Pro tip: If you want to feel like a baller, start your own business in Canada. That way you can pay your taxes in one or two (as opposed to fifty-odd) lump sums. Making the numbers jibe for the benefit of the Canada Revenue Agency was this week's must-do job. Normally, I like math. Not today, though.
Don't get me wrong--it's not the digits on the check (currently en route to Ottawa) that brass me off. It's accounting for what was skimmed off (in flat fees plus a percentage differential on the exchange rate) every time a U.S. client wired payment for services rendered.
And for what? Industrial-strength InfoSec. and the redundancies required by transactional processing don't come cheap--I get that. And there will always be a certain percentage of transfers that go kerblooey and require scrounging up a real human being to debug those edge-cases. Believe me, I grok that too.
Yet considering the millions of international transfers made every day, the fee seems pretty darned steep for a the sliver of a second that it takes a computer algorithm to move ones and zeros from Server A to Server B.
Which sets my mind to thinking again what the virtualisation of goods has done to our internal bean-counting mechanisms. For instance, people who would not shoplift at The Future shop will torrent CD/DVD content and bootleg software. And when money is digitised, I have to wonder whether that likewise tempts banksters to even more light-fingeredness than they would have with cold cash.
Or maybe it's even more insidious than that. Perhaps the nebulousness of "wealth" is even making us confuse money and value more than we ever have in human history. Like how we're so prone to conflating success and merit in our entertainers.
So can you work with me here, Gentle Reader? Can we all focus on what we're getting instead of what we're spending? I think I can safely promise a healthier economy and happier people in it if we do that.
