> One could argue in the future, for example, that those who operate machines to produce tooling dies, should not have their labor treated as regular expenses, but instead as capital assets because their labor output is captured in assets,
In the future? That's how it works!
> just as Sec 174 treats the labor of software developers as assets.
[I was wrong about the following. I misread the text - and the submission title.] That's not what 174 does.
IF they are a manager, then they are managing people. Are you paying appropriate salaries and benefits to your AI agents? Does HR have them in the system?
...no, not a manager.
Aircraft are also more productive and capable than people in specific activities, and useless wastes of money in others.
>IF they are a manager, then they are managing people.
Not really. For example for L1, a visa for managers and executives, managing people isn't a hard requirement, instead it may be "employee’s ability to manage an essential function of the organization at a high level, without direct supervision of others", and thus project managers and architects and even senior engineers make the cut.
Handling capable AI agents would seem to fit if those AI agents perform "an essential function of the organization" and you manage them "at a high level, without direct supervision of others".
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.263(a)-2
Example 4. Acquisition or production cost. D purchases and produces jigs, dies, molds, and patterns for use in the manufacture of D's products. Assume that each of these items is a unit of property as determined under § 1.263(a)-3(e) and is not a material and supply under § 1.162-3(c)(1). D is required to capitalize under paragraph (d)(1) of this section the amounts paid to acquire and produce the jigs, dies, molds, and patterns.
which applies for the part of the work producing a tangible asset; it was an option for software development before. Now all software is considered such an asset, which is a huge change and distinct from how other labor works
You asked for a source for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44233155
I thought it was for the first paragraph.
But I was wrong about 174, maybe you meant that.
Fair enough, that was not the best example.
But I'd also observe that since business owners have to capitalize the wages of the machine operators producing injection molds, then there is an advantage to outsource the whole operation.
Comparing a procurement manager and a CNC operator [the person running the milling machine making a mold] paid the same amount, the CNC operator has a bigger negative impact on the businesses' bottom line, because the business can't expense most of the CNC operator's wages in the current tax year, whereas the procurement manager is generally accepted as fully deductible expense.
Of course, the labor that went into making the mold is effectively built into the acquisition price of the mold, so you haven't gotten rid of it by outsourcing it.
But, by building it into the price of an outsourced mold, one can delay the purchase of the mold to next year to improve the P&L this year, but you can't similarly delay the wages of the tooling operator to a later date.
So, when a CFO is looking for a way to improve the P&L in a given calendar year, there's an incentive to cut operators who build factories, tools, and other assets that have to be amortized, and replace them with more flexible outsource options.
Of course, part of the reason mold making left the US is wages are lower outside the US. But I'd say the current situation with software engineers is a datapoint that demonstrates the impact of expensable versus amortizeable labor on employee retention. It could be that if the tax code is not fixed, the same "CFO logic" would lead to more and more software being outsourced over time, as management is an immediate expense, but software engineers are not.
I suppose one can then argue, why should software engineers get special treatment compared to tooling operators; but then I would counter-argue that perhaps tooling operators should have gotten better treatment so we could have retained more of them in the US.