What I'm Reading 2/24/2020 - Taxes, Taxes, Taxes!

Books

Network Forensics Tracking Hackers Through Cyberspace

Worlds by Joe Haldeman

Wired for War by P.W. Singer -

We are on the cusp of a massive shift in military technology that threatens to make real the stuff of I, Robot and The Terminator. Blending historical evidence with interviews of an amaz­ing cast of characters, Singer shows how technology is changing not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and the ethics that surround war itself. Travelling from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to modern-day "skunk works" in the midst of suburbia, Wired for War will tantalise a wide readership, from military buffs to policy wonks to gearheads.

Blogs / News  

Reuters -  Japan criticizes U.S. digital tax proposal at G20 -

Japanese finance minister Taro Aso criticized on Sunday a U.S. tax reform proposal that he said could undermine global efforts to agree new rules on taxing big tech companies.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD) is developing rules to make digital companies pay tax where they do business, rather than where they register subsidiaries - a move that was broadly endorsed by finance leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies on Sunday. 

Reuters - No global digital tax by end-2020 would mean chaos: France -

Failure to reach a global deal on where and how much to tax digital giants such as Google (GOOGL.O), Amazon (AMZN.O) or Facebook (FB.O) would result in many digital tax regimes emerging all over the world, France’s Finance Minister said on Sunday. 

It would also likely trigger U.S. retaliatory tariffs, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters, underscoring Washington’s determination to thwart tax rules planned by France and other countries if no global deal is reached. 

The Margins - The risk of distributing risk -

Which brings us back to the Lambda ISAs. At first glance, it doesn't seem that slimy for Lambda to be selling off the ISAs to a specialized marketplace. If there are people with more specialized risk appetites, why not let them buy these up? It almost necessarily means you can bring in more students because Lambda is now taking in cash up front, and not bearing the associated risks. More people learning to code!

But once again, it's the incentives. If Lambda owns the ISA, they own the risk. It's how they marketed themselves forever (this is from 2018): (Clipped)

...

The moment Lambda started selling off the contracts, their incentives completely flipped. Their income was then derived from generating ISAs, meaning, the more, the better. Enroll as many students as possible. Of course, if no one ends up getting jobs, investors will eventually stop buying the Lambda ISAs, but that would all happen a long ways down the road.

 Security Affairs - Dragos Report: Analysis of ICS flaws disclosed in 2019 -

According to a report published by Dragos, the experts analyzed 438 ICS vulnerabilities that were reported in 212 security advisories, 26% of advisories is related to zero-day flaws.

The experts determined 116 unique types of flaws, the most common were improper input validation, stack-based buffer overflow, cross-site scripting (XSS), the use of hardcoded credentials, and uncontrolled resource consumption (i.e. DoS) issues.

Newsweek - New Bill Would Give Nearly Every Californian $1,000 a Month, Similar to Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend Plan -

The longshot Yang campaign garnered a surprising amount of support and his UBI proposal popularized the idea to an unprecedented degree. Yang dubbed the payments offered by his plan "Freedom Dividends," which would have mirrored the Low plan in giving most U.S. adults $1,000 per month.

Critics of Yang's plan are likely to have similar critiques of Low's proposal. Funding the program with a value-added tax has been blasted by some who believe such a tax would disproportionately burden the poor. Concerns have also been raised over potentially forcing people to choose between UBI and other existing public assistance programs.