December, 2009

The HST bill was recently passed to combine the two taxes for Ontario. And no, I do not mean Hubble Space Telescope but the Harmonized Sales Tax bill. This means that everything will cost more because it will combine the GST and PST and apply the 13% tax on almost everything. The things that were exempted from the provincial sales tax will now be taxed under this bill. The government says that raising taxes will help create over half a million jobs within the next decade because it will save business millions if not billions of dollars. If it saves business money, who’s to say that they’ll pass on that savings to the consumer?

The way this helps business is that they don’t have to pay taxes on things that they purchase. In the process of making a product, each step is taxed. The company that harvests the raw materials sells that material to the next company but taxes them in the process. The company that uses the material to create the product sells the products to the retailers which is also taxed. And finally the retailers sells the product to the consumers which gets taxed again. What the HST does, I think is eliminate all the taxes that the businesses are charging each other when there’s an exchange of materials and supplies.

So if these savings are not passed on to the consumer, of course we’re all going to be outraged. Companies are in business of making profit so I don’ think they’ll be nice enough to give us a discount. Lately, I’ve been seeing prices go up not down. For example, the price of gas will now go up because there will be an additional tax on it. Services like barber shops where you didn’t see taxes before will now be taxed. But from what I hear, there may be some things that might be exempted. Coffee might be one of those things but I can’t confirm that.

Although it looks pretty bad on the consumer side, personally, it might have some advantages. Along with the introduction of the HST there is a tax cut for personal income. Individuals could see a tax cut as high as 10%.

Nobody likes to pay more than they have to but hopefully the tax cut will help balance things out. This legislation won’t go into effect until July 2010 so we won’t have to worry about it for the first half of the year. Whatever the outcome is, I’m going to have see if I can offset a few things financially.

1/250 sec | f4 / 26mm

This is William’s Coffee Pub, a new hangout for me when I go out for coffee. It’s located at the harbour front by the Marine Discovery Center. The area is very quiet and looks almost deserted because all of the yacht has been put away.

This is my ’95 Mazda Millenia. As you can see, it’s slowly starting to fall apart. I’m hoping to get my new one on the road soon. My dad has been working on it for a while. He changed out the supercharger but it turns out that the exhaust might be faulty as well. So I’m saving up for a new engine.

The kitchen sink has been broken for a while. I’m not sure how it happened but it appears that it rusted to the point where it just broken. From the looks of things, fixing it didn’t appear to be a hard job. From what I could tell, it was just a matter of removing the old strainer and installing a new one. Of course, it helps if you have the right tools.

I recommended to my roommate that she use the sink as little as possible but if she needed to use the sink, I recommended not letting the dish pile up. If you use a little bit of water, it’ll be fine because the new pipes that I temporarily installed would catch most of the water. But if she lets the dish pile up to the point where she’ll be running the water for a longer time, it’s going to leak. But of course, she lets the dish pile up.

Once I cleared the sink of all the pots and pans, I got to work. First, I tried to remove the old strainer by remove the nut. Unfortunately, the nut didn’t want to unscrew itself. As I was turning the wrench, I kept slipping and nothing was moving. I got so fed up with the wrench not working that I eventually tried to pry the strainer off. I got this smart idea to use a flat head screw driver to pry the old on off. I managed to get part way through until I decided to give the wrench another go. This time, I properly adjusted and secure the wrench to the nut. It turned it counter clockwise and finally it budged.

Here’s what the old pieces looked like. You can see where it broke off. I don’t know how long ago this part was installed but if it rusted that much, it must have been installed when the house was built. It’s a trend in this house where metallic things crack.

A few weeks back I purchased the strainer and the pipe from Lowe’s but unfortunately, I didn’t have the tools to install those pieces. I was going to use an adjustable open ended wrench but it wasn’t wide enough which is why I had to go out and buy one. I had to go out and buy an adjustable slip-nut wrench from Canadian Tire which cost me about $15. There’s a good chance that I’ll probably use it a couple more times but for now, it’ll serve its purpose.

The new pieces that I bought do not require the use of the adjustable wrench to install. Everything could be tightened by hand, it was that simple. So if these pieces ever break, I can remove them without any tools.

Once everything was installed, it was a matter of testing it out and making sure that there were no leaks. So if you don’t see any leaks then everything is honky dory.