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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   24087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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Could you share some examples?

When practicing accountants cook the books, they're embezzling or misrepresenting the company's operations. The professionalized field emerged to protect investors from false data. Presuming this works and public data is real, we may wonder if this data is also useful. A few basic valuation practices which violate regulations:

  • Capitalize internally developed intangibles like a "name brand" using marketing spend (while the law requires them to be expensed) (otherwise they're only capitalized when acquired by another company, but goodwill is often a red flag) (a building lease, trademark, customer list or patent are types of intangibles, which may gain value over time, perhaps in relation to money spent building them... Under normal practice, a patent's R&D costs are e.g. expensed as incurred...)
  • John Myers' Critical Event Theory recognizes profits at the critical decision (instead of the sale specifically) with cool impacts on how profits from a loan are worked out
  • Where dividing normal metrics by revenue gives you a percentage, I advocate doing this far more aggressively. Mining uses AISC, but factoring money out gives you something more like EROI (over LCOE), recycle ratio etc. for businesses to really compare operational efficiency (e.g. COGS misses the point; you'd want, say, to look at CAC but by hours spent, facilities and ads used and depreciate by your repeat customer rate). (Going further, many operations derisk by bartering mineral streams for oil streams. Typical accounting practice treats the royalty buyer as making a deposit, an upfront payment - with convoluted structure adjustment for tax planing. My company happily receives payment in mineral streams for software.)
  • Industries closer to commodities do this, e.g. time charter equivalent, scrap value,

Some of this might seem tame, but accepted metrics like COGS leave a lot of alpha on the table because of various violations, which e.g. make illegal some methods to compare companies at different parts of the same industry (e.g. midstream and upstream companies) which help you gauge the cycle.

Similarly, in my system of national accounts, "government spending" is not included in the net material product, a term inspired by the Soviet style which excludes most services and nets out capital depreciation. I use this to forecast growth and market expansion. It's also really import to even out imputed values. From 3% in 1985, now 10% of US GDP is arbitrary imputed rent while e.g. China takes construction cost and depreciates it at 2% per year. This means China's imputed rents on are 1/10 of Germany's for comparable housing, after purchasing power adjustments, when habitable area/person is only 42m^2 vs. 48m^2. In Japan, imputed rent went to 14%.

Now, I don't count "government spending", because monetized transfers like social security directly increase GDP, which is bad. But many governments pay for healthcare and tertiary education - those should be imputed for their real value. This is why I don't count services. After all, greater US healthcare output does not give Americans healthier lives than Italians or Singaporeans, higher European education attainment does not result in greater incomes than Americans; there are obvious confounders for all of this.

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