You have to laugh

The Home & Garden section of the local weekend paper often has before & after photos of rooms, showing the changes undergone.

Quite often I have preferred the 'before' photo, thinking that all that was needed was removing the clutter that's always present, a lick of paint, a different lampshade and perhaps a rug, to transform the room rather than the major cost of changing the ceiling, adding completely new lighting, adding or changing a dividing wall, making a new floor, splashing out on a new suite, opening up the fireplace, enclosing the fireplace opening up the stairs, enclosing the stairs etc etc. You might as well move - it's cheaper.

But Saturday was funny.

They were featuring the "retro" look.

So the 'after' photos were more " before" than the "before" ones.

A confession

In the UK, people pay VAT when they make certain purchases. It's the same in Canada with GST, except that the price is generally displayed without the tax. So you need to calculate the extra.

In Canada the GST is "refunded." Kind of makes one wonder why it's charged in the first place. I suppose less get's refunded than is taken but then why not just reduce the GST charged and not refund it?

To my confession.

GST refunds are made following your annual tax return. Why everyone has to do a tax return every year is beyond me. The UK manages to avoid having to do that.

Anyway, a refund should reflect what you pay out and it's obviously impractical to calculate everyone's GST payment to refund it, so I thought the idea was to see what income was reported and then have some sort of formula to identify a "typical" spend and, thus, some sort of pro-rata refund. In other words, the greater the income, the greater the spend, the greater the refund to reflect that spend.

But I recently discovered the refunds are calculated using rates per person and children and then reduced according to income above a certain level. So it is means tested in exactly the same way Canada's Child Benefit is means tested.

This begs the question why not simply increase the Child Benefit rates instead and, for those without kids, increase the tax alloance accordingly?

Just how much money is wasted on processing refunds? Every household has a refund and many households have multiple recipients of them.

Still...as Canadians would say if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Carry on wasting money on bureaucracy.

What is it with some people?

Occasionally I make posts on the blog pages of the local newspaper. Occasionally.

Since I've lived in New Brunswick from time to time I read of 'Boil Orders' for water for short periods following some sort of incident and I wondered how the authorities put the word out so people knew they were supposed to do this.

I imagined maybe a few cars might drive around with announcements made by megaphone - as happened at election time, for example. Obviously announcements to be made via the media too, but not everyone has their ear to the radio or logs on to municipal websites daily on the off chance.

It finally happened. No actual contamination (well, yet to be confirmed) but a "precautionary" boil water order following a water main rupture.

It happened early in the morning. Not sure what time. The first I knew was that evening when someone mentioned it on the local forum. He discovered the notice when researching something unconnected on the city website.

On the day it happened I shopped in two stores and used two taxis. Taxi drivers routinely talk about likely snowstorms. Supermarket checkout staff make comments about them being busy with people doing their shopping before the snow starts.

It occurs to me this would be a useful network for something like this.

The city could ask stores to assist awareness via public facing staff. Instead of "find everything you were looking for?" it could be "you heard about the boil water order?"

Maybe the schools could tell their students to make sure their parents know when they get home.

Just imagine you're in one of those health groups (dodgy immune system, say) particularly at risk and you discover 24 hours after the event you should have been boiling your water. By which time you may have drunk coffee (coffee makers don't boil sufficiently to make the water safe if contaminated) or even water from the tap (Crystal Light, for example) or washed your lettuce.

If it turned out it was contaminated you could suffer. Even if it wasn't, how much would you be stressed out for a day or two worrying that it might have been? That brings problems too.

So I blogged on the newspaper site suggesting that the city could use these networks for getting the information out there quicker and to more people.

There's a thumbs up/thumbs down feature for people to agree/disagree and while a dozen agreed, 3 gave me a thumbs down.

As I say, I'm only there occasionally so it's not one of those situations where someone regularly disagrees with you and reacts negatively, almost out of habit.

All I did was suggest people might be better informed of something like this by a system of verbal exchanges that already exists.

I made a follow up post "So does three thumbs down mean that some people think it's better to not bother advising people then?"

That got three thumbs down too.