• Modern accounting techniques are amazing and super effective,

    Hmm

    The biggest weakness of accounting though is its inability to capture externalities

    Oh so you mean it’s actually dog shit then, if you can’t properly look at external risks outside the clearly defined formulas and can game said fomulas to cook books to one’s liking.

    How does one company record the cost of their employees commute? How do you even begin to calculate that? How do you measure the cost of extra leukemia cases in a town ten years after a train derails nearby? How do you record that in your books? How do you calculate and record the distress these huge noisy shipping vessels cause whales? It’s just so subjective and impractical.

    You act like these are difficult tasks in the modern era. Commute is pretty simple, what type of vehicle, what are its maintenance costs at certain mileages, what are the crash statistics, etc. Once you have a general fomula you can add an increased payout to cover ireegular externalities to properly hedge against the edge cases. Same shit for the others. It’s not subjective and impractical, it’s just not the going to be perfectly effiecnt as you need to create a bigger financial bubble to account for edge cases. The problem is hyper fixation on extracting the most captial possible from a business. Stop trying to be the most clean cut business and focus on aiding your communities, working to better infrastructure and stop interference with local governments for tax benefits. Then progressive changes can be beneficial to both and reduce external unmitigated risks as we have a more nuanced model to work with.

    • @solstice@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      11 year ago

      That rant is unhinged, you’re not playing with a full deck. Not gonna engage with you if you can’t have a reasonable conversation in good faith.

      • Lol, call out your bullshit and you have nothing but a reductionist argument, but sure bud I’m the one not playing with a full deck. Go lick some more boots if you can’t engage in constructive conversation.

        • @solstice@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          11 year ago

          Come back when you can codify your point into something that can actually be recorded on a balance sheet and P&L. Until then it’s not even wrong, it’s just…word salad…