yonran

You’re right. When Henry George introduced the land value tax, he made it clear that in urban areas he wished to capture the value which is created by the community while the landowner sits and collects increasing rents, not value that existed naturally (https://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp19.htm):

> All these advantages attach to the land. On this land — and no other — they can be utilized. For here is the center of population: the focus of exchange, the marketplace, the workshop of industry. Density of population has given this land productive power equivalent to multiplying its original fertility a thousandfold.… The most valuable lands on earth, those with the highest rent, are not those with the highest natural fertility. Rather, they are lands given a greater usefulness by population density.

I think in principle, an income tax is similar to a land value tax in that both of them are trying to capture monopoly rents. Compared to the property tax, the land value tax exempts investing in improvements, just as the income tax exempts capital investments and interest.

The important differences are in what they exempt from taxation. America’s income tax exempts imputed rent, so a business or household who happened to buy land that has appreciated gets a discount on their taxes compared to their younger neighbors (who have to pay inflated prices). Whereas a land tax would capture imputed rent, so old landowners are on a more even playing field with new businesses/households, incentivizing young people to compete, making land value tax better than income tax.

The land tax’s major additional exemption is labor. A bakery’s land taxes don’t go up at all if he puts in twice as much effort, whereas his income taxes would at least double. So LVT incentivizes work, making land value tax better than income tax.

On the other hand, progressive taxation automatically taxes other monopoly rents, whereas the land value tax depends on the government assessing the value of land and any other important monopolies.

> Sales and property taxes are regressive. Income tax with marginal tax brackets is progressive. This is a pretty simple concept.

Not true. Income taxes (as implemented in the US) have enormous blind spots that favor homeowners at the expense of renters: untaxed imputed rent and the capital gains tax exclusion for your main home. These undermine the claim that the income tax is more progressive than the property tax.

> Landlords will pass on the cost of property taxes to renters.

Not for the most part. The question is, when the property tax increases, how much of it is eaten by the landlord (in lower post-tax rent), and how much is a burden on the tenant (in higher gross rent due to reduced housing supply)? In California where supply is inelastic, I would argue that the low property tax is almost all a windfall to the landowner rather than the tenant.

In 2020 Stephen Martin-Pinto ran for Board of Supervisors (aka city council) in the West Portal district (District 7) but was rejected as a matter of course (since he’s Republican). As a candidate, he was refreshingly honest about his positions. However, I was disappointed that he did not favor adding a lot more housing to his district. But he tweets now.

> Rents in CA (bay area in particular) are a function of demand more than landlords' cost

Exactly. In other words, especially where supply is constrained, the property tax is incident on the landowner rather than the tenant.

> my take on that is that's more caused by NIMBYism and an unwillingness to build enough housing to meet demand

Yes, the difference in land use is bigger than the difference in tax rates. However, when property taxes are higher, there is more incentive for cities and households to allow more housing. And even if you believe that property taxes are regressive, it should give you pause to realize that it is more than made up for by California’s bad land use restrictions.

> Property tax is absolutely not a progressive tax, by definition: everyone pays the same rate based on the value of their home, not based on their income or means.

No, that’s just who writes the check. You had it right the first time. The tax incidence is who bears the burden of the tax. Since property taxes are capitalized into the price and the supply is not very elastic, an increase in projected tax payments (due to an increasing rate or increasing property value) are largely borne by the landowner (in the form of a lower sales price or a sales price that grows more slowly) rather than the young worker who buys/rents it.

I disagree with that article (which repeats the ITEP WhoPays report). It incorrectly assumes that the incidence of the property tax is on the renters that occupy a house rather than the landowner. If you think that property taxes are more regressive in Texas than California you would predict that poor people pay more for rent in Texas than California, when the truth is the reverse. And if you think that property taxes are regressive, you would predict that low property taxes reduce inequality, but the truth is that California’s low property taxes only enrich landowners at the expense of the poor and are the biggest source of inequality. The property tax is a rather progressive tax insofar as its incidence is on those who gain from excluding others, while it allows taxes on labor to be low.

I thought it would have been a better workaround to the Aereo ruling to have separate companies for the antenna + digitizer hardware and the DVR software. If one company simply offers a VM in the cloud that has an antenna and digitizer of various frequencies, it could be used for many different purposes (streaming TV, research like politicaladarchive.org, police scanners like broadcastify.com, learning GPS, etc.), and as long as they don’t provide the DVR service themselves they aren’t acting like a cable company. And separate companies can sell software to run on the VMs to make it all user friendly.

Can podman machine create a shared volume between your Mac and your container?

Interestingly, it is the Left faction of San Francisco politics that have been slipping clauses like that (allowing legislative amendments, but requiring an estimated percentage that would overcome the current opponents and requiring amendments to “further the purpose” of the act) into local initiatives recently. June 2018 Proposition F (free lawyer to tenants facing eviction, which is a policy that both sides supported), allowed the BoS to amend “if the amendment serves to further the purpose of this Initiative” https://webbie1.sfpl.org/multimedia/pdf/elections/June5_2018.... Then in November 2018 Proposition C (double the gross receipts tax to fund homelessness, which is a policy that only the Left minority at the time supported and the Mayor opposed), allowed the BoS to amend “by a two-thirds vote but only to further the Findings and intent” https://webbie1.sfpl.org/multimedia/pdf/elections/november6-... In Nov 2019 Proposition F (increase disclosure requirements political ads, supported by the Left faction of the BoS) similarly had a nonstandard amendment procedure calculated to include the Left faction’s estimated percentage https://webbie1.sfpl.org/multimedia/pdf/elections/November5_... The failed rent control enabling California initiatives (Proposition 10 Nov 2018 https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2018/general/pdf/topl.pdf#page=83, Proposition 21 Nov 2020 https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2020/general/pdf/topl.pdf#page=29) as well as a millionaire’s tax to fund mental health (Proposition 2 Nov 2018 https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2018/general/pdf/topl.pdf#page=13) also contained 2/3 supermajority amendmendability.

So basically the authors of Proposition 22 took this clause that the Left has been evolving in San Francisco anti-business initiatives and copied it to their pro-business California initiative (changing the supermajority requirement to 87.5% to overcome the 73% who supported AB5), and this clause is contributing to the downfall of their own initiative. Ironic!

Did the cops give the scooter shop a citation for failing to record the source of the stolen article on https://www.leadsonline.com/? (This post from last month recounted how a laptop repair man in New York City got in trouble for this law https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810019 specifically Administrative Code §20-273 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC... (electronics record required for each purchase AND sale of second-hand articles) and Rules Title 28 §21-07 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC... (electronics record must be at a designated website leadsonline.com)). The previous post was about the unintended consequence of the law on law-abiding shops, but here we should see the intended consequence that it should shut down shops that fence stolen goods.

> Luckily the W3C deities gave us exactly such a gift in the form (pun intended) of the enctype attribute.

Minor quibble: enctype="text/plain" didn’t come from W3C. HTML 4.0 forms only defines enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" (which pct-encodes the json delimiters {"":}) and enctype="multipart/form-data" (which has a non-json Boundary prefix) so if those were the only enctypes that browsers used, then this exploit would not have worked. https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4

WHATWG HTML5 does define enctype="text/plain" behavior https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-infrastr.... According to the mozilla docs, it was “Introduced by HTML5 for debugging purposes.” https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/fo... But I doubt it was created by WHATWG either; in 2004 the HTML5 editor Ian Hickson said “I agree it is brain-dead (it's IE-compatible)” https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2... Unfortunately I can’t see history of the spec before 2006 though https://github.com/whatwg/html

Regarding the violation for electronic records of used goods for sale, he read the summons in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=965BLLWv8h8. The citations were for Administrative Code §20-273 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC... (electronics record required for each purchase AND sale of second-hand articles) and Rules Title 28 §21-07 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC... (electronics record must be at a specified website https://www.leadsonline.com/). If he didn’t purchase second-hand devices but did sell second-hand devices, then it seems that he would be required to enter each sale transaction on leadsonline. I’m not sure whether he tried to record each sale transaction there as required by the law.

I don’t have a problem with the tools in the tax code to defer realization for capital gains taxes during a lifetime e.g. 1031 exchange, traditional 401(k) or IRA, in-kind redemption for ETFs, etc., so long as the taxes eventually do get paid on the gains. The real issue in my opinion is the loopholes in the tax code to avoid capital gains taxes completely e.g. step-up basis on death + $11.7 million estate and gift tax exclusion per person, $500k capital gains tax exclusion for sale of a home for a married couple (Section 121), Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts, Roth IRAs.

“Lots of people don't fill out all the choices” is an important downside. We’ve had Instant Runoff Voting in San Francisco since 2004, and people still don’t fill out all the choices, so their votes are discarded whereas the voters probably would have voted among the final two choices had there been a runoff election. For example, in June 2018 London Breed won the mayoral election against two candidates who were closer aligned politically (Jane Kim and Mark Leno, who were further left) https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22... and in Nov 2019 Chesa Boudin won the District Attorney race against 3 candidates who were more moderate https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22... . In both cases, the margin of victory was far more narrow than the number of votes that were exhausted in the final round of voting, so due to insufficient voter education I would consider vote splitting still a significant problem even with IRV. (Another possibility is that the ballots are exhausted by the 3 candidate limit in San Francisco.)

Thanks for the correction. Please print out and sign the petitions! https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/

> these kids are not broken.

> we are calling it "merit"

It sounds like you’re arguing about who deserves the prestige of going to Lowell rather than who actually benefits and contributes to the experience of attending classes at Lowell, which is the most populous school in San Francisco and has fairly large class sizes and tough grading.

Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.

I think bunnypapr would have been perfect to protect teachers if safety were the primary concern https://bunnypapr.com

The San Francisco Board of Education have made many displays of incompetence and malice this past year which have been covered by both local and national media.

During the pandemic, the Board of Education announced that 44 schools were named after oppressors (many were justified, but the names committee also made numerous errors) and that principals and families needed to come up with new names for their schools over Zoom. Board member Gabriela Lopez defended even the egregious mistakes, demonstrating that she only cares about “uplifting” and “holding” people of color but not facts https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Unfortunately, Lopez is not up for recall yet, but her enablers are.

Alison Collins led the resolution to remove academic admissions to San Francisco’s magnet high school Lowell High. But instead of debating the pros and cons of having a magnet school, she caricatured the school as bed of “toxic racism” and dismissed the Asian parents who supported an admissions criteria as “a bunch of racists”. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?l... Afterwards, people discovered her previous tweets stereotyping Asians and her pattern of abusing her power (https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352). When her colleagues selected a different Vice President, she lashed out with a lawsuit calling her opponents racists (https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-...)

The other board members haven't done anything offensive but haven't shown any leadership either. They just enabled the radicals. We don't know exactly why SFUSD didn't open the schools this year (negotiations were behind closed doors), but I suspect it has to do with the board members' extreme deference to the teachers' union that endorsed them.

I encourage anyone who is a San Francisco citizen to print out the recall petitions and mail them in https://recallsfschoolboard.org/

See also this explainer The Case for Recalling the School Board https://www.engardio.com/blog/school-board-recall-case

Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care; the problems of the article are virtually nonexistent at Lowell. I don’t think Lowell was particularly selective (I think something like 50% of applicants get in) and there were plenty of poor students (including myself) who benefited from an academic public school that does have both wealthy and non-wealthy students who care about learning (as opposed to private and suburban schools which definitely do discriminate on the basis of wealth/income).

> either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination

The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).

So the focus of the article should have been on eliminating the step up basis (which ProPublica admitted is a bipartisan thing to do) or other ways of avoiding capital gains tax rather than conflating tax avoidance with tax deferral. And all the activities they complained about billionaires doing are things that the middle class can relate to too: deferring taxes (401(k)), avoiding taxes using step up in basis and $500k home gain exemption, borrowing on paper wealth without realizing gains (HELOC).

> 2020's Prop 19 to reform property taxes just a bit had about $20 million behind it, and it didn't even land on the ballot.

Correction: in 2020, Proposition 19 (which limited Proposition 13/58 property tax breaks for parent-child transfers to only farms and owner-occupied “family homes”) did pass 51%-49%, whereas Proposition 15 (which would have eliminated Proposition 13 tax breaks for commercial property) was on the ballot but failed 48%-52%.

I read the articles about Robert Tillman (e.g. https://missionlocal.org/2019/04/historic-mission-district-l...), and apparently the only thing he did that made him a “total jerk” was making a proposal to produce a necessity of life in a city with a desperate shortage, following all the zoning procedures to the tee, and refusing to concede to extortionary demands from politicians and other self-appointed gatekeepers.

By the way I never saw a “tantrum” from him; he followed the law methodically and for that he was ridiculed by the press as a deviant (“kamikaze” according to Joe Eskanazi https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...). He publicly shared his research (e.g. https://groups.google.com/g/sfbarentersfed/c/mHT2l4zDyKg/m/X...) and I think would have wanted his project to be an example to others of how to make the rule of law the norm in San Francisco, but that was not the agenda of the politicians and the press.

I get that people (such as Supervisor Hillary Ronen, gatekeeper Erick Arguello, and so-called “Progressive” journalist Tim Redmond) are upset about people profiting off the housing shortage. But if they are upset about a landowner making ~$130k per unit for investing in alleviating the shortage, they should be livid over every single homeowner in the neighborhood who sells a house for $2 million and makes more profit per unit without increasing the housing supply at all. That they asymmetrically target housing producers while remaining silent to idle speculators gives a perverse disincentive against creating housing and reveals a NIMBY preference by these so-called “Progressives”. In the end I think their advocacy does more harm than good in San Francisco even when it is in the name of capturing some value for the poor.

I bet many banks have similar language prohibiting sharing logins, so you could make the argument that the core business of Plaid could be considered hacking under CFAA. I hope that the legitimate use of tools to do things on the Internet will be normalized before this argument is tried in court.

To add more context, only a few cities (Berkeley, Santa Monica) had strong rent control with vacancy control in the 1980s and 1990s. Other cities, such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, had rent control but have always allowed the rent to reset to market rate when the unit is vacant.

The California Law called Costa-Hawkins phased out vacancy control in all cities from 1995 to 1999. After 1999, landlords have the right to set the initial rent, overriding local vacancy controls. (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...)

In Nov 2018, California voters rejected Proposition 10 41%-59%, which would have repealed Costa-Hawkins and allowed vacancy controls again (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_10,_Local_Ren...). Berkeley, Richmond, and Santa Monica would immediately have imposed vacancy controls under their existing laws.

In Nov 2020, California voters again rejected Proposition 21 40%-60%, which would have allowed vacancy controls that limit rent increases to 15% per vacancy (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_21,_Local_Ren...).

> My understanding is Prop 19 is easily evaded by trusts

No, trusts do not evade Proposition 19 (although some people scrambled to transfer to children with a trust before Feb 15 to avoid Proposition 19’s new terms). Under Proposition 13/RTC 60, the assessor always looks through the trust to see the beneficial owner at any time. LLCs may be useful though to preserve up to 49% of the discount on transfer as described in this article: https://www.pe.com/2021/01/15/prop-19-whats-next-for-homeown....

> Even without hiding ownership, an inheritor could easily live in the property for a year after inheriting (or claim to —— enforcement seems difficult), lock in the old tax basis, and then move out

No, the Board of Equalization’s guidance is to remove the parent-child exclusion as soon as the child stops qualifying for the homeowner’s exemption. According to the Board of Equalization letter to assessors from 2021-01-08, “at the time the family home is no longer the primary residence of a transferee, the change in ownership exclusion that applied at the initial transfer of the family home is lost.” https://www.boe.ca.gov/meetings/pdf/2021/011421-M1a1-Legal-A...

I hope that eventually we will return to more predictable police power and broad taxation, as described by this quote: “The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that private property shall not be taken for a public use without just compensation was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole” (Armstrong v. United States https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/364/40/).

The author, Nick Hanauer, has a podcast (https://pitchforkeconomics.com/) that is heavy on demonizing the very rich 1% and vaguely blaming “neoliberalism” (by which he generally means Milton Friedman-style libertarianism; not sure what he thinks of progressive neoliberals https://exponents.substack.com/p/what-neoliberals-believe). It’s similar to how the Democrats promise not to raise taxes on anyone whose income is under $400,000 (https://joebiden.com/two-tax-policies/).

I think this populist “Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree!” sentiment is probably the wrong focus. I hope people will eventually support broader policies to promote equality (https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/agenda.html), antimonopoly policies, and broader tax increases (such as land value taxes and closing capital gains tax loopholes) instead of singularly focusing on bogeymen.

> Paul Revere’s participation in a Revolutionary War campaign “connected to the colonization of the Penobscot” tribe

It’s even more ridiculous than it sounds. As documented in the Families for San Francisco report https://familiesforsanfrancisco.com/Updates/ https://familiesforsanfrancisco.com/gallery/School%20Renamin... Revere was fighting the British in the Penobscot Expedition, not colonizing the Penobscot tribe of Native Americans as claimed by the School Names Advisory Committee.

> Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s role in a controversy over a Civic Center Plaza flag display that included the Confederate banner

This is ironic because in the resolution that the School Board adopted in 2018 that started this renaming business (https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/files/AYV7FN7557...), Feinstein is listed as one of the schools that they “proudly, confidently and with the advocacy and support of the community” renamed schools to! But now, the School Board has decided that it is time to rename the school away from her name.

> One school was found to be named after a street that was named after a South Carolina county that was named after an English politician who was impeached by the House of Commons in the 17th century.

They’re talking about Clarendon Elementary School, which is named after Clarendon Ave. The committee member claimed/speculated that this street is named after Clarendon County, South Carolina, but I haven’t found documentation proving this (it started showed up in maps of San Francsico around 1890). Clarendon County is named after Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, who owned the Carolinas and who oppressed people by violating habeas corpus in the 1660s.

Given the manifest stupidity at the school board, I wonder whether there will be increasing interest in creating new charter schools or interest in converting existing schools to charter schools (which must be approved by a majority of teachers).

Yes, the redevelopment of owner-occupied housing is a win-win if you believe that more supply reduces rent. Scott Wiener’s SB 50 in 2019 was exactly such a bill; it would have allowed redevelopment of owner-occupied housing into apartments, but it would not have allowed redevelopment of existing rental housing. However, Left-NIMBYs who fundamentally reject the benefits of private development will come up with any excuse (however specious) to oppose it. If you don’t think private housing has any value (or worse, if you think that new housing actively harms people), then you can always come up with excuses to prohibit it (e.g. by demanding that the government “value capture” it so that the developers won’t make any return on their investment on average). Here’s an example of an op-ed opposing SB 50 from San Francisco’s most vocal Left-NIMBYs: https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/how-the-state-can-help-ci...

I feel like I’m reading a repeat of dismisive comments of how goofy masks are a year ago. So far, almost all the comments are focusing on appearance rather than effectiveness.

The benefits of a PAPR include far better filtration than a surgical mask or even an N95 respirator (edit: inexplicably the BioVYZR only uses KN95 filters though https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/biovyzr-venture-out-breat...), better tolerance to leaks, and better comfort for people who find masks uncomfortable.

For a $15 (in quantity) DIY version of a PAPR which uses pulmonary function testing (PFT) filters, see https://viralhelmets.medium.com/15-viral-helmet-version-of-a... and instructions at https://www.viralhelmets.com/.