personal taxation could not succeed. “That’s it,” he says. “Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”
Winnie Byanyima, an Oxfam executive director, took up the fight and said high employment was not a good thing in itself because many people found themselves in exploitative work. She cited the example of poultry workers in the US who had to wear nappies (diapers) because they were not allowed toilet breaks.
“That’s not a dignified job,” she said. “those are the jobs we’ve been told about, that globalisation is bringing jobs. The quality of the jobs matter. In many countries workers no longer have a voice.
Addressing Goldman, she said: “You’re counting the wrong things. You’re not counting dignity of people. You’re counting exploited people.”
Billions of dollars were leaked by tax avoidance every year which should instead be going to alleviate poverty in the developing world, she added.
#Davos
#WorldEconomicForum
#RutgerBregman

“The vast majority of Americans for years and years now … including Fox News viewers and including Republicans are in favor of higher taxes on the rich — higher inheritance taxes, higher top marginal tax rates, higher wealth taxes — it’s all really mainstream,” Bregman said. “But no one’s saying that at Davos just as no one’s saying that on Fox News. And the explanation for that’s quite simple, it’s that most of the people in Davos, as well as most of the people on this channel, have been bought by the billionaire class. You’re not meant to say these things.”

1993  politician paid policy initiative to constrain CEO pay was actually a loophole to not pay taxes.

1993, Bill Clinton and congressional Democrats tried to stop the growing pay inequality of Reagan-era America — Section 162(m) of the US Tax Code.

“Revenue that is paid out to employees as salaries and benefits is not profits, and thus doesn’t get taxed. But section 162(m) created an exception to that rule — any salary of over $1 million paid to top executives would not be deductible for tax purposes.

This was supposed to stop  outrageous 1% executive compensation packages.

Except there was an exception to the exception

compensation that took the form of stock options or stock grants would still be deductible and

the loophole incentivize companies to use a lot of stock-based compensation for their executives.

WHAT STOCK BYBACK ACTUALLY MEANS

A company like AMAZON could give stock-based compensation by taking money out of Jeff Bezos’ bank account and  using it to buy back shares on the open market and pay his executives with shares but no… that would involve using his real money.

Any company,  just churns out shares of their  stock anytime it wants to, kind of like an ICO of some cryptocurrency. This costs Amazon shareholders (or holders of andy crypto) where creating new shares  devalues the existing ones, but it doesn’t really cost the company anything at all.

What a game!

This policy loop hole allowed AMAZON to get away with NO  corporate income tax in 2018 despite the huge surge in profits.

AMAZON got away without paying any tax by giving executives stock-based compensation packages  and the

Securities and Exchange Commission form 10(k) shows it recorded about $1 billion in deductions for stock-based compensation

eliminating what would otherwise have been a non-zero tax liability.

and

  1. research and development tax credit
  2. Trump tax bill included a temporary provision allowing companies to take a 100 percent tax deduction for investment in equipment.

  3. 2018 is the fact that companies can deduct the cost of stock-based compensation from their taxable earnings even though it doesn’t actually cost companies any money to hand out shares of their own stock to employees. The more your share price rises, the bigger the deduction for handing out shares.

see

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► Nicholas C. Zakas on Twitter:
“Mom: Dad said you invented a thing? ESLint?
Me: Yes.
Mom: What is it?
Me: It finds and fixes problems in JavaScript.
Mom: Huh. Do people use it?
Me: Basically everyone writing JS.
Mom: How much did you make on it?
Me: Nothing.
Mom: I don’t understand your industry.
Me: Me either.”

► Open Collective @opencollect
Organizing the Internet generation, one community at a time.

► Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

► Bryce Weiner “The true financial power of cryptocurrencies aren’t in the limited supplies which drive market volatility, but in the ability to mint your own money. That’s what “being your own bank” really means.”

► Hacker Fantastic “2,982 bitcoin miners exposed to the Internet, have factory default credentials of “root/root” and an insecure unsigned firmware update process… this is going to end in tears

► Wikipedia’s Larry Sanger Joins Blockchain Startup to Disrupt His Own Creation

► World War II’s Best Codebreaker Was a Woman Elizebeth Smith Friedman

►Shodan is the world’s first search engine for Internet-connected device  Antminer

►  Tim Bray · Google Memory Loss is ongoing – google isn’t coughing it up anymore / they don’t waste their effort going back to get what you are looking for – this has become the worst search engine to use.