Making good headway on the business section of the Act. Always separate the accounting mechanics of the act from the wording. The act avoids stating formulas which have clear cut values. “The length of the hypotenuese”. The exam in is 14 weeks and the outcome not all that clear.
And here is a picture of the world cyclones from 1985 – 2005, added in 2016. But still neat.
[Author’s note 2016-03-25: this post makes no sense without the background. In 2001, I was studying to get my management accounting degree, and one of the requirements was to study the tax law of a foreign country. So I made the mistake of choosing Canada, making that course the ONLY one in my entire life I failed twice. I’d study my ass off, but when the exam arrived, it was like I had been taking the wrong course. I did not even understand the questions.
Now before my critics jump in, I can only say that if the Tax Act had merely been complicated, like celestial navigation, or merely convoluted, I would easily have aced any exam. But don’t judge until you try to study the thing yourself. Every provision is worded two or three different ways and unless you develop that definitive Canadian attitude that your neighbor’s motives are always the most evil possible, there is no making sense of that rule book.
It is intentionally ambiguously worded so that anyone who is “interpreting” the law has a real advantage over someone who is merely complying with it. One section refers to tax-free items, the next section states everything is taxable, but those items are taxed at a “zero rate”. For now. I could get 100% on a test that asked about each law, but you have to have a particular mindset I do not possess (and hopefully never will) to figure out which law applies to your neighbor. This “neighbor” thing is very big in Canadian tax law. It is also very circular law, a business clause might be dependent on some completely exterior condition, like where you live and who you are related to, "notwithstanding".
The quotation of Pythagorus should also be clarified. What I was doing was making fun of how the Canadian law complicates everything. Pythagorus’ Law is a2 + b2 = c2. But the convoluted text version goes, “The length of the hypotenuese is equal to the root of the sums of the squares of the sums of the adjacent sides”. Ah, now you are getting some idea of what I was up against.]
[Author’s note 2017: um, there is another aspect to Pythagorus' Law that too many experts fail to point out. The Law applies ONLY to whole units of measure. Thus, a 3-4-5 or a 6-8-10 is a Pythgorean triangle, but not a 1-1-√2.]
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