Bracketed Tax: A Guide.

Today I learned that not many people (even those around me who study business) actually know how much they get taxed, or how the Australian taxation system works. I’ve heard statements like “if you earn over $80,000, you’ll get taxed 40%, but under $80,000 you only get taxed 30%”.

If this was correct, a person earning $85,000 would take home $51,000, and a person earning $75,000 would take home $52,500. Why on earth would anyone accept a salary in between those two figures? I’ll tell you why. Because that’s not how the system works.

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And who said MS Excel was boring?

I mean, sure it took the thick end of THIRTEEN HOURS to complete, but can YOU do this?

There’s no such thing as a… wait, what?

New York businessmen, as far as I can tell, are a special bunch. They love big words, big gestures and big paychecks. Unfortunately, in these tough economic times even the New Yorkers find their incomes reduced and as a result their lavish culinary expenditure has been curbed.

Only through extreme cleverness and guile can these sharply-dressed chappies keep their gold-plated money clips filled with the filthy lucre of their exploits. Or the extreme cleverness and guile of someone they’re paying to be extremely clever and guile..y. Enter: the marketing dudes who work for Maloney and Porcelli, who have been applied to the problem of not being able to afford aforementioned lavish culinary expenses and in their infinite wisdom have emerged with a twofold solution.

Said solution is Expense A Steak. This website takes a dollar value (ostensibly the value of your dinner bill) and generates a PDF file containing scanned images of receipts for things that could reasonably be added to a business expense account. Office supplies, cab fares, budget lunches and the like. As you’d expect, these receipts (which look extremely authentic) total to the same value of the dinner bill you entered on the previous page. Staple that sucker to your expense report and BAM – the evening out is on the boss.

Sadly, the receipts generated are specific to New York, so unless you live there this wonderful little loophole that could lead to full reimbursement of what I gather is rather expensive New York cuisine is unavailable to you.

Chemical Dangers.

If you’re of a nerdly persuasion, I would like to bring your attention to the writings of one Derek Lowe, specifically a category from his “In The Pipeline” blog; Things I Won’t Work With.

In those posts Lowe, who holds a PhD in organic chemistry, describes certain chemical compounds of such properties that His Noodliness himself couldn’t convince Lowe to permit them in his lab. Or, if the decision is up to him, the lab next door either.

I love the way Lowe writes – he has a knack for bringing chemistry for the masses, using terms we can all understand. Of chlorine triflouride he writes “Yep, that stuff, the delightful compound that sets sand on fire and eats through asbestos firebrick“, and his description of thioacetone’s unique odour (“An 1890 report from the Whitehall Soap Works in Leeds refers to the odor as “fearful”, and if you could smell anything through the ambient conditions in a Leeds soap factory in 1890, it must have been.) is most colourful.

It’s still a painfully geeky read, though.

Casino by night.

I gave my brother a tripod for his birthday, then took him out to teach him how to use it. This is one of my photos – the Treasury Casino in “green mode”.

A future where cheap, malware and prime-time TV-ad-riddled devices flood the market?

In fine infotainment form, cracked.com is running an educational article about Apple.

Since I’m a very much a PC man, I am happy to provide Cracked an infinitesimally small improvement to their PageRank scores by linking to said article right here.

When a man dances…

I love this little snippet from a 1938 Dating Guide for Single Women.

Dark Sky Observing outside Brisbane.

A week ago I bought a small telescope to indulge my childhood dreams of backyard astronomy. Within three nights, just sitting in my backyard, I’d seen Mars, Saturn, the Orion Nebula and managed to identify a handful of constellations and bright stars. Last night, I took advantage of the new moon and went out to Mt Pleasant with a friend to hunt down some more Deep Sky Objects.

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So the blender costs.. how much?

Anja and I were shopping for blenders today (god, we lead such exciting lives) and I noticed that Harris Scarfe, purveyors of brand-name kitchen appliances at discount prices, seem to be having some computer trouble.

Unless these signs are calculated and printed by hand, in which case whoever does them is missing some vital mathematics skills.

I’ve sold out!

Yup, I’ve gone and put ads over in my sidebar. Why, you ask? Why not? All that space was just doing nothing. It’s more of an experiment and an amusement than an actual money-making venture – I don’t get enough hits to this blog at the moment to believe that anyone is even paying attention to those Cost-Per-Click ads. If you see one that interests you, definitely click on it, though. I’m not allowed to promote click ads on my site, but I will get a couple of token cents if you do click.

Actually, how much I will get paid depends on what keywords in my posts have been bought by advertisers, whose contextual advertisements are presented over there for your clicking (or ignoring) pleasure. A quick jaunt through Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool reveals there are some real earners out there.

The main focus of this blog (photography) has a keyword average Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of a not-terrible $2.64. “Digital photography” pushes that up to $3.42 at the time of writing. If I were to do an article on stock photography, that’s currently paying an average of $5.29. Considering those prices are averages, and require my ads to actually be clicked on, I’m not about to quit my day job.

But what if there’s a keyword out there that only needs a few ad-clicks to start making big bucks? All I’d have to do is start writing things on my blog about those topics and BAM – average chance of getting a free cup of coffee outta Google. So, what are they? “Singles Matchmaking” is paying a little over $6. “Optical Astronomy” rakes in an average of $5.74 per click, but that’s just peanuts, really.

If I could just go get me some maths skills, Google informs an estimated average CPC on the keywords “trigonometry online course” of $9.41! If I knew what “raman spectrometers” were, I could write about them and potentially earn ad revenue of almost $30 per click!

As long as someone is willing to pay me for it.

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  dan (at) dancooper.net.au