It’s that time of year. Tax time. Marsha is enjoying working for American Expat Tax Service, a company that specializes in cross border tax filings. She’s been busy with them for a few months now. First she had to help them set up the office, the processes, the documents, and such. More recently she’s taking calls from customers, helping them get all of their paperwork in order, and then referring the file to the actual tax preparers. They are a great group to work for and she’s really having fun.

I don’t get taxes. Marsha will start talking about T-1s, 1040s, and deductions and my eyes just glaze over. Within a few minutes I curl up in a fetal position with my fingers in my ears singing show-tunes to drive away the evil spirits. I don’t do well with taxes. As far as I’m concerned, it’s witchcraft. Of course I've told Marsha that if she ever stops doing our taxes I'll be ok. It’ll work out. Really I’m not worried at all. The prisons up here are really nice.

The odd thing is that I’m good at math. Trig, Algebra, Geometry, I found them fun. Heck there were even parts of Calc and Stats that I enjoyed. But as soon as money is involved I just freeze up. For the longest time in college I didn’t even have a checking account. I worked on a cash basis. It was simple, as long as there was something green in my sock drawer I knew I was OK. (Cash I mean. There wasn’t any hazmat green stuff and certainly none of that other, smokeable green stuff in MY sock drawer.) Finally though, I got a check book and eventually moved to Minnesota. Shortly after we got together (a year before we got married in fact) Marsha took over balancing my check book. We actually have a very good arrangement, Marsha does the taxes and bank accounts, and retirement accounts, and investments,

and I don’t.

For some reason she doesn’t like how I do the accounts. You see when I went to balance my check book I’d always take the previous months balance, add the deposits and subtract the checks, and finally if the balance was within 5% of what the bank said I’d add or subtract enough to make it zero. Apparently according to the Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (which are voted on once every 200 years by the High Lords of Accounting, the members of which had to have attended at least one previous meeting as a non voting member), adding in a correction factor each month is not the proper methodology. Accounting seems to want everything to be exact, to the penny, absolutely perfect. This has always struck me as very unrealistic, I mean what kind of craziness is this? Nothing is exact in this world. In Geology they taught us that nuclear dating of fossils was +-a few percent. Engineering includes a tolerance of a few thousandths of all parts. Instruments always are accurate to within a particular percentage. Heck at the time if astronomers got the same answer within a power of ten they'd go out to celebrate. But for money they expect you to balance precisely. It may be nuts but Marsha insisted. She goes through the accounts a few times per month and brings everything into balance. Once a year or so she has me balance the accounts just to see that I know how. The result usually has me either hopping around the room in joy, until she shows me that we’re not in fact millionaires, or curled up in the corner sucking my thumb, until she shows me that we’re not in the hole for millions.

For me finance and taxes and such are like fashion. I just don't get it. It makes no sense.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about “new” financial instruments. Things that are possible because of the internet. Bitcoins for example have been in the news a lot. For those that are not aware, Bitcoins are an Internet currency. They are not backed by a country or a central bank or gold, or anything but the agreed upon value of the people that are trading in Bitcoins. Oh yeah, that’ll work. Much to my utter lack of surprise in the last couple of weeks two major Bitcoin houses have suddenly collapsed along with the value of Bitcoins dropping by half. Like wow, could have knocked me over with a feather. I never saw THAT coming.

And then on the BBC they did a story on Peer to Peer loans. The idea with this is where people go through a web site which connects people who need loans with individuals that have money to loan. Once connected they set up agreeable terms and penalties between themselves free of banking rules or SEC rules, or even Usury standards.

Didn’t we used to call this Loan Sharking?

I don’t want to come across as overly cynical but somehow I don’t think that’s gonna work. The lack of oversight is just asking for trouble. There’s just enough people out there who would have no issue rolling a Girl Guide for her tin of cookie money to make this a very questionable financial concept. Nonetheless, they interviewed the head of a major fund that was willing to invest up to half a trillion dollars into one or more Peer to Peer and Peer to Business loan sites.

These the same guys that did so well in 2008?

So I don’t really get all this finance and accounting stuff. I guess I’m just like my folks. While we were growing up they taught us the old saying that “The love of money is the root of all evil.” They must have believed it too. Our house never had much money, or evil in it.

Well, until I came along, that is.

In Canadian news a fair amount happened this week. The HMCS Protecteur finally reached Pearl Harbour. An inspection showed that the damage from the fire is very severe and it is going to need a major overhaul before it can sail again. The thing is the ship is scheduled to be scrapped in two years, and the repairs would take up to three. I guess it’s the end for the HMCS Protecteur.

Of course you know this Monday is St. Patrick's Day. The stores are full of traditional Irish things. Today we saw green tortillas and green Toll House Cookies. Very Old Irish. Actually there is a bit of a crisis about this years St. Patrick's Day. You see on Monday the truckers that serve the Port Of Vancouver went on strike. Most significantly, nearly all of the allotment of Guinness for BC is stuck in the port. Sure there are lots of other beers, fine BC beers, but St. Patricks day just won’t be the same without a bunch of drunken sots guzzling green Guinness.
http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2014/03/beer-supply-shortage-due-truck-strike-vancouver-port/

Then there was the accident in Halifax Nova Scotia. Seems that they were unloading some cargo when the bottom of a container, and the contents, fell out. And the contents were? Oh nothing important, just some Uranium Hexaflouride. You know one of the most dangerous materials in the world. If the radiation doesn’t get you the severely corrosive bit will. Fortunately, though there was a spike in local radiation levels, it was transient. None of the really nasty stuff escaped and nobody was exposed. The port is expected to open again on Monday.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/halifax-uranium-scare-no-toxic-leaks-after-cargo-fell-1.2572311

And finally, at work I had some fun. We are testing a new computerized control system for our robots. It’s much more advanced than our older, analog control systems. We were running the new system through its paces, trying to find things that didn’t work, or worked oddly, you know trying to break the prototype. That’s what you do when you test a new system; break it so it won’t break for the customer. Anyway I noticed that the new system had a sound card. It could make noise. In my report I inquired if we could use this to ‘augment’ the controller. The Engineers asked what we’d do with the sound. I told them that we should use PacMan sounds. When the robot was moving forward it should go wakka wakka wakka and if it struck something it should go beeop beeop beeop.

The big discovery this week was that Engineers have no sense of whimsey.