yonran

I disagree with this bitching that rich states are “subsidizing” the poor “handout” states through federal progressive taxes. This is how progressive taxation is supposed to work, and it would be clearly insensitive and arguably incorrect for a rich individual in the rich state to complain that he is subsidizing the poor person in a poor state. Rich states collect rents from winner-take-all markets that serve the nation, and it is good pro-equality policy to return some of the wealth back with the rest of the country to reduce inequality and promote opportunity.

Edit: to respond to the comment below: I’m not arguing that local taxes should be low; in fact, I think property taxes should be much higher and fairer in California. My point is that the federal government should not provide a federal tax break for local spending e.g. on education. The coasts already do too much opportunity hoarding.

Google never lent out entire copyrighted books without the publisher’s permission. Books.google.com consisted of 1) old public domain books that can be fully downloaded, 2) limited preview books that the publisher opted into putting online partially, and 3) snippet view books that only showed a sentence of context in response to search queries. The Authors’ Guild sued over 3), Google argued that they transformed the book into a search index, not a reading experience, and Google won.

> I support the contractor status (mainly due to general support of a flexible labor market)

A ride share or delivery company could offer flexible hours with part-time workers too, so flexibility is not why the delivery companies created Proposition 22. As I understand it, Proposition 22 was necessary in order to:

* Allow drivers to use their own car rather than forcing Uber to manage all the cars in their fleet.

* Avoid paying drivers when they are parked waiting for an order, which allows drivers to have multiple apps open looking for orders.

Correction: 2020 Proposition 22 was an initiative statute that modified the Business and Professions Code (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayexpand...), not the California Constitution. And the clause that allowed amendments with 7/8 supermajority exists to make it easier to amend than if the clause did not exist, since by default initiatives can’t be modified by the legislature at all (Constitution Article II Sec 10(c) https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...)! It is common to choose a threshold above the known opposition (my earlier comment with more examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28259306), and 7/8 is above the 73% that voted for AB5 (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xht...).

This post makes a good point, in particular that one generation’s house price appreciation (really, land rent and price appreciation) is the next generation’s shelter price inflation. And the obvious solution is higher land taxes and more incentives to construct new housing.

However, I would add nuance that using the word “investment” as synonymous with price appreciation is only partly true because any investment’s value comes from capital gains or dividends. And I dispute his claim that if buying is a good investment, then prices need to increase faster than inflation (although expected rent growth due to supply restrictions may be priced in in the example of Littleton, CO). A house can be both affordable to all generations and a good investment, just as a laptop or a pickup truck or any capital good can be both broadly available and a good investment. You buy a car instead of leasing it because it is a good investment even though it depreciates and even though there is a healthy market of auto leases. Kevin Erdmann has a clear-eyed series on the role of landlords even in a healthy housing market, which is much like the role of lessors of any capital good https://www.mercatus.org/economic-insights/expert-commentary...

The key variable that he is forgetting in the nytimes rent calculator is rent inflation. In almost any market, there will be rental investors, and that’s a good thing; otherwise you would not be able to rent a house. What really matters for the long-term health of the country is making sure that rents don’t increase (YIMBYism) and turning inevitable central city rents into public goods (Georgism).

BlackRock and other landlords just convert owner occupied units into rentals, making it relatively more affordable to rent. If they are the problem, then prices would be too high but rents would be too cheap. But if both prices and rents are becoming unaffordable, then lack of overall supply is the underlying problem.

Although I am disappointed that OpenAI is not all gratis and open-source, I don’t think they ever promised to release everything open-source. In my recollection, their purpose is to prevent monopolization of advanced AI in the biggest tech giants and make it available to smaller businesses, and their “capped-profit” model is consistent with that. There is a spectrum of ways to release technology to preventing monopolization (open source, standards with FRAND patent grants, capped profit), and I think it is still honorable to develop a business that democratizes technology more even without going full nonprofit.

Yes, the vacancy tax encourages economic activity, which is the opposite of the income tax which has a side-effect of reducing economic activity. Another reason that camgunz’s analogy is flawed.

According to the plaintiffs, the problem with the vacancy tax is that the city is not supposed to force homeowners into the business of renting that they do not want (Ellis Act https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...). It is similar to the Obamacare individual mandate, which also forced people to enter the marketplace, which Congress is not allowed to do by the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution. But in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the US Supreme Court said that the individual mandate is just a tax and not a compelled transaction, since “It may often be a reasonable financial decision to make the payment rather than purchase insurance, unlike the “prohibitory” financial punishment in Drexel Furniture” (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/567/519/)

> A vacancy tax no more compels someone to rent their property than an income tax compels me to be unemployed

This is a bad analogy because an income tax is supposed to be for raising revenue, and it is generally understood that it should not be too high that it discourages too much economic activity. On the other hand, the Proposition M vacancy tax is explicitly intended to “disincentivize prolonged vacancies” by taxing up to $20k per unit per year (https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en/tax-keeping-residentia...), which the plaintiffs argue violates the Ellis Act which says that homeowners have the right not to be in the business of being a landlord (https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/sm...).

Oakland also has a vacancy tax (2018 Measure W, https://www.oaklandca.gov/topics/vacantpropertytax), but it is limited to $6k per year per property, whereas San Francsico’s 2022 Proposition M increases to $20k per unit, which the plaintiffs argue is so burdensome that is not simply a revenue-raising tax but it compels the owners into business against their will (https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/sm...).

Are the popular types of insulin still under patent, and if so, how is California’s initiative a solution? Are they hoping to license the necessary patents?

I listened to the Vox The Weeds podcast interviewing the same author and was frustrated that his many explanations seemed disconnected. Since old insulin patents have expired, is it that you are allowed to buy generic insulin but there are no manufacturers, or that you not allowed to buy generic insulin because recent advancements are so good that doctors won’t prescribe the old stuff anymore? And no one will make generic insulin because the brand-name companies will undercut them and there are so many kinds you need to make, but basically a $100 million donation to the world by California will fix all that?

For an explanation of the shift in policy around 2006 that caused the Great Recession and the current housing shortage, I recommend Kevin Erdmann, “Housing Policy, Monetary Policy, and the Great Recession” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667309 and his other articles https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/kevin-erdmann. Erdmann disputes the standard explanation of the Great Recession that excess credit and behavioral economics caused a housing construction boom which caused a pop (e.g. the first Planet Money podcast The Giant Pool of Money, the movie The Big Short, the book House of Debt). Instead, he claims that there was never a construction boom at all; regulators killed the housing construction sector and entry-level mortgages because they mistook a shortage of homes in the Bay Area for a glut of homes in Las Vegas, and unrelated cities such as Atlanta were innocent victims.

> The loss in tax revenue due to prop 13 is roughly $17bn per year.

I’m not sure where you got your number. I presume that you took the HJTA cumulative tax break from that link ($528 billion) and divided it by 31 years (1978 to 2009)? If so, this is most likely an underestimate because the tax break increases over time for properties that do not change hands. Moreover, HJTA does not explain how they calculated their cumulative tax break number, and it is an old article from 13 years ago.

Your estimate is far lower than the original article’s estimate based on the Census ACS, which is “$68 billion per year, or $5,200 per household”.

> California lost a similar amount just to EDD fraud $31bn (probably every year).

I agree that this was terrible, though I think that was a one-time event due to the relaxed unemployment application process due to COVID-19.

> Let us fix fraud and corruption before raising taxes.

Let’s do both.

Property taxes (particularly the land portion) are not only for raising money. They also reduce inequality, reduce the incentive to speculate on underused land, make it easier for new generations to enter the market, and reduce cyclical price swings (see Henry George, Progress and Poverty).

> Why is Prop 13 welfare?

When I talk to my dad about Proposition 13, the one thing he remembers about the ads is that it was supposed to keep widows and single moms from losing their house. In other words, he thinks of it as an entitlement program to help poor residents. But as the article points out, it is a subsidy not for the poor; it is instead a subsidy that regressively targets property owners (including landlords and commercial properties) at the expense of recent buyers and non-property owners (including widows and single moms who do not own an appreciating property).

> This kind of logic results in net loss to citizens: > https://time.com/5530386/aoc-amazon-new-york-hq2/

I agree with you that it is unfortunate that politicians such as AOC conflate economic development incentives with welfare. That has nothing to do with Proposition 13, which is not an incentive program. In fact, the incentives that Proposition 13 does contain (to avoid developing or selling which trigger reassessment) perversely exacerbate the housing scarcity that it was supposed to alleviate.

> Also, why are those against Prop 13 the most silent (usually) on corruption in the state?

Your final question seems to imply that opponents of Proposition 13 are a special interest who are ok with corruption. I disagree. I think an impartial observer can analyze the state’s largest entitlement program and complain about the obvious regressive aspects of it.

The article is not really satire. It is describing Proposition 13 seriously and accurately. It is Proposition 13 that makes a mockery of welfare programs, and he’s right that everyone in California should learn its regressive design and consequences.

This is a good practical article. One minor clarification:

> cross-origin API requests will require these preflight requests, notably including: … Any request including credentials

No, setting XMLHttpRequest’s withCredentials:true and fetch’s credentials:"include" to send the user’s Cookie with the request does not imply that a preflight request must be made, since <script> and <form> sent the Cookie with cross-site requests (back in the CSRF days when the default Cookie SameSite flag was effectively SameSite=None). Maybe he was referring to a custom header such as Authorization, which does trigger prefetch.

> those wanting housing have effectively no say at all.

One of the points that William Fischel makes in Zoning Rules! is that when a developer responds to the profit motive from the market, he is representing the interests of future tenants who need housing. Conversely, when San Francisco Leftists oppose developments because they oppose developers making a profit, they are unwittingly opposing the interests of future tenants. This is part of what makes housing in San Francisco such an unsolved problem: those who claim to represent tenants seeking affordable housing (such as the trade group CCHO) actively fight private development.

One San Francisco-specific building code that might make it difficult to subdivide an office building into smaller rooms is SFBC 1204 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s... that requires almost all habitable rooms to have a window for natural light. In San Francisco, we trust mechanical ventilation, but for some reason we don’t trust electric lights. I think this code is an obsolete holdover that has nothing to do with health or safety anymore.

He was also very active on twitter https://twitter.com/thomas_lord, but I do not know if any of it is technology related (as opposed to arguing about communism vs capitalism in housing, which is where I know him from).

I think the crux of the article is this: they used the protected monopoly on one market (e.g. CDMA modems) to gain an unfair advantage in the other markets (all the other chips in a cell phone).

> Qualcomm's patent licensing fees were calculated based on the value of the entire phone, not just the value of chips that embodied Qualcomm's patented technology. This effectively meant that Qualcomm got a cut of every component of a smartphone—most of which had nothing to do with Qualcomm's cellular patents.

Yes. After observing San Francisco’s acrimonious supervisor redistricting last month (in which politicians and special interests lobbied the nonpartisan commission to move neighborhoods to one district or other to maintain or gain political power), this article has convinced me that the problem is single-winner district elections in the first place. Every map is flawed when only one person represents the district per election. And the solution is proportional representation where multiple people win in each election (although the exact method of proportional representation can be debated).

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2F...

How do these certificates compare against letsencrypt on the technical dimensions? e.g. certificate chain size, rate limits, whether every certificate is published to the certificate transparency logs, what OSs the root CAs are compatible with?

This peculiar behavior (where the Service health check is unaware of the Deployment’s known instances) mirrors Google Compute Engine (where the httpLoadBalancer’s healthCheck is independent of the instanceGroupManager’s known instances). If you want your program to exit as soon as possible rather than waiting for a SIGKILL from the instance group manager, you have to hard-code the health check timeouts like so:

1. After a SIGTERM, the shutdownHook should keep the HTTP server running. Future /@status requests must return an error, but user requests must still succeed!

2. The shutdownHook sleeps for a minimum of the load balancer health check’s checkIntervalSec * unhealthyThreshold + timeoutSec (which by the way must be less than the instanceGroupManager’s health check’s checkIntervalSec * unhealthyThreshold if it uses the same endpoint)

3. Now the load balancer should not be sending new requests. The shutdownHook then waits for any existing requests to drain.

4. After requests drain, the shutdownHook can finally exit gracefully.

It is annoying to have to wait for the health check’s delay (rather than simply draining existing requests as in AWS), but it seems to be necessary for Google-designed load balancers and instance group managers.

Yes, you’re right. The Mayor’s ordinance would encourage a proliferation of private cameras that could turn into police surveillance cameras any time there is an alleged crime, and requires only summary information after the event. This is an end run around the surveillance ordinance which allows the public to review a report about the cameras (software, camera type, location) before they are installed and to view an inventory of all public cameras.

There also seems to be quite a bit of anti-police animosity among activists in general.

Personally, I think the surveillance ordinance is probably too restrictive in prohibiting the police from using technology and not protective enough in ensuring proper policies for the use of the technology that is available. To me, what matters is that the technology is used with professional care, not that the inventory is enumerated months in advance.

Full video of Board of Supervisors Rules Committee hearing https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/40566?meta_id=...

The EFF’s lawsuit Williams v San Francisco (the police won on a technicality since their use of the cameras was grandfathered) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/01/san-francisco-police-i...

The question is whether the police should be allowed to view live footage owned by private organizations of an ongoing crime (such as the mass looting of the Louis Vuitton store in Union Square on Nov 19, 2021). Under current law, it takes at least 3 months for the police to install a camera or borrow a camera feed owned by a neighborhood nonprofit. The only exception is “an emergency involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person”, which is almost the same as the use of deadly force law (Penal Code 835a(c)(1)(A)). So basically, currently, the police are justified in borrowing a video feed of a criminal at the same instant that they are justified in killing the criminal. The Mayor tried to allow the police to borrow video feeds during property crime incidents, but Supervisor Aaron Peskin blocked her.

* The current surveillance policy https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

* Penal Code 835a(c)(1)(A) https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

* Mayor London Breed’s proposed ordinance: Board File 220080 https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5397200...

* Peskin’s proposed initiative: Board File 220109 https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5397228...

I also tried running a service in podman 3.4.2 on ubuntu recently, and I agree that it had a lot of rough edges e.g. ports that fail to publish when restarting a service, podman ps losing track of containers if you ran podman as User= in systemd. There are lots of command incantations that you have to learn when using rootless podman which are not clearly documented (loginctl enable-linger, sudo --user USER XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u USER) systemctl --user restart, usermod --add-subuids, podman unshare chown). Hopefully it becomes clearer over time.

> the same anti-“woke” propaganda

I don’t think the term “luxury beliefs” maps one-for-one to wokism or hatred for elites. The key is that the speaker is far removed from the consequences of his actions so is able to espouse edgy but incorrect and even hypocritical theories. For example, in San Francisco blogger Tim Redmond and supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin are long-time homeowners who espouse anti-capitalist theories in order to justify their actions to prevent housing, which results in higher rents for ordinary workers. I wouldn’t call these out-of-touch people “woke” or especially elite. But I think the term “luxury beliefs” applies well.

See Noah Smith’s examples of luxury beliefs which are not simply wokism: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1474413184891113478

I think most of these backwards policies come from simplistic “luxury beliefs” of the rich that are disconnected from reality (https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...).

A popular luxury belief is that police brutality and mass incarceration are the biggest problems in the judicial system nationally, so the solution is to virtually stop catching petty thieves who steal from cars and shops.

A popular luxury belief on housing in San Francisco is that allowing developers to add housing supply harms poor people. So they delay and add costs to new housing in the name of helping the poor and ignore the fact that these very restrictions ratchet up the rent.

A popular luxury belief in education is that black and brown people are less prepared for academic tests so it is racist to use tests to make decisions. This ignores all the poor people who benefitted from the incentives to study. Hence the decision to eliminate admissions requirements to the magnet school Lowell.

Another luxury belief not mentioned is that vaping is just as immoral as smoking. So even while we loosened marijuana restrictions, San Francisco increased taxes and restrictions on vaping to match the restrictions on smoking.

By the way, although the decision to make Lowell High School a normal lottery-based school was reversed on procedural problems, the superintendent has vowed to bring back the resolution the first thing in January. So we're still going in the wrong direction there http://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=C9K2...

> I don't know what that means.

In Henry George’s terminology, he decomposed income into three components based on the three factors of production. Income from competitive labor is called wages, income from competitive capital is called interest, and income from land and other noncompetitive monopolies is called rent. He proposed to tax land and other monopolies heavily, while exempting labor and capital from tax. What I meant is that a progressive income tax has higher rates for people and companies with high profits while exempting capital and labor expenses, which is similar to the Georgist idea of taxing monopolies more heavily than capital and labor.

> You can read the details in "The Flat Tax: Updated Revised Edition"

Thanks for giving the reference to Hall and Rabushka https://www.hoover.org/research/flat-tax. Previously you mentioned making the curve progressive, which is not a flat tax so I just assumed you meant income tax.

In comparison to the current income tax, it seems that Hall and Rabushka do not exclude business interest expenses or personal mortgage interest, but they still do exclude wage expenses. Wages are progressive at the low end (due to the personal allowance) but their tax is not otherwise progressive. And they totally exclude personal capital gains from taxation (such as the sale of your house) (although the current income tax is not very good at taxing capital gains of real estate).

Basically, the point of the flat tax seems to be to eliminate complicated deductions, credits, and depreciation, and they are skeptical of progressivity which they see as “redistribution”.

Note that they themselves admit that their flat income tax should be combined with property taxes: “We believe that taxing housing is properly ceded to local governments under our federal system. Local property taxes capture part of the value of the services of a house.” (from Chapter 5: Q&A)

> Its a harmful distortion of the price system.

I disagree that LVT (tax on scarcity rents) is a harmful distortion on prices. Chapters 1-4 of Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing is a good book on this topic. https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Economics-Land-Housing-Rya... As you note, the whole point of prices is to incentivize capital investment. But the difference with land is that it has a vertical long-term supply curve, so more money in land does not result in the creation of any more land; it’s just a transfer payment to the old owner.

Ownership of natural resources is a major undeserved source of inequality. We see the inequality playing out in San Francisco: residents who happened to own land became rich, whereas residents who did not own land became impoverished, just as Henry George wrote: “it is as though an immense wedge is being driven through the middle. Those above it are elevated, but those below are crushed” https://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp0.htm. It is better for the poor and better capital allocation to “distort” the economy to prevent extreme inequality between rentiers and laborers+capital.