BirdieNZ

This is the case for renters everywhere.

Lots of countries value land and improvements separately (e.g. New Zealand, Australia, Denmark) for council rates (property tax essentially). Here in New Zealand, there are several companies that provide valuation services to local councils (and private individuals if you want to value your property). You can dispute the valuation if you think you're being unfairly valued (usually because you want to pay less property tax).

I don't think it's been shown to actually increase displacement and instability, in municipalities with a land value tax. It's theoretically the case, because now everyone is renting from either a landlord or the city/government, and if rents rise you might not be able to afford them.

In practice, land value taxes increase home ownership, so the actual displacement rate of a population might be the same or even less with LVT implemented.

> It would also encourage the childless to fight things like schools, as they would pay extra tax having them nearby.

Note that any existing property tax or council rates regime already theoretically has this effect too, but I don't really see this behaviour. It's a theoretical strategy that certain demographics could utilise, but not one that plays out in practice in any city I've ever seen.

Gentrification, which displaces renters (rents become too expensive for existing tenants so they need to leave the area), will start displacing some land owners as well. LVT would increase due to land value increasing, and the current land owners may not be able to afford the increased tax.

If you don't allow deferment of the tax, pensioners might have to move unwillingly (low income that may not cover the tax). Most proposals allow deferment for retirees until sale of the property, though, so it's kinda a non-issue.

In general, if your circumstances change unexpectedly then you might be unable to pay the tax and thus lose ownership of your property. This already is the case for renters, but it does mean a somewhat reduced sense of security for home owners too. Mind you, this is already the case for any existing property tax or council rates, which exist in many/most places, so it's also kinda a non-issue.

You can build lots of housing in remote locations, sure, but people have to want to live there. Even existing cities can have massive surplus of housing if people don't want to live there anymore (see Detroit for an example). Most people want to live in existing cities, and particularly the biggest cities (hence them being the biggest). Tokyo is huge because people want to be there; there are cheap houses available outside of Tokyo but people don't want to be there as much. Most of the time, each state or country has a single large city that grows much faster than all the other cities, because people want to be there and not somewhere else.

The main "successful" new cities these days are when governments create one for their headquarters (or move their headquarters to an existing smaller city), like Sejong in South Korea. This is because it induces demand quite successfully for government employees to move there. You need a strong inducing of demand to create a new city; existing cities already have strong demand via jobs, other people, and services, so new cities need to outcompete them.

Land supply in desirable locations cannot be increased; you can zone for increased density in those locations, but developers are not incentivised to release new supply as quickly as possible (as that would reduce prices). See for example https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/a-housing-supply-abs... and other articles on that blog which explain this phenomenon.

The property market has too many inherent and imposed monopoly conditions that prevent it from acting as a hypothetical free market where supply and demand are the only factors that influence price.

Actors not motivated by profit can increase supply faster than the private sector's preferred absorption rate (e.g. mass state housing projects like in Singapore and Vienna), in which case sure, if the government massively increases supply consistently above demand and only rents or sells in a manner preventing monopoly acquisition then prices (rents or purchases prices) can be pushed down. There are other alternatives (e.g. Georgist style land taxes combined with liberal zoning laws, so efficient use of desirable locations is encouraged and enabled).

On what data do you base that claim? Roads are enormously expensive to build and maintain, and often even small towns in some countries have railway.

The original Landlord's Game has two rulesets, and it switches to the Georgist ruleset when enough players agree (I think > half). The first ruleset is similar to modern Monopoly, but when enough players agree to switch because they're all getting destroyed by the top 1-2 players, then it changes to a Georgist style policy/rules.

Land value taxes have existed and do exist around the world (along with variations on the theme, such as leasehold land that is leased from the government for a long time). They don't result in the behaviour you describe. Most land value tax proposals are also revenue neutral (e.g. lower income tax in exchange for higher land value tax), so the balance sheet should end up looking the same for companies and individuals, but with higher land holding costs and lower land purchasing costs.

Arguably it's a good description because it automatically filters out audiences who don't know what it means; if you're building a distributed system and looking at different consensus algorithms then it's a simple and clear explanation, but if you aren't then it's not a relevant algorithm for you anyway!

The general class of consensus algorithms are for trying to solve the problem of what to do when you have multiple replicas of a data store across several physical devices, when one or many of the devices or their connections fail in some fashion. They are titled "consensus" because the machines need to come to a consensus for what decision to make about a piece of data when a failure event occurs.

For example, you have three servers all replicating the same SQL database:

(A) - (B) - (C)

The network connection linking (C) to the other two drops; (A) and (B) are notified and (B) is promoted to be the primary (it receives the writes and then distributes them to the replicas).

However, (C) doesn't know what's happened, and continues to receive some writes. The network connection is restored, and now (A) and (B) and (C) need to decide what to do. (B) and (C) have both independently received a different set of writes, and the servers need to come to a consensus on what to do with the data.

This is what Raft, Paxos etc. are attempting to solve in a consistent and performant fashion.

> One ex-Microsoft manager, now a senior Manager at Atlassian, called that 'hand holding'.

Which senior manager is this, out of interest?

The current CTO and engineering leaders or the previous crop?

> society is largely set up to favor neurotypicals at the expense of those with ADHD.

As someone with diagnosed ADHD, I think this misrepresents ADHD. There's no form of society in which ADHD is an advantage; in a hunter-gatherer society, my tent would still be untidy and I'd still procrastinate fixing my spear before the hunt until the day before, and I'd still lose focus during the hunt and miss the deer walking past, because I was watching ants move sticks around.

ADHD is a disability, not a difference of ability. It's not very enjoyable for me to accept as I'm reasonably bright, but I'm mentally disabled in a way that someone of equivalent intelligence without ADHD is not. They can more easily achieve what they want in life than I can. I don't think there's any task in which someone with ADHD is more suited to than someone without; there are tasks which are less difficult for the person with ADHD than other tasks, but ADHD doesn't bestow many, if any, advantages over a neurotypical person.

There was a recent brief blog post[1] on this from Scott Alexander, if you're curious to read more, but I've come to the same conclusion independently.

[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-social-mode...

> I think it's fair to say there is a difference of at least $100 between your rent and mortgage payment.

In my country the rent has usually been more expensive than the cost to service a mortgage (particularly taking into account only the interest repayments, not the principal repayments).

Mortgages are one of the only easy ways to leverage 5x for the average person, and over the course of 30 years you can expect to be earning more (inflation of your salary) whereas the mortgage stays the same.

Rent, on the other hand, typically rises in proportion to your income, so your cost are increasing each year. With a mortgage, your costs are either the same or decreasing if you repay the mortgage faster than the initial term.

Where I'm from, interest and dividends from other forms of investments are taxed as income, but repaying your mortgage is not. In addition, as long as it continues to be a desirable place to live and incomes keep rising, real estate prices will continue to rise as a function of income. This means that you're leveraging into a fairly low risk asset with good growth potential, and tax-free returns.

Plus all the intangibles, like being able to:

- Have as many pets as you want, or pets at all - Not be kicked out with a short amount of notice - Redecorate, put pictures up, improve the house as you please - No 3-monthly house inspections

I'm not saying home ownership is a panacea but it has a lot of positives over renting, both financially and otherwise.

> There is also comorbidity, if I'm not mistaken.

Last I checked, it's uni-directional; if you have autism, you are more likely than the general population to have ADHD, but not the other way around.

Yes, but so is Change Failure Rate (and a good team will use feature flagging anyway for gradual rollouts, so you don't roll out a DDoSing broken feature to 100% of users, just a tiny subset).

There's a combination of factors, of which some are:

- Holding cost of land is near 0 in most cities, so you can use it extremely unproductively without any issues. There's a Christmas tree farm in a central suburb in my city; it could easily hold a 5-story apartment block or 8 townhouses housing tens of people instead. [Solution: land value tax]

- In most Western democracies, there are significant regulatory requirements that make it more expensive to build housing. This isn't necessarily entirely bad, but it does increase the cost to build more housing, thus reducing its supply. [Solution: there's no real easy solution for this one. Some regulations are necessary, it's hard work to make the regulations really good]

- In most cities, there are restrictions on what you can build and where. Again, not always entirely bad per se, but the settings are usually dialed up to the point of absurdity. This means even if you wanted to build more housing within some suburb, you might be unable to build it densely enough to increase how many people are housed. [Solution: more flexible zoning laws to enable more freedom in what people can build on their land; if you want a standalone house, go for it, if you want a 28 story apartment block, go for it, if you want a 3-story townhouse row, go for it, if you want a work-and-live store with an apartment on top, go for it]

- Even in areas where there are fewer restrictions, e.g. new land areas opened up for development, developers are incentivised to keep the available supply of housing low to keep the price high. This means that a large development of hundreds of houses will often only release the houses 5-10 at a time, artificially reducing supply. [Solution: increase the holding price of land, aka land value tax]

Who are these people who can't comprehend SFH car preferences? I'm pretty pro-urban-density and pro-transit/walking/cycling, but I definitely understand why people prefer SFH and cars and low density. Heck, I don't think we should ban any of those, we should just allow people to build denser if they want to and spend as much on mass transit and cycling and walking as we do on cars.

Get just a little smaller, and dedicate a (grade-separated) lane to them, and you have bicycles in a bike lane.

Rising tenant incomes. As incomes increase, landlords are able to increase rents proportionally. This is only true where demand outstrips supply, but that's the case in most developed cities in the West, as well as many other cities.

Tenants have several fixed costs to pay: taxes, food, rent, and transportation being the main ones. If their incomes go up, rent typically consumes the increase, because housing is a fairly uncompetitive market.

(Usually) rents are already as high as they can be, in aggregate. In other words, the market cannot bear a higher cost for the good, so an increase in cost has to be eaten by the landlord.

This is actually very easy to see in countries with no 30 year mortgages, because landlords have to refix their mortgage rates every 1-5 years. This means you can see regular landlord cost changes as interest rates fluctuate, as well as the impact on rents.

The impact on rents is essentially 0 as landlord costs change; instead, rents follow tenant incomes, because landlords are able to charge more as long as tenant incomes increase.

I've got plenty of data from New Zealand if you're interested, but I'm sure it's the same everywhere there is supply-constrained housing.

Taxing land doesn't increase rent; it's an inelastic good with greater demand than supply. See Ricardo's Law of Rent, Henry George, or basically any analysis of land tax (or indeed, taxing any monopoly good). The incidence of land tax is well known to not fall on the tenant.

How is saying "there's a one in three chance that such-and-such an event occurs" classified as "plenty wrong" in your view, if the event occurs?

Just take this a step further, bring "local" all the way down to "the person who owns the land". Let the locals decide what to do on the land they own. If they want an apartment, or a store, or a giant mansion in the middle of 20 acres, as long as they own the land let them do it! They're the most local individual, right?

Your reasoning sounds a little over-binary; both things can be simultaneously true:

1: Attractive people will find dating and securing a relationship easier than unattractive people

2: Physically unattractive people can still be very successful in dating and securing relationships, because there are many other impactful factors besides physical looks

So you can say without lying or deception "it's surprising that [incredibly good looking person] is perpetually single, it should be easy to leverage their looks into a relationship" and also "don't give up just because you're ugly, there are far more important factors to finding a relationship than just your looks".

Isn't an 11% chance to be hiring a really good to incredible employee good signal? I don't think you can have the same chance when hiring from most small companies, not based on company reputation alone.

I'm not a gambling man but if I was I would put a very large amount of my net worth on a bet that no trades will be automated in 5 years time. Not a single one.

Not sure if this is satire, but most places lose money on public transit (at least, the ticket fares don't cover operating and capital costs). A few places make money off public transit, such as Hong Kong's MTR, because they own the land around the stations and build shopping malls on the land and profit from the rent.

Of course, there are less immediately tangible financial benefits of having public transit, such as improving a city's economy through moving labour efficiently compared to, say, roads.

It's the opposite; it increases the percentage of owner occupiers. It reduces landlord/renters; see for example https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenan... or https://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Prospe...

Most proposals for land value tax are also revenue neutral, so you essentially pay rent to society/government for the land you use, but keep more of your income.

How much are you willing to pay for the basic necessities of life, life land, shelter, food, water?

If the providers of those necessities possess a monopoly, either natural or through regulatory capture, humans will pay whatever they have to get those necessities. It is important for social prosperity to prevent extracting excess profits through monopolisation, either by destroying the monopoly or by taxing it and reducing other taxes on the individuals.