visualradio

"All of Europe had been what you were describing for 300 years or so. But by the time the US came along, that spirit was starting to fade. So what they did quite literally was put all their money in the US. The way JP Morgan got established was that his father Junius Morgan ran the leading merchant bank in London, and then set up his son Pierpont to run a correspondent bank in New York, and the two of them basically funneled money from the UK to the US to build everything in what was known as the Second Industrial Revolution."

The money was not as important as the workers, thinkers, raw materials. The prior civil war era was a period of massive industrial output, despite the government simply throwing legal tender into circulation without obtaining gold from Europe, and the destruction of huge quantities of wealth in the war. The railroads and war effort required business to organize the transportation and production of large quantities of material wealth which lead to a greater focus on industrial profits, rather than hollow financial profits from real estate speculation. The later form of investment is 'hollow' because the procedure is a M -> M' paper gain which does not produce any material goods or fixed capital as a side effect.

European investors had been investing money in America since 1600s, primarily to engage in real estate speculation on western lands, what was important in industrialization is that there was a shift in investment from real estate speculation to industrial development. The driver of the shift was industrialists like Andrew Carnegie who were involved in the war effort.

To promote industrial investment without militarism it's primarily a matter of reducing large after-tax total returns and access to credit for financial speculators obtaining hollow M -> M' gains relative to industrial investors.

In the United States continuous revolution is referred to as 'property tax'.

The historical pattern is that advocates for the rich will try to undermine assessments to fall more heavily on buildings in poor neighborhoods and replace property tax revenues with sales tax, and that advocates for the poor will try to reform assessments to fall more heavily on land in rich neighborhoods and decrease sales tax.

'Land reform' in the sense of trying to equally divide low value rural land by area without appointing assessors to appraise taxable value of urban property is viewed as a bizarre and impractical European idea.

Industrial development can be promoted without creating poverty by using the tax code to eliminate any after-tax speculative super profits in real estate and finance and non-industrial sectors so that investors are forced to put their money into the real economy.

Then by using financial regulations to require loans which expand quantity of legal tender in circulation to be issued on security of the replacement cost of tangible industrial capital, structures, plant, and equipment values rather than on security of the present value of future property rents.

Then by replacing regressive sales, consumption, and payroll tax with a distributive ground rent tax on property owners.

Promoting industrial development through regressive taxes and wage suppression is only the aristocratic form of industrialization pursued by right-wing governments when they are unwilling to eliminate after tax ground rents and non-industrial super profits enjoyed by the rich.

Identity is used to automate decision making, so less energy is expended on conscious thought, so less time is spent weighing pros and cons of each alternative for every daily decision. If someone is 'dog person' they have routine where they take dog for walks, with positive effects such as exercise, without having to weigh pros and cons each time it is performed. If someone is coffee person, they do not have to weigh pros and cons of what to drink with breakfast. With politics this is perhaps bad, as we do not want people to make decisions unconciously, we want citizens to weigh pros and cons conciously, so that they are less easily duped. But for other daily activities it is useful to simplify decision making so conscious thought can be allocated elsewhere.

The format of the article was that of a critique. The author described how systems currently operate in a manner he viewed as deficient and then suggested ideas for improvements.

When the author states "the principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation", the author was implying that this is wrong.

They then stated that "Employees have a much larger investment in most corporations than their shareholders. Corporations should be maximizing stakeholder, not shareholder, value to employees, customers, and shareholders."

Thus the author semantically implies that "employees" are a separate group of persons from "those who manage the corporations". If employees and "those who manage the corporation" were the same group of persons or part of the system, then it would not have been necessary for the author to claim that corporations should also maximize value for employees, they would have only mentioned customers as the excluded group of stakeholders.

The basis of systems thinking is considering the relation of parts to the whole, and the relation of the whole to the parts. Classically it was simply referred to as 'geometry'. The author distinguishes 'corporation' from 'employees and customers' in following sentence. This implies that corporate managers, employees, and customers are separate parts of a larger system and that use of term manager likely referred to the employers which employ the employees and not also to the employees which metaphorically employ the equipment.

> A corporation that fails to provide an adequate return for their investment to its employees and customers is just as likely to fail as one that does not reward its shareholders adequately.

Author distinguishes corporation from employees in following sentence, so managers likely refers to employers which employ the employees. Employees are those who are employed by employers, the managers are those employers.

How would cryptographically verified identities solve the misinformation problem?

Conservative elites which believe it is necessary to fabricate some external evil to preserve social order are historically willing to engage in obscurantism and spread lies under their real names.

The monopolization of farm land by domestic land lords is fault of foreign powers for not allowing enough living room, attempts to end feudalism in south america are Russian plots to establish Stalinist regimes on southern border of United States, UFOs are not domestic military projects but nefarious extraterrestrials, Soviet Union is not collapsing but actually developing undetectable super weapons, Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, etc.

The cheapest listing I see in Iowa City is $25,000 for a vacant lot with no building.

edit: This is a good indication of real estate bubble btw.

I think the bigger issue is that prices may be extremely inflated in both locations, relative to construction cost of replacing current improvements with new improvements of equal utility, due to national or global real estate credit bubbles, which have the power to wreck the economy.

The external value of the location should not be heavily capitalized into the sales price regardless of the amenities of the location. When someone asks $400,000 for a building which costs $200,000 to replace, the buyers are likely to build a new building next door for cheaper unless the land is impossible to acquire or being held off the market at high prices. The duration which private owners are allowed to hold vacant land off the market and hold out for higher prices is ultimate determined by public financial policy.

Setting aside economics, James Madison developed an interesting categorization of systems of governance, based upon their method of obtaining civic energy, which seems rather timeless:

"Spirit of Governments"

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-14-02-020...

> For example, across the Rust Belt in the US, probably someone could buy a house for $10k or an entire block of homes for dirt cheap

In 2021?

> Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy.

According to zillow, uninhabitable \ barely habitable wood frame homes requiring substantial repairs still sell for about $30,000 in rural Missouri.

Any state which enforces private land tenure in a non-reciprocated manner will tend towards autocracy over time. A distinguishing feature of high functioning republics is the ability to organize reliable public assessments of direct taxes on landed property within their borders. Under corrupt governments the assessments are never kept up to date and the nobility is given arbitrary and excessive privileges and exemptions to shift direct contributions to the least advantaged members of society. Maybe 50% of local governments and 20% of regional states in the U.S. are high functioning. The federal government was able to organize assessments in 1798, 1813-1816, and 1861 but is generally not high functioning.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

"Where Does California’s Homeless Population Come From?"

> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood.

> Several years ago, L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state.

> “The vast majority fell into homelessness in L.A. County,” Mr. Lynn said.

> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.

> In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.

In order to eliminate taxes on the homeless, the state and local sales tax needs to be eliminated, and permanently set to 0%.

The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.

In republics without absolute rulers, individuals trust each other to maintain the state out of a sense of civic duty, and not to declare themselves king.

This trust is greatly eroded by calls to eliminate direct taxes on land holders. In America the local property tax is the most important thing holding society together. It provides residents with assurances that regardless of how corrupt the public process for distributing legal tender becomes, that the richest cannot simply buy the entire country and turn the continent into a private estate which their descendants will inherit in perpetuity without paying enormous taxes to everyone else.

When James Madison organized the assessment of property taxes at the national level during his presidency it resulted in the 'Era of Good Feelings' and a relative low point of political polarization. In contrast when state governments introduced sales taxes for the first time to reduce property taxes it prolonged the Great Depression, and when NYC gave the largest property tax abatements in the country to Donald Trump it lead to the Trump presidency which increased political polarization.

If programmers do want to wrap structs in a typedef without using the "_t" suffix, the Vulkan API appears to have settled on upper-camel case:

    typedef struct VkMemoryBarrier {
        VkStructureType    sType;
        const void*        pNext;
        VkAccessFlags      srcAccessMask;
        VkAccessFlags      dstAccessMask;
    } VkMemoryBarrier;

> In my part of the country there are places where this situation has persisted for fifty years, as the auction value of the property is only in the hundreds of dollars per acre

At 2021 market valuations, not lower public assessments?

> Even in higher property value areas I would be surprised to see a tax delinquency action taken after just a few years. The administrative cost is substantial

In some areas owner only has a few years then legal department will process tax sale within few months. It's true that in many areas property tax less than 1% of true market value. Prior to 1930s when no state or local government was collecting sales tax it used to be closer 3%.

> Also the church runs alot of old folks homes, and thus persuades old people to transfer there land to the church, so in some towns, half the houses are owned by the catholic church

Is the church exempt from property tax in Germany?

If so this sounds like a return to 'mortmain' principle of middle ages which caused a lot of conflict between government and church historically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortmain

England developed quicker than the rest of Europe because the King limited the accumulation of tax exempt real estate by the church. The church was essentially largest absentee corporate land holder in Europe. It left large quantities of land vacant and did not contribute public fees towards infrastructure improvements.

> which means all the owners are not known - previous landowner died or emigrated and it waits for their descendants to claim it. It isn't possible to build anything on these lots

In the U.S. there is no central registrar, deeds are recorded at local level, and owners are regularly found by collecting property tax. Back tax is tracked independently of ownership so if true owner fails to pay tax within a few years there is lien or foreclosure.

I'm guessing in Slovakia they might only tax sales or income of property rather than passive enclosure? If back taxes are levied on parcel the owners should immediately make themselves known.

"The Earth belongs in usufruct to the living. The dead have neither powers nor rights over it" - Thomas Jefferson

> Given the central role that C continues to play in systems software, and the difficulty of writing safe and correct C code, it remains a grand challenge to develop effective formal methods for verifying C programs.

One of the reasons C likely continues to play a large role in systems programming, despite regularly highlighted defects by researchers, is because new language designers have largely given up on concept of header files and forward declaration.

When a standards organization wants to work with hardware vendors to define a cross-platform interface in terms of human readable symbols rather than explicit values, with the possibility of many competing private translations, C is a natural choice because header files provide a necessary bridge or abstraction.

It would be interesting if a 'Better C' language was also a 'Better H' language and provided a literate interface declaration formats without macros or inline functions. Eliminating support for macros and inline functions from headers, and making inlinability a private implementation detail, should not theoretically prevent future compilers from inlining implementation code from multiple sources into a single unit as a performance optimization.

The idea that the majority homeless Californians are 'migrants' from out of state is largely upper class propaganda promoted to avoid discussion of downward mobility caused by high land prices.

The problem could be solved by repealing proposition 58 and 13, establishing a state board of commisioners to reappraise all land at the state level at present market valuations, and replacing sales taxes with distributive land taxes. But property owners obviously don't want to hear that and would prefer to pretend the problem doesn't exist.

"Where does California's Homeless Population Come From?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood.

> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.

> In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.

> Data about migration to California from other states among the housed population showed that the largest group of transplants to the state were actually college-educated professionals

> “I hear a lot of people complain that the homeless people are all from ‘somewhere else,’” wrote Ms. Kroger of Stockton, a lifelong Californian. “I think it might raise empathy and compassion if it turns out that the majority of the people who have been displaced are from the very communities in which they are now trying to survive on the streets.”

The issue with most Better C languages is that they focus on ABI rather than API compatibility and throw away C header parsing because no one likes libc.

With cross-platform standards like OpenGL, POSIX, Vulkan the API is declared in terms of high-level ANSI C or C99 language constructs and binary constants may be unspecified and left up to vendor.

Ideally new language designers which don't want to support H files would propose an even simpler header file format for listing procedures, enumerations, structs, constants that existing C compilers could also support. Library vendors don't have time to generate header bindings for every new language using language specific constructs, and application developers don't have time to manually write bindings for large libraries when testing new languages.

Zig supports C header parsing, but as you mention is based on LLVM. It also allows defining new functions inside structs and return values, which can result in heavily nested code that some programmers may not be a fan of.

So there is theoretically some room for another language which maintains compatibility with C headers (or defines an even simpler header format which can be supported by C compilers), which does not use LLVM, and which maintains stronger conceptual separation between namespaces and structs.

We don't actually need a global minimum tax to make the corporate income tax raise more revenue.

We just need to only record and recognize conveyance of deeds, titles, patents between domestic residents and domestically chartered corporations and eliminate deductions, depreciation, expensing for intangibles.

Federal income tax does not allow depreciation of land, IP and enclosures of ideas should be treated similar to land.

Well there are many types of capital. Fixed capital attached to land doesn't readily flow across borders unless owners spend money to disassemble and salvage it. Financial capital isn't really capital as banks can create money on security of fictitious capital without finding existing deposits for borrowers to purchase speculative assets which do not convey ownership of any fixed capital.

Allowing cross-border flows of floating capital such as machines and commodity inputs and outputs should not be problematic if all new legal tender is initially placed into circulation through public local loans issued on security of the replacement cost of industrial fixed capital physically attached to domestic soil.

Conveyance of state enforced privilege such as deeds, titles, patents can also only be recorded between domestic residents and domestically chartered corporations liable for corporate tax. While these privileges provide security for capital investment they are not really capital themselves.

Allowing foreign investors to purchase shares of domestic corporations does not seem overly problematic as long any deeds, titles, patents held by corporations are directly taxed and there are some distributive offsets and deductions for domestic residents.

> Naively, you would expect this to be fixed via basic economics: high demand and low supply lead to high prices, which should lead to MORE supply, which should lower prices

Classical economics says only half the real estate asset price corresponds to actual capital. The land-fraction of real estate value is a monopoly price. The capitalized ground-rent increases the scarcer land becomes. Investors maximize asset gains by holding out for high prices as possible.

> The system isn't self-healing anymore. It's jammed up

The fictitious capitalization of ground-rent into asset prices has caused problems since classical antiquity. This is business as usual and everyone should know how this works by now.

> but the trend has been happening for years, maybe a full decade now

North American land speculation goes back to 1600-1700s and John Law's Mississippi company. It caused lots of problems during westward expansion. There is typically a real estate bubble and crash every 18 years since 1840s.

Cycle can be interrupted with financial regulation, central bank window guidance to discourage credit creation for speculative asset purchases, and special taxes.

Ideally we'd want state governments to appoint commissioners to chair equalization boards to redo land valuations at state level, introduce a federal direct land tax on comparable sales price of estates less replacement cost of improvements, increase realization of real estate asset gains taxes, requires brokers to appraise replacement cost of improvements separately from comparable sales price, and cap mortgage guarantees by federal GSEs at 200% of replacement cost of non-obsolete fixed capital improvements whenever that is lower than comparable sales price.

> Imagine if businesses eventually buy -all- housing. You can tax them 10000%, they'll just pass it on to renters

No, that's incorrect.

For vacant, obsolete, uninhabitable, and undeveloped properties there are no tenants. There is no one to pass the tax on to. In order to acquire cash to pay the tax the owners without tenants must either sell off excess properties at lower prices or lower leases to attract more tenants.

The land fraction of real estate value is already monopoly price. Without direct property and land tax, and no public carrying cost, investors could hold properties off the market forever to maximize sales price and surplus extracted from buyers. Imposing a higher public carrying cost does not give them additional leverage to hold out for higher prices, it does the opposite decreases the time they can afford to hold properties off the market. And a pure land value tax which fully exempts replacement cost of improvements would also create zero market barrier to supplying new homes and instead reduce market barrier by making land more plentiful.

And with a distributive tax it should also be clear that real estate investment trusts and foreign direct investors aren't getting the tax deduction because they aren't a permanent resident.

U.S. has relied on levying direct property taxes at higher rates than other nations to prevent overaccumulation since early 1700s. If direct taxes weren't successful at reducing overaccumulation then the U.S. would never have become a superpower.

Generally with most indirect taxes like sales taxes where the tax can be shifted the businesses which remain open rarely lobby against them once they are put in place. But in every age of history the large land holders have regular complained about direct taxes on landed property, precisely because they are much more difficult to shift.

> Screw taxing...make it illegal for any person or entity to own more than say, 2 houses. Maybe 3

Taxes are a simpler and more effective though. Ideal solution is a land tax on comparable sales price of the estate less some portion of replacement cost of non-obsolete fixed capital improvements.

If there is a lot large enough for 10 houses worth millions in the middle of the city next to publicly maintained infrastructure, investors might be able to avoid the cap by rendering the units uninhabitable, removing toilets, etc.

Land and property taxes do not have to be flat taxes. They are easy to make distributive by adding an X% deduction on the first $Y in tax payments per resident per billing period that they resided in the same jurisdiction that the parcel is located.

State governments can reform property tax system by appointing state commissioners to chair a state board of equalization attended by local assessors to reappraise property values at the state level. When this was done in the Progressive Era, states found large areas of land held by railroad corporations and barons which were not being taxed at all and put them on the tax rolls.

The federal government can also introduce a national property tax by amending and reintroducing the direct tax collected under James Madison. Any increase in direct land or property tax burden can be offset by distributive offsets for permanent residents or cuts to regressive taxes such as sales taxes and payroll taxes.

It's not a great write up. It did not mention the largest problem of capitalism: the capitalization of ground rent in asset prices. It instead fixates on another explanation: human desire for riches.

> Again, the problem is not riches per se, but the fixation on riches.

The desire for riches is not problematic if the majority of people are willing to cooperate to acquire wealth, and seek income from increasing the mastery of humanity over the environment rather by obtaining at the expense of others. Effective cooperation requires distinguishing between income which is positive sum, which adds to the aggregate stock of wealth, and income which is zero sum, which merely transfers existing wealth from others.

Both types of income are mixed together when capitalized into asset prices. Effective cooperation requires individuals to devise methods for distinguishing between the two and communicate these methods with others.

Capitalism vs socialism debates tend to prevent this from happening because they emphasize either productive income or unproductive income without advancing the practical arts and sciences for distinguishing between the two in manner which allows the majority of individuals willing to engage in cooperative production to do so more efficiently.

> The institution of private property, including private ownership of the basic means of production

Property is never really wholly private or wholly public. Deeds, titles, freeholds, leaseholds, etc all generally come with some form of public obligations to a sovereign. And in a republic the sovereign is a general government which uses its authority on behalf of the people as a whole to maximize their happiness.

> A doctrinaire laissez-faire mentality that is reflexively hostile to all governmental economic intervention

Laissez-faire was originally a progressive ideology advocated by the French physiocrats which opposed the internal tariffs and private privileges which the king, nobility, and church enjoyed under the Ancien Régime. Part of laissez-faire was the idea that governments should collect a large direct tax on landed property and raise 100% of tax revenues from the most privileged classes of society.

These capitalism vs socialism debates are never really worth having.

There's many types of capitalism and really only a subset of what is commonly referred to as capital has a material basis. These debates always oversimplify things, under-estimate the degree to which western economies are central planned by private banks, and ignore the problem of fictitious capital.