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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