$500,000 scope

You don't go broke making a profit, though. The total cash effect is better than just a writeoff.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Denying write permissions for the OS and operating program is a good start, and not allowing software installation also helps. Plus, who's going to bother writing some special hack for the few hundred of those $500k scopes that exist in the world? (Stuxnet apart, of course.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The widget is a sunk cost. It was already bought out of profits and were taxed on them then. The way to recover that tax is to write it down. If you need it this year, you write the whole thing down and scrap the widget. This is the sort of tax nonsense that's killing business.

That's true only if the tax rate were greater than 100%.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

No it's true of any nonzero tax rate.

Riiight. Which is why we all burn our houses down instead of selling them.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Interesting. I know when I worked for Dell/SWRX they had annual fire sales - they'd just pile up everything near the stock room door and you grabbed what you could carry. I scored two IBM eServers.

I've always been fascinated by stupid mega-corp accounting practices. I need to start asking the suits if they run their personal finances the same way as done at work.

It's a little different in *many* ways. If the cost, including accounting, of my selling the home approached it's value, AND I could write down this loss on my house against my income, AND if I had income (to write down) greater than the write down....

If you hadn't noticed in your time at IBM, they do things rather differently with their checkbook than you do with your checkbook. The tax rules aren't the same.

krw > It's a little different in *many* krw > ways. If the cost, including krw > accounting, of my selling the home krw > approached it's value, AND I could krw > write down this loss on my house krw > against my income, AND if I had krw > income (to write down) greater krw > than the write down.... krw > If you hadn't noticed in your krw > time at IBM, they do things rather krw > differently with their checkbook krw > than you do with your checkbook. krw > The tax rules aren't the same. I know of a big pharma company that made insane suicidal cuts to sales staff to artificially and temporarily make their company "metrics" look better. Bean counter numbers on big companies really can be a deliberate deception.

Okay, I'm stupid. Here I was thinking that selling something got it off the books as well as crushing it, and that apart from the tax on any difference between the book value and the selling price, you got to keep the difference. Silly me, but that's what I think.

If I'm badly wrong about that, please do the arithmetic and show me otherwise. Citing the stupidity of the way corporate finance people handle other people's money doesn't prove anything--they have personal incentives that are in opposition to prudence with the shareholders' money, e.g. Gerstner and York's hack job on IBM in 1992. Getting the mess cleared up somehow in the shortest time let them blame it all on the previous idiots, never mind crushing billions of dollars worth of assets.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs