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yellowapple

12,086 karma · joined June 12, 2013

Polyglot programmer and sysadmin with experience in healthcare IT and e-commerce fulfillment/logistics/operations. Maintainer of a couple FOSS projects.

Website: https://yellowapple.us

Email: northrup @ the above domain

Keybase: [ my public key: https://keybase.io/yellowapple; my proof: https://keybase.io/yellowapple/sigs/JfN02l9FJTFqFnACyDFYbK7yNYFSlzTvPktWnPQiTZg ]

meet.hn/city/us-Reno

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yellowapple··on Dots: Always-on agents
Did OpenAI acquire OpenClaw, or just the guy who created it? Last I checked it's still under the OpenClaw Foundation's stewardship.
yellowapple··on Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built
LVT (and land leases, the logical conclusion of charging 100% LVT) have been successfully tried all over the world, and so has UBI. Combining the two is hardly some spherical-cow-style theoretical construct.
yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
Because having more money than what's needed for basic subsistence is nice? Because it's something that interests you? Maybe you'd be one to lounge around doing nothing if you had UBI, but UBI studies so far have demonstrated that you'd be the exception rather than the norm.
yellowapple··on Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built
The “LVT-funded” in “LVT-funded UBI” above ain't there just for decoration :)
yellowapple··on Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built
In this case the version with fewer steps does indeed work quite well.
yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
> If all landlords' costs go up (e.g. taxes) then all landlords will raise rents to maintain the same previously optimal profit margin they were extracting.

And then all landlords will see a surge in vacancies, and not all landlords are able to tolerate paying LVT on empty units for very long before they're forced to drop their rents back to the actual market value.

> why not raise taxes to $1M/sq.ft.? $1B/sq.ft.?

Same reason why landlords can't raise rents to $1M/sq.ft or $1B/sq.ft: because nobody in their right mind would pay that much.

yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
At least I have some influence over my local government and how it spends my tax money. Same can't be said about my landlord and how it spends my rent money.
yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
> all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.

All land¹ is already owned by the state and leased to the “owners”; the only differences are in how much the state charges those “owners” for rent.

In light of this, the difference between a 100% LVT rate v. the state issuing land leases is just semantics.

----

¹ within any state's territory, of course.

yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
Responding to LVT in this way would require an unprecedented degree of collusion among landlords. That's unlikely to be sustainable, given that a lot of rental inventory is under smaller-scale landlords who will have a much harder time holding units vacant and therefore will be more eager to cave and drop rents back down to their actual market values.

Even if such a cartel could be sustainable (say, because the vast majority of rental units are under a couple of massive property management firms instead of thousands of smallhold landlords), it'd only “work” until people get sick of it and move to other cities, thus producing more vacancies, thus (under LVT) causing those landlords to hemorrhage more money.

Put differently: every landlord already knows every other landlord wants to maximize cash flow, so if landlords were actually capable of coordinating to the degree necessary to raise rents in response to LVT without bankrupting themselves, then why are they not doing that already? Why have they not yet all gotten together and decided “we're all going to charge infinity dollars per month per square foot”?

yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
It's much easier to do things like pursue higher education or start a business when you don't have to worry that you'll be homeless if things don't pan out.
yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
The solution to this is to use that LVT revenue to fund UBI, such that the income from all that Disneyland-related land value offsets your own LVT burden.

In a mathematically-perfect setup (100% LVT going entirely to UBI, with zero overhead and zero other government expenditures), the break-even point where your LVT exactly equals your UBI would mean that you own your exact equal share of that tax jurisdiction's total land value; if you own more, then you pay for it, and if you own less, then you get paid for it. Obviously in the real world some of that LVT revenue has to go toward paying people to collect taxes / distribute income checks (not to mention the many other functions of a typical government), but the point is that LVT+UBI produces a self-balancing system that maximizes fairness even for people using their land “non-productively”.

yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
Full LVT “never works” because landowners have a vested interest in sabotaging it and the vast majority of politicians are landowners.
yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
> 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.

I think people get tripped up on this specifically because a growing demand for something with fixed/inelastic supply will naturally tend to cause that thing to become scarce given enough time, and it's that scarcity as applied to land that's making Georgism look more and more like a good idea.

yellowapple··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
> Georgism taxes away the gain from the creation of Locations

The premise of Georgism is that there is no creation of locations (at least unless you're in the business of creating planets).

> Places that were too far from London to be useful suddenly became Locations

No, those were always locations, before and after the construction of railways made them more valuable. Accordingly, Georgists ain't interested in taxing the gains of the railways themselves; we're only interested in taxing the gains of the landowners profiting off of their land suddenly being more valuable from no contribution of their own. Under LVT the railway companies still would've made their money back in droves — probably moreso if they're only paying taxes on the land under the railroads instead of the actual railroads themselves!

yellowapple··on Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built
> More power than anything* the fibre usually comes later.

This depends a lot on the datacenter. Some are sited specifically around proximity to existing fiber, or more especially proximity to places where multiple fiber backbones intersect (e.g. carrier hotels / meet-me-rooms). There's a datacenter going up here in Reno to that exact effect, with a lot of the public complaints being “but why do we need a datacenter in the middle of town?” even though:

1) that's where multiple fiber backbones intersect

2) it's being built in a mixed commercial/industrial zone with other datacenters already there

3) the company building it has another datacenter dead smack in the middle of Downtown doing similar carrier hotel stuff, and the new one is an extension of that

yellowapple··on Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built
It's enough money to me to be worth taking.
yellowapple··on Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built
At some point we're just doing LVT-funded UBI with extra steps.
yellowapple··on Nuclear Waste Accidentally Leaked at Pacific Coast Site
> You could probably swim on the surface of that reactor pool and be perfectly fine.

Relevant XKCD “What If?” article on this exact topic: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

And in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRUL7vKdU8

yellowapple··on Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 Series
Makes me wonder how long until Framework starts shipping ARM-based motherboards. They already sell a RISC-V-based motherboard for the 13.
yellowapple··on The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)
This'll be a controversial answer, but this sounds like exactly the sort of thing an LLM should be able to do reasonably well, whether by the human writing the docs and the LLM updating the code accordingly or by the human writing the code and the LLM updating the docs accordingly.
yellowapple··on The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)
I've been gradually migrating my Git repos to Fossil as I've been touching them. Been quite happy with it.

There are only a couple things that I miss:

- Grouping repos together into a combined project. I'd love to be able to have a single Fossil server/instance with a single set of users, wiki pages, tickets, etc. but multiple independent codebases. Closest I've gotten to that is to simply have multiple independent branches instead of a single trunk (example: https://fsl.yellowapple.us/avorion/home), and it's worked surprisingly well, but it's clear Fossil wasn't designed with this workflow in mind, so there are some rough edges with it (albeit minor and easy to work around).

- Compatibility with things that assume you're using Git. Being able to export to Git helps a lot here, but it's still extra steps. Ideal solution here would be for the Fossil server to be able to double as a Git forge and present repos accordingly, such that I can point things like CI/CD pipelines or Terragrunt module calls or whatever directly to the Fossil repo itself over the Git interface those things expect instead of having to setup a Git forge manually and somehow synchronize everything w.r.t. access controls.

- An equivalent to Git's submodules. This would IMO help address the “grouping repos together into a combined project” case as well.

yellowapple··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
Yeah, but that would require billionaires to pay taxes, and that's simply unacceptable.
yellowapple··on Raspberry Pi blocks changing RAM chips
The much easier and more reasonable solution here would be for the RPi Foundation to ignore RMA requests for boards not bought from them or an authorized reseller.
yellowapple··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Designers having that artistic taste, and clients lacking it, is exactly why I don't think generative AI is going to do much to replace (skilled) designers anytime soon. Likewise for other creative professions, and indeed for knowledge work in general.
yellowapple··on OpenJev
Honestly I prefer that over the overabundance of empty space that's been the norm in “modern” web design for more than a decade now.
yellowapple··on GEFS on OpenBSD: A Early Preview
I've seen file corruption with FFS on some of my OpenBSD servers, though them being VMs is likely a factor there.
yellowapple··on No cities on the Moon – there isn't enough water, scientists say
The lack of water is related to the lack of hydrogen; you'd need to find a hydrogen source to synthesize water.

Lots of oxygen in moon rocks, though, so in addition to directly importing icy asteroids, importing hydrocarbon-rich asteroids would also help (with the added bonus of carbon also being something scarce on the Moon).

yellowapple··on We must pace the frontier
It's pretty fringe among just about everyone I know in meatspace (the vast majority of whom are not in tech). At worst, people are indifferent to it.
yellowapple··on Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap
> e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree

If that forest's dominant tree happens to be a quaking aspen then technically speaking it might not have been mistagged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

yellowapple··on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
The requirement to use union labor for construction hasn't stopped datacenter buildouts here in Nevada.
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