12,086 karma · joined June 12, 2013
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
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.
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.
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¹ within any state's territory, of course.
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”?
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”.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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).
If that forest's dominant tree happens to be a quaking aspen then technically speaking it might not have been mistagged.