would have had the shit beaten out of him.

It depends on how situation aware the cops are about all the cameras and witnesses. In an ideal case, they’d realize there are a lot of voting community members around them who made the time to attend a ceremony. Not a situation where people will just turn up the volume on their television sets.

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Sports Team Owners Face New Scrutiny From IRS Over Tax Avoidance

by Robert Faturechi, Ellis Simani and Justin Elliott

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The IRS has launched a campaign to examine whether wealthy taxpayers are violating the law when using their ownership of sports teams to save large amounts in taxes.

The effort will focus on sports industry entities that are reporting “significant tax losses” to “determine if the income and deductions driving the losses” are lawful, according to the IRS announcement earlier this year. That announcement, which consisted of one sentence on a webpage devoted to compliance campaigns by the IRS division that focuses on large businesses, did not specify what kinds of abuses the agency will be looking for.

The initiative comes after ProPublica, drawing on leaked IRS data, revealed how billionaire team owners frequently report incomes for their teams that are vastly lower than their real-world earnings.

When someone buys a business, they’re often able to deduct almost the entire sale price against their income during the ensuing years. That allows them to pay less in taxes. The underlying logic is that the purchase price was composed of assets — buildings, equipment, patents and more — that degrade over time and should be counted as expenses. Owners of sports franchises routinely avail themselves of such deductions, which can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But in few industries is that tax treatment more detached from economic reality than in professional sports. Teams’ most valuable assets, such as TV deals and player contracts, are virtually guaranteed to regenerate because sports franchises are essentially monopolies. There’s little risk that players will stop playing for their teams or that TV stations will stop airing their games. But the team owners still get to deduct the value of those assets over time, sometimes billions of dollars’ worth, from their taxable income.

It helps billionaire sports team owners pay far lower income tax rates than the athletes they employ or even the low-wage workers who sell food or clean their stadiums.

ProPublica’s 2021 article traced how owners, starting with the late baseball showman Bill Veeck decades ago, persuaded the IRS to accept a “gimmick” that allows owners to take massive depreciation write-offs.

Among those benefiting was Steve Ballmer, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and former CEO of Microsoft. His tax records showed that in recent years his basketball team had reported $700 million in losses for tax purposes, despite indications that the Clippers’ real-world financial results were often profitable.

That allowed Ballmer to legally not pay tax on any real-world Clippers profits, and to offset his other income and cut his tax bill. His spokesperson said at the time that Ballmer “has always paid the taxes he owes.”

The practice helps create a counterintuitive overall tax picture that upends conventional wisdom about how taxation works in America. ProPublica found that billionaire owners like Ballmer are consistently paying lower income tax rates than their millionaire players — and often lower even than the rates paid by the concessions workers who staff their stadiums.

The IRS did not immediately respond to questions from ProPublica about what prompted the initiative and what abuses it’s investigating.

In an analysis for clients, the law firm Morgan Lewis credited the IRS campaign to several factors: an increased enforcement budget, criticism that wealthy taxpayers are not audited frequently enough and ProPublica’s reporting.

“The IRS may be acting on its promise to restore ‘fairness’ in tax compliance by taking more shots at partnerships and high-wealth individuals, including sports team owners,” the firm wrote. “With the Sports Industry Losses campaign, the sports industry looks to be the next opponent in the IRS arena.”

Clay Hodges, a tax planning specialist at the firm Moss Adams, said in an interview that the IRS usually selects areas to focus enforcement efforts based on evidence that it will find unpaid taxes. While it’s impossible to judge the IRS’ motivation based on its public announcement, he said, he noted the regular headlines of sports team owners selling teams for huge profits.

“When they announce these campaigns, the IRS is very strategic,” he said. “It’s more than just a fishing expedition. They think it will bear fruit.”

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EPA Proposes Ban on Pesticide Widely Used on Fruits and Vegetables

by Sharon Lerner

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal this week to ban a controversial pesticide that is widely used on celery, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables.

The EPA released its plan on Tuesday, nearly a week after a ProPublica investigation revealed the agency had laid out a justification for increasing the amount of acephate allowed on food by removing limits meant to protect children’s developing brains.

In calling for an end to all uses of the pesticide on food, the agency cited evidence that acephate harms workers who apply the chemical as well as the general public and young children, who may be exposed to the pesticide through contaminated drinking water.

Acephate, which was banned by the European Union more than 20 years ago, belongs to a class of chemicals called organophosphates. U.S. farmers have used these pesticides for decades because they efficiently kill aphids, fire ants and other pests. But what makes organophosphate pesticides good bug killers — their ability to interfere with signals sent between nerve cells — also makes them dangerous to people. Studies have linked acephate to reductions in IQ and verbal comprehension and autism with intellectual disability.

Environmental advocates, who have been pushing the agency to restrict and ban acephate for years, said they were not expecting the agency to make such a bold move.

“I’m surprised and very pleased,” said Patti Goldman, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, who has been part of a farmworker led group that expressed concerns to EPA officials over the past years about the ongoing use of acephate and other organophosphates.

As much as 12 million pounds of acephate were used on soybeans, Brussels sprouts and other crops in 2019, according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. The federal agency estimates that up to 30% of celery, 35% of lettuce and 20% of cauliflower and peppers were grown with acephate.

A draft risk assessment issued in August by the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs found “little to no evidence” that acephate and a chemical created when it breaks down in the body harm the developing brain. The document said there was no justification to keep restrictions on the bug killer that are designed to protect children from developmental harm. Removing that layer of protection would allow 10 times more acephate on food than is acceptable under the current limits.

The draft risk assessment’s conclusion relied in large part on the results of a new battery of tests that are performed on disembodied cells rather than whole lab animals.

The tests have been in development for years, but the EPA’s review of acephate’s effects on the developing brain marked one of the first times the agency had recommended changing a legal safety threshold largely based on their results.

Multiple science groups, including panels the EPA created to help guide its work, had discouraged using the nonanimal tests to conclude a chemical is safe. A member of the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, one of the panels providing guidance to EPA, described the earlier acephate proposal as “exactly what we recommended against.”

But even as it proposed a new outcome this week, the EPA did not change its stance on the use of the cell-based tests.

“Even in this good news proposal, the EPA continues to misuse the cell-based assays,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the environmental advocacy organization Natural Resources Defense Council.

Sass said she believes that both pressure from advocates and questions from journalists helped the EPA decide to change course on acephate. ProPublica began submitting a series of detailed inquiries to the agency about the pesticide starting in January.

An EPA spokesperson said late Tuesday that the agency had been working for months on its proposal to ban acephate from food and that neither advocates nor journalists played a role in the decision.

The EPA proposal would ban acephate on all plants with the exception of trees that do not produce fruit or nuts.

While lauding the proposed ban, Nathan Donley, a scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, expressed concern about the possibility that, after pesticide companies and agricultural groups respond to the proposal, the agency might not finalize its proposed ban. (The agency is accepting public comments through its portal until July 1.)

“The pushback on this is going to be really intense,” Donley said. “I hope they stick to their guns.”

I just want a you tube channel of some guy with a spectrogram machine testing user voted products available via retail. Lets let videos go viral when they discover lead in mayo.

@TheHooligan95@lemmy.dbzer0.com Lol. Torrenting is sharing. And for now you haven’t been visited, but I’m certain Hollywood will pay a visit to your local enforcer chief to explain to him the technicalities over fine wine & dinner.

The risk is still there. Keep your share ratios to 3 so you don’t look like a big problem as @Melkath@kbin.social put it. And when you get a letter from somebody complaining, it’s time to start looking into a VPN.

The second best thing to do is your own research into your country’s laws, and subscribing to e-mail alerts so you can know if the law will change. At least a google alert at a minimum.

Your complaints should be in the donation message.

This was an interesting side effect to discover about climate change. As the need for change increases, conservatives gain more power.

Except if y’all forget about the promise, in time for us to make another 10 year goal!

Recognize him for a different OG status:

His work was so bad that all the “internet nerds” worked overnight trying to disprove him.

Does nobody use the god given Repository of all human knowledge?

There are privacy issues that still have not been addressed as of 2023:

A privacy review of Tribler, the onion-routed BitTorrent app

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/tribler-onion-routed-bittorrent.html

Daniel Aleksandersen 2022-01-11 10:35Z

Hi Anth0rx, yes — I’ve looked into all of them. Here are some hot-takes:

Loginet is just a front for a cryptocurrency. It’s decentralized but not distributed. It’s primary purpose is to selling you hot air, though.

I2P can only talk to other I2P users. There are far from enough users on it to reliably use it for P2P. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it just never reached critical mass. The set-up process is probably too complicated for most potential users.

GNUnet has been “fixing the internet” for literally two decades. They‘ve yet to deliver anything. The software download pages clearly warns that it’s still “not yet ready”. It’s an interesting project, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Daniel Aleksandersen 2023-07-02 15:17Z

The project change log does not indicate any work on any of the things discussed in this article. I might revisit this after the next beta release.

TLDR: Censorship resistant doesn’t mean anything if they can find you and nail you to a cross

Different purposes. Tor was intended so you could access the real web anonymously.

I2p the whole thing is an anonymous web. Everybody is a node. Tracing a packet never ends because you can’t be sure you found the origin of the packet. Which only gets worse the longer somebody remains connected to i2p. And it even can handle torrenting, a torrent client is built in.

I2P sadly gets a lot less funding/support.

i2p or tor addresses. Which aren’t popular because it’s hard for both admin & user.

The Premier League wants domain registrar GoDaddy to identify people connected to dozen of pirate sports streaming domains that broadcast live football matches. The information, including IP-addresses and payment information, could assist with enforcement efforts. In addition, the Premier League would like GoDaddy to take action against these infringements but, as far as we know, that hasn’t happened yet.

Spanish football league LaLiga has asked a local court to charge the directors of Google, Apple, and Huawei in a row over an IPTV player app. The companies removed the Newplay app from their stores in 2022 to comply with a court order but LaLiga says that apps already installed on users’ phones must be remotely deactivated.

It would stop being science very very quickly, and just be “hey girl, heard you want your son to attend the “control group” school”.

People saying flip phones. But search for grey scale e-ink phones. Pretty sure they can only handle apps the company designed for them. Battery life is forever. And they can practice using their pocket computers.

Everybody speculating on what it tastes like. When we should probably just pour money into scientific research to bring dinosaurs back from the dead to confirm definitively their taste.

Republishing under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Soldiers Charged With Violent Crimes Will Now Face More Scrutiny Before They Can Simply Leave the Army

by Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Davis Winkie, Military Times

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The U.S. Army, the country’s largest military branch, will no longer allow military commanders to decide on their own whether soldiers accused of certain serious crimes can leave the service rather than go on trial.

The decision comes one year after ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Military Times published an investigation exposing how hundreds of soldiers charged with violent crimes were administratively discharged instead of facing a court martial.

Under the new rule, which goes into effect Saturday, military commanders will no longer have the sole authority to grant a soldier’s request for what is known as a discharge in lieu of court martial, or Chapter 10, in certain cases. Instead, the newly created Office of Special Trial Counsel, a group of military attorneys who specialize in handling cases involving violent crimes, must also approve the decision. Without the attorneys’ approval, charges against a soldier can’t be dismissed.

The Office of Special Trial Counsel will have the final say, the Army told the news organizations.

The new rule will apply only to cases that fall under the purview of the Office of Special Trial Counsel, including sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, kidnapping and murder. In 2021, Congress authorized creation of the new legal office — one for each military branch except the U.S. Coast Guard — in response to yearslong pressure to change how the military responds to violent crimes, specifically sexual assault, and reduce commanders’ control over that process. As of December, attorneys with this special office, and not commanders, now decide whether to prosecute cases related to those serious offenses.

Army officials told the news organizations that the change in discharge authority was made in response to the creation of the Office of Special Trial Counsel.

As far back as 1978, a federal watchdog agency called for the U.S. Department of Defense to end its policy of allowing service members accused of crimes to leave the military to avoid going to court. Armed forces leaders continued the practice anyway.

Last year, ProPublica, the Tribune and Military Times found that more than half of the 900 soldiers who were allowed to leave the Army in the previous decade rather than go to trial had been accused of violent crimes, including sexual assault and domestic violence, according to an analysis of roughly 8,000 Army courts-martial cases that reached arraignment. These soldiers had to acknowledge that they committed an offense that could be punishable under military law but did not have to admit guilt to a specific crime or face any other consequences that can come with a conviction, like registering as a sex offender.

The Army did not dispute the news organizations’ findings that the discharges in lieu of trial, also known as separations, were increasingly being used for violent crimes. An Army official said separations are a good alternative if commanders believe wrongdoing occurred but don’t have the evidence for a conviction, or if a victim prefers not to pursue a case.

Military law experts contacted by the news organizations called the Army’s change a step in the right direction.

“It’s good to see the Army has closed the loophole,” said former Air Force chief prosecutor Col. Don Christensen, who is now in private practice.

However, the Office of Special Trial Counsel’s decisions are not absolute. If the attorneys want to drop a charge, the commander still has the option to impose a range of other administrative punishments, Army officials said.

Christensen said he believes commanders should be removed from the judicial process entirely, a shift he said that the military has continued to fight. Commanders often have little to no legal experience. The military has long maintained that commanders are an important part of its justice system.

“They just can’t break away from commanders making these decisions,” said Christensen, who’s been a vocal critic of commanders’ outsize role in the military justice system. “They’re too wedded to that process.”

The Army told the newsrooms that additional changes to DOD and Army policy would be required to remove commanders entirely and instead give the Office of Special Trial Counsel full authority over separations in lieu of trial.

The news organizations reached out to several military branches to determine how the creation of the Office of Special Trial Counsel will affect their discharge processes. The U.S. Navy has taken steps similar to the Army’s. In the U.S. Air Force, the Office of Special Trial Counsel now makes recommendations in cases involving officers, and the branch is in the process of changing the rules for enlisted members. The U.S. Marines confirmed to the news organizations that it has not yet changed its discharge system.

I get that it can be several megabytes in size. But in this day and age it’s like pulling a key flavor from the dish.

The part of the story I hate the most:

Asked about experts’ arguments that Microsoft’s strategy of profiting off of cybersecurity is incompatible with a security-first mindset, Faehl says, “We would disagree with that characterization.”