Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2006 September 15

# 15 Sep 2006, 02:21PM: Accounting Lessons: My pedantic little distinctions include "abbreviation" vs. "acronym" and "between" vs. "among." Today I learned a new one: tangible long-term assets get "depreciated," while intangible long-term assets, such as a franchise fee, get "amortized." I've been using "amortized" for years to refer to using up the value of tangible assets, but as long as I'm only hanging around non-accountants that should be fine. This is akin to saying "sorting" instead of "hashing" around computer programmers.

Another accounting wrinkle I learned today gave me pause. An asset is something you now control, thanks to a past acquisition or transaction at a measurable cost, that you expect will give you economic benefits in the future. This means that employees don't belong on the balance sheet. They could quit at any time so you don't control them, the work to be performed is in the future instead of the past, and so on. This seems fishy to me. I mean, does anyone really control anything? Your warehouse might burn down, or the town might rezone your land. And you buy an asset, or hire an employee, because of perceived future use.

But in accounting terms, it's only an asset if you can put a price on it. If you don't know how much you'll end up paying an employee in total, you can't valuate her work as an asset or her future wages as a corresponding liability.

So if you wanted to create your own derivative of standard accounting that included particular workers or their work as an asset, you could buy them as slaves, or you could hire them on periodic contracts and think of the contracts as assets. Sure, you haven't paid yet, but sometimes you buy assets entirely on credit.

Another option: pay your employee her entire year's salary in advance, when she signs a one-year contract. I don't know what would be more radical, that or putting workers down as assets on the balance sheet.

# 15 Sep 2006, 07:09PM: Business Ideas: Well, there's the intellectual property clearing-firm. It could also start what doesn't exist, which is a universal registry of who owns what IP. Do I hear databases calling? Tech component: check? However, it could be that such a database, or the problem people would hire it to solve, is computationally impossible or epistemologically intractable. And where's the target market? People who can afford lawyers already have them, and indie artists or small businesses who would use this service couldn't afford what I'd have to charge. The network effect plus publishing companies' possible urge to outsource legal work makes for thin gruel here.

You could set up a dehydrator near airport security lines to speed-dry liquids for people into just-add-water powders. Leonard tells me that rapid dehydration often changes the chemical properties of a complicated liquid. A better business proposition would be to sell tooth powders, shampoo bars, etc. to airport sundries shops, but where's the tech in that?

And there's coming up with an online sudoku competition site, possibly for sale to Yahoo! Games. The folks at work thought up a few variations so as to make Sudoku a two-player game:

When you complete a row, column, or 3x3 square, your opponent's board gets rotated randomly: 90, 180, or 270 degrees.
When you complete a subtask, some boxes your opponent had filled are erased, and others are filled.
Variation on that last one: when you finish a subtask, your opponent's puzzle actually changes. The computer permutes it by changing a few of the numbers.

But I'm not seeing where people would pay. Yahoo! Games is free; people don't pay to play Hearts or the like over the Internet.

None of these are right for my Master's project. Back to the thought mines.