Yes, but it is different. I’m employed, so my employer pays taxes, social security, pension fund money, and health insurance into the proper channels, and I get an “after taxes” direct transfer (which is standard here for decades now).
The tax rates the employer pays are based on complicated tables which are calculated on average annual incomes and no deductions. So they are usually higher than they would be in reality.
At the beginning of the year, we get a paper from the employer stating how much taxes they have paid out of my pay over the year. Then we can take (you are not required to, but letting this slip would be stupid) tax forms and fill them out, or use a tax software (costs about €5 and contains all the legal tricks and up-to-date information). There you can claim all things that would reduce your tax load, e.g. Text benefits for education, for having a handicap, times on unemployment, change of pay rate, office supplies you need for business purposes, medical costs (which usually is not much, because we have working health insurance, but there are co-pays and things that are not covered, like something that is a big thing for us: a fixed rate per kilometer for trips to doctors and physiotherapeuts, which is a list of several pages and alone reduces our tax load by several hundred euro).
You submit this as a paper form, or, more modern, online. We usually hear back from the tax guys a few weeks later, asking for invoices and receipts, send them in, and again a few weeks later, we get money back. As we can claim a lot of stuff (my wife is handicapped), we usually get a few thousand euro back - which is a good incentive to file taxes! But even as a normal person, it pays, as there is a form “work-related costs” where people can claim money for commuting and similar things.
As a self-employed person, one has to submit taxes for the business, of course.
Not familiar with belgium but in Australia they don’t. It’s linked to your payroll so they know if you paid more or less that it was due, plus they have linked your bank accounts so they know if you had any interest to pay taxes on. Something similar for investments accounts too.
If you want to claim any deductions (ie. You work from home and have home office expenses) you punch them in yourself
Check the tax office’s website of the country you live in, you might be up for an unpleasant surprise. Pretty normal to have to file a tax report if you are a grown up. There are exceptions in a few countries if all your income is from salaried work and you don’t have any deductions to claim but not the norm
That absolutely is the norm. All handled through PAYE.
Any alterations are typically handled through next year’s tax code. Normal people don’t have to get involved in the process at all. You can prod them to get any refunds sooner (say you get a big bonus and the tax ends up going out of whack), but it works out over time to the point you don’t need to.
CRA (Canada) basically fills in your info for you, you just need to authorize your account in your tax software. Doable online too. If you run a business they obviously can’t do this but if you’re an employee they have all your info.
in the us they have all your info, but your employer pays an estimated amount of taxes out of your paycheck all year, and you’ve still gotta fill out paperwork about it yourself as well.
if it turns out you overpaid, which you only know by doing the paperwork yourself, and you filed taxes, you get money back from the gov. if you overpaid and don’t file, the gov just keeps your money. if you underpaid and filed, you’ll have to send them more money, and if you underpaid and didn’t file, the IRS will be coming for you.
Sure they have all your info. I’m not familiar with Canada but in other countries where this happens happens, the site tells you that you need to check that everything is correct, and that YOU are responsible for the information submitted. When you confirm you have effectively submitted your tax return, albeit with the help of a number of automations.
I’m in Australia now, and that how it works here too. Yes it’s just a couple of clicks for most people, but you are indeed doing your tax return.
I haven’t don’t it in Europe in a while, but that was the case when I was there (albeit less automated) and I’m pretty sure that’s the case in most countries
Right. You license it. Owning something isn’t the be all end all of commerce. Just admit you like getting free stuff.
Do you complain about the Theme Park getting to keep all of its rides when you leave at the end of the day? You paid money to be there, surely you should get to take part of the park home with you.
A better comparation would be this: you paid for Dondurma and after the guy is done with the tricks he moved on to the other customer so you asked where’s my ice cream. And he says umm actually if you scanned the QR code of the menu you would have known, after watching 2 ads, that you are paying for the tricks not the ice cream
As someone who has literally never bought any software at all, ever… I just get the stuff I need whether it is free or not. I don’t care if it is freeware or not actually
Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it’s become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That’s quite as silly to me as this whole “what gender is this washing machine” nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don’t have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to “it” instead of “him/her/they”. Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun “hän”. It’s just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
I do mean that we Finns use “se” very often in everyday speech to refer yo other human beings, and “se” would translate as “it.”
Ofc I’m aware how horrible using “it” when referring yo people would be in English.
But if someone asked me to translate a sentence like “mihin se [a person] meni”, I would ofc not use a direct translation because of how offensive and wrong it would be.
I respect the distinctions languages have for genders, but I’m happy I grew up with one which didn’t have them. Language shapes thought. We don’t think of people as “it”, it’s just the colloquial form of the language.
In Finnish, if you had to give a formal speech or something, most people realise to default to “hän”, the 3rd person singular.
And if you’re doing customer service or addressing someone with the sort of respect you’d use titles with in English. Then you’d address the person in the second person plural instead of the second person singular.
Just like English did hundreds of years ago, and it worked so well that in the end, English left the second person singular out of the language altogether. It still exists, but isn’t really used unless thou wants to pretend being from Elizabethan Britain.
We could do with something though. ‘Them’ doesn’t really cut it as it’s not clear if it’s plural or singular. ‘It’ is insulting.
If there was a good one, I’d just use it all the time for everyone. Why should gender be so important to identity? Isn’t it a regression to be so hungup on gender?
I’d be happy with ‘xe’ for gender neutral single-person pronoun. And for awhile I was using that from time to time - but because its rare and people aren’t use to it, using it is a distraction from what you actually are trying to talk about. I’ve stopped using it because I don’t really want to talk about it over and over. Sometimes people find it confusing. Sometime people are just curious. And some people find aggravating (because they don’t like the idea of degendering or changing genders).
I don’t mind the concept of a degendeted pronoun, but I would vote against “xe”. Just find it unpleasant to use the “x” sound so much. Don’t know what I would like, just x makes it extra weird on top of the “weirdness” of trying to explicitly evolve language.
Sure. And as with a lot of English, it isn’t totally clear has ‘xe’ is even meant to be pronounced. (I assume like ‘ze’).
Perhaps a nicer sounding version would be ‘ce’. Or whatever. To be honest, it really doesn’t matter to me. I’d be happy to just call literally everyone “she” or “he” or whatever. I’d suggest that we just use “he” for all genders, because many people on the internet seem to be doing that anyway; but obviously that would be upsetting to people who have been fighting for gender recognition. Pushing for “she” might be a bit better, but not by a lot. … So we’re probably in this mess for a long time. But I reckon if we just shake it up just a little bit as individuals, using different words and such, we’ll eventually start to see something change more widely.
If you get aggravated being degendering, or of others changing gender, it makes me think you are insecure about your gender. They should get over it. ‘xe’ would be good, but I don’t see it taking off with being popularizied some how. Some popular TV show or something.
It’s not. Context provides you all the needed info in 99.9% of cases.
“Alex is coming over after school, I haven’t seen them in forever.” Obviously means a single person.
“There’s construction going on? When will they be done?” Honestly doesn’t matter but obviously means a group of people.
Sure, you need to provide context, but you’d need to with a pronoun anyway.
“Where is she?” Who the heck is “she”?
“What time is he finished with work?” Who are we talking about?…
You’re essentially looking at the words singular and plural definitions and coming up with a reason they don’t work. (Hey, another “they” and I’m sure you picked up on the fact that I’m not talking about a singular human.)
Can you even think of a situation that has ambiguity, which would actually come up in natural language?
“Get who wrote this rubbish in here.” “I’ve message them. They are coming to the meeting now.” “You mean a team or an individual did this?”
It does depend how pedantic you want to be. I’ll dyslexic and I don’t process language like others and so I don’t like ambiguous. My default interpretation is frequently different. Human language has enough ambiguousness as it is. I’d like it reduced ideally.
“Who wrote this rubbish” is already ambiguous from the start, since it can be a singular author, or multiple. I admit they/them didn’t help resolve that ambiguity, but it isn’t the cause.
I agree ‘who’ is ambiguous and ‘they/them’ tells you nothing further. If we had a ‘xhe’ or whatever, you could narrow it down to a single person, without having to get into gender needlessly. I don’t need to know/care about gender.
The ambiguity doesn’t lie in they, it lies in the way the writer constructed that sentence, as the person you responded to already stated.
The writer (and the person they are communicating with) knows the plurality of the “who”, an outside observer (us, the readers) aren’t privy to that information. Clarification on the part of the writer would provide that context. But the sentence isn’t written to be read to a 3rd party, but the other party (the person the writer is communicating with).
99.99% of people understand this intuitively, but this is the way you’d parse the understanding of that sentence.
And if you’ll note, in my second sentence, “they” is understood to be singular—the writer.
E: and for Shits n’ giggles: if neither party (the writer nor the person being communicated to) knows the plurality of the “who” they are referring to, then it’s irrelevant information. They will discover who wrote it when they go searching.
And if you’ll note, in that previous sentence, it’s understood that I am using the plural they (the writer and the person being communicated to) in both uses of the last sentence.
As a dyslexic I don’t parse sentences like others. I’ve also been programming since childhood, I’m sure it’s made that worse in some ways. I read unclear ambiguity when other don’t.
I’ve literally had it were multiple people are sure of the same interpretation but could not explain why. They didn’t even see ambiguity until I pointed it.
I’m not arguing everyone should have a gender. Only that I wish we had another thing to use. Well constructed writing can use them just fine, but there is a lot of writing not well constructed. Not least of which is mine! I’d rather be going the other way in language. I’d like language to be compilable. 😉
’Them’ doesn’t really cut it as it’s not clear if it’s plural or singular.
Beyond the other reply about the history of the singular “they,” we also have another prominent plural pronoun we use in the singular all the time. So often we don’t even think about it as being plural anymore. So much so that we’ve created new plural versions of this already plural pronoun.
“You.”
“You” was originally the objective case plural 2nd person pronoun in English, with “ye” being the nominative.
But “thou” was considered informal, like the German “du” or the Spanish “tú,” and the plural 2nd person was used as the formal. And this eventually supplanted “thou” completely.
And now we think of “you” as singular to the point where we make slang words like “y’all” and “yous” to have a plural.
I’m a native English speaker and I’ve used “they” as a singular third person neutral pronoun since before I even knew anything about trans or nonbinary people. It’s commonly accepted and not at all unusual usage, at least in American English where I grew up.
This is one of those things that, if translated directly, would be really, really bad.
Now I’ve spoken English for more than a quarter century, so my mouths used to it already, but I remember when learning the language, it was rather hard for the brain to keep switching between “he” and “she”, as it was not a distinction my brain had to make before using English.
I mean obviously I could differentiate women and men, but having to use different pronouns for both?
Yeah I don’t see anyone accepting being called “it” in English; that’s how you refer to farm animals bound for slaughter or undesirable ethnicities you’re going to exterminate.
Why would anyone ever want to try using “it” for people in English unless they’re purposefully trying to demean someone… ?
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to say that’s what English should do. I was describing what Finnish does.
I’m pointing out that lots of languages have less gender distinctions than English, so English calling French out on gendered nouns is rather silly.
My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people, we usually use the even more general one, which is just for anything. Except when talking to and about pets, because then somehow everyone uses less colloquial language.
While English has a perfectly good second person singular, but doesn’t even use it anymore.
You can’t have more third person singulars before you finish your second person singulars, that’s the rule. Now open up!
My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people we usually use the even more general one
The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.
Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:
Antti sanoi, että se tulee. (Antti said that someone else will come.)
Antti sanoi, että hän tulee. (Antti said that he himself will come.)
First, I’d like to identify Finnish as a Finno-Ugric language, more than a uralic one, because “uralic” is very broad, just like, say, “Indo-European languages”. There’s several distinction within both groups.
But yeah, there are quite a lot of grammatical cases, I can see that yeah. I wouldn’t bother learning Finnish if I wasn’t born with it, lol.
My point is rather that English calling French out on something linguistic. English is three languages in a trenchcoat masquerading as one.
But also, getting the conjugation wrong won’t really be offensive to anyone, whereas confusing he/she just because your brain is unused to having to specify such things and your mouth is unused to the “sh” sound in she, and ending up misgendering someone, could be. Even accidentally.
“She sells seashells on the seashore” is a very challenging tongue twister for Finns.
Also, note how I can write a sentence like “hän menee kirjastoon”, meaning “[3rd person nongendered singular] goes to the library”, but if you run that through a translator to English, the translator will have to make up a gender. And not surprisingly, the default is the masculine one. (Down with the patriarchy and all that.)
Although this also means you’ll lose information when translating to Finnish. Ups and downs.
He’s a regular on a show my ex watched called 90 day fiance. He pretty much tries to date women outside the U.S. exclusively, and unsuccessfully. I’m not entirely convinced that no-neck-ed isn’t a character written for the show with some fancy prosthetics
It’s a birth defect - Big Ed Brown from 90 Day Fiancé has Klippel-Feil syndrome, which makes his body look different from others.
I don’t watch it, but making fun of someone for his looks, which he can’t control, is a doozy, so I hope they laugh because of his antics and not his body. Would be kinda cheap otherwise.
“90 Day Fiancé star Ed “Big Ed” Brown is working on himself mentally and physically.
The interior designer, 55, opened up about his insecurities stemming from having Klippel Feil syndrome, how he’s been combating them and his fitness journey that resulted in a 21-pound weight loss.”
“I grew up with the condition called KFS - Klippel-Feil syndrome- where it looks like I actually don’t have a neck,” Big Ed explained. “But I do. I have 3 vertebrates that are the size of 2 when most normal humans from this world have 7. And I have a bigger than normal chest cavity so I’ve been bullied all my life.” While some viewers have been cruel about Big Ed’s appearance, he is used to receiving criticism and standing out.”
It’s probably trolling to see how many idiots follow along. I don’t care for her music and her fans are annoying, but I don’t listen to her music or hang out with her fans so idgaf, and even if I did hang out with them they’re not required to be in lockstep with what I like to be a friend. Pointless and seemingly artificial dividing lines. 🤷
Taylor Swift has rigged the Super Bowl in favor of Kansas City and is going to use that event to endorse Joe Biden.
No I’m not kidding.
At this point you can assume that most everything you’ll hear about her over the next six months will be conservative astroturfing.
Swift does own a private jet. So naturally everyone who five minutes ago didn’t give half a shit about the environment is going to use that as a cudgel regarding the environment. They’re safe to ignore.
No, the NFL rigged the superbowl. It’s the Pentagon that manipulated the relationship with the football player who will win the rigged superbowl which will elevate Taylor Swift on a national platform (which she previously did not have) to endorse Joe Biden
Yeah totally true that’s why yesterday there was a thread about the reason for her popularity in which like 70% of the comments were neutral or positive about her.
Kremlin smear campaign designed to discourage celebrities from supporting Joe Biden’s campaign since he’s the key opponent of their asset: Donald Trump.
I actually only have a problem with her polluting issues and for being a billionaire people like. I’m glad she’s making some of her fans pay attention to politics, but that doesn’t make her infallible.
I think aliens would be horrified by so many things we do (or don't do!) that wearing an entertainment device on your face wouldn't even break the top 100.
ETA: The guy in the cyber truck though. That might get shown as an example in some of the other items in their list.
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