embedded machine learning research engineer - georgist - urbanist - environmentalist
- 76 Posts
- 154 Comments
I’m a registered Democrat, but that doesn’t stop me disagreeing with the Democratic party on plenty of issues. The vast majority of people don’t adhere 100% to their party’s politics, especially with the big-tent two-party system in the US. I can’t speak for the person to whom you’re responding, but you can’t extrapolate from their disagreement on one issue to disagreement on others.
High pedal assist to minimize pedalling and maximize breeze. I had a summer internship where I commuted an hour each way on an ebike, even on hot and humid days like that. Honestly, I wasn’t that sweaty by the end of it, as the breeze and pedal assist work wonders for keeping you cool.
Yeah, I had a summer internship and bought a real cheapo ebike. Hour bike ride each way through suburban sprawl and with a fair number of hills. I simply wouldn’t have done it on an non-electric bike. The electric made it 1000x more practical to go the distance and over the hills, especially in the heat.
It’s reductive for people to pretend ebikes are purely about laziness, and it certainly doesn’t help to look down on ebikes when they’re actively bringing in a whole new segment of the population to advocate for better bike infrastructure.
926·2 years agoOne of my roommates in undergrad was from China, and whenever he went back to China to visit his family, we literally couldn’t contact him because all the messaging apps/services we use are blocked in China.
Another family friend of mine lived and taught in Macau as a professor for a while, and he explained how he had to get a VPN just to access the regular internet.
Any government that locks down access like that is not one worthy of admiration. It’s insane that people defend the CCP.
Plus, it boils the entire k-dimensional space that is ideology into one single dimension. On social issues, I would argue Democrats (at least in the past few years) have shifted to become significantly more progressive than most European parties. On economic issues, though, obviously they’re not as left-wing as European counterparts, but still certainly not far-right. This whole “Democrats are far-right” is a silly hasn’t-touched-grass-in-ages leftist circlejerk.
There’s not exactly a shortage of things to complain about Democrats for – I could certainly complain about them for hours on end – but it’s important to actually criticize them for the things they oughta be criticized for, not the leftist equivalent of “I did that” stickers on gas pumps whenever gas prices go up.
And all of the above is still ignoring that economics alone is a k-dimensional space all its own, not just one single dimension.
I love the author’s energy. I’m tired of all this manufactured fear-mongering about ebikes. Every teenager on an ebike is one fewer teen behind the wheel of a car. Much harder to kill people with an ebike than a car, and ebikes are 100x less bad for the environment.
But just because they fought a great evil, doesnt mean they were " the good guys". It just means they fought a great evil.
Exactly! You can’t just divide the world into “fought against the Nazis” and “didn’t fight against the Nazis” and use that as your entire basis of morality. By that same logic, America is the Good Guys™ and has absolutely zero neo-Nazi problems because they destroyed Imperial Japan and fought against the Nazis, right?
It’s completely possible to fight against the Nazis and still be evil yourself (cough cough Stalin), or the reverse where the Finns technically cooperated with the Nazis, but only because the USSR was literally doing a colonialism against Finland and the Nazis happened to be the only ones fighting the USSR at the time.
Morality and history are not black and white, despite these lemmygrad users’ naked attempts to coerce them into being such.
Tankies != communists
Tankies are the insufferable fascists who take on a red aesthetic. There are plenty of great leftists, commies, and progressives who don’t deny the Uyghur genocide or Holodomor or simp for Russia and the CCP. I’m not a communist myself (nor am I a capitalist for that matter), but I’ve got nothing against non-tankie communists aside from economic disagreements. Tankies I do have issue with, as should anyone who gives a rat’s ass about the working class and basic human rights.
Also, lol at that Stalin profile pic. Literally fetishizing a genocidal dictator who betrayed the working class and murdered millions of innocents.
Yeah, and the admins of lemmy.ml are straight up tankies
It’s funny how people always use play it like “oh, it’s just differing opinions” when what they’re actually defending is indefensible malarkey like nazis and tankies. They know if they made a meme saying we should “try to understand” nazis and tankies, they’d be downvoted to oblivion. And so they hide behind a shield of “differing opinions”.
These cretins have a right to post nazi and tankie shit on their own instances – them’s the beauty of the fediverse. But I also have a right to not want hate speech, genocide denial, and Hitler/Stalin/Mao simps polluting my feed. It’s not mere “differing opinions” when one person’s opinion is “Holodomor didn’t happen, and if it did, the Ukrainians deserved it” or “Holocaust didn’t happen, and if it did, the Jews deserved it” or whatever apologia they wanna peddle.
I mean, the whole point of the fediverse is self-moderating. Each instance is allowed and encouraged to operate how it pleases, so instances that don’t tolerate hate speech, brigading, Nazis, and tankies are, imo, justified in removing such content as well as defederating from instances ripe with those issues. Likewise, instances that are more permissive of those kinds of things are free to defederate (or not) with whomever they please. If people are unhappy with how their local instance has acted, they can just migrate to another instance. This “drama” is just the fediverse working as it is supposed to.
1·2 years agoAs it stands, you need a ton of money just to own land. Roughly speaking, if you think owning a parcel can provide you $1000 of value per year, you might be willing to spend $10k or $20k or more upfront to own it. And last time I checked, people who can afford that much money upfront are disproportionately rich.
But if it’s taxed at $1000 per year, the net benefits to owning the land evaporate, and you won’t be willing to spend money upfront on it. Nor will others, hence the price of land drops towards zero. Neither you nor rich people want to waste money on something that is just as much an obligation as it is an asset.
And that’s the key idea here: to decouple access to land from economic advantage. This is reverse feudalism. In feudalism, it’s all about concentrating control of land to concentrate the benefits of land ownership. With LVT, it’s about taxing away the benefits of land ownership so it’s no longer this precious commodity that is worth hoarding.
Under a “full” LVT, there would be precisely zero economic benefit nor reason to hoard land. You would effectively just rent land from the government if you believed you had a suitable use for it. And renters are statistically poorer, as paying upfront is a massive barrier to entry. Hence why homeowners are statistically richer, because you need money to pay the upfront cost.
Edit:
I’ll add some empirical results from Estonia:
Estonia levies an LVT to fund municipalities. It is a state level tax, but 100% of the revenue funds Local Councils. The rate is set by the Local Council within the limits of 0.1–2.5%. It is one of the most important sources of funding for municipalities.[90] LVT is levied on the value of the land only. Few exemptions are available and even public institutions are subject to it. Church sites are exempt, but other land held by religious institutions is not.[90] The tax has contributed to a high rate (~90%)[90] of owner-occupied residences within Estonia, compared to a rate of 67.4% in the United States.[91]
Reducing the upfront cost of land via land value taxes makes land easier to access for the masses, and it makes the peculiar benefits of land more evenly felt. It’s the opposite of feudalism.
Land value taxes would actually have (and do actually have!) the opposite effect. First, land is taxed based on its value, much like property taxes are based on the value of the property. This is typically appraised by using fancy statistics. The idea being you don’t tax rural land at anywhere near the same rate (in dollars per acre) as you tax land in Manhattan.
Second is – as the data from the Australian Capital Territory shows – a land value tax makes possessing land an obligation and also reduces upwards speculative pressure on land prices. Thus, land value taxes tend to make land cheaper to purchase. In theory, if you raise land value taxes high enough, you could make land prices approach zero, as the tax obligations start to equal the benefits of owning the land. In effect, such a situation would be functionally equivalent to renting land from the government.
And of course the big benefit of renting vs owning is you don’t have to pay an upfront cost, which means much lower barriers to entry for starting small businesses and startups, and also means you could buy a home without also paying upfront for the land.
Edit:
A good quote by American economist Henry George I think explains it nicely:
The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive.
After all, possessing land is an asset, hence why we’re willing to spend so much money for it. Even by merely possessing land, you can rent it out to someone else for money. This is called the “rental value” of the land. Henry George was famous for advocating that we tax land to the value of the full rental value of land. At this level of taxation, owning land is equally asset and obligation, so its price would approach zero. Thus, regardless of if you owned land or not, you would be at neither advantage nor disadvantage.
A great socioeconomic equalizer, if you ask me.
8·2 years agoThe quick basics I would want are single transferrable vote (STV), as it has a ranked ballot, regional representatives (important in a large, diverse country, imo), and pretty (although not perfectly) proportionate results.
I would also increase salaries and pensions for elected officials, but on the stipulation that they and their immediate family must liquidate all investments in order to take office, including real estate. The reason for this is to eliminate ulterior motives and reduce risk of corruption, and the compensation of course would be a very generous salary and pension so they never have to worry about their financial situation during or after leaving office.
I would also constitutionally eliminate the ability to take away someone’s vote, and to demonstrate why, I’ll copy-paste an old comment of mine from my reddit days:
What people like this miss about democracy is it’s more than just majority rule; democracy depends on minority rights, so the majority can’t just vote to trample over the minority.
This is not only to protect the minority (as you point out), but to protect democracy itself. An example:
There are 10 people. 4 of these people want to ban all fruits except mangos. 6 of them don’t want that.
So the 4 people scheme. One of those 6 people is really frickin ugly, and everyone can agree on that. So they propose to strip that ugly person of the right to vote (or just kill them or something). That vote passes 9 to 1. Ugly person is out of the equation.
The 4 people are still the minority, so they try again. One of those 5 other people likes to dip their pizza in marshmallow fluff, and everyone else agrees that that is absolutely vile. So they propose to strip that person with horrendous taste of the right to vote. That vote passes 8 to 1. Marshmallow pizza eater is out of the equation.
Now the 4 mango purists see they’re half the electorate. They just need to boot out 1 more pan-fruitarian. Fortunately for them, one of those remaining 4 pan-fruitarians always unnecessarily explains the punchlines of obvious jokes, and it really annoys everyone else. So they propose to strip that annoying joke explainer of the right to vote. That vote passes 7 to 1. Annoying joke explainer is out of the equation.
And now the mango purists have a majority and can ban all other fruits, counter to the true majority.
If this all seems abstract and unlikely, consider fascist movements and their tendency to start as big-tent to gain allies and gain power and then, once they’re in power, start trimming down who counts as the protected in-group until it’s only the core group they cared about in the beginning, producing lots of r/leopardsatemyface material in the process.
Yeah, and it’s really not hard to imagine why strict term limits increase the effect of lobbying. Consider this thought experiment:
You’re a relatively young 30-something hoping to make a change in politics. You run for office and somehow get elected! Great, right?
Well, now you have to actually do the job. Most of your time is not sitting in the hall of Congress, Parliament, etc. voting on bills; it’s much more mundane things like writing bills, meeting with constituents, discussing draft bills in committees and subcommittees, etc.
The thing is, however, there are no real job requirements to being an elected legislator. No job posting saying “minimum 5 years experience with drafting bills”. Here you are in office now, zero experience with actually legislating, and you have to actually write bills.
Suffice to say, you’re probably swamped, struggling, and have no clue how to actually do your job. And along comes some guy from a group like ALEC, and he’s got a pre-written bill for you! Great, right?
Well, you’re not totally lacking in dignity, so you’re a little suspicious, right? He’s a great salesman, though, and really tries to reassure you that the content of the 200-page bill he just handed you only does things you actually like. Further, he tells you that the things in it that do help him aren’t so bad, and they’re good for you and for the people at large, too.
You walk out of that interaction not totally comfortable, but hopeful that maybe it really is a decent bill. After all, he seemed like a nice chap, representing what seems to be just a group of concerned citizens… Anyhoo, you decide to give it a skim to make sure it seems legit.
You crack it open and see hundreds of pages of legalese and countless appendices full of definitions and edge cases. Further, it’s discussing some economic or industrial matter, and you’re just some guy, not an economist, and you’re not equipped at all to understand the nuanced impacts of the proposed policies on the market or wider economy. Or maybe it’s sociological and you barely know anything about sociology. Or maybe it’s technological and you know little more about technology than how to use Microsoft Office and what you read on the news.
You think about asking someone for help with understanding this bill, or perhaps drafting your own, but you realize you have no connections. You don’t know any federal judges or constitutional scholars who can give you off-the-cuff constitutional advice. You don’t know any fellow legislators well enough to feel comfortable asking them for potentially months of mentorship as you find your footing. You don’t know any economists you can call up and ask economic matters. You don’t know any experts on the Iowa pig farming business to tell you frankly about how that industry operates.
But what you do have is a lot of lobbyists willing to pretend to be your friend, willing to pretend to be a mentor of sorts, to sell you biased information on their particular brand of snake oil.
And maybe you think for a moment that you’ll just tough it out and ignore the lobbyists! But you realize another problem with that: not all of them are sleazy snake oil salesmen trying to earn special favors for their political or industrial agenda. Many of them are actual legit people representing actual organizations just trying to advocate for good policy.
Trouble is, you don’t know who is who. The sleazy guys will try their hardest to appear legit, and the non-sleazy guys will of course also try to appear legit. Both kinds of lobbyists know you won’t listen to them if you think they’re the sleazy kind.
So you take a chance on this particular lobbyist, do your best to make sure the bill they handed you wasn’t completely terrible, and submit it. You’re too tired and stressed and unsure in yourself to do much else. You tell yourself you’ll try to tough out the beginning and become a better legislator in the future, once you get the hang of it. You know accepting the lobbyist’s pre-written bill ain’t the best, but it’s probably not too bad, right? It’s just one small bill, affecting one relatively small issue, and at least it doesn’t affect you, right? There’ll be no media firestorm over this, you and your family won’t personally be impacted by some minor changes to the hog industry regulations. And besides, you’ll get better at this job and do better next time, right?
Anyhoo, long story short, legislating is a profession like any other. It takes real skills, knowledge, and experience to do well, and you need to be able to balance the ability to get rid of old do-nothing geezers and the ability for more junior folks to actually be able to gain experience and institutional know-how. A company run solely by junior engineers would be a disaster, but a company run solely by complacent do-nothing senior engineers would also be terrible.
Yes, almost nowhere in North America currently has land value taxes, including my city. Rather, most places here have property taxes, which are different in a critical way. This video explains the issue well. But essentially property taxes bundle land values and improvement values (i.e., what’s built on the land). The problem with this is it creates a financial disincentive for improving your land while those who wildly underutilize urban land (e.g., for parking lots in downtown or vacant lots) pay pennies in property taxes. This often makes it profitable for speculators to buy up vacant land, hold it vacant (or at minimal use like a parking lot), and just wait for it to appreciate, then sell or rent out at massive unearned profits. And when a whole bunch of others catch wind of this scheme for free, unearned profits, well they start buying up land, too, further driving up prices.
Land value taxes can stop this as they don’t tax you for your improvements but they tax you significantly more for the land you hold. This means the annual taxes you pay on that vacant lot or that downtown parking lot will be more than your expected annual gains from appreciation. Both because your taxes are higher and because appreciation will be less now that holding that land incurs a not-insignificant tax obligation.
Long story short, property taxes make speculation profitable and incentivize land hoarding, while land value taxes make speculation unprofitable and incentivize denser development.
You are exactly correct. When the supply is constrained, subsidizing demand just means all that aid money gets pocketed by landlords. The best way to help is to build build build.
Any new housing – even market-rate or “luxury” – is good for affordability:
New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by about 6% relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially.
Policymakers have debated whether allowing more market-rate—meaning unsubsidized—housing improves overall affordability in a market. The evidence indicates that adding more housing of any kind helps slow rent growth. And the Pew analysis of these four places is consistent with that finding. (See Table 1.)
As for how to get more built, well, we don’t even need to spend a single penny – we just need to stop making it literally illegal to build anything but low-density sprawl:
Each of these places kept rent growth minimal relative to the U.S. overall, even while demand for housing continued to grow. Between 2017 and 2021, the four jurisdictions saw their total number of households grow between 7% and 22%, while the total households nationally increased by 6%. More households require more homes, and a housing shortage relative to demand drives up rents.
So, how did these high-demand areas keep rents from spiking? The evidence indicates that more flexible zoning helped these places add new housing faster than new households formed or moved in to fill the homes. And that helped slow rent growth. (See Figure 1.) Towns and cities in the same metro areas that did not allow as much new housing generally saw faster rent growth. This trend matches the findings of prior research—that adding housing slows rent growth because there are more homes available. That means households are less likely to be chasing too few homes.
Some of the particularly nasty policies responsible for this are restrictive zoning – it’s literally illegal to build anything but detached single-family houses on the vast majority of urban land in this country – and parking minimums.
In addition, we can tax land:
Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6]
It’s a progressive, essentially impossible to evade tax that incentivizes densification and development while disincentivizing real estate speculation. Oh, and it can’t be passed on tenants, both in theory and in practice.
And even a milquetoast LVT – such as in the Australian Capital Territory – can have positive impacts:
It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.
Maybe it’d be easier to pick just one had you picked a different week to quit sniffing glue.
5·2 years agoGoing and meeting with the wedding officiant with my fiancée. Also meeting her aunt and uncle and cousins from another city. Probably playing some Cities: Skylines as well.
A life goal of mine is to try to develop tools to help automate sustainable agriculture as much as possible. As I see it, part of the reason we keep on doing the monocultures is because the alternatives are just so dang labor-intensive, and anything that helps sustainable polycultures, agroforestry, etc. be more automated and less labor-intensive makes it easier for us to finally kick our current soil-destroying and ecosystem-obliterating habits.