epistasis

What do you mean? These numbers provide great guidance so that people can understand the size of the battery discharge, and what they could replace.

Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.

The headline says that the batteries are powering the homes, which is absolutely and technically correct use of "powering".

Maybe you saw "generating"? It may interest you to know that batteries output is counted among "generation" by the EIA and nearly all grid documents I know about, and is also technically correct.

Natural gas is merely stored solar energy too, if it the ideas of batteries "generating" anything rubs you the wrong way.

Assuming they set up the house to island, which depends a lot on the install. Otherwise live power from a house in an outage is a big risk to those working on solving the outage.

Easily solved, if addressed!

It depends a lot on the market, but before there were lots of batteries this was extremely typical in the Australian grid. You probably just weren't exposed to it as a consumer! Massive price fluctuations were the impetus for one of the first large scale grid batteries in Australia, and the batteries worked really well to solve it. It doesn't happen often, and nobody is getting paid $150 every day for their home battery. It's just for the extreme events.

As more and more batteries are deployed the price swings will decrease.

It's not a "broken community" it's just end consumers being able to help out in times of great grid need and getting compensated fairly for it.

Another thing to point out is that the geography in the book, the UK, has spectacularly bad resources for solar, just astoundingly bad.

So even with updated technology pricing numbers, the conclusions from it should not be lifted to other geographies without adjusting for that. We're talking worse resources than Germany (worse than an US state), and into Finland territory:

https://globalsolaratlas.info/

A well functioning government that regulates things is so crucial to everything in a technological life.

Currently in the US, it's not criminal if it's done at the bidding of Trump, or if Trump approves of the violence.

The federal government is still stymieing the investigation of the ICE/DHS killings of Minneapolis citizens, violating their own policies requiring investigation.

There's no more federal rule of law until there's a full change in power, and that requires installing a functional DOJ and a new Supreme Court that is more interested in the law than in furthering partisan politics.

> Tariffs have reduced exports, particularly to Canada, which was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.

And it links to a Feb 2025 article titled "Canada Tariffs Paused, but California Wineries Fear a Trade Dispute Would Be Crushing"

https://www.kqed.org/news/12025404/canada-tariffs-paused-cal...

It's core to the AT Protocol method of opening up social feeds. Some introductory blog posts that helped me:

https://overreacted.io/open-social/

https://overreacted.io/where-its-at/

https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

Honestly the entire UI was so responsive and fast.

We've come a long way when web apps feel faster and more native than native apps.

It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.

See also:

- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]

- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]

[0] https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri... ( https://archive.is/vs8OD )

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...

I will say that of the people I know in pharma, they are not allowed to use Anthropic nor OpenAI directly. It's all AWS Bedrock access, whom they trust not to use the data. (Because they already trust AWS with all their data, and AWS is not putting out papers in their fields of work.)

I would not call a "hack" a "systemic fix" in fact quite the opposite.

And those who work on understanding the systems (economists) universally agree that the hack is a great hack, across all sorts of schools of thought, something that's pretty much unheard of in economics.

I hope you are as interested in detail as you purport with your link, and go and look at the real world examples of doing this hack in practice!

Excellent point, and nobody has ever brought it up to me despite me talking this way many times! I think the "competition" angle is really good at pointing out why a land value tax is very different from a property tax here.

A property tax affects all square footage of apartments quite equally, which is very well correlated to rental prices, so a property tax is roughly equally a rise in all landlord's costs. So in the very few housing markets where rental prices have fallen to near the cost level, and there's very near zero profit in renting, property taxes could easily cause a rise in rents.

However when switching to a land value tax from the current property tax system, the incidence is quite different than a broad property tax increase. Some landlord's taxes fall quite a bit, some landlord's tax bills might increase.

More money in the hands of the entire population have a multiplicative effect in the economy, as it spurs more spending, and that spending is organic choices by tons of people, rather than it just sitting in the investment accounts of a few wealthy people.

The fuel of capitalism is a large population of consumers. To be extent that we have inequality and we have lots of people that are unable to make economic choices due to poverty, we limit the growth of the economy.

Landlords tend to raise rent to the maximum value they can.

If they could raise rents, why haven't they already?

And if their costs go up and they can't make ends meet, they will sell the property, possibly at a loss, and the lower value will lower taxes.

But this won't happen, because the landlord's taxes won't rise. They'll almost certainly fall, as shown in the abundant data. And if for some reason the landlord's property tax does rise, it's because it's a ridiculously underused parcel in an area of really really high value, like a duplex next to 10+ story buildings. Which means it may be best to let 100-300 people use that parcel rather than ~10.

The LVT shifts tax burden away from homes and businesses and towards empty lots and parking lots.

Take the Netherlands as an extreme example of this; something like 17% of the country is reclaimed land. There's not many places you could do that.

Since unreclaimed "land" if it can be owned, can not generate any rents, it won't be taxed at all. But if all the additional value of making it usable were taxed away with a full LVT, it creates very little incentive to reclaim it and make it usable.

I think the best thing to do would be to exempt reclaimed land from land value tax for a period of time. Just like we grant monopolies for patents for a fixed value of time to incentivize sharing of the secrets.

If you got 50 years on reclaimed land without tax, it would heavily incentivize its creation.

> Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise,

When there's a full LVT, the transactional sale price for land is very close to $0, because your land rents are taxed away. That leaves only the buildings as something that's lost to the natural disaster, so in many ways this might be far better for property owners.

It would also alleviate many of the challenges with relocation when necessary, from flooding, etc. Since the land is no longer the valuable part of the relationship estate, only the building must be moved/replaced.

This piece was not written by Scott Alexander.

I think it's better to say that HN readers have a soft spot for clever solutions that seem like hacks. And the LVT is really a huge societal hack to unlock a lot of prosperity and eliminate a lot of poverty.

> A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.

It wouldn't directly address those planning issues, but it aligns the financial incentives of the body politic between residential homeowners and the rest of the community. Normally residential homeowners have huge financial incentive to make housing scare and expensive, the LVT removes that financial gain from causing misery.

It's actually a really key part of the functioning of the LVT. It is fuel to grow the economy, just like the LVT is the stick that punishes those who hold back the economy by hoarding land.

At least, that's my opinion. Carrot based economic policies have a tendency of working in multiples of the money involved, and penalties a bit less than that.

Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production which are fixed in quantity, and that you can't make more of. This is a very different characteristic than scarcity, because many scarce things can be increased, and should be if they are needed.

Taxing specialized labor goes against that spirit, because specialized labor can be created. And in fact taxing the labor would result in less of it being there, the exact opposite of the optimal result.

This is baffling, there's all sorts of information on my phone that Apple has zero knowledge of, why would the transactions be different?

Do you think Apple has complete copies of everything? I don't understand where this supposed contradiction is supposed to exist, unless you think that Apple has complete knowledge of all phone contents, which would require complete ignorance of the entire platform.

"Big campaign" sounds right. These sort of tax revolt campaigns tend to spread wide, with the hope of passing similar things elsewhere shortly after.

Fortunately, this one did not spread which is very good news, because the long term effects have been absolutely horrific for housing prices in California. However, I hear of other states right now proposing adoption of California's housing crisis via similar tax measures... Hopefully they don't pass and learn the lessons of what has happened here.

Vancouver used to have a land value tax, which was widely credited with the its prosperity up to the ~1960s. However eventually enough homeowners and landowners got sick of paying their fair share and overturned it, which has resulted in Vancouver's housing situation which is possibly even worse than the SF Bay Area's...

And not in small part because Prop 13 disconnects property from housing costs, which leads to political incentives where beneficiaries of Prop 13 embrace policy that causes housing prices to rise precipitously.

Social Security Announces 8.7 Percent Benefit Increase for 2023

https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2022-10-13.html

So either your parents were getting $115 from social security, or you are trying to report increase of a year with essentially 0% inflation as if it were the year with 9% inflation.

> fixed income at the end of your life in no position really to deal with inflation.

This might be true if you have everything in cash in a safe at your house and plan on taking out fixed amounts for the rest of your life, I guess, but who are those people?

Most people are on social security, which is inflation adjusted.

Others with more wealth have retirement savings, which are likely mostly in bonds and stocks, which weather inflation not too shabbily. Interest rates go up, and banks start actually yielding interest!

Prop 13 passed mostly as a populist revolt against taxes, but in reality it does a lot more for people in their prime of earning and a toooon more for commercial property tax cuts than it does for retirees.

Every other state has better tax deferral mechanisms, and given the tiny fraction of Prop 14 effect that goes to retirees, I don't really buy this back formation of what was going on. If people really voted for such a lie, it wouldn't be the first time with propositions but from the media I've seen from the time I really don't think people were that duped and probably knew the broad effects of Prop 13.

I tend to keep quiet on the following critiques, because it can be counterproductive to larger goals to speak the truth sometimes, but something in this comment got to me and I need to share my truth. You're too kind on the "tenant" advocacy groups here. They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior. These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.

If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!

I say this as someone who continues to advocate alongside tenant groups on policy for better protections, for rent registries, etc. And as someone who spent many years giving small donations to local tenant advocacy groups. At least Andreesen is transparent in his greed, and not hiding it. I regret all those years of donations to the groups that hurt people, but when it comes to the few good things they do I'll be there with them still. Marc Andreesen and the wealthy funders of "tenant" groups are not harmed at all by better tenant protection policy, but boy are they harmed if real power were handed back to tenants in the form of having enough housing, and therefore ultimate power over the landlords.

It's actually much harder to target a particular owner, because it's based only on land area, and the value of land in a general area! Property taxes are much much more susceptible to targeting as individual properties are much more variable and there's far more judgement about individual buildings and the potential value of a building.

This is a reasonable and common concern, and one I shared until I looked into it in fine detail. Turns out it's far easier to estimate the value of land that things sit on than the entire property value, and most of the country actually operates on continually updated estimates of total property value rather than just land.

There's several anchoring sales nearby, you can regress out from all sales, etc. etc. And it's smoothly varying for nearby parcels, with very little change!

A much better explanation than what I can write can be found in the "Estimating" section here https://landeconomics.org/reports/california-billionaire-wea...

That distinction between tall buildings and shorter buildings on the same plot of land is exactly why the land should be taxed.

Economic land is any capital that has a fixed amount, that you can't make more of. When the local governments in the Bay Area started capping the amount of buildable square feet, they greatly accelerated inequality by converting regular living space and working space into economic land, just like the real land it sits upon.

This is why economic inequality skyrocketed so much. Rentierism resulted in so much being stolen from anybody who doesn't own the land, and blocks out so many people from even having access to the economic system.