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Prepaying Your Property Tax? I.R.S. Cautions It Might Not Pay Off – “…The tax bill that President Trump signed into law last week sharply limited the itemized deductions for state and local taxes while raising the standard deduction for individuals and couples. Those rules do not take effect until 2018, however. That has led some …
“The richest people on earth became $1 trillion richer in 2017, more than four times last year’s gain, as stock markets shrugged off economic, social and political divisions to reach record highs. The 23 percent increase on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s 500 richest people, compares with an almost 20 …
What can machine learning do? Workforce implications. Erik Brynjolfsson and Tom Mitchell. Science 22 Dec 2017: Vol. 358, Issue 6370, pp. 1530-1534 DOI: 10.1126/science.aap8062 “Digital computers have transformed work in almost every sector of the economy over the past several decades. We are now at the beginning of an even larger and more rapid transformation …
Weak States: Causes and Consequences of the Sicilian Mafia. Daron Acemoglu, Giuseppe De Feo, and Giacomo De Luca. NBER Working Paper No. 24115. December 2017. “We document that the spread of the Mafia in Sicily at the end of the 19th century was in part shaped by the rise of socialist Peasant Fasci organizations. In …
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System: Is it legal for a business in the United States to refuse cash as a form of payment? [Useful information – I generally pay with cash and have increasingly encountered the response – we take credit/debit cards or you can use an app] “Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, …
Archival FRED Economic Data Time Travel from the St. Louis Fed’s Economic Research Division. [h/t terese mulkern, bizrefdesk] “ALFRED® allows you to retrieve vintage versions of economic data that were available on specific dates in history. In general, economic data for past observation periods are revised as more accurate estimates become available. As a result, …
– Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, December 15, 2017. “I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of extreme poverty in America undermines the …
“Without major intermediaries (cloud-based software, cloud-based document storage, etc.) to provide convenience and standards, it is necessary for industries themselves to band together to jointly develop standards and governance, thus the typically non-profit, consortium strategy. The mission of the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium is to organize and align the stakeholders in the global legal industry …
The Billion-Dollar Loophole The most generous charitable deduction in the federal tax code is being manipulated to make big profits — and there’s no sign that Congress has any intention of fixing the problem. Article by ProPublica and Fortune. “The idea seems like the perfect marriage of environmentalism and capitalism: Landowners give up their right …
Bank Systemic Risk Regulation: The $50 Billion Threshold in the Dodd-Frank Act, December 6, 2017. The 2007-2009 financial crisis highlighted the problem of “too big to fail” financial institutions—the concept that the failure of a large financial firmc ould trigger financial instability, which in several cases prompted extraordinary federal assistance to prevent their failure. This …
Among the companies we found doing it: Amazon, Verizon, UPS and Facebook itself. “It’s blatantly unlawful,” said one employment law expert. by Julia Angwin, ProPublica, Noam Scheiber, The New York Times, and Ariana Tobin, ProPublica, Dec. 20, 2017. “A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused …
PR Newswire: “Bloomberg Media and Twitter today launched TicToc by Bloomberg, the first-ever 24/7 global news network built for a social media platform that targets the next generation of on-the-go, mobile-first news consumers. TicToc by Bloomberg combines the global news gathering capabilities of Bloomberg’s 2,700 journalists and analysts across 120 countries, with the digital power …
