Half-agree: zoning restrictions and non-essential building regulations are a de-facto government handout to existing property owners.
At the same time, apologists for rentiers will do anything except taxing unimproved land value (which among other virtues, functions as a vacancy tax to reduce unproductive speculation, and incentivize development).
The blunt reality is a zero-sum tension: homeowners and landlords want number go up, new buyers and renters want number go down.
> Half-agree: zoning restrictions and non-essential building regulations are a de-facto government handout to existing property owners.
The government represents existing property owners, so they are effectively a handout to themselves for creating and/or sustaining a desirable area. I don't see why things would be any other way.
> At the same time, apologists for rentiers will do anything except taxing unimproved land value (which among other virtues, functions as a vacancy tax to reduce unproductive speculation, and incentivize development).
LVT is a terrible idea. There's a reason why leftists support it, which is that it centralizes control over property values (and therefore control over said property) in the hands of the state.
If you want development, you don't need to incentivize it. You need to just stop getting in the way of it.
I run in some far-left circles, and trust me, they don't :) Georgism is the neglected middle child of political economy: libertarians see it as an abrogation of sacred property rights, socialists see it as too liberal (a dirty word in that ecosystem).
> it centralizes control over property values (and therefore control over said property) in the hands of the state.
The state is already in control of property, in both its creation of the legal constructs, and providing the security backstop for its protection. Whatever one's views of which property constructs are just and/or efficient: the realpolitik of property is that an individual's property right is a secondary one: if the thugs with guns decide to take it, with or without a legal fig leaf, the property claim vanishes in a puff of smoke.
And the thing is, governments already assess property values for tax purposes, relative to nearby "comps", only for property tax (improvements + land value), as opposed to unimproved land value alone. There is certainly a risk of perverse incentive, but (a) if locally adjudicated, the price is somewhat disciplined by owners voting with their feet, and (b) there is a lot of good work being done to improve these calculations algorithmically: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/mass-appraisal-for-the-masse...
I certainly don't claim "a single tax on unimproved land value" is perfect; but it doesn't have to be, just a lesser evil compared to existing income tax on labor, and existing property taxes (a tax on labor with extra steps). And one essential crux of the Georgist argument is: those who work for a living already pay the tax, only to private rent-seekers rather than states and municipalities. (Even owners end up paying indirectly, where the opportunity cost of renting is priced into the purchase cost, aka "imputed rents", which for mortgage buyers is looks at lot like the bank being your landlord.)
> If you want development, you don't need to incentivize it.
Or perhaps: we remove the disincentive of taxing improvements. :) Even a revenue-neutral LVT (raise unimproved value by enough to compensate loss of taxing improvements) would shift the incentive landscape, where the numbers now might make sense to build a high-rise on top of what used to be a parking lot, because it doesn't incur new tax liability.
Cool! Disappointing there's so much focus on the non-sandboxing, I think it's a reasonable trade-off to release early, and follow up with signing later.
- Website looks great overall, but the fixed and overlaid header title is awkward and hurts readability for not much benefit.
- Battery Health on my M3 Max MBP reads as "1%", when System Report shows Condition: Normal, Maximum Capacity: 100%. What is this reading from?
- Handy password generator is great; any chance of an option for "correct horse" [0] style passwords? I find these are preferable for reasonably secure passwords which can still be remembered or hand-typed as needed.
Yes, the pre-release is intended for testing purposes, so thanks for bringing the battery health issue to my attention. It is calculated from the the battery's reported design capacity and current capacity, but the reported values seem to be unreliable across different systems.
The password generator suggestion is interesting, but I intentionally gave the user only one password generator option in the base version of the app - the most secure one :)
Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.
This is not to say that this administration is definitely not targeting civilians or infrastructure on purpose; just that the end result, and the moral culpability, are the same in either case.
The fascinating paradox: there are clearly "tells" (slop-smells, like code-smells?) of LLM-generated text. We're all developing heuristics rapidly, which probably pass a Pepsi challenge 95+% of the time.
And yet: LLMs are writing entirely based on human input. Presumably there exists a great quantity of median representative text, some lowest-common denominator, of humans who write similarly to these heuristics.
(In particular: why are LLMs so fond of em-dashes, when I'm not sure I've ever seen them used in the wilds of the internet?)
Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes.
There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).
Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
And the fact you feel a hole that religion fills for you doesn’t mean it’s there in everyone. Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
I don't disagree. I trimmed "religious and mythological memeplexes" down to avoid repetition. (Also worth considering: de-facto religious behaviors need not be supernatural or "mythological"; you can substitute your own examples of political ideologies that are difficult to distinguish from religions in practice.)
It is obviously a deeply complicated and complex phenomenon. Even the Dennett/Dawkins model of selfish replicators aren't necessarily sufficient, in addition to my claim that the relationship between genes and memes can sometimes be mutually symbiotic (and I'm aware of the great many counter-examples).
To be clear, I don't hold to a particular faith myself (and I've spent time at both ends of the spectrum). I suspect that the so-called "god-shaped hole" is one of many characteristics that varies in the human animal, not unlike those who have a mind's eye and those who don't, or those who hear their thoughts audibly and those who don't.
> Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
While what people crave obviously varies, I think most people do crave something like meaning and community (or flipping it around: selection pressures seem to have selected for meaning and community, presumably at least in part from a green-beard effect [0]). While those can exist independently of faith, we can empirically observe that they tend to overlap quite a lot (again, for good and ill).
While I'd agree with you regarding illiberal theocracies and religious totalitarianism, I'd problematize your framing in two ways: (a) "forced" implies that someone is doing the forcing, meaning presumably someone craves it, or is at least willing to play along [1]; but more pertinently, (b) there is a middle ground between the extremes of "explicit individual choice", and "forced participation": norms, culture, emulation, etc.
No one "forces" anyone in the business world to wear suits, or use LinkedIn jargon; but the incentives are in favor of doing so (and against not doing so), so people play along: some cynically, some internalizing norms sincerely. If we hit a magic History Randomizer Button that shuffled historical contingencies, I don't think we'd have an absence of those norms, but other norms with different details. And I suspect we'd see different churches and myths and holy books, not an absence of them.
To reiterate, I'm just talking Darwinian functionality here, not whether religion is good or bad in a normative sense. If the niche exists, "nature finds a way".
This is (tragically) the reason why I remain a tab hoarder: the UI carries an implicit nudge (a costly signal of visual real estate), for my future self to engage with it.
In a similar spirit to OP: it did help mitigate the hoarding, when I began thinking "how hard is it to find this resource/reference again, should I actually need it?". And if it's trivial to google (and mnemonically sticky enough I can trust my future self to remember it), I can close the tab.
The emails are bizarrely sloppy with spelling and punctuation, perhaps many usages of "don't" ended up being typed as "don t", triggering an automated find-and-replace.
The export itself is also sloppy, with characters like equal signs being added in weird places. Seems like they have it set to cast a wide and poorly set up net.
I don't like "Wrappeds" (low-key social hack to manufacture normalization of surveillance capitalism?), but with HN being public, I succumbed to temptation. Very fun, 10/10 no notes, surprisingly good for a small sample set this year.
> You write comments like you're trying to win a Pulitzer in Political Economy while trapped inside a middle-manager's strategy meeting.
reply