The IRS could recover $12 for every $1 spent on scrutinizing the ultra-wealthy's taxes

It turns out that scrutinizing the rich's taxes pays off.

A new paper from economists at the Department of Treasury, Harvard University, and the University of Sydney looks at the return on investment from IRS audits from 2010 through 2014. They find that while it's much more expensive to audit the wealthiest tax payers, it's still a hearty return on investment. Auditing the top 1% yields $4.25 per dollar spent, and that number soars to $6.29 when auditing the top 0.1%.

And pouring even just a bit more money into auditing the rich could yield a lot more revenue, with every additional dollar yielding up to potentially $12 in revenue from the top 90th percentile of earners.

The findings illustrate how much money might be sitting untapped in what the IRS calls the tax gap — the chasm between taxes owed and taxes paid. America's highest earners are especially adept at not paying their taxes; a 2021 study from the IRS and economists found that the top 1% of earners don't report nearly a quarter of their income. And the top 0.1% under-report twice as much. The Treasury Department has previously estimated that the top 1% evade $163 billion in taxes annually.

That avoidance "has huge consequences. because it just means that low and moderate income families have to pick up a bigger share of our overall cost of government," Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told Insider.

"It also means that the public services that we all depend on are underfunded," Hanauer said. "So we have less revenue to pay for healthcare and education and higher education and infrastructure and all of the things that our tax dollars support that enable us to have strong communities."

Found via https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/40780

EU: Smartphones Must Have User-Replaceable Batteries by 2027

The European Parliament just caused a major headache for smartphone and tablet manufacturers.

The European Union (EU) is set to usher in a new era of smartphones with batteries that consumers can easily replace themselves.

Earlier this week, the European Parliament approved new rules(Opens in a new window) covering the design, production, and recycling of all rechargeable batteries sold within the EU.

The new rules stipulate that all electric vehicle, light means of transport (e.g. electric scooters), and rechargeable industrial batteries (above 2kWh) will need to have a compulsory carbon footprint declaration, label, and digital passport.

For "portable batteries" used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cameras, consumers must be able to "easily remove and replace them." This will require a drastic design rethink by manufacturers, as most phone and tablet makers currently seal the battery away and require specialist tools and knowledge to access and replace them safely.

Apple has already been forced by the European Union to change from a Lightning port to a USB-C port on iPhones, with the iPhone 15 expected to be the first to make the switch. Now it seems Apple will need to figure out how to allow access to the battery inside future iPhones, as will every other smartphone manufacturer.

The new rules also stipulate strict targets for collecting waste and recovering materials from old batteries. The percentages for each increase at set intervals between now and 2031, at which point 61% waste collection must be achieved and 95% of materials must be recovered from old portable batteries. There will also be minimum levels of recycled content used in new batteries required, but only "eight years after the entry into force of the regulation."

Auckland surgeons must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations - some are not happy

Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.

Several surgeons say they are upset by the policy, which was introduced in Auckland in February and gave priority to Māori and Pacific Island patients - on the grounds that they have historically had unequal access to healthcare.

Health officials stress that ethnicity is just one of five factors considered in deciding when a person gets surgery, and that it is an important step in addressing poor health outcomes within Māori and Pacific populations.

Some surgeons, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the new scoring tool was medically indefensible. They said patients should be prioritised on how sick they were, how urgently they needed treatment, and how long they had been waiting for it - not on their ethnicity.

One of the surgeons said he was “disgusted” by the new ranking system.

“It’s ethically challenging to treat anyone based on race, it’s their medical condition that must establish the urgency of the treatment,” the surgeon said.

“There’s no place for elitism in medicine and the medical fraternity in this country is disturbed by these developments.”

A document on the equity adjustor which was leaked to Newstalk ZB shows two Māori patients, both aged 62 and who have been waiting more than a year, ranked above others on the list. A 36-year-old Middle Eastern patient who has been waiting almost two years has a much lower priority ranking.

Reddit is fighting for its soul. Many users are in revolt over API pricing changes that will shut down some of the most popular third-party Reddit apps, and they’re furious at CEO Steve Huffman after last week’s AMA that made it clear the platform wouldn’t budge. Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up, but they’re also wiping out some beloved Reddit apps, and thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.

On Thursday, Reddit offered me an interview with Huffman (who goes by u/spez on Reddit). I’ve already published one story from my conversation about how Reddit was apparently never designed to support third-party apps. But here is a lightly edited transcript of the entire interview — which, at times, was contentious.

In an unexpected announcement today, Google Domains is “winding down following a transition period,” with Squarespace taking over the business and assets.

Squarespace announced today that it “entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business.” This includes “approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.”

Google cited “efforts to sharpen our focus” in selling the Google Domains registrar business, which launched in 2014 as a big proponent of HTTPS and top-level domains (TLDs) as of late. The service exited beta in 2022.

This makes sense in the context of Google trying to be more efficient with resources and is at least better than shutting down the service without a guided migration path.

Hello Miners,
Welcome to SEASON 04 - CRITICAL CORRUPTION ! Though we have gained great ground against the rampaging Lithophage in the past months, it remains a constant threat - and to make matters worse, reports of alarming new mutations are starting to come in.

Let’s get right into it!

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

In short, they are defederating from these instances because they have fully open registration, without applications or manual approval. As a result of this, it has been exceptionally difficult to moderate content originating from the users of these instances. Beehaw hopes to federate with these instances again, once better moderation tools are available for use with lemmy.

There is also a discussion post about this announcement on lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/26956

Big improvements and new features for the Steam Desktop client are now out of Beta!

Hello! We’re excited to announce that we've just shipped a new version of the Steam Client to everyone. This update includes all the new Steam Desktop features that have been tested and fine-tuned in the beta branch. Before we get into the details, we want to thank our beta testers really quick – we couldn’t have shipped without all of your invaluable feedback and bug reports!

Gradually over the last decade, Reddit went from merely embarrassing but occasionally amusing, to actively harmful, to—mainly by accident—essential. As the platform that swallowed niche message boards, it became home to numerous small communities of surprisingly helpful enthusiasts, and grew into a repository of arcane knowledge about, and instantly available first-hand expertise on, a staggering number of topics, from the demographically predictable to the somewhat more surprising. And now that is all set to come to an ignominious, self-inflicted end.

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.

Found via Twitter: https://twitter.com/DefectorMedia/status/1668017737895911425

#Techtonica is a first-person factory-building game set below the surface of an alien planet within a network of caverns teeming with bioluminescent life. Players will explore a vast network of caves beneath the surface of an alien planet as they work alone or with friends to build and optimize complex, automated factories, gather resources, establish a base of operations, and uncover the secrets buried in Techtonica.

Found via ![email protected]: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/25262

Techtonica on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/

One thing that all programs on your computer have in common is a need for memory. Programs need to be loaded from your hard drive into memory before they can be run. While running, the majority of what programs do is load values from memory, do some computation on them, and then store the result back in memory.

In this post I'm going to introduce you to the basics of memory allocation. Allocators exist because it's not enough to have memory available, you need to use it effectively. We will visually explore how simple allocators work. We'll see some of the problems that they try to solve, and some of the techniques used to solve them. At the end of this post, you should know everything you need to know to write your own allocator.

Found via ![email protected] https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/24337

Instant Brands, the maker of kitchen appliances known for its Instant Pot cooker, filed for bankruptcy Monday after succumbing to financial headwinds made worse as consumers slowed their discretionary spending to cope with inflation.

The Illinois-based home appliance maker filed for chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston, listing more than $500 million in both assets and liabilities. Private-equity firm Cornell Capital bought the company in 2019 and combined it with Corelle Brands, another kitchenware company.

The company’s net sales decreased 21.9% in the first quarter this year compared with the same period in 2022, the seventh consecutive quarter of declining year-over-year sales, S&P Global said in a ratings downgrade of Instant Brands last week. The company ended March with roughly $95 million in liquidity and the business hasn’t been generating cash, according to the ratings report.

Instant Brands was founded in 2009 by Robert Wang, Yi Quin and three other partners in Canada before it was sold to Cornell Capital a decade later.

Original link (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/articles/instant-pots-slower-sales-tip-gadget-maker-into-bankruptcy-1ef2c7d1

Found via Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1668611912458813444

It's the pinnacle of private equity brain to take Instant Pot, one of the the simplest, most no-drama businesses of all time, and somehow turn it into a $500 million bankruptcy

A worker from Area 51 leaks Top Secret files and a Tape to a Private Investigator.

A PSX Style adventure game based on accounts of Alien Abductions. Intended to be played in one sitting.

average playtime is 20-25 mins

Spotted via https://twitter.com/DanInFiction/status/1667981357253906434

I haven't played it myself, but I may have to! It looks very interesting

Last week, Iran’s military unveiled what it called “the first product of the quantum processing algorithm” of the Imam Khomeini Naval University of Nowshahr. During a ceremony at the university, the Islamic Republic’s military revealed a bit of electronics sealed under glass. It appeared to be a common development board, available widely online for around $600.

According to multiple state-linked news agencies in Iran, the computer will help Iran detect disturbances on the surface of water using algorithms. Iranian Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari showed off the board during the ceremony and spoke of Iran’s recent breakthroughs in the world of quantum technology.

The touted quantum device appears to be a development board manufactured by a company called Diligent. The brand “ZedBoard” appears clearly in pictures. According to the company’s website, the ZedBoard has everything the beginning developer needs to get started working in Android, Linux, and Windows. It does not appear to come with any of the advanced qubits that make up a quantum computer, and suggested uses include "video processing, reconfigurable computing, motor control, software acceleration," among others.

It’s impossible to know if Iran has figured out how to use off-the-shelf dev boards to make quantum algorithms, but it’s not likely. True quantum devices are experimental pieces of equipment that don't typically resemble circuit boards of the kind you'd find in a home desktop, although researchers have reported being able to simulate some quantum processes on classical computers. Even if Iran is merely claiming that the device was manufactured with the help of quantum algorithms, they may not have been needed—the device is still a ZedBoard that anyone can buy, without any visible modifications.

This isn’t the first time Iran has shown off tech with a less than credible pedigree. In 2020, the Iranian Army revealed a device it claimed could detect COVID and AIDS. It appeared to be similar to another device that was previously sold as a bomb detector.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81.

Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known.

Ted Kaczynski's most notable work, his manifesto titled Industrial Society and Its Future, can be read in full here: https://unabombermanifesto.com/

Link to the Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/

Reddit’s unpopular decision to revise its API pricing in a move that’s forcing third-party apps out of business has taken a weird turn. In an AMA hosted today by Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, aka u/spez on the internet forum site, the exec doubled down on accusations against the developer behind the well-liked third-party app Apollo, which the company had previously accused of operating inefficiently and not being a good “API” user.

Despite community backlash — which includes a site-wide protest from thousands of communities known as subreddits — Huffman’s AMA confirmed the company has no plans to revise its coming API changes. What’s more, Huffman continued his accusations against Apollo, calling out the developer, Christian Selig’s, “behavior and communications” as being “all over the place” and saying he couldn’t see Reddit working with the developer further.

Other third-party apps are also closing down, including Sync, RIF and Reddplant, to name a few.

But Huffman seemingly has an ax to grind with Selig in particular, first accusing the developer of extortion, per Selig’s extensive post on the situation between himself and Reddit.

This theme of this talk is about the intersection of game engines and programming languages - I've spent my career building both, usually with one influencing the other extensively.

I’m going to start with a whirlwind tour of past engine and language designs that may be interesting, then moving toward my latest engine where we see how the scripting language taking on a different role changes everything, mixed with other fun topics such as type inference, resource & memory management, performance, serialization, debugging, refactoring and.. raytracing?

Coming to PlayStation 5 and PC in 2024! https://babystepsgame.com

Play as Nate, an unemployed failson with nothing going for him, until one day he discovers a power he never knew he had… putting one foot in front of the other.

Explore a world shrouded in mist, one step at a time. Hike the serene mountains by placing each footstep yourself, in original physics-based gameplay from the minds behind Ape Out and Getting Over It. Take in the sights, fall in love with the local fauna, and try to find meaning in a wasted life.

Get ready to fall for Nate, in Baby Steps, a literal walking simulator.

We are pleased to announce Star Trek: Infinite, a new game developed with the team at Nimble Giant Entertainment. Bringing the captivating fantasy of the Star Trek universe into an experience not before had. Follow our social media accounts and save the date for June 16th, Picard Day, where we will make a full reveal of Star Trek: Infinite.

So this seems to be more or less Stellaris, but Star Trek? They've certainly got my attention

ISTANBUL – The Turkish authorities on Tuesday seized and jailed a 16-year-old boy for drawing a moustache on an election campaign poster showing re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, media reports said.

Several media outlets close to the opposition, including daily newspapers BirGun, Cumhuriyet and private TV station Halk TV, said the youth from the south-eastern town of Mersin was accused of defacing the poster near his home with a pen, scribbling “a Hitler moustache and writing insulting comments”.

He was arrested after he was identified through CCTV camera footage, media reports said.

The authorities interviewed him at his home, where he reportedly “admitted drawing the moustache” while denying writing the accompanying comments.

Taken before the public prosecutor, he was found to have “insulted the president” and was jailed at a nearby youth facility, according to Halk TV.

Mr Erdogan extended his 20-year rule over Turkey after winning the May 28 second round of the presidential election to embark on a new five-year term.

According to the Justice Ministry, “insulting the president” is one of the most common crimes in Turkey, resulting in 16,753 convictions in 2022. AFP