Month: February 2015

I’m always pleased when campaigners about tax avoidance manage to find concrete examples of what they want changed. It takes a lot more knowledge and work, but is much more likely to have some impact in legislation.

So it’s great that 38 degrees have zoomed in hedge fund managers claiming their income as capital gains rather than wages. This not only gives them a lower tax rater, but makes it easier for them to claim numerous exemptions. The end result can be tax of just 12.7%.

Last week they released a report on the topic. It’s written by my friend Mike Lewis, and estimates the tax cost of this ‘loophole’ at £700 million per year.

38 degrees’ proposed solution is to explicitly treat payments to private equity employees as salary. That’s probably the right position for them to take — it’s a good change that might plausibly be implemented.

Personally, though, I’d prefer a much more radical change. It’s abhorrent to tax labour so much more highly than capital. This is something that brings out my inner socialist. The low rate of capital gains tax just shows that the system is rigged in favour of capitalists and against workers.

I’m an immense fan of Eliot Higgins’ work, reporting on conflicts by correlating publicly-available satellite images against youtube videos and social media. It’s stunning just how much you can find out, and how few people are doing so.

This report, also summarized in the Guardian, is a case in point.

They are trying to verify claims of Russian artillery firing over the border into Ukraine, last summer.

They use google maps to look at the craters left by shelling:

From a crater, you can tell roughly which direction the attack came. Doing this when you’re on the ground is fairly straightforward, and many soldiers are trained in “crater analysis”. Doing it from satellite photos is a bit shakier, but with 800+ craters on the photo, you can get some idea.

You take a crater image like this:

compare it to a model from a US military manual:

and decide that the gun was somewhere off to the north-east.

Do this with all the craters you can find, to give you an overall picture of the direction(s) the fire came from. Then trace the route back on google maps. With luck, you’ll find some trace of the firing positions on the map:

In this case, it turns out that the guns were fired from inside Russia. QED.

Some people have quibbled about the reliability of aerial-only impact analysis. And, looking at (roughly) the same images as Bellingcat, I can’t always see enough marks to agree with their analysis for every crater. The general pattern is compelling, though, as is the match between craters, tracks in the firing areas, and youtube videos. Overall, though, this is a far clearer analysis than anything else out there, either in the media or being reported by NGOs. And they are almost unique in including enough information that, if you want, you can repeat their process step by step and confirm their conclusions

It’s ten years to the day since Hunter S Thompson obliterated himself in the most American way, with a shotgun to the head.

Whenever I reread his books, I’m struck by how he was so much more than the crazed self-destructive hedonist of myth. He was constantly trying to understand his world, and above all to make sense of America. Even

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

is subtitled

A savage journey to the heart of the American Dream

. It’s a topic he keeps coming round to, especially in his diary of the ’72 presidential campaign which re-elected Nixon.

Above all, there’s a constant sense of dashed optimism, from someone who had seen the birth of a culture he believed in, then watched it be destroyed in infacy by the counter-revolution of a heartless mainstream. Here’s one of many passages where he laments that death:

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant….

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened….There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda….You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.


So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high—water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I’ve been enjoying this series of lectures on Surrealism, given by Dawn Ades at Oxford a few years back.

Among other things, it’s nice to have my fondness for surrealism validated by an Important Person. Because whenever I bring it up around Serious Art People, they tend to react with patronising disdain, much as though I’d just said ABBA were my favourite band.

Better, though, is the attention Ades gives to the surrealist journals, I love it when artists try to explain what they are doing, and it sounds like the surrealists did so more thoroughly and with less bullshit than just about any other art movement out there.

A couple of petitions that are simultaneously hilarious and serious. First, to make tampons VAT-free by classifying them as essential items:

The Government taxes sanitary products but not crocodile steaks. If you value the functioning of those who menstruate at least as much as you enjoy your crocodile Friday then sign our petition and join our campaign

Then, there are a various petitions trying to prevent a planned Margaret Thatcher museum receiving any public money. It all feels a bit silly since nobody powerful is talking about using public funding to establish the museum. Still, prevention is better than cure, and this petition has the best approach — demanding that the museum have a section devoted to the paedophiles Thatcher worked with. “

This will also help the waxwork industry who must by now have a large amount of public figures that they can no longer show

”

The New York Times has just turned out a long, worthy article on New York real estate owned through shell companies:

On the 74th floor of the Time Warner Center, Condominium 74B was purchased in 2010 for $15.65 million by a secretive entity called 25CC ST74B L.L.C. It traces to the family of Vitaly Malkin, a former Russian senator and banker who was barred from entering Canada because of suspected connections to organized crime.

Last fall, another shell company bought a condo down the hall for $21.4 million from a Greek businessman named Dimitrios Contominas, who was arrested a year ago as part of a corruption sweep in Greece.

This kind of story tends to leave me a bit confused. Isn’t it already a cliche that luxury New York (and London) real estate gets bought by dodgy businessmen and Russian oligarchs? I’m still glad it gets written, because sometimes the journalists will turn up something actually criminal, and the attention increases the chances of getting real estate sales subject to tighter “know your customer” rules. But I don’t really see why people outside the niche of corruption-tracking should care

The psychology of pricing goes way further than just setting prices a few cents below a whole number.

Products that are recreational or luxurious benefit from rounded prices: Consumers were more inclined to buy a bottle of champagne when it was priced at $40.00 rather than at $39.72 or $40.28. However, for purchases that are utilitarian—a calculator, in this experiment—participants were more likely to buy at the higher non-rounded price.

Presumably we now associate non-round-number pricing with products competing on price. And that doesn’t mesh well with luxury goods, making them seem less rather than more desirable.

A lot of my ‘programming’ time is actually spent sniffing around various libraries and open-source projects, trying to figure out which will be helpful and which will leave me cursing the mistake of building anything on top of them. ‘Soft’ areas like documentation and community management tend to matter almost as much as the quality of the code itself.

So well done mrjob for not just having decent documentation, but trying to rope new users into improving it:

If you’re reading this, it’s probably your first contact with the library, which means you are in a great position to provide valuable feedback about our documentation. Let us know if anything is unclear or hard to understand.

[if you’re interested, mrjob is a library that streamlines writing Hadoop jobs in python, with a particular focus on Amazon Elastic MapReduce]

An absolutely on-point critique of the ideology of making things:

The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.

Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. While the shift might be from the corporate to the individual (supported, mind, by a different set of companies selling a different set of things), it mostly re-inscribes familiar values, in slightly different form: that artifacts are important, and people are not.

Dsquared posts on Crooked Timber, asks only Greeks to comment. Comments thread predictably explodes into erudite snark, notably Joshua W. Burton’s take on Tennyson’s Ulysses:

. . . Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer deal.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The hounding Euros; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the market, and the wrath
Of all the western banks, until I die.
It may be that the Gulf will buy us up:
It may be we shall touch the Cayman Isles
And see the great Onassis, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved oil and cargo; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of expatriate wealth,
Made weak by various new reporting regulations, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to borrow, and not to yield.