larsiusprime

It's not just zoning, though that exacerbates it. City centers are where economic activity tends to be concentrated so even without zoning you would see these exponential land value effects as you approach the centers of economic activity (and indeed, we did see these same relative patterns prior to the passing of modern zoning laws).

Good points! Thanks.

Both. They do understand that it’s worth “more” in the city but they vastly underestimate the magnitude, and they vastly underestimate what that means in terms of where the total bulk of land value is concentrated, and therefore what the distribution of winners and losers will be in any tax shift scenario.

Author here: it’s a cheap rate limiter and something we are looking to remove soon.

Author here. This is the problem we are seeking to solve, we are property tax reform activists:

https://open.substack.com/pub/progressandpoverty/p/enacting-...

Author here. Our blog generally concerns property tax reform for our regular readership which is admittedly less clear to a new reader coming in cold: the intuitions I’m referring to is the average homeowner kind of assumes any tax reform (such as shifting taxes off buildings and onto land) is designed to impoverish them personally. The purpose of these maps is to show such people where land value in cities is really concentrated - Ie, not the m the suburbs. Mono centric city value might be intuitive to academics, but it’s not among regular everyday people.

The main purpose of the 3D is to communicate the extreme differences in scale of value, which chloropleth alone doesn’t always get across as it flattens the magnitude disparity. Keeping true north to avoid confusion is a good point.

Diamond prices are famously crashing now due to artificial lab made diamonds (increased supply)

IceFrog was on the Dota2 team, and valve owns the trademark

This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents.

https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/P...

Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.

Although they key thing here is that it's not just that effect, but emergent unintended consequences. In the article, it describes how non profit healthcare institutions have an incentive to buy for profit clinics, because (alongside the other incentives), when they do so, the real estate becomes tax exempt because now it's owned by a non profit, even if the work being performed stays the same.

If I understand it, the premise of this article is that because the marginal cost of software production is now free, now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up.

I mean, it seems at the very least, that open source and in-house production has a natural advantage here? If the marginal cost of software production is now free, then FOSS/in-house just got easier to create and maintain too. Does that make it easier for FOSS/in-house, both available without a subscription to an external third party, undermine "sales critter" SAAS, by the author's own premises?

It's funny that people always bring this up, but I don't see what centrally planned mandatory setbacks, height limits, and parking mandates have to do with preventing industrial accidents.

This is actually how the popular Texas dominoes game of "42" was invented. It's similar to Spades and other trick-taking games with bids and trumps, but it's played with dominoes, not cards, and therefore it's okay :) Two boys from a Baptist family who got in trouble for playing cards came up with it.

http://texas42.net/42Article.html

Honestly, the surest sign of the existence of vampires to me would be a class of investors with extremely anomalous discount rates, suggesting that they are operating on inhumanly long time horizons, combined with a particular interest in real estate, as first documented in the field's seminal publication (Stoker, 1897).

Thank you!

Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?

I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?

Interesting. So basically an individual out in the sticks can genuinely get by with Internet but not plumbing, but urban life would be impossible at scale without plumbing, and without urban civilization at scale we probably wouldn’t be able to maintain the internet at scale?

> Socialism might work in that world

Technically, what you've just described is Georgism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

The real question is, in a truly post-labor future, how do workers have enough leverage to negotiate for any particular change in the economic system?

If all labor is automated and nobody can earn anything selling their own anymore, all that’s left are the other two factors of production: capital and land.

Land is scarce and cant be produced, so whoever already owns it will benefit after the change.

Capital can be produced, but what produces it? Labor. Even worse, capital depreciates over time so just owning some now doesn’t guarantee you an income in the post labor future.

In a fully automated world where human labor is truly of zero value it seems the main returns in the long run are to those who can gate keep valuable land, natural resources, and other fundamentally scarce assets.

Because a revenue neutral implementation lowers taxes on net on improved active sites that do something with land, and raises it on net for vacant abandoned sites that do nothing, shifting the incentive to do something with the land or sell it to someone who will.

Scott Alexander is in fact an MD

What on earth does the discovery institute amd creationists have to do with Alzheimer’s research? Come on. Most of the people I’ve seen criticize the amyloid hypothesis are secular.

Cmon the puritans were one of many different founding cohorts. Quakers, borderers, cavaliers, etc. America was never of one mind on the subject of religion.

Higher property taxes and low income taxes is preferable actually, it keeps the housing market from getting massively distorted.

There’s a full write up. Audio is streamed as button presses.

Can someone provide some context for those of us who are utterly out of the loop?

I work in the mass appraisal space, and I use QGIS all the time. The professional alternative is ESRI's ArcGIS.

A lot of shops I know (private and public) will use ArcGIS still, but I'm noticing an increasing number of people (particularly younger researchers/analysts) who are exclusively using QGIS.

QGIS is powerful and full featured, but it is admittedly a bit rusty around the edges, especially when working with very large datasets. If they keep working on fixing some of the sharpest edges I think it will go on to have a good future. Just in the past few years I've noticed significant improvement.

In many ways it feels like Blender -- long ignored and dismissed, but slowly but surely improved over time, and then suddenly became quite a big deal.