Black Money-The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same
In the budget speech made on February 1, 2017, the finance minister Arun Jaitley had said: “The Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up by the Government for black money has suggested that no transaction above Rs. 3 lakh should be permitted in cash. The Government has decided to accept this proposal.” Black money is basically money earned through legal or illegal means but on which tax has not been paid. In the Finance Bill (which is what the budget is) that was finally passed on March 30, 2017, this limit was reduced to Rs. 2 lakh. So far so good. As Vivek Kaul writes the intentions are very noble indeed. Nevertheless, the first question is how will the government and more specifically the Income Tax department figure out that cash transactions of greater than Rs. 2 lakh are taking place? Typically, such large cash transactions are carried out only if the two parties do not want the government to know about it, and in the process avoid paying tax on the transaction. Let’s say you go to buy a luxury good which costs more than Rs. 2 lakh. The shopkeeper may not want to take cash for an amount greater than Rs. 2 lakh. But one always has the option to go over to another shopkeeper who is willing to accept cash and fudge his books of account. He writes that this new law will not have a major impact on black money in India, its noble intentions notwithstanding. He concludes by saying that Black money can only be eradicated from system if the system of electoral financing in India is cleaned up. Given the high cost of elections in India, politicians need cash. And the builders and the corporates provide this cash. And there is nothing that the government has done on this front till date.
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Forget coding, we need to teach our kids how to dream
A 5-year-old today will enter a working world in 2030 that is so incomprehensible that we need an existential re-imagination of the very foundation of education. It’s the cliched hope of the paranoid parent that teaching Chinese will best prepare kids for a future of different power structures in geopolitics, but is that essential in a world of Google translate? Many think that teaching kids to code is the solution, but won’t soon software be written by software? Life is becoming increasingly less predictable. From the political volatility of Donald Trump and Brexit to the vast societal changes of globalisation, drastic, seismic change is in the air. If we accept that the role of education is to furnish our children with the best understanding, skills and values for a prosperous and happy life, then how do we arm them for a future that we can’t imagine? Do we even need knowledge in a world of Alexa and Siri? Is the skill of agility now more valuable than the gaining of knowledge? We’ve prioritised the acquisition of knowledge around what we assume society would deem most “worthy”. This value has, however, eroded over the years. Businesses have complained about the poor skills of school-leavers, and we’ve assumed the way forward is to ensure that more people study for longer. I think that the changing world means that we need to prepare kids in a totally different way. Current schooling seems outward-in. We prioritise knowledge above all else. It is tested in exams. The best in school are those who can most easily recall information. Which was pretty helpful until like now, where information is immediate, everywhere and abundant. For kids growing up today, let alone tomorrow, we’re living in a world where we outsource knowledge and skills to the Internet. Kids will struggle to communicate if they can’t spell at all, but when spell-checkers auto translate and software handles voice-to-text, maybe it’s not something to take up much time. Maths and the logic from it is essential, but perhaps we need to think of it more philosophically.
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/forget-coding-we-need-to-teach-our-kids-how-to-dream/
Hackers hijacked banks entire online operation
This story is out of thriller except that it is true and that’s why going digital without adequate backend security can be risky. One enterprising group of hackers targeting a Brazilian bank on one weekend afternoon, rerouted all of the bank’s online customers to perfectly reconstructed fakes of the bank’s properties, where the marks obediently handed over their account information. The internet security firm investigating this fraud described an unprecedented case of wholesale bank fraud, one that essentially hijacked a bank’s entire internet footprint. At 1 pm on October 22 of last year, the researchers say, hackers changed the Domain Name System registrations of all 36 of the bank’s online properties, commandeering the bank’s desktop and mobile website domains to take users to phishing sites. In practice, that meant the hackers could steal login credentials at sites hosted at the bank’s legitimate web addresses. Researchers believe the hackers may have even simultaneously redirected all transactions at ATMs or point-of-sale systems to their own servers, collecting the credit card details of anyone who used their card that Saturday afternoon. “Absolutely all of the bank’s online operations were under the attackers’ control for five to six hours,” With that domain hijacking in place, anyone visiting the bank’s website URLs were redirected to lookalike sites. And those sites even had valid HTTPS certificates issued in the name of the bank, so that visitors’ browsers would show a green lock and the bank’s name, just as they would with the real sites. From the hackers’ point of view, the DNS attack meant that “you become the bank. Everything belongs to you now.”
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World without retirement
We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all. This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state. Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.
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