The Washington Post's editorial board announces its position in "The Post's view," a section of its site which officially "represent the views of The Washington Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board." Its newest position?

America's Internal Revenue Service "should not make you scan your face to see your tax returns." The Internal Revenue Service might soon force every American who wants to access their taxes online to record a selfie of themselves and submit to facial recognition to verify their identity. The IRS wants to start this extra verification procedure this summer. That would be a mistake. This cannot be the only way to access an account online, as 90 percent of tax filers currently do.

Requiring facial recognition could prevent a substantial number of people from accessing their accounts. Low-income Americans often lack the necessary technology, and research shows people of color are more likely to be misidentified. There are equally serious concerns about privacy and what will happen to the potentially more than 100 million selfies the IRS will collect. Cutting down on fraud is a worthy goal, but facial recognition should not be introduced so swiftly without clear guardrails around the data.... [T]here is no federal law regulating how this sensitive information can be used. And let's not forget that hackers exposed the personal information of more than 140 million Americans when they broke into Equifax — itself once an IRS verification company....

There have been encouraging reports that the IRS is reconsidering its sole reliance on ID.me for online verification for website access. At a minimum, the IRS must offer other verification options and clearly articulate guidelines on what happens to all facial data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: OpenSea has revealed just how much of the NFT activity on its platform is defined by fakery and theft, and it's a lot. In fact, according to the company, nearly all of the NFTs created for free on its platform are either spam or plagiarized. The revelation began with some drama. On Thursday, popular NFT marketplace OpenSea announced that it would limit how many times a user could create (or "mint") an NFT for free on the platform using its tools to 50. So-called "lazy minting" on the site lets users skip paying a blockchain gas fee when they create an NFT on OpenSea (with the buyer eventually paying the fee at the time of sale), so it's a popular option especially for people who don't have deep pockets to jumpstart their digital art empire.

This decision set off a firestorm, with some projects complaining that this was an out-of-the-blue roadblock for them as they still needed to mint NFTs but suddenly couldn't. Shortly after, OpenSea reversed course and announced that it would remove the limit, as well as provided some reasoning for the limit in the first place: The free minting tool is being used almost exclusively for the purposes of fraud or spam. "Every decision we make, we make with our creators in mind. We originally built our shared storefront contract to make it easy for creators to onboard into the space," OpenSea said in a tweet thread. "However, we've recently seen misuse of this feature increase exponentially. Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam."

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinction. From a report: On 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. "I am writing on a plane en route from Los Angeles to Washington and for all I know this editorial ... may never be published," Brown said. "Never in history have people and nations been so close to death and destruction on such a vast scale. Midnight is upon us." With this dire warning, he was referring to the Doomsday Clock, which has been the Bulletin's iconic motif since it was founded 75 years ago by Albert Einstein and some of the University of Chicago scientists from the Manhattan Project. Their work had contributed to making the atomic bomb, but many of them had been outraged when the US used it against Japanese cities.

The image of the clock ticking away to midnight was intended to convey the sense of urgent peril, which Brown felt so viscerally on that 1962 flight to Washington. "He thought the world could end while he was on that flight," said Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin's current president. On Thursday, the Doomsday Clock will be unveiled for the 75th time, and we will find out what way the Bulletin's panel of scientists and security experts will move the minute hand. For the past two years it has been stuck at 100 seconds to midnight. With Russia poised to attack Ukraine, it is hard to imagine the clock being set back, and that means that the experts assess we are in greater danger now than ever. The closest the clock came at the height of the cold war was two minutes to midnight in 1953 after the first detonation of a thermonuclear warhead, a hydrogen bomb. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the hands were at seven minutes to, but despite Brown's apocalyptic editorial, the Bulletin decided not to move them forward because the shock of near catastrophe had given Washington and Moscow fresh incentive to work towards risk reduction and arms control.

SFGate visits a San Francisco elementary school where there's absolutely no trace of warehouse that used to be there where Tim Burton kicked a hole in the wall during the arduous two-year filming of "The Nightmare Before Christmas".

At least one animator remembers Burton at the time was directing Batman Returns, and only stopped by every month or so to check on the film's progress and "actually got to witness, proof positive, how the crew suffered to create his vision...."

Slashdot reader destinyland shares SFGate's report: Disney initially had reservations about the film, releasing it under the Touchstone banner with a PG rating that was uncommon for an animated feature at the time. Nonetheless, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" became a sleeper hit — Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is annually remodeled with a seasonal overlay inspired by the film, and it clocks in at #7 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the best Christmas movies of all time. It was immortalized in a Blink-182 song, and Roger Ebert went as far as to compare the originality of the worlds captured in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" to the planets in the "Star Wars" franchise....

[A] team of 120 animators, puppet fabricators, camera operators, and more moved into San Francisco Studios — later renamed Skellington Productions — in July of 1991, with production expected to begin later that October. The 35,000-square-foot warehouse on 375 7th Street was outfitted with 19 soundstages where 227 puppets — many of them duplicates of the main characters — were painstakingly assembled and animated. Passersby in SoMa likely had no idea the studio existed, and if they did, they were completely unaware of what was going on inside.

Unlike studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks, where each animator is usually seated at a computer in a cubicle, these soundstages were massive and sectioned off with thick black curtains, said animator Justin Kohn, who lived in a Sausalito apartment next to Smitty's Bar during filming and still resides in Marin. "It was like visiting this crazy museum," he said. "You'd part the curtain, and it was like visiting a whole new world with clouds and stars everywhere." Set pieces were built no larger than two feet tall and wide so an animator could easily reach inside and move the puppets around. Each character had to be posed 24 times for every second of animated footage, while many of the scenes required 20-30 lighting instruments on top of that to create lifelike visual effects. "It was the most sophisticated stop motion ever done in the world up until that point," said Kohn...

All the while, they wondered if the hours of tedious work would pay off. When the film was completed, most of the sets and puppets were thrown away, with animators taking home some of them as keepsakes — Kohn still has a Jack Skellington puppet and the sleigh displayed in an office.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: On December 1, hours before Texas' social media law, HB 20, was slated to go into effect, a federal court in Texas blocked it for violating the First Amendment. Like a similar law in Florida, which was blocked and is now pending before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the Texas law will go to the Fifth Circuit. These laws are retaliatory, obviously unconstitutional, and EFF will continue advocating that courts stop them. In October, EFF filed an amicus brief against HB 20 in Netchoice v. Paxton, a challenge to the law brought by two associations of tech companies. HB 20 prohibits large social media platforms from removing or moderating content based on the viewpoint of the user. We argued, and the federal court agreed, that the government cannot regulate the editorial decisions made by online platforms about what content they host. As the judge wrote, platforms' right under the First Amendment to moderate content "has repeatedly been recognized by courts." Social media platforms are not "common carriers" that transmit speech without curation.

Moreover, Texas explicitly passed HB 20 to stop social media companies' purported discrimination against conservative users. The court explained that this "announced purpose of balancing the discussion" is precisely the kind of government manipulation of public discourse that the First Amendment forbids. As EFF's brief explained, the government can't retaliate against disfavored speakers and promote favored ones. Moreover, HB 20 would destroy or prevent the emergence of even large conservative platforms, as they would have to accept user speech from across the political spectrum. HB 20 also imposed transparency requirements and user complaint procedures on large platforms. While these kinds of government mandates might be appropriate when carefully crafted -- and separated from editorial restrictions or government retaliation -- they are not here. The court noted that companies like YouTube and Facebook remove millions of pieces of user content a month. It further noted Facebook's declaration in the case that it would be "impossible" to establish a system by December 1 compliant with the bill's requirements for that many removals. Platforms would simply stop removing content to avoid violating HB 20 -- an impermissible chill of First Amendment rights.

Twitter asked a federal judge to throw out Donald Trump's lawsuit over his ban from the platform for stoking the U.S. Capitol riot, arguing the company's right to free speech is at stake -- not the former president's. From a report: Twitter's First Amendment rights "are at their apex" in the case because the editorial decisions Trump is challenging relate to matters of public concern, including threats to the peaceful transfer of power, Twitter and its chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, said in a San Francisco federal court filing. Trump "agreed to abide by Twitter's rules, and yet proceeded to repeatedly violate those rules" before, during and after the deadly assault on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters, with tweets that "could encourage further violence," the company said in its filing late Thursday.

Trump's free-speech claim also ignores "that Twitter is a private actor that is not constrained by the federal constitution," the company said. The government "cannot force the private operator of an online platform, such as Twitter, to disseminate speech with which the operator disagrees." Trump is fighting bans or suspensions from Twitter, Meta Platforms' Facebook and Alphabet's Google, accusing the tech giants of trying to silence conservative views and violating his free-speech rights. He's also pressing ahead with plans to launch a rival social-media platform as part of a new media company with "non-woke" entertainment and news.

From the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: In 1947, more than 4 million Americans owned $3.4 billion in saving deposits held not by a bank or credit union, but by the United States Postal Service. It's a largely forgotten part of American banking (and postal) history that the USPS ran the Postal Savings System for 56 years, from 1911 to 1967... [T]o this day postal services around the world provide small-scale financial services, from check cashing to savings accounts to e-commerce solutions, such as allowing refunds for returned goods to be deposited directly into a consumer's postal account. In September, the U.S. Postal Service took the first steps toward restoring its place in Americans' financial lives: At four East Coast post offices, customers can now get paychecks or business checks worth up to $500 cashed for a flat fee of $5.95....

Postal banking has the potential to reorient the American financial landscape for the benefit the most vulnerable. A fifth of Americans are considered "unbanked" or "underbanked," often relying on unscrupulous payday lenders because they lack the week-to-week security to set even a little aside in a traditional account. According to a 2014 USPS report, in 2012 alone these "alternative financial services" wrung $89 billion in interest and fees out of the poorest Americans... Postal banking also has a bipartisan pedigree. While it has most recently been a centerpiece of the progressive platforms of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., it has also been promoted by reformist conservatives as a way to get and keep capital in local communities, rather than having it held in the coffers of multinational conglomerates.

And finally, an expansion into basic financial services may be essential to the very survival of the U.S. Postal Service. As Amazon and private shipping companies continue to press their advantage, the Postal Service can press its own: thousands of locations in every nook and cranny of the country, along with broad community trust.
This modest pilot "is the foundation for more expansive contemplated postal banking services that could include bill-paying services, ATM access and money-order and wire-transfer capabilities," argues a follow-up piece in the same newspaper: Local bank branches are shuttering in communities all across our country, and mainstream banks are failing to offer financial services that meet the needs of many communities... Robust postal banking, which should ultimately include checking and savings accounts as well as loan options, could step into the breach and provide equitable, accessible and affordable financial services to people who lack access to traditional bank services and would otherwise have to turn to high-cost and low-value fringe financial institutions... Underbanked households have an average annual income of $25,000 and typically spend approximately 10% of their income on fees and interest to fringe financial institutions simply to access their money — an amount equal to what the average household spends on food annually...

Postal banking provides an economic lifeline to countless Americans living in banking deserts. The Postal Service's 34,000 facilities service every ZIP code in the country. More than two-thirds of the census tracts that have a post office do not have a bank branch. Postal banking also provides transparent and equitable services and costs. Traditional bank fees and requirements — such as minimum balance requirements, activity fees and overdraft charges — exclude low-income and small-balance customers... Postal banking is a key pathway from poverty to economic mobility for millions of Americans and also produces significant revenue and opportunities for the Postal Service to flourish and expand its business model.

Greg Bensinger of the New York Times editorial board argues ridesharing companies haven't delivered on their promises of well-paying driver jobs with less traffic congestion (let alone their predictions of an end to car ownership — or even of a sustainable, profitable, business model).

And he adds that now a new study "is punching a hole in another of Uber and Lyft's promised benefits: curtailing pollution." The companies have long insisted their services are a boon to the environment in part because they reduce the need for short trips, can pool riders heading in roughly the same direction and cut unnecessary miles by, for instance, eliminating the need to look for street parking. It turns out that Uber rides do spare the air from the high amount of pollutants emitted from starting up a cold vehicle, when it is operating less efficiently, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found. But that gain is wiped out by the need for drivers to circle around waiting for or fetching their next passenger, known as deadheading. Deadheading, Lyft and Uber estimated in 2019, is equal to about 40 percent of rideshare miles driven in six American cities.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimated that driving without a passenger leads to a roughly 20 percent overall increase in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions compared with trips made by personal vehicles.

The researchers also found that switching from a private car to on-demand rides, like an Uber or Lyft, increased the external costs of a typical trip by 30 percent to 35 percent, or roughly 35 cents on average, because of the added congestion, collisions and noise from ridesharing services. "This burden is not carried by the individual user, but rather impacts the surrounding community," reads a summary of the research conducted by Jacob Ward, Jeremy Michalek and Constantine Samaras. "Society as a whole currently shoulders these external costs in the form of increased mortality risks, damage to vehicles and infrastructure, climate impacts and increased traffic congestion."

Luke Plunkett, writing at Kotaku: Back in 2018, The Verge released a guide to building a new PC that was, well, from where I was sitting it was not ideal. From where some angry PC nerds were sitting, though, it was an outrage. How bad was the video? It has its own knowyourmeme page, that's how bad. The guide was full of glaring omissions and bizarre tips, from a strange obsession with power usage to the most liberal use of thermal paste you've ever seen. The original video guide was eventually removed by The Verge (though you can see it here, and the written portion remains online), with the site claiming that it didn't meet their "editorial standards." Things took a turn for the worse when folks' initial bemusement with the guide quickly morphed into outright harassment from others, with author Stefan Etienne receiving a ton of racial abuse and The Verge issuing takedown notices on a couple of videos critical of the situation.

Anyway, that was 2018. We're not here to drag up bad old content and the ramblings of internet shitheads, we're here for the redemptive arc in this tale. That comes in the form of this new Linus Tech Tips video, where the host gets Etienne on to "fix" his old build, going through the same basic overall process as the original, making some changes (or just adding some extra information) at stops along the way. Etienne is a great sport throughout (and interestingly claims that The Verge's editorial basically threw him under the bus with the video section of the guide). The pair go through the original guide point by point, not just explaining how they'd improve things in 2021, but also allowing Etienne to break down just what was going on during the creation of the video as well. [H/T UnknowingFool.]

CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus, who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Microsoft is launching Microsoft Start today, a personalized news feed that integrates into Windows 11 and is accessible online and on iOS and Android. Microsoft Start is very similar to the MSN feed that exists today and to Microsoft News. Microsoft is rebranding these into Microsoft Start and integrating the feed into the Windows 11 widgets section and the Windows 10 taskbar. From a report: Much like Microsoft News, Microsoft Start includes news and media channels from more than 1,000 publishers. Microsoft uses AI and machine learning algorithms to sort through which news is presented to users and to personalize content based on interests and how you engage with content. There's also some "human moderation" involved, but Microsoft did layoff dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations last year, so it's not clear how involved editors will be. Microsoft Start will surface top stories, personalized recommendations, and sports scores or the weather in its feed.

John Charap, Emeritus professor of theoretical physics, Queen Mary University of London and Norman Dombey Emeritus, professor of theoretical physics, University of Sussex, writing at The Guardian: Your editorial on quantum physics starts with a quote from Richard Feynman -- "nobody understands quantum mechanics" -- and then says "that is no longer true." One of us (Norman Dombey) was taught quantum theory by Feynman at Caltech; the other (John Charap) was taught by Paul Dirac at Cambridge. Quantum theory was devised by several physicists including Dirac, Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s and 1930s, and Dirac made their work relativistic.

It is absurd to say that quantum mechanics is now understood whereas it was not 50 years ago. There have of course been advances in our understanding of quantum phenomena, but the conceptual framework of quantum physics remains as it was. The examples you give of nuclear plants, medical scans and lasers involve straightforward applications of quantum mechanics that were understood 50 years ago. The major advance in the understanding of quantum physics in this period is a theorem of John Bell from Cern, which states that quantum physics cannot be local -- that is to say that it permits phenomena to be correlated at arbitrarily large distances from each other.

This has now been demonstrated experimentally and leads to what is known as quantum entanglement, which is important in the development of quantum computers. But even these ideas were discussed by Albert Einstein and coworkers in 1935. The editorial goes on to say that "subatomic particles do not travel a path that can be plotted." If that were so, how can protons travel at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern and hit their target so that experiments can be performed? We agree with Phillip Ball, who wrote in Physics World that "quantum mechanics is still, a century after it was conceived, making us scratch our heads." There are many speculative proposals in contention but none have consensus support.

People will no longer be able to play the digital version of The New York Times daily crossword puzzle in third-party apps, according to an announcement made by the Times on Monday. The Verge reports: Starting August 10th, the crossword will be available digitally only via the NYT site or on its own crossword app. Downloadable PDFs, in addition to the physical newspaper, will still be available for people who want to print and play. Until now, crosswords were available in the Across Lite .puz file format, so anyone with a Times games subscription could download a puzzle and open it in the desktop or mobile app of their choice. The change applies not just to future puzzles but to the archive of puzzles that are currently in the .puz format.

Everdeen Mason, editorial director of games at the Times, said on Twitter that she made the decision to end .puz support in an effort to build something where editors can "edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can't control."

"A batch of early coronavirus data that went missing for a year has emerged from hiding," reports the New York Times. (Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, had found copies of 13 of the deleted sequences on Google Cloud.)

Though their deletion raised some suspicions, "An odd explanation has emerged, stemming from an editorial oversight by a scientific journal," reports the Times. "And the sequences have been uploaded into a different database, overseen by the Chinese government."

The Times also notes that the researchers had already posted their early findings online in March 2020: That month, they also uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, which is maintained by the National Institutes of Health, and submitted a paper describing their results to a scientific journal called Small. The paper was published in June 2020... [A] spokeswoman for the N.I.H. said that the authors of the study had requested in June 2020 that the sequences be withdrawn from the database. The authors informed the agency that the sequences were being updated and would be added to a different database... On July 5, more than a year after the researchers withdrew the sequences from the Sequence Read Archive and two weeks after Dr. Bloom's report was published online, the sequences were quietly uploaded to a database maintained by China National Center for Bioinformation by Ben Hu, a researcher at Wuhan University and a co-author of the Small paper.

On July 21, the disappearance of the sequences was brought up during a news conference in Beijing... According to a translation of the news conference by a journalist at the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency, the vice minister of China's National Health Commission, Dr. Zeng Yixin, said that the trouble arose when editors at Small deleted a paragraph in which the scientists described the sequences in the Sequence Read Archive. "Therefore, the researchers thought it was no longer necessary to store the data in the N.C.B.I. database," Dr. Zeng said, referring to the Sequence Read Archive, which is run by the N.I.H.

An editor at Small, which specializes in science at the micro and nano scale and is based in Germany, confirmed his account. "The data availability statement was mistakenly deleted," the editor, Plamena Dogandzhiyski, wrote in an email. "We will issue a correction very shortly, which will clarify the error and include a link to the depository where the data is now hosted." The journal posted a formal correction to that effect on Thursday.
While the researchers' first report had described their sequences as coming from patients "early in the epidemic," thus provoking intense curiosity, the sequences were, as promised, updated, to include a more specific date after they were published in the database, according to the Times. "They were taken from Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University on January 30 — almost two months after the earliest reports of Covid-19 in China."

Comic-Con went virtual again in 2020. (San Diego businesses will miss the chance to profit from the 100,000 visitors the convention usually attracted.) And NPR reports the convention has gotten smaller in other ways: Both Marvel Studios and DC are staying away; as it did last year, DC is again directing its resources towards its own event, DC FanDome, set for mid-October. But fans of shows like Doctor Who, Dexter and Comic-Con stalwart The Walking Dead will have lots to look forward to.
Rotten Tomatoes and The Verge have gathered up the trailers that did premier. Some of the highlights:

• Blade Runner: Black Lotus , an upcoming anime television series set to premiere in late 2021 on Crunchyroll and Adult Swim (co-producing it with Alcon Television Group).
• The upcoming remake of Dune
• J.J. Abrams' new four-part Showtime documentary about UFOs.
• Season 2 of Star Trek: Lower Decks and the new Star Trek: Prodigy, a CGI-animated series about a group of aliens who escape captivity onboard the Enterprise.

But interestingly, one of the more visibile presenters was: NASA. Current and former NASA officials made appearances on several different panels, according to Space.com, including one on modern space law, U.N. treaty-making, and how it all stacks up against the portrayal we get in our various future-space franchises. And a former NASA astronaut was also part of a panel touting a virtual simulation platform, "where students can have access to the same tools that professionals use and in the case of space are given the opportunity to solve real problems related to missions to our Moon, Mars, and beyond... from piloting to terra-forming to creating habitats and spacecraft."

There was also a panel of four NASA engineers titled "No Tow Trucks Beyond Mars," on "how we go boldly where there's no one around to fix it. Hear stories from the trenches of the heartbreaks, close calls, and adventures of real-life landing (and flying!) on Mars and our round-table discussion of what Netflix got right in their movie Stowaway."

Sunday's panels will include an astronomer, an astrobiologist, and a geologist/paleontologist discussing "The Science of Star Wars" with the concept designer for Star Wars episodes 7-9, Rogue One, and Solo.

U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden said last week "he is revisiting proposed legislation that would crack down on the giant tax-free retirement accounts amassed by the ultrawealthy," reports ProPublica, "after a ProPublica story exposed that billionaires were shielding fortunes inside them."

Earlier ProPublica had reported that PayPal founder Peter Thiel turned his retirement account "into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank." Wyden said ProPublica's stories have shifted the debate about taxes at the grassroots level, underscoring a "double standard" that would have a nurse in Medford, Oregon, dutifully paying taxes "with every single paycheck" while the wealthiest Americans "just defer, defer, defer paying their taxes almost until perpetuity..."

Wyden's proposal also targeted the stuffing of undervalued assets into Roths, which congressional investigators had flagged as the foundation of many large accounts. Under the Wyden draft bill, purchasing an asset for less than fair market value would strip the tax benefits from the entire IRA. ProPublica's investigation showed that Thiel purchased founder's shares of the company that would become PayPal at $0.001 per share in 1999. At that price, he was able to buy 1.7 million shares and still fall below the $2,000 maximum contribution limit Congress had set at the time for Roth IRAs. PayPal later disclosed in an SEC filing that those shares, and others issued that year, were sold at "below fair value...." Daniel Hemel, a tax law professor at the University of Chicago who has been researching large Roths, said that Congress should simply prohibit IRAs from purchasing assets that are not bought and sold on the public market...

He added that lawmakers should go beyond reforms targeting the accounts directly and address a potential estate tax dodge related to Roths. If the holder of a large Roth dies, the retirement account is considered part of the taxable estate, and a significant tax is due. But, Hemel said, there's nothing to stop an American who has amassed a giant Roth from renouncing their citizenship and moving abroad to a country with no estate taxes. It's rare, but not unheard of, for the ultrawealthy to renounce their U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes. Under federal law, U.S. citizens who renounce their citizenship are taxed that day on assets that have risen in value but are not yet sold. But there's an exception for certain kinds of assets, Hemel said, including Roth retirement accounts.

Thiel acquired citizenship in New Zealand in 2011. Unlike the United States, New Zealand has no estate tax. It's not clear whether estate taxes figured into Thiel's decision... Patching the hole in the expatriation law, Hemel said, "should be a top policy priority because we're talking about, with Thiel alone, billions of dollars of taxes."
Wyden's proposed legislation to regulate Roth IRA accounts was excoriated in at least one 2016 editorial that complained everything in it was "opposed to capitalism and economic freedom."

UPDATE (7/30): All the missing virus sequences have now been published, with their deletion being explained as just "an editorial oversight by a scientific journal," according to the New York Times.

In Slashdot's original report, an anonymous reader quoted another report from The New York Times: About a year ago, genetic sequences from more than 200 virus samples from early cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan disappeared from an online scientific database. Now, by rooting through files stored on Google Cloud, a researcher in Seattle reports that he has recovered 13 of those original sequences -- intriguing new information for discerning when and how the virus may have spilled over from a bat or another animal into humans. The new analysis, released on Tuesday, bolsters earlier suggestions that a variety of coronaviruses may have been circulating in Wuhan before the initial outbreaks linked to animal and seafood markets in December 2019. As the Biden administration investigates the contested origins of the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, the study neither strengthens nor discounts the hypothesis that the pathogen leaked out of a famous Wuhan lab. But it does raise questions about why original sequences were deleted, and suggests that there may be more revelations to recover from the far corners of the internet.
UPDATE (6/25): The Washington Post notes the data wasn't exactly suppressed. "Processed forms of the same data were included in a preprint paper from Chinese scientists posted in March 2020 and, after peer review, published that June in the journal Small." And in addition: The NIH released a statement Wednesday saying that a researcher who originally published the genetic sequences asked for them to be removed from the NIH database so that they could be included in a different database. The agency said it is standard practice to remove data if requested to do so...

Bloom's paper acknowledges that there are benign reasons why researchers might want to delete data from a public database. The data cited by Bloom are not alone in being removed by the NIH during the pandemic. The agency, in response to an inquiry from The Post, said the National Library of Medicine has so far identified eight instances since the start of the pandemic when researchers had withdrawn submissions to the library.

"This one from China and the rest from submitters predominantly in the U.S.," the NIH said in its response. "All of those followed standard operating procedures."
The New York Times writes: The genetic sequences of viral samples hold crucial clues about how SARS-CoV-2 shifted to our species from another animal, most likely a bat. Most precious of all are sequences from early in the pandemic, because they take scientists closer to the original spillover event. As [Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who wrote the new report] was reviewing what genetic data had been published by various research groups, he came across a March 2020 study with a spreadsheet that included information on 241 genetic sequences collected by scientists at Wuhan University. The spreadsheet indicated that the scientists had uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, managed by the U.S. government's National Library of Medicine. But when Dr. Bloom looked for the Wuhan sequences in the database earlier this month, his only result was "no item found." Puzzled, he went back to the spreadsheet for any further clues. It indicated that the 241 sequences had been collected by a scientist named Aisi Fu at Renmin Hospital in Wuhan. Searching medical literature, Dr. Bloom eventually found another study posted online in March 2020 by Dr. Fu and colleagues, describing a new experimental test for SARS-CoV-2. The Chinese scientists published it in a scientific journal three months later. In that study, the scientists wrote that they had looked at 45 samples from nasal swabs taken "from outpatients with suspected Covid-19 early in the epidemic." They then searched for a portion of SARS-CoV-2's genetic material in the swabs. The researchers did not publish the actual sequences of the genes they fished out of the samples. Instead, they only published some mutations in the viruses.

But a number of clues indicated to Dr. Bloom that the samples were the source of the 241 missing sequences. The papers included no explanation as to why the sequences had been uploaded to the Sequence Read Archive, only to disappear later. Perusing the archive, Dr. Bloom figured out that many of the sequences were stored as files on Google Cloud. Each sequence was contained in a file in the cloud, and the names of the files all shared the same basic format, he reported. Dr. Bloom swapped in the code for a missing sequence from Wuhan. Suddenly, he had the sequence. All told, he managed to recover 13 sequences from the cloud this way. With this new data, Dr. Bloom looked back once more at the early stages of the pandemic. He combined the 13 sequences with other published sequences of early coronaviruses, hoping to make progress on building the family tree of SARS-CoV-2. Working out all the steps by which SARS-CoV-2 evolved from a bat virus has been a challenge because scientists still have a limited number of samples to study. Some of the earliest samples come from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where an outbreak occurred in December 2019. But those market viruses actually have three extra mutations that are missing from SARS-CoV-2 samples collected weeks later. In other words, those later viruses look more like coronaviruses found in bats, supporting the idea that there was some early lineage of the virus that did not pass through the seafood market. Dr. Bloom found that the deleted sequences he recovered from the cloud also lack those extra mutations. "They're three steps more similar to the bat coronaviruses than the viruses from the Huanan fish market," Dr. Bloom said. This suggests, he said, that by the time SARS-CoV-2 reached the market, it had been circulating for awhile in Wuhan or beyond. The market viruses, he argued, aren't representative of full diversity of coronaviruses already loose in late 2019.
UPDATE (7/30): When republishing their sequences, the researchers indicated they actually came from January 30, 2020 (and not "late 2019").

In March of 2020, Florida's governor was assuring the state that there was no evidence of Covid-19 in Florida, remembers the Washington Post. But there was — as far back as January.

The Miami Herald reports that when questioned Florida's Department of Health told its data manager to hide that data from public view, "emails from within the agency reviewed by the Miami Herald and others show." Eventually that data manager was fired, and within months her home had been raided by gun-toting police officers.

But that's not the end of the story. The latest development? That data manager is now instead "officially a whistleblower under Florida law, the Office of the Inspector General told her attorneys Friday," the Miami Herald reports. The Inspector General now says the data manager has indeed shown "reasonable cause to suspect that an employee or agent of an agency or independent contractor has violated [a] federal, state or local law, rule or regulation." Slashdot reader whoever57 notes the move "will grant her certain protections."

The Miami Herald reports: Rebekah Jones, who was responsible for building the COVID-19 data dashboard for the Florida Department of Health, was fired last year after raising concerns about "misleading data" being presented to the public, according to the complaint, which was reviewed by the Miami Herald. In the complaint, filed July 17, 2020, Jones alleged she was fired for "opposition and resistance to instructions to falsify data in a government website." She described being asked to bend data analysis to fit pre-determined policy and delete data from public view after questions from the press — actions she claimed "represent an immediate injury to the public health, safety, and welfare, including the possibility of death to members of the public."

On Friday, the Office of the Inspector General informed Jones that "the information disclosed does meet the criteria for whistleblower status as described by ... Florida statutes," according to the email obtained by the Herald... "It's pretty huge," Jones told the Herald in response to the news. "This isn't vindication but this is a start. It's a big push forward...."

A department spokesperson said at the time that Jones was fired for "insubordination."
There's now an ongoing investigation into Jones' allegations. And in December Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper cited other issues with the state government's transparency:

• The Florida Department of Health's county-level spokespeople were ordered in September to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election.

• State officials withheld information about infections in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, relenting only under pressure or legal action from family members, advocacy groups and journalists.

• The governor highlighted statistics that would paint the rosiest picture possible and attempted to cast doubt on the validity of Florida's rising death toll.

"Unfortunately, the possibility of the Department of Health manipulating information is not a stretch," writes the editorial board of the Miami Herald.

For that reason, they write that Jones' whistleblower victory "stands to be a win over state secrecy for the rest of us."

Several science web sites are strongly disputing a China-based journal's claim that time-lapse photos of Mars show growing mushrooms.

TNW Neural headlined their story "Mushrooms on Mars is a hoax — stop believing hack 'scientists'" If you believe those images demonstrate fungus growing on Mars, I'm about to blow your frickin' mind. Check out this pic. You see that? To heck with fungus, that's an entire highway growing out of the sand in front of a moving bus. You can clearly see that the Earth's sandy crust is being broken apart as the expanding highway organism grows beneath it.

Or, if you're the "Occam's Razor" type: the wind is just blowing sand around. I've never been to Mars, but I'm led to believe there are rocks, dust, and wind. Do we really need to go any further in debunking this nonsense?
They also link to Retraction Watch's page about the story's lead author, Rhawn Gabriel Joseph. IFL Science picks up the story: Nicknamed the Space Tiger King — due to the photographs posted on his frankly ridiculous personal website — Joseph has spent decades erroneously claiming that life has already been discovered on other planets. Back in the 1970s, he began alleging that NASA's Viking lander had found biological matter, despite the agency stating the exact opposite of this.

After setting up his own journal in an attempt to air his unscientific assertions, he later filed a lawsuit against NASA in order to force them to investigate a structure which he claimed resembled a "putative biological organism", but which later turned out to be a rock.
CNET adds: "Claiming that mushrooms are sprouting all over Mars is an extraordinary claim that requires better evidence than an analysis of photographic morphology by a known crank who has claimed, on the basis of the same kind of analysis, that he has seen fields of skulls on Mars," says Paul Myers, a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has followed Joseph's work in the past...

After being alerted to the new paper on Wednesday, I sent emails to the associate editors-in-chief of Advances in Microbiology, asking for clarification around the peer review process. They have not responded to requests for comment. I also emailed members of the editorial board listed on SCIRP's website, including Jian Li, a microbiologist at Monash University in Australia. He says he has not been on the journal's editorial board "for at least five to six years" and has not handled any of the papers in the journal.
The "mushrooms" theory was also dismissed by several actual scientists, reports Futurism: "The conditions on Mars are so extreme that you're not going to see fungi or any kind of life growing at that sort of speed under conditions like coldness and low air pressure," Jonathan Clarke, president of Mars Society Australia, told the South China Morning Post. "Life can barely survive, let alone thrive."

Clarke also took issue with the paper claiming that mushrooms were actually growing on Mars. "It's just like if you go to a beach and there are shells," he told the newspaper. "If the wind blows, the sand moves and exposes more shells. But we won't say the shells are growing there, it's just that they become visible..."

"We have more than photos, records, instruments that tell us what these materials are made of," David Flannery, lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology who is a member of NASA's Mars 2020 mission science team, told SCMP. "And we have models for the features we see around us.... Robots are sending back huge amounts of data," he added. "We have plenty of information but it's just that no one is interpreting the features that we see as something like fungi. There's zero evidence for that."

"This paper, which is really not credible, will be ignored by the scientific community," Flannery said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Tech workers at The New York Times have formed a union under the NewsGuild of New York, and they are demanding voluntary recognition from the paper's management. The new union, called the Tech Times Guild, represents more than 650 workers from the digital side of the company, including software engineers, designers, and data analysts. Those employees are not included in the editorial union of The New York Times, which represents more than 3,000 reporters and media professionals at the newspaper and is also organized under NewsGuild. The editorial union has historically excluded employees on the digital side of the paper, even as the company has expanded into more ambitious data and digital work. As a result, the Tech Times Guild is seeking a separate bargaining unit, which would negotiate separately with the Times management. "As of now, we face a number of challenges," the Tech Times Guild said in a statement on Twitter, "including sudden or unexplained termination, opaque promotion processes, unpaid overtime, and underinvestment in diverse representation. Without a union, we lack the data or bargaining rights to address these issues."

The Times has not formally responded to the union's request for recognition. "Voluntary recognition is a significant decision," The New York Times Company said in a statement. "We have heard questions from colleagues such as what a union would mean for staff, who might be included in the union, and how colleagues would have a say in who might represent them. We want to make sure all voices are heard."