Chris.d.woo

Forbes: IRS Takes a Bite Out of Bitcoin, by Robert W. Wood: Bitcoin is virtual currency much in the news these days. It’s peer-to-peer so there’s no central bank or government. But if you think that means the IRS won’t get a piece, think again. The IRS already gets a...

That’s an interesting use for a soup spoon.

Samuel R. Scarcello (J.D. 2013, Northwestern), Comment, Transfer Taxes in Flux: A Comparison of Alternative Plans for GRAT Reform, 107 Nw. U. L. Rev. 321 (2012): Estate and gift taxes may be a topic of national discussion, but few Americans are familiar with the methods taxpayers utilize to minimize these...

cosmarxpolitan:

Cosmarxpolitan, Issue 1

Is constant unceasing class warfare ruining your skin?

paulftompkins:

Sherwin Williams, remember to leave an uncovered patch at the small of the Earth’s back to prevent suffocation!

See, I thought this was for the Socialist Worker’s Party. I mean it’s RED for crap’s sake!

6,297 Chinese restaurants and hungry for more:

David Chan has been collating data on Chinese restaurants since at least 1955. This is a man after my statistics-loving heart:

Chan, 64, has eaten at 6,297 Chinese restaurants (at press time) and he has documented the experiences on an Excel spreadsheet, a data-centric diary of a gastronomic journey that spans the United States and beyond.

I kind of want to take a crack at his data and see if Chinese restaurants can truly be rated by their Tomato Beef Chow Mein (as my father has maintained since the 70s) or if the lack of Orange Chicken on a menu denotes quality (as my brother believes).

kellysodope:

they grew up to be planeteers!

AHAHAHAHAHAHA! YES!

Benjamin Leff (American) presents Tax Planning for Marijuana Dealers at Harvard today as part of its Tax Policy Seminar hosted by Stephen Shay: In recent years, many states have legalized marijuana while the federal government continues to consider all marijuana sales and use illegal. But marijuana industry insiders consider not...

Miniatures for use in roleplaying don't need to be beautifully polished and detailed. It's nice if they are, but there's nothing stopping you using any old lump of plastic, or spare dice, or even cheese-flavoured snacks to represent various characters or machines on the tabletop.

In fact, you don't need miniatures at all. You don't need to spend time scouring hobby shops for model kits, modifying character figures to customise them with the right gear, or bashing together disparate parts form multiple sources to produce that perfect model. You can just get by imagining the layout of combat scenes in your head. But where's the fun in that?

So this is an autonomous rocket that flies 250 meters into the air, hovers for a bit, and then lands — which is a mean feat of technical engineering. It’s the SpaceX Grasshopper, a tech demonstrator that will hopefully one day lead to a near fully reusable Falcon-derived rocket. I’m always excited to see new work from SpaceX, since they always seem to be pushing the envelope.

Also the song’s not bad either.

Reddit, Boston and the Missing Student:

When crowdsourcing goes wrong.

A good read about how insane some corners of the Internet get whenever there’s a news story that wants to “beat” the mainstream media — or even government investigators — to the punch and how it can go completely wrong.

Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt | Next New Deal:

For some background information on this article way back in 2010 while austerity was already being bandied about as the solution to the European Debt Crisis (and America’s own not-as-bad government debt quasi-crisis) a paper written by two Harvard professors argued that high debt was caused low growth. This was an incredible boon to pro-austerity factions and has been incredibly influential on American (mostly Republican) politicians.

In progressive circles — for instance in articles written by Paul Krugman — the paper was seen as problematic.  Some felt the authors of the paper overstated the relationship while others believed that the causal relationship was the reverse, i.e. that a poor economy will naturally boost government debt as a result of automatic stabilizing mechanisms like unemployment payments.

Enter UMass grad student Thomas Herndon.  Herndon asked and received the original dataset and ran the numbers himself.  Along with two faculty advisers, Herndon wrote a paper criticizing the paper for its poor statistical rigor.  Among other things, missing data and improver statistical methods appear to have skewed the data in a way that bolstered austerity arguments.

Now comes this blog post by an assistant econ professor at Amherst.  He took the dataset provided by Herndon and ran his own analysis that suggests that actually declining economic growth leads to increased government debt.  Importantly, this is a reverse of the causality proposed by the Harvard paper.

With a week of the regular tax season to go (I’m not forgetting about those extensions), spammers and schemers have upped their game. I’ve received a number of notifications about my tax refund via email (four today alone)… only I’m not getting a tax refund. And the bigger tip-off: the IRS wouldn’t send a notification about a potential problem or unexpected refund via email.

The latest one looks like this:

If you read it carefully, you can tell pretty quickly that it’s a fake. There are a few variations on a theme circulating, too, and they all say pretty much the same thing. Clearly, the spammers are hoping that you won’t read carefully. So be smart.

Remember that the IRS will never initiate contact with you via email. You won’t receive an audit notice or request for additional information via email. These emails are intended to either harvest information from you in order to steal your identity or they may contain malware or spyware.

You know the drill. Don’t click, just delete. You can also forward to phishing@irs.gov to report the email as abusive.

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