Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of @CWAUnion Local 1440. The union is called @AlphabetWorkers (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called "Alphabet").

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The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a founding member of the EU, but it's also a rogue state, enabling massive corruption throughout the trading bloc; while Cyprus and Malta will sell any corrupt robber-baron EU citizenship, it's Luxembourg that leads in laundering their money.

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As the @TaxJusticeNet's @nickshaxson memorably put it, Luxembourg is "a criminal enterprise with a country attached" - a country where corporations are guaranteed "an easy ride on taxes, disclosure, financial regulations, and criminal

2014's #Luxleaks exposed some of the worst corruption, whereby @PwC worked with Luxembourg officials to secure illegal tax benefits for major corporations and the world's richest

Luxleaks lead to a 2018 EU directive that required member states to publish registers of the true owners of the companies they registered.

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Luxembourg published theirs in 2019, and @lemondefr partnered with ten media orgs for a year-long analysis of the register, which was published this week: #Openlux. The findings reveal that Luxleaks was just the tip of the

Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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Though "bean counters" are employed by firms, they are notionally bound by a professional code of ethics every bit as serious as the Hippocratic Oath: "count things honestly." Without an accurate accounting of quantities, you can't make good decisions on quality.

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Though accountancy concerns itself with counting things, it is inextricably bound up with the realm of ideas, and accounting conventions (how you account for things) are philosophical matters, not empirical ones.

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It's no coincidence that #ModernMonetaryTheory owes more to accountancy than it does to economics. Economic accounts of the economy have an unfortunate tendency to proceed from first principles, creating models based on pure reason, without checking in on the actual world.

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For example, neoclassical econ's "homo economicus," the rational value-maximizing actor who populated so many models; or economists' insistence on targeting inflation with interest rates; or treating national "debts" like they were household debts.

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THREAD:

Employees vs Employers

“We who toil for other people have all in some way been captured by pirates and sold into slavery.” –Law 24

It should be said plainly; employment is nothing more than the next step in the evolution of slavery.

The corporation you are employed by has a psychopathic level of indifference as to whether you live or die.

This is not Leftwing political rhetoric; it is a machiavellian reality you will have to contend with.

Your employer is not your ally; they are your adversary.

It is in your best interest for wages to be as high as possible, while it is in your employer’s best interest for wages to be as low as possible.

Tax thread: Employees vs independent contractors.

1. Legally, the two terms are mutually exclusive and are direct opposites... https://t.co/jR0PBMp32M

Employee works for an employer.
Independent contractor is basically an entrepreneur.

2. This highlights two key points:

An employer has some measure of control over the employee.

An "IC" (short for independent contractor) is "his own boss".

It is the responsibility of the employer to determine that a person is either an employee or an IC.

3. Where does PAYE come into play? PAYE is deducted from remuneration. Remuneration applies to employee earnings, whereas for IC's (on certain conditions), their earnings can be excluded from remuneration and therefore no PAYE.

This difference is the scenario of yesterday.

4. There are two important tools: Statutory tests and common law tests. They can be used to determine employee/IC status.

The statutory test is to see if a person is independent from 1: the person paying them;
2 who the work is done for

AND

5. Whether the person is subject to two main things: Control, OR
Supervision

If the person is not independent from the employer (for both the work and the pay) AND the employer has control or supervision of the person - PAYE will apply.

The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.

From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.

We cannot argue that there are benefits of scale associated with having more money. Also, high-frequency trading has shown the value of high-speed trading. So in an abstract sense, market manipulation can involve a kind of momentum play.

The objective of stock trading is to buy a financial instrument at a low price and sell it at a higher price. The purpose of a momentum play is to front-run the decision process of other traders such that one acquires the assets before a decision is made.

@jspujji @RomeenSheth @ampush @GatewayX Down!