“A corruption scandal is shaking up the Ukrainian government, with top officials stepping aside as Kyiv seems eager to assure Western partners of their responsible stewardship of billions in military and economic aid.
Among the high-profile exits are Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head in the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a deputy in the ministry of defense, Vyacheslav Shapovalov, who was responsible for overseeing supplies and food for troops. A deputy prosecutor general was also fired, as were a handful of regional governors and a few other government ministers.
The actual details of what prompted the shake-up are a bit murky, and not all of the resignations and ousters appear to be related, but it comes after at least one report in Ukrainian media that the Ministry of Defense had purchased food for troops at extra-high prices. The Ministry of Defense had said the allegations were a deliberate attempt to mislead, but said it would conduct an internal audit. Additional media reports in the past week had questioned officials, including Tymoshenko, who appeared to be enjoying lavish lifestyles.
This represents the most high-profile reshuffle since Russia’s invasion last year. More details about the alleged graft are likely to emerge, but it seems clear that Zelenskyy’s government moved fast to tamp down any allegations of widespread corruption, especially from international backers who are providing tens of billions of dollars in assistance that Ukraine depends on in its fight against Russia. Some critics have also suggested the shake-up is more of a political move, rather than a genuine anti-corruption effort.”
https://www.vox.com/world/23552619/ukraine-war-germany-leopard-tanks-zelenskyy-russia-putin
“The answer to why companies make it hard or impossible for people to call them is simple: It saves them money. It’s more expensive to hire a person in a call center — assuming they can find people who want to work there — than it is to engineer some chatbot that offers up canned answers on a website. The result is sort of a sliding scale of cost-saving terribleness.
“There’s a straight-up clear hierarchy,” Buell said. “The cost to talk to a live person face-to-face is always going to be greater than the cost to talk to a live person on the phone, which is going to be greater than the cost to talk to a live person over chat, which is going to be greater than the cost to talk to some kind of automated solution. In the middle there is also email, and chat is more expensive than email, which is more expensive than non-human.””
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“Even if companies do have options to call, they’re often ineffective and have a ton of automated options before you get to a real person, if you ever do. “You have to go through all the menus, you say, ‘I want to talk with a person,’ you have to wait for an hour,” Hu said. “Even though they have the call option, it’s almost like no call at all.””
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“Talking to customers about their products and services may lead businesses to discover deficiencies they might not otherwise notice. This allows them to improve their offerings so that, in the long run, they build something better — and ultimately field fewer complaints.”
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“recently found herself on the “holy hell” end of the customer service frustration experience. She couldn’t get the electricity turned on in her new house because her credit was frozen, and the credit bureau she needed to reach out to to have it unfrozen had shuttered its call center. She had to send copies of her driver’s license and Social Security card to a random post office box in Texas. She ultimately waited months for her credit to be unfrozen and her lights to be turned on.”
“The FairTax, at its heart, is simple enough: It would take almost every federal tax and replace them with a fat 30 percent sales tax on everything. Virtually every American would get a monthly check from the government to cover the cost of paying the tax on essentials. It’s a radical idea, but one which since its first introduction to Congress in 1999 has been a favorite of conservative Republicans. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) already has 23 co-sponsors for the current iteration. Prominent party figures like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain have all championed the idea over the years.
Not surprisingly, liberal groups who judge the proposal regressive are against it. But so are many enthusiastic conservative tax-cutters, like the Wall Street Journal editorial board and Grover Norquist. Here’s what National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru had to say about it:
“Any House Republican who backs this bill can accurately be accused of voting for … raising the price of everything by a huge amount at a time when inflation is already high; shifting more of the tax burden to the middle class; instituting a large new wealth tax on senior citizens; increasing federal spending by a massive amount; increasing the deficit; and creating large black markets.””
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“he FairTax gets rid of the personal and corporate income taxes, and the estate tax, which are the three most progressive taxes in the federal code. For most poor people, the personal income tax already gives them money through provisions like the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit. Getting rid of it means all those benefits go away.
At the top end, the rich go from paying a top rate of 40.8 percent on their wages, as well as 23.8 percent on their income from investments, to just paying the 30 percent tax on everything they buy. But wealthy people save more of their income than non-wealthy people do, and everything they save would be tax-free. By one measure, rich people in the 2010s saved 8.5 percent of their income, while the bottom 90 percent had a negative savings rate, spending 2.8 percent more than they earned.
I know of no credible estimates of the distributional impact of the FairTax, if it were to replace income and payroll taxes, but when the Bush administration appointed a panel to study tax reform proposals, it concluded that using the tax to replace the income tax alone would sharply raise taxes on the middle class.”
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“Assuming a reasonable amount of tax evasion (20 percent) — and the question of evasion is important, as you’ll see — he found that the FairTax would increase the deficit by about $10.6 trillion over 10 years. In order to avoid increasing the deficit 10 years later, the FairTax would have to be set at 64.4 percent.”
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“I wouldn’t be so quick to reject sales taxes more broadly. There’s a reason every rich country except the US has a value-added tax: It’s a very efficient, easy-to-administer way to raise lots of money for progressive social programs like universal health care, child allowances, long-term care, and more.
Gale, the FairTax critic, is actually a vocal advocate for adopting a VAT in the US. I like his idea of pairing a 10 percent VAT with a small universal basic income to make sure low-income people come out ahead. He estimates the bottom 20 percent of earners would see their incomes rise by nearly 17 percent as a result, while households with income above $90,000 or so would pay more. If you use some of the revenue to pay for the now-expired expanded child tax credit, the net effect would likely be a substantial reduction in poverty.
You could also, as Columbia professor Michael Graetz and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) have proposed, use the VAT to exempt all but the wealthiest individuals from the income tax, by creating standard deductions of $50,000 or $100,000 for couples. This isn’t as progressive as using it for a UBI, but it would vastly simplify income tax collection and enable the large majority of Americans to not worry about filing taxes ever.”
“In 2019, a few weeks after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Trump administration flipped the script and began investigating the investigators.
Attorney General Bill Barr appointed US Attorney John Durham to investigate those government officials who had presumed to look into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
The FBI’s Trump-Russia probe, Barr argued publicly, was born of chasing thin conspiracy theories and relied on phony evidence, and its investigators were either blinded by political bias or acting with blatant political motives.
And then Durham and Barr proceeded to do all those same things.
A new, detailed exposé by the New York Times’s Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner digs into what exactly happened with the nearly four-year Durham investigation, which is purportedly about to conclude, and it isn’t pretty. Anecdote after anecdote portrays Durham and Barr as believing in conspiracy theories without evidence but with clear political motives to bolster one of Trump’s favorite arguments: that he was the victim of a nefarious plot.
Basically, Durham and Barr wanted to prove that the Trump-Russia investigation was manufactured in bad faith by either “deep state” officials or the Clinton campaign (or both), with the goal of hurting Trump politically. Again and again, Durham pursued various versions of this theory, and again and again, he fell short of proving his case.
If Barr and Durham started off with suspicions but found upon investigation that they were baseless, that’s not necessarily so terrible. Yet both men kept on saying or implying publicly that the “‘deep state’/Clinton campaign hit job” theory was true — Barr in public statements where he said this outright and Durham in court filings and trial questioning that seemed designed to advance a narrative he couldn’t actually prove.
Bizarrely enough, when checking out one of these theories — that Italian officials were somehow involved in launching the Trump-Russia investigation — Durham and Barr were instead presented with evidence linking Trump himself to potential financial crimes. “Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore,” the Times reporters write. Barr kept this new investigation of Trump in Durham’s hands, and it’s unclear what became of it.
The Trump-Russia investigation certainly shouldn’t be exempt from criticism, and a fair-minded review of whether investigators made misjudgments would be reasonable. But the Durham probe was not that. Instead, it repeatedly assumed dastardly plots against Trump, even when the evidence kept failing to establish those plots, while Barr seeded a narrative to conservative media and President Trump himself that Durham was closing in on Trump’s “deep state” enemies. The politicized, blinkered investigation they were looking for was inside them all along.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/27/23573026/durham-barr-new-york-times-trump-investigation
“Infectious disease experts knew this year might be an outlier. Covid-19 has been the biggest disruption to the normal cycle of disease in a century, and we know from prior experience that major pandemics can be followed by a year or two of chaotic viral behavior before settling into a more normal pattern. It happened with both the 1918 flu and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
For RSV and influenza, the past two years have been aberrations; it is reasonable to expect more normal patterns will resume in the future as immunity builds back up. (Still, every cold-and-flu season will be different — variation from season to season is a constant.)
“My guess is that this is entirely temporary and things will settle down into more routine patterns in coming seasons as typical population immunity gets back on track,” said Richard Webby, an infectious disease researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Covid-19 is trickier to project, given its continuing evolution toward more transmissibility. So far, the protection from prior infection and vaccines seems to be effective for most people, at least in preventing them from ending up in the hospital. But it also continues to pose a threat to the unvaccinated, the elderly, and the immunocompromised — and yearly surges when the conditions are more favorable for viral spread (i.e., the winter) are to be expected.”
“EV fires are relatively rare. Smith said his department has seen just a handful of EV fires. While the US government doesn’t track the number of EV fires, specifically, Tesla’s reported numbers are far lower than the rate for highway fires overall, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) told Vox. The overwhelming majority of car fires are caused by traditional internal combustion vehicles. (This makes sense, in part because these vehicles carry highly flammable liquids like gasoline in their tanks, and, as their name implies, their engines work by igniting that fuel.)”
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“Although they’re relatively rare, electric car fires present a new technical and safety challenge for fire departments. These fires burn at much higher temperatures and require a lot more water to fight than conventional car fires. There also isn’t an established consensus on the best firefighting strategies for EVs, experts told Vox. Instead, there’s a hodgepodge of guidance shared among fire departments, associations that advise firefighters, and automakers. As many as half of the 1.2 million firefighters in the US might not be currently trained to combat EV fires, according to the NFPA.”
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2023/1/17/23470878/tesla-fires-evs-florida-hurricane-batteries-lithium-ion