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throwaway667555

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The good thing is new law usually references old law and explains why it has evolved so I wonder if arranging the law in chronological order will help the LLM follow the thread.

Precedent in law is like discovery in science. It advances the boundary of human understanding so a probabilistic regurgitator will have trouble applying it without treatise roadmaps.

You can't put your finger on it because money is merely an accumulator and medium of exchange of economic performance. The performance of services in exchange for other services without money is a perfectly valid economic exchange that can and should be booked to revenue of each of the parties, if actually performed.

Loans without any economic performance of services generate circular meaningless cash flows yeah, but that's not the case when services are actually performed.

Loans are promises to pay. Business deals are promises to perform services or deliver goods. The difference is easily lost in the details even for accountants and economists.

Companies will often state a subsidiary is wholly owned by the ultimate parent regardless of which tier the subsidiary is at. The Thunderbird subsidiary could be under the Firefox subsidiary and the statement would still be true.

Lenders have an amount of capital that they need to invest and earn returns -- they're generally not in the business temporarily so they don't want their capital back. And when the loans are secured by hard assets, e.g. publicly traded stocks, there's little risk of default so long as the price stays up. In times of rising stock prices, there's little to no reason for a debt holder (lender) to exit their positions at maturity. Rather roll and continue taking the return (interest).

When the cash flow from the assets exceeds interest expense, you've cashed out the assets without incurring tax on your appreciated position and you can afford to pay the interest. As for principal, debt is largely not paid back these days, especially large bespoke debt secured by liquid and well-defined assets. The debt holders (lenders) get paid back after death of the borrower or they continue rolling the position and collecting their return (interest income). The only question in the lender's mind is how much leverage to grant on the underlying assets, e.g. blue chip stocks, and what to do in a liquidity crunch when rolling.

I believe client accounting firms, and probably companies themselves, would appreciate standardized accounting workpapers such as a loan amortization schedule, salary accrual schedule (to accrue salaries daily based on historical rates), depreciation schedule, and more. If you think of categorizing transactions as not only putting them in their final resting place (an account) but also as tagging them with special attributes (e.g. the attribute of needing to be accounted for in an aforementioned schedule), you'll have a killer innovation IMO. Many will tell you the dream of standardization is unrealistic but accounting methods are finite and a majority are well defined. You don't have to cover all use cases to win the hearts and minds of most who will see the value in prebuilt, integrated worksheets. Just an opinion from a client accounting manager who loves tools and applied theory.

This can be solved by NYPL having a silent policy to replace presumed-stolen books after X time passes. This spending mustn't be so large that it nixes the no-late-fee policy, I suppose.