First, automation is a new orthogonal dimension. You can have automation with or without plain text.
Second, your emphasis on "automation" leads me to believe that perhaps you misunderstand what accounting is. Accounting is not just taking a list of transactions and recording them (database, file etc). That is called bookkeeping. Yes, accounting is also amenable to automation, but much less so than bookkeeping. Although, you could argue that when applied to the life of a normal individual, accounting and bookkeeping are almost indistinguishable. You have income, you have costs, and you have a mortgage - pretty straightforward. My point is in general you cannot entirely automate accounting. The reason for that is that accounting isn't just processing bytes, but instead requires the understanding of the underlying economics associated with the transactions. This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't disagree with you that accounting could use more automation. Everything could use more automation. But for something it's more straightforward than others.
> This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. It isn’t impossible (for most use cases) to embed that mental model into your automation tools.
You the correct that it means you can’t have purely general purpose automation that will do all accounting work for every entity, but you could certainly create automation rules that cover everything (or nearly everything) for some particular entity.
I think many accountants would laugh at saying accuracy is a requirement. They have full time jobs because the books for any major company are a disaster that are kept together by prayer and duct tape. Accuracy is the ideal, but when you have hundreds of revenue streams, discounts, rebates, deprecation, tax structures, salesmen actively trying to sell out the company, etc keeping the books in order is a tall order.
I suppose one problem with this is that accounting needs legal responsibility in case of mistakes. Software usually (if not always) does not guarantee anything (in the legal sense) and its seller/producer does not assume any responsibility whatsoever.
This! It blows my mind every bank doesn't have a sort of scripting language of some sort that let's me automate whatever I want to happen. I've seen a few services that supposedly enable this but their prone to breakage, don't support one bank or another, or are simply way too expensive.
Judging by the font embedded in the SVG file, it looks like it was created using Excalidraw. It's a great tool if you're looking for that hand-drawn aesthetic!
When you read this story - your heart warms & your eyes gets filled. It is crazy nice feeling. You feel like this world is such a better place. Yet, it hurts - to know there are so many homeless that our system needs corrections.
It also reminds me that systems can’t fix situations like this. The system of “care,” as the story alludes to the autistic person experiencing in their youth, often looks a lot more like warehousing the people on the margins of society, often in unpleasant (and almost always in institutional) conditions. Some kinds of humanity can only ever happen person-to-person, and it’s a great treasure for everyone involved to encounter such an opportunity and choose to take it up.
The so called safety net don't do jack shit. They are a way to give power to mean, power hungry bitches that can feel good about themselve for "taking care" and scolding other people that receive much less than they do for their bullshit job.
The funny thing is that if the wealth was actually shared fairly instead of politicaly, most of the recipient would fare a better life and we could do away with insane bureaucratic waste.
Another way would be to have less governement taxes and regulations that would allow for jobs to pay better and remove much of the need of the so-called safety nets.
Of course, this way you would take power away from the mean girl bitches running those things so that can't happen.
From my experience, I can tell you that none of the people running those things have actually worked a single day in their life (as in, usefull work, that people would actually agree to pay for) but they can feel good about themselve because they are "helping".
It's hard to describe how corrupted the system is, church corruption seems a bit tame in comparison.
And it would be accurate if you were talking about political or legal safety nets which are common across Asia except in china, for example. Your attempt at being geographically correct is dismissive and counter productive to the conversation about something that is obviously not about the specific geographic usage of the word.
Nope, it still wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. Nobody cares if the UK wants to pretend to be Asian or American or simply “not living on a continent” or whatever worthless distinction they’re clinging to. They’re European. Chinese are Asian. Brazilians are South American.
They’re the ones deviating from the usage the rest of the world uses. It would be identical to them pretending they’re the only ones driving on the correct side of the world. Nobody cares.
Nobody does this, it’s a disconnect between the UK’s believed place in the world vs. their true one. Literally nobody does this. They might say UK to differentiate from Europe because they’re SO intertwined that it can be legitimately difficult to separate the two in any other way.
Correct, this is just as stupid. You only say “Middle East” to differentiate from the rest of Asia because they’re so similar and intertwined otherwise. Pakistan is literally just India.
I disagree that it’s as useless as saying they can’t be done, because acknowledging the possibility opens the door intellectually to think about solutions.
"Incentivizing" doesn't really fix it either, as people take avantage of the incentives. You do have to make it possible for the people who do care to be able to, though.
You see far more horrific cases in the current US system where minors are cared for by members of the general public at their homes. This self selects for both ends of the spectrum people who want to do good and very bad actors.
That’s the core issue so often ignored, we need systems to deal with people at their best and their worst.
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