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.


So, how much tax do you really pay? Simplified, your tax payable is equal to income tax minus deductions. Deductions are an individual thing, based on assets, income, dependents, all kinds of things. I’m not going to go into that here. But I will show you how to calculate your income tax.

First of all, you need to understand that your income gets divided up into brackets and each bracket is assigned a tax rate. In Australia, the lowest tax bracket is $0 to $6000, upon which you are not taxed at all. The next bracket starts at $6,001 and goes up to $34,000. This bracket carries a tax of 15%. The last three brackets of $34,001 – $80,000, $80,001 – $180,000 and $180001+ carry taxes of 30%, 40% and 45% respectively.

To calculate your tax, you start with your total gross income. Up to the first $6,000 you’ll pay no tax. For every dollar above $6,000 up to $34,000 you’ll pay just 15% on. Did your income exceed $34,000? By how much? Between $34,001 and $80,000, you’ll have to pay 30%. And so on, and so forth. Money within a bracket is only ever taxed at that bracket’s rate.

I’ve taken the liberty to produce a simple Excel spreadsheet to calculate income tax in Australia. You can download it here. Just enter your taxable income in the top left box and the spreadsheet will tell you how much tax you’re paying inside each bracket. There is a total in the bottom right.

I’ve also included an Effective Rate box. The Effective Rate is is the average rate of tax you’re paying per dollar. For people whose income is reasonably steady, this should give you a far better idea of how much of your weekly paycheck you will have to give up as tax.

I leave it to the reader to figure out their own deductions, payable levies and the like.

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.

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.

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.

Over the next 4 hours or so we also viewed Mars and Saturn (the easiest planets to find), the Jewel Box (NGC 4755 is its official designation) and the Beehive Cluster (M44/NGC 2632, depending on which catalog you’re following. Some photos were taken by my Nikon D60 and 200mm zoom lens, but most of the night for me was spent hunting DSOs with my telescope, teaching Pat the basics of photography, or just looking up.

The photo at the top of this post is a long-ish exposure photograph of our setup under the sky. The red lines are the two of us poring over a book of star charts with red torches. The two bright, white star trails in the centre of the image are actually Alpha and Beta Centauri – the two brightest stars in Centaurus and better known as the two stars that point to the Southern Cross.

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

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.