GST on Gold Selling

As questionable it may be, gold selling is a way to make money. Like any other Australian business, a Australian gold seller may get taxed on their proceeds, and if they have not been declaring such income on their BAS (business activity statement), they may well be running up a tax debt...

Josh, as well as his friends Guy and Sandy, have dipped their toes into the grey market, and are now wondering if they will have to pay GST (Goods and Services Tax). Unfortunately, they find the A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999 (GST Act) too daunting to find out themselves. Will you be able to help them?

This problem has been taken out of Understanding Taxation Law 2011 (see bibliography for full citation), and the GST Act as of 1 November 2010 has been referred to.

How to attract the tax collector
In the GST Act:

• s 7-1 says that "GST is payable on taxable supplies and taxable importations".
• s 9-5 says that a taxable supply is made if a supply is made for consideration in the course or furtherance of an enterprise carried on, if it is connected with Australia and the supplier is registered or required to be registered.

In defense of merchanting

Merchanting is the activity of buying items at a low price and selling them higher later. If done properly, the merchanter can make substantial amounts of profit. Given factors such as the non-production of items in the process and an apparent increase in price volatility, this kind of business is often stigmatised.

However, merchanting may serve a useful role in the economy. Such activity can actually help to keep prices more stable and, as a bonus, the merchanter will be rewarded for it.

Elastic supply and demand
Price elasticity is how much the quantity of an item in the market changes with a given change in price. The more elastic the price, the more quantity will change with a given price change. There are two types of elasticity:

Value Added to MMO Items

In real life, people engage in production to make goods and provide services. In doing so, they hope to add value of the finished product above what it cost them in materials, labour and capital. Normally, this is what actually does happen, however in MMOs (massively multiplayer online [roleplaying games]), especially those whose skills are difficult to learn, items actually decrease in value as they are processed.

Like their real-life counterparts, items usually are assets, that is, they provide economic benefits to whoever is in possession of it. As part of production of a real-life asset, any combination of materials, labour and capital may be used in an effort to add value to it. This is usually what happens with an ingame asset as well.

As is the case both in real life and ingame, as a person/character repeatedly makes the same good or provides the same service, they learn more about how to do so. As part of an asset's total value (which includes its value as part of a finished product), there is value placed on its ability to facilitate such learning. When the materials/items are finally processed, such benefits are consumed and the total value somewhat falls.

RuneScape's Cryptic Clue Fest: A Retrospect

On 26 November 2009, following a system update, Mod Howes (pictured to the right) started the Cryptic Clue Fest, a series of puzzles sending players throughout the F2P world. All puzzles were needed to be done in sequence to finish the whole exercise.

Each step required talking to certain NPCs while carrying the correct quantities of various 'code items'. To find out which, how many and who, various cryptic messages needed to be deciphered: some involving interpretation and some involving mathematics. The Clue Fest proved to be very challenging to players with a poor wield of various skills and knowledge.