575 karma · joined September 1, 2016
Obviously FAANG (and most companies) want to pay as little as possible for their labour. They don't pay $500,000 for senior engineers because of their innate generosity and desire to pay them well. They pay that much because they have to if they want to attract and retain the employees they are looking for.
My comp sci degree covered this, and it isn't a particularly prestigious university either. Most leetcode problems are just extensions of (or exact duplicates of) problems covered in my Data Structures and Algorithms class.
It seems like some of the skill involved for passing leetcode interviews is pattern-recognition to quickly recognise the kind of problem and what the likely tools to solve it are.
The first stage was: these anti-vaxxers don't have a degree in immunology, what makes them qualified to even attempt to interpret scientific papers on the subject?
The second stage was: wait, I don't have a degree in immunology either, why am I pretending to be "following the science" when I don't have even the vocabulary or the context to properly grasp immunology papers?
Accepting that I am a functional ignoramus with regards to Covid, viruses, immunology, vaccine development etc. is very freeing. I'm basically knowledgeable on very few things, and am not an authority on (vaccines|economics|law|history|basically everything). Being good at software engineering doesn't make me an expert at everything I read two articles on.
On the other hand, the land value tax and Progress and Poverty's general diagnosis and solution of how property, rent, supply and demand interact is very compelling, seems to align nicely with most of the spectrum of political viewpoints, and would mesh so well with removing other taxes to encourage productivity that it is hard to avoid being excited about.
It may not be as bad in some other countries, but the monopolisation of land in my country is rotting it out from the inside. Existing landowners are continuing to grow wealthier and wealthier as desperate first home buyers try to jump onto the last rung of a ladder that is rapidly climbing out of reach. Even now, the only ones who can afford to buy are those who have land-owning parents. Renting results in huge percentages of income being stripped away, but the service provided is a damp, mouldy, poorly maintained house far away from where workplaces are. The future of my country and city looks bleak if nothing changes to fix the situation.
Alright, use "valuable" then. Value is derived from people's desire to purchase the land, which means valuable land is equivalent to desirable land.
> Yes, you can. We call them skyscrapers.
Skyscrapers aren't land.
I'm not entirely sure you're conversing in good faith but I'll do my best to assume you are. Land is a natural monopoly, and the most classic of all. For example, the land surrounding Central Park in New York City is of limited supply. If you want land which borders, say, the west side of Central Park, then there is even less land available.
If someone owns all of the land that borders the west side of Central Park, then no one else can use that land unless they are permitted to by the owner. This means that the owner has a natural monopoly over all land that borders the west side of Central Park. You cannot create more land that borders the west side of Central Park.
Now, if you wanted to live in a house or apartment that borders the west side of Central Park, your only option is to negotiate with the land-owner. They may sell you the land, or rent the land to you (or rent you an apartment or house on that land). If living on the west side of Central Park is something desirable to you, then the land-owner can charge you the absolute maximum price you are willing to pay for living there. You have no alternative, except to not pay at all. If you are willing to pay $1000 a week to live on the west side of Central Park, the land-owner can charge $1000 a week. It is entirely independent of the labour and costs of the land-owner, and entirely based on your willingness to pay.
You can't create more land in the middle of San Francisco, so the land-owners of the land in the middle of San Francisco have a natural monopoly on the land in the middle of San Francisco.
Land value has been increasing, because land in desirable locations is in limited supply and is not able to be added to (with minor exceptions). This means that land is a monopoly, which is why land-owners are able to extract economic rents from the land far beyond what other investments can afford, compared to the work you put in.
There's a fantastic book which explains this, and Scott Alexander's blog has a book review (by someone else) which is an easy summary: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
It helps explain why we have poverty in the midst of extreme wealth.
Supply and demand don't "work" the same when there is a monopoly of a necessary good.
Consider the scenario where there is no more water in the world. All that is left is in a well in your back yard. You can charge whatever you want for the water, because people need it. The limit is what they can spend, because the demand is essentially infinite.
Now, if you had to purchase a more expensive pump to extract water from your well, would you charge more for your water? No, because you can already charge as much as you want.
I haven't seen the data for other countries, but in New Zealand, you can look at trends of rent vs house price and they are not correlated anywhere near the way rent and income is correlated.
Supply and demand do still exist and affect rent, but when supply is low for housing, landlord cost increases have no effect on rent.
The land-owning class as a group have monopoly control of land. As far as I know, there isn't much un-owned land, so the land-owning class owns all the land.
> And whether or not new land is being produced or land is unique is pretty flimsy.
This is one of the definitional factors of a monopoly: "a lack of economic competition to produce the good or service", so I don't think it's flimsy at all. It's also a very commonly noted point by basically every economist that has looked at land, when distinguishing land from capital.
> if you want to abolish private ownership of land, just out and say it.
Not at all!
> This is just emotional handwaving. Water is vital for human life and you can't produce more of it ignoring very minor exceptions of chemical reactions. If I pour myself a glass of water I don't gain monopoly control of water.
As it turns out, if you and, say, 1 million others owned all the water in your country, you would in fact be part of the group that has monopolised control of water. You could then charge whatever you want to those who do not own the water, given they need it for life. This would be rent-seeking, as the amount you charge could far exceed your marginal costs of production. Water is actually a form of economic land, it just happens to be in great abundance and is slippery enough to be difficult to monopolise.
> And Ricardo's Law of Rent does not explain that land-lording is rent-seeking. Millions of people own a second house and rent it out, how are they rent-seeking?
Rent-seeking is the activity by which people try to gain more economic rent; that is, they are trying to gain something without doing anything in return. Those who own a second house and rent it out are actually doing two things: they are hiring out a house, which is not rent, properly speaking. And they are extracting rent for access to the land, which is economic rent. Building a house and maintaining it is a productive use of capital, and hiring it out is not rent-seeking. Owning land and renting out it is, definitionally, rent-seeking (unless one were to only charge as much rent for the land as the costs of keeping the land).
Ricardo's Law of Rent does explain this quite clearly. You can see an introduction here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent but this lecture may be more clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyv1xYDWAxk
Land is essentially monopolised through regulatory capture (council land use restrictions) and the lack of new production of land (ignoring for now the very minor exceptions of, say, Dubai, Singapore, the Netherlands). There is a lack of viable substitutes of land, and due the necessity of land for human life, the owners of land are able to extract rent far above their marginal cost.
It would be possible for landlords to not engage in rent-seeking, but in practice there are exceedingly few landlords who do not. See, for example, Ricardo's Law of Rent for an introduction as to why land-lording is the classic example of rent-seeking.
Note that by saying "Investing in appreciating assets of any kind is also not." I suspect that you see land as equivalent to other forms of capital, and thus a legitimate form of investment to be pursued without any ethical qualms. However, land is not capital, and is distinct from other forms of investment.
I'm quite surprised that this is a large part of the top comment. I'm not an extrovert but I love office life, despite its flaws. The primary flaws of office life for me are:
1. Commute. Currently not a problem but it will be in the future for me. 2. Open plan offices are the norm and make focusing more difficult. 3. Slight more difficulty in eating home-cooked food as if you aren't organised, you end up buying lunch rather than cooking at home.
I don't think I have a perverse addiction to conflict.
Major advantages of working in an office include:
1. I work more productively usually. The environment helps me focus, rather than goof off. 2. It is much easier to have impromptu coffee and lunch conversations and interesting discussions, both work related and otherwise. This increases team social bonding and speeds up knowledge transfer. 3. The people I work with in the office regularly are easier to relate to and think well of than faces online.
Basically, preprod and any not-prod environments cannot ultimately perfectly reproduce prod, and in a sufficiently complex system, the failure states cannot be predicted in a replicated environment. Instead, using strategies like rolling deployments, you can test on the actual environment you want to validate.
If set up properly, it doesn't really risk breaking prod.
This, but unironically.
Depending on your use case, any local tests, whether mocked or using a swarm of local containers attempting to represent production may be a far stretch from production reality. Put everything behind feature flags and test your contracts, then release to production regularly and test against live data and live services.
For only serving SFCs on request, you can use something like https://vitejs.dev/ during local dev, unless I'm misunderstanding, along with code-splitting.
This isn't usually part of LVT proposals, and for good reason. LVT should apply to all land everywhere, or else it becomes much less effective.
ADHD meds for non-ADHD students don't really help those students perform better academically. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/
They make you feel better, but not actually perform notably better.
There's plenty of existing and on-going research that demonstrates differences in brain structure and development in people clinically diagnosed with ADHD. In other words, ADHD is caused by parts of your brain being underdeveloped or damaged. There is on-going research applying machine learning to MRI brain scans to try to predict ADHD through brain scans rather than only clinical diagnosis.
As someone who was homeschooled, and would quite happily at least try to homeschool my own children in the future, I do agree with this statement.
Nonetheless, I don't necessarily see it as a strict negative. Yes, initially after finishing my secondary education there were some difficulties with integrating specifically with my peer group (but not with other age groups). This took at least a couple of years to overcome to a sufficient level that I "passed" as a normal person. A lot of this was not social ability per se, but more to do with using the right vernacular, dressing to match my peers better, and avoiding certain social faux pas.
However, positively as an "Other", I am advantaged in some ways.
1) I fit in better with other "Others", like immigrants and their children, racial minorities, odd and strange people, and so on. Because I was/am one, they are "my people", even if I can easily pass as not-Other.
2) Learning to assimilate means that I can easily assimilate into different cultural contexts more easily than those who never had to. I can fit in with a wider group of cultural contexts and adjust quickly and easily.
3) I have a different perspective on some aspects of society that is not necessarily better or worse, just different.
When you add that up to the other benefits of homeschooling, I'm not sure the negatives come near to discouraging homeschooling. However, my experience is not everyone's experience, and I understand that some people remain stuck as Other and suffer for it. I also can't say it felt particularly good to be Other and unable to pass as normal, in the interim. In the long term, I don't know that it mattered that much.
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I feel compelled to note that the common idealisation of being a maverick, odd-ball, elite hacker on the edges of society and so on that is common enough in tech circles is not necessarily an advantage or something I am advocating for. There's nothing wrong with being ordinary, and being unusual often or typically works against you. I wouldn't homeschool my children to make them unusual, and I don't think we should glorify weirdness as superior. I don't consider my experience as being an odd-ball on society as something that makes me superior; if anything, it was for a time an inferiority to be overcome.
Sounds like ADHD.
So a 1% land value tax would be $10,000 a year. A 3% LVT would eat up the entirety of the economic rent.
However, the yield on that property would go down from 4% per annum to 1% per annum, so the value of the land would drop.
Any politically realistic implementation would involve progressively increasing the LVT and reducing other taxes over time, so the first year might be 1% LVT, but eventually the price of the property would drop such that a 100% LVT wouldn't be unreasonable (although an 85% LVT or thereabouts is often thought to work better).
With ADHD meds, I'm suddenly performing like all my potential and desires suggests I should be.
It's a complete waste of time for developers, but unfortunately the rest of the company might need to have an idea how long something might take because they need to sell products or services, and get return on investment.
It's really hard to sell people on "we will do these features/this project, but we have no idea how long it will take so just pay us until it's done". It's much easier to work on your estimations until they always get a little over-estimated, and then sell those estimations to the people paying the bills.
How can someone like me get a piece of US salaries without moving to the USA?