Another weekend and another weekend reads! Here are the articles I enjoyed reading this week: “Avoid Tax on Capital Gains, Dividends with These Tips“, “Facebook: Social Network, Media Company – or Both?“, “If We Made Contacts with Aliens, How Would Religions React“, and “The Chilling Stories Behind Japan’s Evaporating People“.
As usual, pour yourself a mug of your favorite coffee or tea, find your favorite spot in your house and get ready to enjoy the weekend reads.
Here are this weekend’s four articles. I hope you find them worthy of your time and enjoy them as much as I did. Have a great weekend.
Avoid Tax on Capital Gains, Dividends with These Tips
Physician on Fire explores strategies to avoid taxes on capital gains and dividends. Both of these investment returns come in two flavors. Short-term capital gains and ordinary non-qualified dividends are taxed like income, so it’s awfully difficult to avoid taxes on those. Long-term capital gains (LTCG), realized when you sell an asset you’ve held for more than a year, and qualified dividends (QD) are a different variety. The tax treatment on them can be much more favorable.
Facebook: Social Network, Media Company – or Both?
by Amol Rajan
Is Facebook a media company?
This abstract question may strike you as the preserve of Palo Alto wannabes, Lower East Side podcasters, and media navel-gazers closer to home.
In fact the answer, while complex, goes to the very essence of democracy in our time.
And you cannot understand Thursday’s announcement from the company, about its clampdown on fake news, without answering the prior question above.
If We Made Contacts with Aliens, How Would Religions React
The discovery of life on another planet might seem incompatible with faith in a deity. Yet many theologians are already open to the existence of extraterrestrials, argues the writer Brandon Ambrosino.
The Chilling Stories Behind Japan’s ‘Evaporating People’
Of the many oddities that are culturally specific to Japan — from cat cafés to graveyard eviction notices to the infamous Suicide Forest, where an estimated 100 people per year take their own lives — perhaps none is as little known, and curious, as “the evaporated people.”
Since the mid-1990s, it’s estimated that at least 100,000 Japanese men and women vanish annually. They are the architects of their own disappearances, banishing themselves over indignities large and small: divorce, debt, job loss, failing an exam.
