Neurovagrant

Geoengineering and Dissent

Thinking today about the prospect of governments and corporations quickly latching onto geoengineering as a way to muffle dissent. Technology’s not quite there yet, but pretty close. I vaguely remember something about China pregaming the Beijing Olympics by seeding clouds ahead of time to try and prevent rain during the actual event. Think about the PRC doing that in the event of a mass protest. Or, hell, the US government or UK government doing it, for that matter. Seeding clouds on a day of mass action to make the rain pour down. Wells-Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto hacking the temperature to make it uncomfortable so that only the hardcore show up. If they’ll do it with tear gas and sound cannons, why wouldn’t they with rainclouds and heat waves or cold snaps? The military applications for weather creation and diversion are many and given how we’ve seen so much military technology turned back around to deal with domestic civil unrest, I can’t imagine this tech will be any different.

Deterrence and Moral Persuasion Effects on Corporate Tax Compliance

Previous studies on tax compliance have focused primarily on the tax-reporting behavior of individuals. This study reports results from a randomized field test of the effects of deterrence and moral persuasion on the tax-reporting behavior of 4,395 corporations in Israel. Two experimental groups received tax letters, one conveying a deterrent message and the other a moral persuasion message. Three types of measures are used to evaluate compliance based on the magnitude of the difference-in-differences of means in 1) gross sales values reported to the authority, 2) tax dollars paid to the authority, and 3) tax deductions. Overall, both deterrence and moral persuasion approaches do not produce statistically significant greater compliance compared with control conditions. These results do not support the ability of a policy of sending tax letters to increase substantively the reporting of true tax liability or tax payments by corporations. However, these results also show that moral persuasion can be counterproductive: Corporations in this experimental group show an increase rather than a decrease in tax deductions, which translates into loss of state revenues. The implications for theory, research, and tax policy are discussed.

(Source: dx.doi.org)

Kaishakunin

A kaishakunin (Japanese: 介錯人) is an appointed second whose duty is to behead one who has committed seppuku, Japanese ritual suicide, at the moment of agony.

(Source: Wikipedia)