Online Sales Tax, The Education System, Real vs. Fake News

Why Some Sites Change Sales Taxes and Others Don’t Guest: John Barrick, CPA, Professor of Accountancy, BYU People still go to stores for their holiday gift purchases, but online Christmas sales continue to tick steadily up each year. So, it’s no wonder states would like to capture tax revenue from online sales. To date, their efforts have been mixed. But the online behemoth Amazon is more willing than it was even a few years ago to strike deals with states to start charging and collecting sales taxes. The latest of these arrangements is with Utah. In local media reports, Utah officials are practically rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of new revenues, while online shoppers look into the camera rather glumly.  NASA is Sending Astronauts to Mars Guest: Stephen Hoffman, PhD, Senior Systems Engineer and Independent Contractor for NASA’s Journey to Mars Mission NASA hopes to have astronauts on Mars in the next 20 years. Getting there isn’t really the challenge, since scientists have already figured out how to send rovers to the Red Planet and communicate with them from Earth. The larger questions center on how well humans will hold up on the months-long journey to Mars and where they’ll live and work once they get there.  Real or Fake News? Guest: Teresa Ortega, Senior Project Manager of the Stanford History Education Group More than a year ago – long before the outcry over how damaging fake news is online - researchers at Stanford began to study how well young people can tell truth from fiction on the internet. The results are “bleak” to quote the researchers. Most middle school students couldn’t tell ads from news articles and most high school students couldn’t tell real news from fake. College students had trouble judging if a claim in a Tweet came from a biased source.  The Age of Accountability is Making Teachers Miserable Guest: Marc Tucker, President and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy American high school students are falling further behind their internat