211–220 of 301 posts
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FWIW, being off by 10s of dollars sounds to me like different ideas of how to count days. Banks sometimes use calendar days, sometimes business days, and sometimes a fictitious calendar with 12 months of 30 days each.
Yes, you'd call that the calendar convention if I remember correctly. The one you are referencing is called 30/360 for 30 days in a month, 360 days in a year.
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The formulas are published in a programming language called M. There is an open source implementation [1]. > There is currently no legal guarantee of any kind about the correctness of the code produced by the Mlang compiler, or by the results produced by the interpreter of Mlang. However, authors have been in contact with DGFiP to validate Mlang, and the system passes all the private DGFiP tests as of Sept. 2022 for…
MLanguage in this context is not M, aka MUMPS. MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing key–value database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts General Hospital for managing hospital laboratory information systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
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None of this complexity is from trying to plug tax loopholes. Most of it is from politicians wanting to name things. For example, for decades Canada has had a "personal amount" tax credit -- for arcane reasons, rather than saying "the first $X of income isn't taxed", the lowest tax bracket starts at $0 but there's a non-refundable credit equal to the lowest tax rate times $X. Then a politician came along and said "we…
> None of this complexity is from trying to plug tax loopholes. Most of it is from politicians wanting to name things. The effect you describe is very real, but "loop hole closure" is certainly a source of complexity too, e.g., the US's insane alternative minimum tax (AMT), which nearly duplicates the amount of tax work to be done by insisting you compute your taxes under a second set of assumptions. The idea was to…
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I don’t think the “woke-mind-virus” superlative is conducive to the type of conversation we should be having but otherwise I fully agree. Canada does nothing to promote home-grown economic prosperity. What is the value in adding those taxes and fees on a $10 part? Do we honestly believe that type of protectionism is going to create a bunch of jobs domestically? Our GDP has grown mostly due to real estate. I work in t…
A business in my family was ineligible for COVID aid for the longest time because the business was too new to be paying people salaries. For some reason they decided the government drew an arbitrary line and said that businesses must have employees on salary to matter.
I can understand wanting to limit elegibility to legitimate endeavours, but it's not like the business was some kind of side-hustle being run out of the trunk of somebody's car.
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I don’t think the “woke-mind-virus” superlative is conducive to the type of conversation we should be having but otherwise I fully agree. Canada does nothing to promote home-grown economic prosperity. What is the value in adding those taxes and fees on a $10 part? Do we honestly believe that type of protectionism is going to create a bunch of jobs domestically? Our GDP has grown mostly due to real estate. I work in t…
When I had a small software consultancy in Toronto (10 years back), we also primarily looked for US clients.
We had a running joke in the office that went something like..
Canadian client: here are my vague business requirements, tell me exactly what this will cost before we start.
US client: here's exactly how much money I have, let's work together to figure out how I can make the most of it.
There's such a conservative and risk-averse mentality in Canadian business, and it leads to a lack of trust and innovation.
It’s charts like this why payroll providers exist. See the relevant _Bits About Money_ post at https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payroll-providers-pow...
It's still math and the standardizing to ensure what payroll providers submit is correct is still checked by the government, who could provide said standard.
Where I live (New Zealand) holiday pay got complex, and quite a few civil service payrolls got it wrong (IIRC by a few different providors). It tooke years for anyone to notice, and has taken years, and billions, to put right.
Keep it simple. Please
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I disagree, I think those types of things need to be said and in more places than they currently are. It’s the only way to build momentum to achieve change. Sure, it might be uncomfortable but that’s a part of growth.
"Woke" was originally shorthand for "woke up to the fact that socioeconomics is not a level playing field", usually w.r.t. race but intersecting with gender and class. Would you care to elaborate on how this is a mind virus, or responsible for the fees in the post?
I will always enjoy the irony of attaching "mind virus" to concepts with seemingly zero understanding or consideration. What could possibly be a better demonstration of a "mind virus?"
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It's a shame that we don't have open formulas in code form published by the government. The only way that I know how to do this reliably is using the web form provided by the CRA here: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/... As you can imagine, doing this by hand is quite painful and error-prone.
Germany has been publishing standardized flowcharts with named variables and formulas for payroll calculation for a long time (at least since the 1970s — hence the notation employed): https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Downloads/...
For social security, you have to get certified by a completely different set of bureaucrats with partially incompatible requirements:
The simplifications, they are additional! (Usually.)
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A lot of countries trend toward bureaucracy as their biggest “innovation”. Unfortunately, the same people who are in position to change things for the better (ie. to make a country more competitive, innovative) stands to benefit from more bureaucracy, not less.
for example US government forms require UX testing (user research), but even the smallest change requires it, and all forms require it. but you can't just use a big pool of preapproved providers or whatever, it goes through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ... which now is in effect a fucking big roadblock of a bottleneck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperwork_Reduction_Act
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...