18/Nov/2017(Sat)

[yoon.]

Government Poised to Tax Religious Institutions from Next Year

SEOUL, June 8 (Korea Bizwire) – The newly-elected South Korean government is accelerating efforts to put an end to religious tax exemptions beginning next year, as President Moon Jae-in’s nominee for Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Strategy and Finance, Kim Dong-yeon, has indicated his intent to deliver on the tax reform proposal.

In a written answer submitted to the National Assembly for his confirmation hearing, Kim said, “As far as I’m concerned, tax on religious institutions should take effect from next year.

“The central government must hold meetings with the National Tax Service and religious organizations to prepare for a smooth enforcement of the proposed tax reform.

Kim’s comments come as no surprise, as Moon’s nominee for Deputy Prime Minister previously expressed his support for raising taxes, citing the country’s low tax burden among OECD member countries.

Prior to the Moon administration, public calls to tax religious institutions garnered support from highly placed government officials, including former Finance Minister Park Jae-wan, until an initiative to tax religious institutions was thwarted by opposition from religious leaders.

Though the legislature passed a law in December 2015, its enforcement was delayed until 2018 during a regular session of the National Assembly.

While some call for the implementation of a tax on religious institutions to be pushed back another two years, including the nominal chairman of the State Affairs Advisory Council, the growing public support coupled with politicians supportive of the law is likely to see the country finally do away with a religious tax exemption that has been widely criticized.

On tax policy, Kim said, “The burden of taxation in South Korea is relatively low compared to other OECD member countries, leaving us with room for tax increases.

“Instead of tax rate increases, I’d first introduce stricter tax rules that could see more taxes imposed on the likes of high income earners and rich property owners, while reducing tax exemptions and reductions for corporations.”

Opinions from religious groups varied, however, depending on the religion and denomination.

The Catholic Church, which has been paying taxes since 1994, and Buddhist institutions including the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, shared the same sentiment in support of an end to religious tax exemptions, while conservative leaders of Protestant congregations such as the Christian Council of Korea say it is still too early, and that it should be up to churches to decide whether or not they want to pay taxes.

 

 

Welcoming Worshipers With Open Arms and Concealed Ones, Too

Before the church massacre in Sutherland Springs, Tex., there was the church massacre in Charleston, S.C. It was enough to make the Rev. John Darsey think that his young Georgia church needed a security plan — one that involved defenders with firearms.

So his church, Redeemer Church of Madison, hired three uniformed sheriff’s deputies for each Sunday service, one directing traffic, one in the parking lot, and one right by the door.

This is the visible deterrent — the first line of defense.

The second, more subtle layer is an in-house security team of church members with military or law enforcement backgrounds, all carrying concealed weapons. Inside the spare, spacious modern sanctuary — where some 500 people come every Sunday morning — the team members split the room into quadrants, with one always keeping a bird’s-eye view from the back of the room, on the riser with the sound and lighting equipment.

The third layer of protection is one that Mr. Darsey knows is there, though he has trouble quantifying it. He estimated that about 20 to 25 of his flock were concealing a weapon on any given Sunday. “Now that’s just the ones I know about,” he said.

And there were other weapons around. “Including here,” he said, opening a drawer of his big wooden desk.

Around the country, a string of threats and attacks in recent years have led many houses of worship to take steps to secure their sanctuaries. And after 26 people were killed at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Tex., last Sunday, one of the worst mass shootings in American history and the deadliest ever at a church, many more have begun looking hard at whether God’s protection might need some armed backup.

In Plano, Tex., the Prestonwood Baptist Church, a megachurch with more than 43,000 members and a model of modern-day vigilance — with off-duty police, private security, and cameras monitored 24 hours a day — offered to hold a seminar on church security after the shooting last Sunday.

Within 48 hours, more than 250 ministers and lay leaders from more than 100 churches in four states had signed up.

“This has caused every church in the country to think about the security of their people, and how that has to be of utmost importance,” said the Rev. Mike Buster, Prestonwood’s executive pastor.

But securing a house of worship poses very different challenges from securing other public places like airports, schools or theaters.

For one thing, most American congregations are relatively small, and lack the staff or the budget for extensive security. Two-thirds of the churches in the United States have fewer than 100 regular attendees, adults and children combined, according to data from the National Congregations Study, and in many cases, only part-time or volunteer ministers.

Just as important, many clergy members say that the very mission of houses of worship leaves them conflicted over imposing security measures. A church, temple or mosque should be a welcoming place, they say, with doors kept wide open to strangers and those who are hurting.

Many say they have ministered to people in all kinds of crises — homelessness, drug addiction, domestic abuse, or trouble with the law — without being sure whether they are intent on harm.

“The safe thing to do is to isolate yourself from these people, but that’s the wrong thing to do for a church,” said the Rev. Bart Barber, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Farmersville, Tex., who wrote an essay for Christianity Today about the security dilemma for small rural churches.

“We’re not going to cordon off the block, and make people show their I.D. and do a fingerprint background check to get into the worship service,” Mr. Barber said. “Because the very people we’re afraid of are also the people we are here to help.”

But increasingly, clergy members have felt it necessary to have extra eyes, and sometimes weapons, watching their open doors.

In the last five years alone, shootings have occurred at churches, mosques, a Sikh temple and a Jewish community center, forcing religious leaders nationwide to confront the issue of safety. Consultants have started businesses focused on church security, and the federal government has offered limited grants for houses of worship to install cameras and hire guards. It was a security camera image from Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston that helped the authorities quickly identify Dylann S. Roof as the gunman.

Church Executive magazine recently suggested that church leaders invite local police officers to stop by and use the restrooms or meeting rooms, in order to acquaint them with the church’s layout and leadership before an emergency arises.

In areas of the country where many people own and carry guns, church security is complicated by the question of whether to allow or even encourage guns in church.

Texas law allows houses of worship to bar firearms, and many do, posting signs saying that carrying guns onto the property is prohibited. The United Methodist Church adopted a resolution suggesting that churches post such signs in 2016, part of a larger statement on ending gun violence. Mormon Church policy says that carrying firearms is “inappropriate except as required by officers of the law.”

All week, since the massacre in the pews in Sutherland Springs, the Rev. Brady Martin said that members of his church, Temple Baptist Church, in Gainesville, Tex., have been coming to his office to discuss how to protect the church while still being welcoming. One asked whether the sign posted out front announcing that the church doesn’t allow the open carrying of firearms — showing a gun with a slash through it — could actually be sending the message that the church is vulnerable.

“That was something I hadn’t actually thought through,” he said, though he added that the church was not reconsidering its open-carry policy. (It does allow concealed firearms.) “We are not thinking that everybody should open carry. That would be a security nightmare.”

He said that his church would send 12 people to the security seminar at Prestonwood. In the meantime, his volunteer security team is considering stationing members in the parking lot before Sunday services, not just inside.

The Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of a Dallas megachurch, First Baptist Dallas, said in an interview on Fox News this week that he felt safer knowing that one-quarter to half of his congregation carries concealed weapons to services on Sunday.

“If somebody tries that in our church,” he said of the attack in Sutherland Springs, “they might get one shot off, or two shots off, and that’s the last thing they’ll ever do in this life.”

Mr. Darsey, the pastor at Redeemer in Georgia, acknowledged that some might find it odd that so many deadly weapons were being brought into a building dedicated to worshiping the man the book of Isaiah calls the Prince of Peace. But he cited Romans 13, which allows earthly authorities to serve as “agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”

There was always a chance, he said, that someone who meant to fire a weapon to protect innocents could end up harming the innocents themselves, which would be a “nightmare scenario” for his church.

“I’m not so Southern and fundamentalist in my thinking that I don’t see the other side of that issue,” he said. “But it is what it is.”

Jason Singleton, 36, is among the members who brings a handgun to Redeemer, in his case, strapped to his torso with a belly band. He said he would never pull the gun if there was merely a fight. There had to be an armed attacker, shooting innocents.

“It would be a last resort,” he said. “If I took someone’s life it would be because mine was about to be took or someone else’s, and I think I’d be O.K. with answering for that, in the by and by.”

 

 

The Limits of Artificial Intelligence

 Companies are too reluctant to talk about the limits of AI.

Talking about artificial intelligence is in season for Europe’s corporate executives. Just don’t mention its shortcomings.

The C-suite is eager to tout its abilities in riding the 21st-century wave of automation by using sophisticated machine learning or shop-floor robots. Mentions of the phrase “artificial intelligence” on earnings calls are surging, as Bloomberg Intelligence’s Michael McDonough has noted.

In a world where CEOs get more credit for cutting costs and buying back shares than opening factories or hiring staff, technology-driven efficiency is a carrot to dangle in front of shareholders. Stock-market valuations are stretched and spending opportunities are rare—but processing power is abundant and data storage cheap.

That’s why executives are conjuring up the promise of lower costs, more revenue or something in between. Deutsche Telekom and Royal Bank of Scotland are turning to chatbots—a digital replacement for call centers that could shave billions off costs in the next five years. France’s BNP Paribas and publisher Wolters Kluwer are trying to boost revenue, and are using machines to screen financial markets or customer databases and trigger automatic alerts.

Siemens computers are having a go at running gas turbines more efficiently than humans. And don’t forget the blue-collar world: Logistics firms Deutsche Post and DHL are talking up the idea of using robots alongside workers on the warehouse floor.

But there’s remarkably little talk of the limits of automation. What is the acceptable failure rate of these projects? Outside of games like Go or poker, just how suited are machines to the corporate world? Are some algorithms too expensive, as Netflix once foundout? There’s a risk that disappointing results lead to an exaggerated corporate pullback, as the Harvard Business Review warned in April.

Machines can fail. Chatbots do so very publicly: Microsoft shut down a bot called Tay after pranksters pushed it to make racist, sexist and pornographic remarks. Earlier this year, Facebook went back to the drawing board after its bots hit a failure rate of 70 percent, according to The Information.

Failure is fine, but the acceptable failure rate of an intelligent vehicle or a computer-controlled turbine is probably different to a bum steer on an electricity bill. That can be the difference between an easy path to cost savings and a complex, long-term investment that doesn’t work as intended.

Then there’s the question of whether machines are always suitable. Machine learning works best in an environment with rules and huge numbers of data points. That might work with cars driving through heavy traffic governed by laws, or with achieving the best price for selling a big block of shares.

It might not work well in deciding where to invest a hedge fund’s money, for example, or recommending products to customers without much previous data to go on. The minute things get fuzzy—either due to a lack of rules, an unclear eval‎uation of success or a lack of data—artificial intelligence performs poorly, according to Pictet strategist Edgar van Tuyll.

These limitations mean it’s not yet clear that the cost of automation will be offset by savings in human capital. Hiring a data scientist can cost more than $200,000, according to Bloomberg News. Flight-bookings company Amadeus has 40 of them. Siemens says it has more than 200 A.I. specialists running various projects. And even Silicon Valley has its grunt workers: Facebook is hiring 3,000 content moderators, on top of 4,500 existing ones. A.I. cheerleader Amazon has 341,000 employees—three times the number it had in 2012.

There are good reasons to talk about A.I. and boast of its successes. But opening up about failure will help, too.

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