It is amusing that Eve Online is often derided as being a "spreadsheet game" which is removed from immersive play. There are lots of columns of numbers, but no real way to interact directly with ships as pilots. Still interesting, but this seems to embrace calculation dominated simulation interaction.
A man observed a single small demon in a city. "Surely this is the most righteous of cities, for only a single demon is found among them!"
He later saw four monstrous demons beleaguering an old man. "This must be the most wicked sort, for four demons haunt upon him!"
Describing his experience to the local priestess, he was corrected. "The city is so wicked that it only takes a pitifully small one to rule them. The old man is a paragon, for even four of the strongest demons could not fell him."
Individual accountants are not amoral. Accountancy, however 8)
No, this is the old saw about "money is the root of all evil" which is bollocks - it's "The love of money is the root of all evil" which is still bollocks but at least likely. So that's the motivation for the usual crap trolled out at accountants.
It is ironic (hypocritical?) that us lot on HN are familiar with the difference between a hacker and a cracker in IT terms and yet deign to decry accountancy.
The tools of your trade in accountancy can be used for both getting your books in order and with some additional thought and effort: fraud. The real world parallels are so obvious and if you happen to read Terry Pratchett, you will encounter the "Dark Accountants".
Accountants and lawyers are often seen as an expensive enemy/cost centre. The funny thing is that IT is often seen in the same way by everyone else, including accountants and lawyers!
So, kids: you might be able to fiddle up a cluster of webby funkiness. If you can't work out how to turn a profit from your coolness, you might need an accountant to do all the boring stuff like making money work properly.
Now I come to think of it, accountancy could learn a bit from IT. OK IT is about 100 years old and accountancy has been running for millenia and double entry and the three ledgers are quite well understood. Avoiding tax seems to occupy the minds of far too many people. Instead of fixating on a 20% "loss" to tax, why not try to increase production/sales by say 30%. Cost your time on each endeavour and see which makes the best return.
I think accountancy needs something like the CVE system too. So when a new tax avoidance measure is discovered - CVE number deployed, description, patches by vendor/govt. etc etc. In the UK, when you do your Self Assessment tax thing, you could simply declare which CVEs you accidentally used for a 50% discount this year but full payment next year and those not declared run 200% if found out.
Eh, cloud accounting started taking off back in 2013 or so. The accounting industry is making changing. In the UK, you have small changes like making tax digital with the HRMC. A lot of those CVEs appear to be intentional to incentivize certain behaviors or outcomes or to give your political friends more money. Tax professionals these days work with both domain knowledge and specialized software and don't need encyclopedic knowledge of the tax code anymore. So yes, when the tax law changes, the software gets patched as well.
Double entry accounting more or less started with Luca Pacioli in the 15th century. Our current CPA/CA/CMA environment started in the early 20th century. A lot of entry level work and rote data entry is being handled more programs these days, but a lot of the core work may remain out of reach of automation due to the edge cases or frequent changes. More firm consolidation is happening, and more non-accounting majors are being hired to work in accounting businesses.
> Instead of fixating on a 20% "loss" to tax, why not try to increase production/sales by say 30%. Cost your time on each endeavour and see which makes the best return.
A lot of the mindset is minimizing one of the biggest expenses, taxes, in order to maximize leftover money. Not every industry can scale up quite so easily as software :). So, if sales can be increased substantially, minimizing costs, or taxes, would be one of the natural areas of focus. Americans, including me, are often quite jealous of the ease of tax filing in other countries.
Anyways, cheers.
Just one, and it was elective. Few enough to realize this stuff is tricky and I should tread with care. Not enough to know all the loopholes of what you can get away with and still be ethical.
Also it becomes very useful piloting a ship with an oversized afterburner which makes it move very fast but penalizes the turn speed, thus breaking the logic of usual controls provided in game.
