branchless

Whenever anyone follows me on Twitter I check their account. If it's not someone genuine i block them. Wouldn't work for someone famous but for a normal person it's worth it.

My interest is that the feudal lord was living off the backs of others. The state taxing land to build hospitals is not the same thing.

How are devolved local states equivalent to private landlords? States capture land value via land tax and socialise this. Private landlords capture it and keep it.

Night and day.

I don't like "the economist" however a while back they did do a piece on land value tax, maybe HN will find it more palatable coming from this journal:

https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-va...

Not quite correct.

We've tried:

- Real identities (Facebook comments)

- Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.)

- Strong moderation (Reddit, HN)

All within the context of rampant financialisation, land policies returning us to feudalism and continuous lying about the banking bailout including removing the one candidate who was going to take on the banks (Bernie).

Maybe it's not "the internet" that's the problem. Maybe the dissemination of information as we slide into this rentier hellpit is causing people to be pretty pissed off?

Spot on, The City is a square mile for avoiding taxes, appropriating wealth and crushing workers.

Agreed. And let's not forget that Airbnb isn't"the sharing economy", it's a website with images and text on it for landlords.

No innovation, just exploitation. Silicon valley.

It's a good book, but I find his use of his good writing skills to try to smooth over the many terrible parts of the language a little irksome.

Not true.

There is a third circle of hell: kdb. Unpopular and what is there is unsearchable as the syntax consists of items like ,:/.

I like kdb and the docs are okay, but my word...

Agreed. I'm about to get PR, same boat. Thanks for the info and enjoy canada!

Read the first paragraph and thought"come to Canada!". You delivered.

Are you paid/employed in cad or usd? If the latter is it hard with PR?

It's solely to surpress wages.

People in their 20s don't remember before the banking coup. They think it has to be like this.

I know, it was tongue in cheek

Let's tax these parasites, get them out of residential areas.

What is Airbnb providing? Their premium "service" is their previously claimed bare-minimum if you exclude the slumlord part.

Tech innovation? Pah.

Wait, I'm confused. Airbnb is part of the "sharing" economy, right? So mostly people renting out their home whilst briefly away.

And they don't have a drying rack? Something doesn't fit.

Which is caused by high land costs. Now we must maximize our employability, and to hell with friends, family and community. The land costs, set by loose credit from banks, must be met.

As you know, it's anecdotal, but this may be down to rising interest rates!

I think kdb / q developers are possibly as far from wolf of wall street as it's possible to be.

One guy in London who worked in kdb was a huge arse, the tens of others I've encountered have all been lovely. It's an insane little language, though I'm only a basic user.

Agree with everything except the "I wouldn't be surprised to see more scrutiny". That would surprise me!

Nope, we have a series of too big to fail banks which have exclusive issuance of debt as $, unconstrained by any limits other than demand now we are off the gold standard:

https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-inter...

They use this privilege to capture all benefits of wealth creation via usury against land.

Just go outside. Why are banks like the new churches in the middle of the most expensive real-estate in the world? They are supposed to be the oil of real industry. The tail is wagging the dog.

Agreed, but there is a huge, huge amount of people doing very little of value. All the games with low latency and the rules for order placement could be changed to greatly simplify and stop the race to ever-lower latency.

I work in it, it's a total waste of resources.

Our banking sectors are insanely large. Aren't they supposed to be efficient? Why such a large % of the economy?

German banks lend against productive endeavor, shunning the Anglophone rentier behaviour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpq2eqz6mR0

They also make land available to build on, unlike former UK colonies which all use a combination of zoning to suppress supply and loose credit to increase bidding levels.

All former UK colonies have land bubbles.

And a bunch of other people lost exactly the same amount, because none of them are creating anything.

Totally agreed. The run over the last 5 years is massive. A modest drop is hardly going to clean out most "investors".

Most people won't benefit from the crash because they have no savings to buy the dip.

What we need is jobs that pay and land prices that are not gouging productivity increases.

Not quite. You don't have to borrow a dollar for any old thing. Yes you need to eat and the shop sells food in dollars, but we need to extrapolate more. The shop wants dollars because they too have to pay their taxes.

You could find a shop that takes bitcoin. You buy all your food there. Life is good, you are sat with your girlfriend eating croissants from this store. There's someone at the door. It's the government. Taxes time.

Your point about the state having a monopoly on violence is critical. They want their taxes, they will send you a letter. Then another letter. Eventually they send a guy with a gun.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the state having that monopoly. I'm not some raving libertarian. But the failure of bitcoin advocates to understand this distinction is wearing.

If only someone else needed bitcoin.

For example sovereign issuers of fiat currency insist that taxes are paid in their fiat currency.

Because that's what really makes a currency once we get past the facile "a unit of exchange" chat.

A graph of income share versus union membership:

https://i.redd.it/nhp7e2rzy8d01.jpg

Think also of the insanely high CEO pay.

Where is the risk to the real economy? No fiat was destroyed.

The book "do no harm",by an nhs brain surgeon, is full of this stuff. Very good. Could not do his job. Ever.