me: > > In other words, they don't care about the specific kind of > > depreciation they're measuring. They simply apply an accounting > > formula. They don't care about moral depreciation _per se_. Maybe they > > are dolts.
Doug Henwood wrote: > What are they supposed to do? Track every piece of software? Three years > isn't a bad approximation of the real world for packaged software. And as we > learned during Y2K, there's a lot of custom software that's in use for > decades. it's quite possible that moral depreciation is impossible to measure. It's quite possible that depreciation is impossible to measure, period. But my point remains: they weren't dealing with the specifics of the real (empirical) world as much as with accounting generalizations. That may be as good as it gets, but we have to remember that the NIPA data are not what we'd like them to be. "three years isn't a bad approximation of the real world for packaged software"? I thought you said that software was forever (like Herpes?) BTW, I was kidding about being dolts. I can't do accounting. I admire anyone who can, since they can tolerate the slings and arrows of extremely detailed and often-ambiguous information and somehow come up with something coherent from it. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
