As I get older, it's hard to not get overwhelmed by the amount of things I try to keep track of in my head. I try writing them down in a list, but then the list becomes another thing I need to keep track of and manage. The only thing that seems to work is to pick one or two things and only work on that. Given that I need to eat and shit, I tend to prioritize little else.
This works well until my accountant e-mails me to remind me my buisness taxes are due in two days. She's kind enough to ask me if I want an extension, although it's a prefunctory gesture since she knows I'm already fucked.
I hate taxes (and airplane food and mondays). I was talking to a EU economist and he told me, "In the EU, the northern countries like to pay taxes and people are very meticulous about it. In the southern countries nobody pays and the government just inflates the currency." At least they used to, now that they are both on the Euro, the differences in how people subsidize their government spending comes into stark relief.
The inflationary method seems simpler at the cost of the ability to regulate behavior with targeted tax breaks used as incentives. Not only that, it also frees up the overhead of keeping track of all the specific tax exemptions and spending precious mental cycles gaming the system.
Intertia is a bitch though and governments don't change (they can only be overthrown). So here I am loading up Quickbooks yet again, like Sysiphus rolling his rock up a hill. Albert Camus imagined Sisyphus smiling while pushing the rock and embracing his situation. I guess that's the best we can hope for... well either that or the temporary climax of a revolution. At least until the fighting is over and people want clean drinking water, then it's back to Quickbooks and rolling rocks up hills.
McAfee 2020... fuck clean drinking water, I'm sick of doing taxes.