yellowapple

Is there an option to split property tax into separate land value tax + improvement tax?

Highly-structured outputs (like what you'd need for tool calls) seems like it'd be easier to put out than arbitrary text, no? At the very least, even something like BERT could make the decision of “Would any of my available tools be useful here?” and delegate to some deeper-thinking model to structure that tool call.

> Given that it lacks both broad world knowledge and tool calling integration in any way, that seems kind of like a dead-end.

In its current form probably. I think the key to taking this further would be to split the listening model from the speaking model, and have some model(s) in between that can do those database/knowledgebase queries and tool calls and such and influence how the speaking model response to what the hearing model perceives. That's probably pretty similar to how ChatGPT Live and similar are operating (STT→LLM→TTS), but Dessa demonstrates that it doesn't have to necessarily be text/language, specifically, as the intermediary — and therefore it doesn't have to necessarily be an LLM, specifically, as that intermediate model.

Pretty sure in most/all the cases mentioned, they were available as extensions long before Zen had them. In particular, both Zen's and Firefox's built-in vertical tabs feel like a bit of a downgrade from Tree Style Tabs (which I continue to use on Firefox, and also used on Zen last time I tried it).

> If that's not how you interpreted it

That's indeed not how I interpreted it.

Being a good person, being a good citizen, and making the world better are all really sides of the same (somehow-three-sided) coin: do what you can for yourself, for your community, for your society. They apply even in the complete absence of hierarchies and higher authorities (and are indeed the very core of anarchism: making societal decisions bottom-up from individuals and the communities thereof, not top-down from some supreme executive authority).

“the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor”

Nobody in this thread (AFAICT) is arguing for that. By all means, people who contribute more to society should be rewarded for it. The only thing being argued is that everyone deserves to enjoy a baseline standard of living, on top of which they might receive additional benefits in exchange for the work they do. As automation continues to expand, providing everyone with that baseline standard of living unconditionally becomes more and more practical to achieve, in which case it becomes more and more unethical for society to refuse to do so.

The first step is to quantify “everything you need”, and go individually from there.

The adult world doesn't have to be far more complicated than that.

> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal

I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.

While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.

> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.

I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.

FYI: OpenStreetMap seems to be blocking the site with a 403 error (suggesting maybe it's pulling too much data from OSM's servers?): https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Blocked_tiles

Especially in the western half of the US. Exactly four, half of them here in Nevada, none of them in California despite Google itself being headquartered there.

Microsoft almost certainly ain't the one hiring construction workers. That work gets contracted out.

As someone who uses a USB equivalent to this piece of hardware (in my case, a Behringer UMC1820): having MIDI and audio inputs on the same interface is a nice convenience feature. Avoids needing to use up multiple ports on the host machine, and avoids a lot of the time synchronization issues that arise with trying to use multiple interfaces at once.

Did OpenAI acquire OpenClaw, or just the guy who created it? Last I checked it's still under the OpenClaw Foundation's stewardship.

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.

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.

The “LVT-funded” in “LVT-funded UBI” above ain't there just for decoration :)

In this case the version with fewer steps does indeed work quite well.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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¹ within any state's territory, of course.

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”?

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.

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”.

Full LVT “never works” because landowners have a vested interest in sabotaging it and the vast majority of politicians are landowners.

> 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.

> 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!

> 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

It's enough money to me to be worth taking.