I've listened to it several times now and I have to say I like it. This might lead Tom to believe that this group is destined for tragedy. I don't know, however, what he currently thinks of Belle & Sebastian, so maybe this doesn't apply in the case that he thinks that they're already bad. They feel a little twenty-something-single-Toronto-girl-with-a-dog to me, but I still dig the music, and that thought might have something to do with the band's association with Juno and Juno's 30-(at the time)-something writer. Also, I believe that Tom's axiom #1 of my life was initially meant specifically to apply to bands that I really like and though I'm glad that I purchased this LP, and I even have several of B&S's MP3s, I'm not sure that it necessarily passes the threshold into bands that I'm totally into and that therefore will inevitably start to totally suck.
If it does, though, there is still a potential saving grace for Scotland's homegrown sons and daughters in that this axiom apparently only applies to All or Substantially All (ASA) of the bands that I end up really liking. According to s. 4.1 of the Canada Revenue Agency's SR&ED Capital Expenditures Policy, ASA is "generally accepted to mean 90% or more". It's not clear to me, however, whether this applies to how long I've liked the band for, how much I like the band, how many bands fit into the "really liking" category, or something else altogether. The reason for my confusion likely stems from the fact that, as mentioned above, I as yet do not have a fully solid hold on what bands make the cut-off into the territory where the axiom applies, and more importantly, the ASA principal that governs these axioms was previously explained to me by way of a demonstration that involved the cities in which I lived and the hockey teams representing said cities. The difference being that Tom connected ASA to the fact that of my entire life I had only lived in some cities for a small amount of time, rather than another statistic that could have been used: namely, the total number of cities. That is something on the order of 10 and so if 3 of those cities didn't have great hockey teams then the accuracy falls down to 70% and we find ourselves below the ASA threshold held out by CRA's policies to be no less than 90%. And so if these bands have a weight of some kind, rather than all counting equally, then it would be very difficult to determine the ASA applicability for these edge cases.
On Sunday we ran 26km. That fell just below ASA of the amount of time that we were awake on Sunday.
I think you're destined to work for an accounting firm (or shall I say "a professional services firm" as we now like to call ourselves). The great thing about ac-counting and how it differs dramatically from normal counting is that you use principals like the ASA one that you've recently become aware of to get naturally developed data to reveal whatever you want/need it to. Here's a great example.
ReplyDeleteCompany A: " We just bought a million $ piece of equipment, can we get a tax break?"
Pemulis the Consultant: "It will depend on what you used it for"
Company A: "We used the equipment 10 times in the fiscal year. We used it continuously for 3999hrs to extract bitumen from below the Alberta surface to tailing ponds at the surface where we hold it and allow birds and Caribou to drink from it without actually refining or selling it which means that it won't enter the market and reduce gas prices such that the oil we extracted from Saudi Arabia and ship over here is worth more and our share price goes up. We ran it another 9 times for 6 minutes each time to see if the noise it made would scare away Grizzly Bears who were coming to eat the Caribou. The noise didn't scare away the Bears, but they did end up drinking the bitumen water and dying, so the Caribou were safe. Until they drank the water and died also. The carcasses attracted a lot of flies which in turn attracted small animals, who also died, attracting more flies and the cycle of death continued. To be honest we learned a lot on this project. I can't even begin to quantify the cover-up costs."
Pemulis the Consultant: Hmmm, you used it for a total of 4000hrs, 9 minutes of which was to see if it was loud enough to scare away bears, but those 9 minutes consist of 9 different trials.... Yup, that's 90% of it's useful life! Sounds like R&D to me!
Oops, in the previous example Pemulis the Consultant probably should have said: "[...] 1 hour of which was to see [...] but that 1 hour consisted of 9 different trials [...]"
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, Pemulis the Consultant likely would not have noticed the error in his example if he'd been losing brain cells at his ac-counting job for >5yrs. Luckily for you, the reader, Pemulis had not yet hit that threshold at the time of the example and thus he noticed the error in his ways.
Perhaps the "5 years of service conundrum" is another interesting ac-counting concept that can be covered in a future post...