Naga

I did mean bank statement, thank you.

I'm aware of how reconciliation works. I'm actually an accountant by trade. $1000 is a trivial transaction of course, but reconciliation becomes challenging when its thousands of transactions per month of differing amounts. If anything, transactions not matching the bank statement is a good way of increasing your audit fees as the auditor struggles to make sense of what your accounting system has recorded.

I disagree with this. This might be fair and technically correct on paper, but we don't use paper anymore. Transactions with more than two line items are by far the most common method of recording transactions. In fact, I'd probably go so far as to say that the method you suggest isn't used at all in practice, especially since most transactions need some sort of recording of sales tax.

In the example of $1000 paid in rent, the technically correct method is actually worse for usability. If $1000 left the bank account and two transactions totalling $1000 were recording, how can you match the ledger to the bank account? Or if there are bank charges paid on a transaction (Paid $1000 with $5 in bank charges).

Agreed. I maintain a paper zettlekasten and have for about six months, but still growing strong. The key factor in deciding on paper is that the hard parts are 1. Writing at all, then 2. What to write. Software doesn't solve either of those problems

Doomberg is also on substack: https://doomberg.substack.com/

If the only metrics on sensibility of fuel is the rate of re-forestation, sure burning wood makes sense, but that's not the only metric. It's heavy and hard to transport and its dirty, both in the micro environment (soot) and the macro (CO2). It's also way less convenient than other forms of heating. Remember: Europe is going through an energy crisis and is replacing mostly natural gas and electric heating with wood. Turning the furnace on with a switch isn't really the same thing as maintaining a wood stove.

SEEKING WORK | Ontario | REMOTE

I'm a CPA turned developer. I was an auditor who taught myself programming on the side, and am now working in the space of helping transform internal financial processes with code

I'm interested in anything that might intersect finance and tech, such as things like providing advice on accounting software. I can also help you with financial planning, budgeting, financial analysis, internal control design, evaluation of processes, recommendations for improvements, help with the audit process, accounting education, etc. I'm experienced with Python, Django, SQL. Unlike most accountants, I know how to use git properly.

I have around 5-10 hours a week available, might be able to swing more for short-term projects.

Email nick at nicksavage dot ca Website: nicksavage.ca

I'm also a CPA and develop software now (there are dozens of us!). I think part of this is that the perception among devs is that accounting is too complicated, and therefore can be radically simplified in software, which can be true, but largely doesn't meet real world scenarios. The problem is that accounting is generally complicated because business is complicated. I've seen software that throws away the ability to add more than 2 line items to a transaction. I've also seen software that goes too far the other way and automates every step of a process (okay great, how can we show the auditors now that this works?). It's a pretty classic misunderstanding of the domain, where most CPAs don't speak software, so there's a severe lack of communication (which probably makes CPAs who do understand software very valuable!).

The other factor is that while accounting software as a whole sucks, but at least for larger businesses, its probably better to tell the auditors that you use quickbooks, versus some custom in house software. From a risk management perspective, that's a much easier value proposition for the board/management.

What country requires you to have WhatsApp to get a driver’s license?

Accounting is also a strange field because its a bunch of almost unrelated fields stuck together. Accounting covers financial accounting (dealing with recording transactions, representing reality, etc), tax, management and cost accounting (things like tracking performance, figuring out what the widget you produced actually costs you, once you've included the direct costs and an estimate of overhead) and a whole slew of other things like internal controls, governance questions (how do you align incentives in an organization?), etc. Picking up a textbook on financial accounting is probably a good starting place to get the basics of debits/credits, but from there it depends what your interests are.

For books on finance, I recommend Niall Ferguson's Ascent of Money as a pretty good introduction into the history of finance and how it all sortof fits together.

One of the big advantages of double-entry accounting is that it lets you model pretty complicated events in a simple way. I think its a common misconception that transactions have two sides to them, debits and credits. It probably comes from the name, and that most simple examples only have one two sides. Really, its at least two sides. The important characteristic is that the debits must equal the credits, in value not in quantity.

In reality, its very infrequent that transactions will only have one debit and one credit. Lets say you sell a service to someone, a year of service for $100. This sounds simple, debit cash for $100 and credit sales revenue for $100. But was there sales tax on it? You might have actually collected $115 from them, in which case the entry is to "debit cash for $115, credit sales revenue for $100 and credit sales tax liability for $15". This impacts three different accounts, but really any transaction could impact n accounts. This both simplifies what you need to do to model it, but also acts as a shortcut to the user.

It also has the side effect of being a signal that the sales tax collected and the sales revenue are related. You could also record two separate transactions, one for $100 and one for $15, but the bank statement probably has $115 instead of $100, so how could you ever know what was what? As a former auditor, this is crucial to understanding how past transactions occurred and what they were for.

This is a pretty good article about the basics! I'm a CPA who is now working in the tech space. I've helped work on some accounting software and other finance-type processes. I'm happy to answer any questions if anyone has them! Either here, or my email is in my profile.

Kraft Dinner (or just KD( is something special though! It's not just boxed macaroni and cheese, it has a fake cheese neon orange sauce (at least it used to, now it's apparently safer) with its own special taste. It's peak Canadian comfort food that the other boxed meals don't match. They're all gross, but KD has no peers.

My parents are from Canada, and when my dad was in the Navy in the 1980s, he was deployed to the UK. His biggest story is that they couldn’t buy peanut butter and Kraft Dinner except at the Base, which was obviously a problem. I travelled to the UK recently and asked someone there about those two items. Peanut butter is available now, but not that popular, but Kraft Dinner was unknown and frankly seemed disgusting to her! Which is fair, but its comfort food in Canada.

This line of thinking has never made sense to me. We spend billions worldwide combatting diseases that mostly impact people over the median age of death and with other co-morbidities. Heart disease mostly kills old and obese people, but no one ever has a problem with tax dollars going to this. If we don't care about people with co-morbidities, doesn't it make sense to shut down heart institutes and cancer wards?

I have a bachelor of arts in history, most of a bachelor of commerce and the CPA designation.

I was into programming and computers when I was a kid and in high school but for whatever reason I decided I didn't want to study computer science. Ended up in an arts program, which I graduated from and reached the top of my career path nearly immediately by getting a minimum wage job at a bookstore. I went back to school for accounting and became an auditor at a public accounting firm. I made it to manager, burnt out, and decided that I'd explore other options. I ended up with a consulting side gig at a startup using both my tech and accounting knowledge, and now my primary job is in finance process transformation/automation.

Looking back, it looks like my career path was tailor-made for the position I'm in now. I use all my education - arts has made me a good communicator, researcher, accounting has given me good technical and management skills. This is just the narrative fallacy at work though, I had no idea what I was doing along the way (and still don't!).

Public accounting and CPA has been fantastic at teaching me how businesses work inside and out, and is very valuable for what I do now. I don't know if I'd recommend it for everyone, but studying accounting itself is probably a good idea for anyone working in management or finance.

This is an unbelievable debate for me as a citizen of a smaller city with a much less developed system. Our system is so far away from being able to accurately time trains like this that asking whether it should be door close or train moving is like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I travelled to London a few weeks ago and was shocked that the trains would come when the schedule said it would. I'm used to +/-5 minutes on a good day, but with the max delay much worse than that.

I’d take that. The Canadian pattern is over budget poorly implemented.

The article linked the study though: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115

Agreed. This sort of issue has been public knowledge about Twitter for a long time. This sounds to me like an excuse to delay or get out with plausible deniability.

I live in Ottawa now, but I grew up in the GTA and spent most of my summers on Lake Ontario. You're right, there's something mystical about it.

Also, just wanted to share my favourite love letter to the lakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqkWnnPjzv0

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Unfortunately most of the (probable) evidence is under meters of water and mud.

Not about the darknet diaries in particular, but you're describing the Gell-Mann Amnesia hypothesis: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

This is very annoying for me too! I am North American, but work for a European company, and my Windows and Office locale settings are all screwed up, and consistency reset themselves whenever I try to fix it.

As an aside, the link at the top of the article (http://www.starwave.com/people/naughton/book/) interestingly enough redirects now to disney.com.

This has been an exciting few years for exploration fans, between the discovery of the Franklin Expedition's ships and this!

This is really interesting. As a non-U.S. based and infrequent traveller, I had always just assumed that you lost the value of the ticket if you missed the trip. I never really understood sitcoms where no one seems to care if they missed their flights or not, but this would make a lot of sense.

In fact, arson attempts are so common in Ottawa that you could probably make the argument that the convoy was preventing arson from occurring. /s

The news reported that someone in the building had a confrontation with some of the protesters that day, and then there is video of someone trying to burn the building down. I wonder if it could be related. The facts of the matter are that there is no linkage to the truckers because the cops don't know who it is. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Why don't we say instead that the occupation instead created an environment of lawlessness where the police had no control.

My anger isn't really placed at you, but I'm really sick of people from all over the internet telling the people who actually live in Ottawa that the protests have been peaceful. I wrote about this on my blog earlier this week: https://nsavage.substack.com/p/makeottawaboringagain. Everyone is keen to talk about what the truckers want, or what the government wants, but no one wants to talk about how the only people directly affected by the occupation are the people of Ottawa, who are faced with things like:

- Harrassing elementary school children: https://pressprogress.ca/elementary-school-students-and-teac...

- Flooding 911 system: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-police-say-...

- Forcing businesses to close: https://twitter.com/CreesonCTV/status/1492620852764020743

- Millions in lost revenue: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/truck-convoy-costs-ottawa-s-busies...

These things are obviously not okay and not signs of a peaceful protest. They should be beyond the pale for everyone. I'm working on a new article about the Emergency's Act and freezing bank accounts, and I think the government went too far, but that doesn't mean that any of the things that came before are acceptable.

In the country I grew up in, trying and failing to commit crimes is still a crime. The act itself is the crime, not the success of it. Unfortunately these days it seems like the better determinant of whether something is a crime is someone's political affiliation.

Oh, so the 'debunking' is not on whether or not an attempted mass murder/arson occurred, but that there is no "direct linkage" between the occupation and the crime.

What that likely means is that they don't know who the people in the video are. It seems pretty likely to me that it's related to the occupation, especially since there was a 'confrontation' earlier that day with residents of the building. It's not like buildings are burnt down in Ottawa every day.

When was that debunked? The last I heard the police were investigating. I even saw video from it.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/police-arson-unit-probes-otta...

I'm guessing from reading the article that it's not applicable, but does this affect gas barbecues as well? I'm guessing not since they are outdoors. Gas barbecues are pretty common in my neck of the woods, although gas stoves are not.