Fate takes Woniora Ground Floor: It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass . . .
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
[ 'Walking,' written by Mr. Theodore Roethke]
· Imrich’s model: Data Mining Through Social Networking [ via Alex Pentland: workplace spoken conversations ]
· See Also Six degrees of separation? Chermside’s & Brisbane’s small world

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Changing landscape of the Google News

My Brilliant Search Engines Spotlight on Google and Search Engines in Newsweek
Little Engines That Can - Even Google can't think of everything. A host of start-ups are working to fill niches and capitalize on the search boom
· All Eyes on Google
· See Also Giddy Over Going Public
· See Also Talk Transcript: Steven Levy Talked About Google and the Search Wars

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GST the second-fastest growing tax behind booming company taxes

Taxpayers in the top tax bracket
Crrently, there is much debate regarding income tax rates and possible tax cuts. Part of this debate concerns higher income earners and whether they should receive tax cuts—either through lowering their marginal tax rate and/or increasing the income threshold at which their marginal tax rate takes effect. In this research note Stephen Barber provides statistics over the last thirty to forty years relating to taxpayers in the top tax bracket.
· If 1969/70...were 2004 [Information and Research Services, Dapartment of the Parliamentary Library]
· Postcodes in electoral divisions (2003 electoral boundaries)
· See Also No degrees of separation? Political finance disclosure: party and donor annual returns 2002–03
· See Also Disruption of Finances of Al Qaeda: I.R.S. Request for More Terrorism Investigators Is Denied

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Expert's push on radical tax
A new Australian report recommends that children should be counted as a tax concession and families permitted to pool incomes for tax purposes. Academic Terry Dwyer has noted in a paper released by The Centre for Independent Studies that a family with two incomes of $A40,000 pays less tax than a family with a single income of $A80,000. Parents should be allowed to pool their incomes and their tax-free thresholds on a voluntary basis, with an additional tax-free allowance of $A3,000 for each child. The changes would reduce the tax bill of a family of four on a single income of $A80,000 by $A14,000. The report also noted that reducing the financial pressure for both parents to work could also reduce the unemployment rate and increase productivity. [Summary poached from 30/03/2004. The Mercury, Page 9]
See Also ...Discussion Paper: Review of Aspects of Income Tax Self Assessment

Amazon.com Ranking 557 as at 30 March 2004....I will be honest the people who tell other people that I am chorrible (sic) are the best advertising for Cold River than most of my family members Media Dragon is so broke, so unsuccessful and so self-failed that, like every other sole survivor you could name, he doesn't need to pretend that his next mistake will be his first...

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Arithmetic of Carr
Heaven help the state's finances if the Carr Government's arithmetic for its 10th budget, due on June 22, is as sound as its explanation for next Tuesday's mini-budget. The justification does not add up
· Tax increases, service cuts and public sector job losses are on the agenda
· See Also Wrist-slashing time over budget, says Egan
· See Also Moore Future: Last chance to give our city a future

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Tax to be slashed by $10 billion, say economists
The Government will deliver an annual income tax cut of up to $10 billion in the budget to win back electoral momentum, economists have predicted.
· Bracket Creep

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Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready to eliminate violently whole social strata that seemed to them to be made up of parasites and conspirators, in order that they might adjust this actual France to the Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more than is commonly realized a bucolic episode. It lends color to the assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is homicidal mania.
Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership

Tax both revered and mocked: UK Announces New Movie Investment Tax Credit
A new tax credit program for British filmmakers will help spur the industry. A government program that had given tax breaks for those who invest in UK movies is coming to an end, and the movie industry had complained that its discontinuation would kill British film investment.
· BBC Not Acting on the theory that if it's not broke, break it
· See Also Words are no longer enough. The all authors must be like Imrich all-singing, all-dancing, good looking if possible and, if not, with a sufficiently troubled past to keep the public interested
· Sued To Fame And Fortune
Average Hollywood Movie Now Costs $100 Million... Hollywood's Record Year (Despite The Pirates) Hollywood movie studios took in almost $11 billion in 2003 - a record!


It's an enormous honour to be publihed; Even if it makes me feel like I'm almost dead ...
· See Also Escape To Reality (On The Screen) Movie documentaries like Cold River are hot these days
· See Also Lynden Barber, film critic for The Australian newspaper: It is a poacher-turns-gamekeeper appointment

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Bruce Elder in Weekend edition of the best paper in the world, SMH, shares with readers the background to a book entitled Stasiland which like Schindlers Arch (List) is written by an Australian, this time by a woman called, Anna Funder. Funder was apparently confronted by an Argentinian viewer who wanted to know why the televesion station she was working for in Berlin did not do more stories on the Iron Curtain and the Stasi, the old East German secret police. The Argentinian viewer pointed out that it took Germany 20 years to start discussing and dissecting Nazism:
Will it be 2010 or 2020 before what happened in East Germany (or Czechoslovakia) is remembered?...
It’s generally believed that people want to forget about the past and move on—but I find it curious that they wouldn’t want to know about this when so much remains unresolved... Stasiland shine a dazzling light on one of the world’s most paranoid and secretive regimes, and its effects on contemporary German society.
(Some unkind soul suggested resently to this Slavic Dragon that 21st Sentury Sydney has SusSex Secret Police...)

What's Wrong With Germany?
If it is true, as Jimmy Carter once asserted, that nations can find themselves in a state of collective malaise, there is no doubt that Germany in 2004 would qualify as downright sickly, at least as far as its own residents are concerned. Strangely, when viewed from an objective standpoint, Germany doesn't seem to be any worse off economically, culturally, or politically, than most other European nations, but England and France do not seem to be in quite the despairing mood that Germany is in. Is the difference perhaps, as some have been saying, Germans just enjoy complaining? Or does it run deeper?
· Nations can find themselves in a state of collective malaise [link first seen at The New York Times 03/24/04 ]
· See Also Hamas: Gates of Hell, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
· See Also Interview: Alan Dershowitz
· See Also Bluntly Our Culture Through A Wagner Filter: The English like their mythologies to work out, to resolve themselves
· Did the Terrorists Win in Madrid? German Views
· A New Churchill Needed for Europe? Czech Views
· The EU's New Terrorism Czar [ via EuroSavant ]

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No longer safe as houses
Oversupply and potential tax changes will test investors. The nation's decade-long obsession with ploughing funds into bricks and mortar, fuelled by low interest rates, low unemployment and creating a heady cocktail of high prices, relatively high rental yields and an abundance of new apartments, appears to have ended.
· There is a perception in the market of a crisis in confidence and we haven't see the bottom
· Home sellers count high cost of greed
· See Also They minimise their taxable income to cheat their kids. They throw in jobs to become "self-employed" to hide their real incomes
· See Also Building industry 'rife with criminals'

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As President Kennedy wrote in a special message to Congress over forty years ago, The integrity of such a system depends upon the continued willingness of the people honestly and accurately to discharge this annual price of citizenship.
These words remain as true today as when they were written in 1961.

Mark W. Everson: Dear Leonard ...Love Dad
Adam Smith, the Scottish economic philosopher, believed that the tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to every other person.
We confront significant challenges today. We face a large annual tax gap — the difference between what our taxpayers are supposed to pay when their tax obligations become due and what is actually collected. Moreover, in the last four years, the proportion of Americans who say it is OK to cheat on paying your taxes rose from 11 percent to 17 percent 90% in Czech Republic) ) a trajectory which, if not reversed, will threaten the government’s future revenue stream and basic respect for the rule of law.
· See Also At the IRS our working equation is service plus enforcement equals compliance. Not service or enforcement; we have to do both

In a speech before the National Conference of State Legislators, at the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, D.C., Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY) called on NCSL members to support the Streamlined Sales & Use Tax Act (SSUTA, S. 1736).
· Enzi Urges State Legislators to Back Streamlined Sales & Use Tax ]

Failure requires study and work. It's harder than you think. Bull markets aren't forever... A person can outperform a committee.
· Templeton’s 22 Principles For Successful Investing
· Kenneth W. Gideon: Tax planners will always be able to find ways to beat the system, unless that system is much more efficient and less complex

· See Also Sony/Phillips' new e Ink Reader: future of ebooks and PDAs

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You can't keep secrets, judge tells Kennedy
Businessman Trevor Kennedy's frantic efforts to shield his financial affairs from corporate regulators have failed, with a judge rejecting his attempt to keep crucial documents from investigators.
· Swiss affairs in Australia

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First thing first, Czech Out Noam Chomsky: Turning The Tide & New Technorati redesign Launched

Writers, Journalists, Storytellers... Thomas says outrage keeps her going on White House beat
Helen Thomas complains that she's not called on at White House press briefings: I'm in the back row now so I'm ignored . . . They don’t like my questions. That’s okay, just so somebody asks them, but they just don’t want me to ask questions. Geov Parrish asks Thomas what keeps her going:
· Outrage. And interest in the world, and knowing that I'm lucky to be alive [link first seen at Romenesko ]
· See Also Howell Raines: The Times not only occupies a central place in our national civic life but also plays just as important a role as the ethical keystone of American journalism

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Some are born to dominate, some to submit. Let's follow the way leading to power play...
Before collectivization people in Russia had potatoes but no socialism. Later, they had socialism but no potatoes... The overall impression is that the Council on Foreign Relations isn't just a think thank, it's a do tank:

Foreign Mood Disorders: one-stop shop about all things international
At a time when so many hip, glossy magazines with deep pockets aren't very aggressive on the Web, it's refreshing to see an 83-year-old nonprofit thrive online. The Council on Foreign Relations and its venerable publication, Foreign Affairs, have kept themselves more than just relevant in the digital age, they are a model for quality online publishing.
Collectively, CFR.org and ForeignAffairs.org have done a terrific job of capitalizing on the Council's resident expertise, as well as extending the shelf life of the scholarly articles in the magazine. The overall impression is that the Council isn't just a think thank, it's a "do" tank.
· Foreign Affairs Backgrounders By Sree Sreenivasan [ courtesy of SreeTips]
· See Also TerrorismAnswers.com: a terrorism encyclopedia

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Investors facing tax crunch
Property investors face tighter deduction rules when filing their next tax returns in what may be a backdoor step towards reining in the overheated property market.
The Australian Tax Office said it would release new guidelines within six weeks on deductions landlords can claim for depreciating housing assets, such as lighting, air conditioning and even vacuum cleaning systems.
· Rental tax deductions exceeded declared rental income by $600 million in Australia last year

Stephen Barber and Andrew Kopras take recently published postcode taxation statistics and aggregate them to an electorate basis. Summary information on such items as taxpayers, taxable income, tax paid and net tax ratio are shown for each electorate in Australia. Six tables ranking the electorates by various taxation categories are provided as well as two choropleth (colour coded) maps.
· See Also Taxable income and tax paid in Commonwealth electoral divisions, 2000–01 (PDF) [ courtesy of Successful delivery of professional and non-partisan services in a partisan environment]

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New home owners have been warned they may have to wait for up to a decade for the value of their properties to rise ...

Aussies Pull Broadband out of Air
Australian company launched a wireless broadband service in Sydney this week that lets laptop and PDA users roam up to nine miles away from the base station and still get a speedy connection.
The technology, called iBurst, fits in a potentially lucrative niche.
· We need to get teams of varying sizes into our client's [ courtesy of Unwired Australia ]
· See Also NASA develops handsfree web browsing technolog: Look Mum No Hands...
· See Also Trends to Watch
· Social Change Online's Mark McGrath looks back on how unions have used the web in 2003
· See Also Blog Survey: Expectations of Privacy and Accountability [ some via Barista ]
· See Also 110 page PDF presentation by Jenny Levine and Steven Cohen on Blogging and RSS

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Greatest Cities in Best Practices
The greatest cities in the world, such as New York, London and Paris are amalgams of discrete communities, such as Greenwich Village in New York, or the arrondissements of Paris
· Moore Space
· See Also HighRise
· See Also Our Roads are Killing Fields

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In Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the I.R.S., Mr. Yancey describes his 12 years with the agency. He relates everything from his on-the-job training by a General Patton-type manager who wishes he could carry a gun to his own slow but steady evolution into someone who could close down a four-person woodworking shop for failure to pay payroll taxes and seize homes of the seriously tax delinquent without losing sleep...

Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's tour of Duty Inside the IRS
Treasury has quietly sanctioned a massive hike in spending on large-scale Inland Revenue investigations in an attempt to increase the amount of tax being brought in from big companies and wealthy people.
· See Also Revenue quietly ups spending in tax dragnet
· See Also Book Review
· Book Richard Yancey [link first seen at Book TV]

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In Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the I.R.S., Mr. Yancey describes his 12 years with the agency. He relates everything from his on-the-job training by a General Patton-type manager who wishes he could carry a gun to his own slow but steady evolution into someone who could close down a four-person woodworking shop for failure to pay payroll taxes and seize homes of the seriously tax delinquent without losing sleep...

Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's tour of Duty Inside the IRS
Treasury has quietly sanctioned a massive hike in spending on large-scale Inland Revenue investigations in an attempt to increase the amount of tax being brought in from big companies and wealthy people.
· See Also Revenue quietly ups spending in tax dragnet
· See Also
· Book Richard Yancey [link first seen at Book TV]

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Suffering Suburbs
Jeffrey Cohan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a two-part series on the economic conditions of Pittsburgh's suburbs. "While the city's property tax base has remained remarkably stable over the past 25 years, no fewer than 55 other Allegheny County municipalities have suffered decreases in the total value of their taxable property since 1980. The second story found disparity in tax rates between white and black residents: On average, blacks in this county pay a local income tax rate that is 49 percent higher than what whites pay ....
· Put another way, the typical black person with a $40,000 salary would pay $908 to the school district and municipality, while a white person with the same salary would pay just $604