Lola at the Coffee House

Of course.

The trick is to make them greatly desire to place your file in a cabinet that is rarely opened.




I like that.

It was an honest question. For all I know, taxes might be taken directly out of pay checks elsewhere. How would I know?

I still wonder if other countries have systems as complicated and circuitous as ours. It seems likely that someone somewhere would have developed a simpler system.

Well, my taxes ARE taken out of my pay .......but we also have to fill out returns, in case we had income from other sources and also we can claim for various expenses....like professional books and training for instance.

We also pay a form of VAT....called the GST here....as well as taxes other transactions.

I can't comment about whether our taxes are more or less complicated than those in the US.

If you're an employee, you're on PAYE (pay as you earn), and unless you have any other form of income you don't have to fill in a tax return. If you're self employed and/or have multiple sources of income you have to fill in a tax return.

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the people without umbrellas.

been up half the night helping deliver lambs. I smell like a barn and I need some nice black and tan with sugar, lotsa sugar.

Ill sit by myself if noone minds , I smell a bit like a tack room, all these gurning little maggoty lambs, give em a half hour to find their mothers teat and they suddenly feed up and relax witha nice peaceful
look.

My work is done after my coffee Im gonna take a hot shower and get some sleep.

Should be goddam done with lambing in a week

Morning all.

Whoa...a New York Times!

This belong to anyone???

Ovaltine, Wassau.

Without any cream or sugar.

I'm feeling manly today.

Lucky Manly........

Just for you Frank.

When you are done with that Times, Frank, I'd like to have a look at the Crossword from yesterday. I couldn't finish the lower left hand corner because I don't know who played Kelso on That 70's Show.

Joe(I never watched it)Nation

I didn't get my lamb. I guess you only deliver locally.

May i have another coffee, please?

I'm still thinking about umbrellas . . . and parasols. Both of those words mean to protect one from the sun. But when it rains, the sun isn't shining . . . hmmmm . . .

Won't do any good, Joe. The paper was yesterday's. Maybe that's why it was just sitting there.

I did get my hands on another New York Post, though. The crossword in it probably is not as hard as the Times, though. I notice the grid is only 6 x 6.

You raise an interesting question here. I don't think that either governments or taxpayers (as a whole on both sides) really want simple tax systems, though most say they do. The fact is governments frequently use tax incentives to motivate behaviors they think (often without good reasion) to be beneficial, while at the same time taxpayers (or groups of them) seek special exemptions for their own problems (to which they are well attuned and very sympathetic). Money and control are the things government seeks, while "Tax he, tax she, but don't tax me" is the rule for taxpayers.

"Fair, as we have seen is a very elastic concept. It is regularly used to describe the whole range of contending views on the matter.

I'll readily concede that our system in the U.S. is highly complex, with different tax rates on multiple different sources of income (salaries, pensions, annuities, self employment income, interest, qualifying dividende, other dividends, capital gains, Alternate minimum tax etc. And, in addition, an equally complex set of tax credits and in some cases inverse taxes in which the government pays some people. Finally, depending on the state in which one lives a growing and equally complex state income tax structure. ( California is a particularly bad example of this.)

I need a coffee for the road. About to go to Tomball to see if they have any food in any of the grocery stores.

I agree with most of that except the " irrelevant to mental development" bit.

I think they do your head in and are a way of avoiding more interesting puzzles. Which is very relevant to mental development.

On the Pavlovian sugar lump principle; in this case a series of psychological rewards each one triggering serotonin activation, 5-hydroxytryptamine, a monoamine neurotransmitter, the whole central nervous system is suffused with a rosy glow of self-congratulation whenever a clue is solved and satisfies a need to demonstrate, usually to the self, although a few insecure people do boast publicly of their feats in this regard, a rather vulgar mannerism, one's intellectual brilliance, the compiler is granted the privilege of tailoring brains and, if enough of his puzzles are solved, or nearly solved, cloning them with his own.

Thus the puzzles become easier and easier in direct proportion to the number cruddled over and this leads to faster and faster delivery of the pleasure quanta and, theoretically at least, may produce a self-induced orgasm.

Doing crosswords from different compilers cannot but lead to confusion and perplexity unless the second compiler has been previously cloned by the first.

Obviously the compilers of crossword puzzles, and their editors. know all that and are thus able to render their subjects into addicts of the publication involved which foots up to a tax levied upon the service of facilitating self-induced sensations of well being which, in turn, when the conditioned habit becomes ingrained, leads not only to a sense of being infallible but of jealously regarding one's personal compiler, and the rag, in a similar manner as a lady does concerning her interior decor and presentational delicacies. As status symbols, I mean, which need stressing from time to time in order that the rest of us are reminded of the excellence of the organism to which we are paying attention.

Titles which include "Times" are the epitome of the puissant in this respect.

But a compiler who sets puzzles which an average person cannot do, a fairly easy thing to manage, is soon sent on his way by an editor who is concerned about circulation.

I am addicted to the puzzles of Raymond Smullyan. They are some of the most difficult logic puzzles ever...and the amount of enjoyment gotten from solving them is enormous.

Working the brain, in my opinion, is never a futile or useless endeavor.

I could have killed Will Shortz (Crossword Puzzle Editor of the NYT) the other day. I could not figure out what the hell was wrong, all the spacing was off. If the answer to a clue (Movie with Murphy) was SHREK, there were only FOUR spaces. The S and H were correct, I had the K. What the ... .
Then I solved the theme of the puzzle answer (by cheating, I looked up the answer) Answer to question that stumped whatshisname of Jeopardy. The answer was H&R BLOCK.

That's right. The puzzle had no H's and no R's.
So you were supposed to put it SHEK,,,,,,,arrrgggghhhhh.

I'm going to have to see a surgeon about putting back in all the hair I pulled out.

Joe(I only cheat after I say "**** it, I'm not doing this another minute.)Nation

that still makes no sense, Joe N.

that would be SEK...

(I dislike crosswords, the clues usually are goofy at best)