In addition, the socioeconomic gaps are wider. So much so that the software engineer rushing to their 10am meeting doesn't want your $50. The Uber driver does, though.
The rate of being killed is pretty damn high in your circle? What is s/killed? Or is it just a harassment issue? If it's so high, why keep doing it? I'm struggling to understand the risk/reward, and what the risk actually is compared to what it's perceived to be.
s/foo/bar/ is search & replace foo with bar. So yes, they're saying the rate of harassment is high. Even if we posit that >99% of men aren't harassers, a solo female traveler is going to encounter a lot more than 100 men, so is quite likely to be harassed.
I do like that the article touches exactly this, and even though I'm a stranger to the entire concept, it makes sense:
>Hardly anyone hitchhikes any more, which is a shame because it encourages the habit of generosity from drivers, and it nurtures the grace of gratitude and patience of being kinded from hikers
yes. There are mafia&organized beggers and cheaters in every major tourist city.
Someone looking for your pity $, but is actually faking it.
especially gypsies
Not sure I agree, the systematicness can be cultural as well.
In my area there's a bunch of Islands with ferry service, but the ferry terminals are often remotely located on these islands, away from lodging and population centers.
It's fairly common to see people hitchhiking their way to hop off the islands. Every time I've chosen to do it, I'm still filled with the same sense of gratitude Kevin Kelly describes. The folks picking me up always feel like they're experiencing the sense of levity and kindness, not habituality and scorn.
I wasn't trying to enforce reciprocity. I'm just saying that if you don't need help you shouldn't be asking for it from strangers.
If you have a job and income you can afford transportation. Behaving like a broke person when you are not is taking advantage of other people, and taking limited kindness resources away from people who actually need help.
If you are morally obligated to use your own resources if you have them, then you're stratifying society. The financially comfortable can never ride a bus. The rich cannot drive themselves. Nobody can ever learn what those less fortunate are like, and must necessarily look down upon them and use their imagination to figure out what "those people" care about and need.
So that's not a great outcome either.
(I don't exactly disagree with you either. Accepting a scarce resource from someone when you possess significantly more? That rubs me the wrong way too. Get their mailing address and pay it back later, in spades, if it deprived them of something!)
If you tax land the only thing you will end up with is higher rents. You are punishing the wrong people.
Want to punish the right people? Cut taxes so that people can save cash faster, afford houses earlier and stop renting from their landlords.
Build more actually-affordable housing, too. Not these blocks of luxury apartments with swimming pools that nobody uses. (See HDB, Singapore -- that’s what the US needs more of)
Land is taxed but improvements are not. That tax is not passed down because landlords are already charging the highest price they can.
The tax simply redirect the unearned income to the public coffer which are either spent on public investment that further increase land value or redistributed as citizen's dividend.
Meanwhile landlords are free to construct as many buildings as they can without being penalized by higher taxes.
Empty lot, parking lots, and self storage facilities would be penalized because they wouldn't generate enough income to cover taxes on land, leading to more efficient utilization of land, as improvements are no longer penalized.
> Empty lot, parking lots, and self storage facilities would be penalized because they wouldn't generate enough income to cover taxes on land, leading to more efficient utilization of land
Right, so the city would be nothing but luxury (to maximize income to pay those taxes) high rise apartments packed tight every block.
No parks, no playgrounds, no soccer fields, no sports courts, no bike trails, no dog parks... none of the things that make living in an area pleasant. Also, no low income housing. Because none of those maximize "efficiency" (measured only in dollars) of every square inch of land.
Life is not pleasant if maximizing value extraction is the one and only #1 criteria. This is what land value tax misses.
Incorrect. Parks and other amenities raise land value. They would be an investment by the city to raise land value in a given area. People do not want to live in soulless concrete jungle. They want to live in a society full of amenities such as theater, parks, train station, basketball courts, etc.
Also, "luxury" housing cause what economists called "filtering", in which new construction are occupied by the upper strata of income, which means they pay for the cost. As housing age, this naturally becomes more affordable to the lower strata. This of course, depend on sufficient housing stock. Otherwise the inverse will happen.
Also, you only need to cover the cost of paying the land value tax to keep it, not to generate the maximum amount of revenue for that plot of land.
We are not talking about value extraction here, but making sure that landowners work for their keep, while the unearned income/economic rent that would otherwise goes to them is returned to society, because the value of the land is largely determined by the agglomeration effect, the sum total of the community's effort and entrepreneurial spirit. Otherwise, your private effort as individuals would flow to landowners reaping the benefit of increased land value, hence appreciation in real estate price.
I am responding to the comment I quoted, namely: "parking lots, and self storage facilities would be penalized because they wouldn't generate enough income to cover taxes on land".
So if a LVT has the explicit goal of eliminating things like parking lots and self storage units because those don't generate enough income to pay for the taxes, then what hope do things like playgrounds and parks have to continue existing.. they generate far less income than a self storage facility.
Parks and playgrounds increase the land value of the surrounding community. That results in higher LVT.
That creates a virtuous cycle for the local government who is administering those taxpayer paid amenities, same as other form of infrastructure and amenities.
That feels like wishfull thinking. What I see around me in practice is government doing all they can to sell off public lots (like parks) to developers to tear down the park and build another luxury condo. More tax revenue, more money in the government pocket, some bribes under the table, another loss of quality of life in the neighborhood.
> Under the tax scheme described, the reverse is true.
Explain how.. In a dense urban area, with LVT, that lot that held a park will bring even larger tax revenue when the city sells it off to a developer. Having the tax be based on maximum potential usage will only increase the temptation to sell it off and remove yet another park from the people.
I think this assumes politicians who care about subjectives like quality of life, and who are able to think in long-term sustainable city finances instead of just maximizing what they can grab in current fiscal year. We don't have any such politicians in power in the US.
No. If you want affordability, make the government efficient and tax people LESS.
The government steals half of my money, half of my landlord's money, and I have to pay my landlord’s income and property tax in addition to my own income tax.
This is why I still cannot afford a home even though I work in a senior role in AI. After paying all those damn taxes and everyone else’s taxes there is almost nothing left.
I’d imagine it’s less taxes and more you want to buy a nice house in the Bay Area where a lot of people are high earners and would be driving up prices on the low supply.
Yes and for some weird reason, the bay and all the nice places to live are all single-family and expensive as hell. Just build some soviet or Chinese style apartment blocks and give people housing like Singapore does its not that hard. This is not a democrat or republican issue, it is a have versus have-not issue.
The logical conclusion is that the residents of these desirable areas like the bay / San Diego / Seattle / DC actually want housing prices to stay high.
Building giant apartments would change the vibe of the Bay though, and my guess is some of people who want to live there also want to live in it as it is now and not what it would be with high rise apartments etc. There’s probably a way to do it well, but it’s a pretty heavy lift versus doing nothing, which is the current status quo.
Also doesn’t help there’s a lot of red tape as the other commenter mentioned.
I mean.. some people would prefer to live next to a forest or grassland, but nope, houses were built there, because people needed somewhere to live. Now that's not enough, and larger buildings are needed, and that includes socialist buildings.
I live in a former socialist country (well, part of a country, the country does not exist anymore), and when we needed more housing, we designated the land in the city to be for housing, ie. large socialist buildings. Then 1990s came, no more socialism, capitalism now, and no more large building projects, no new neighborhoods. So now, we have cows and cornfields in what would be prime realestate because the government won't change the zoning, all three neighbors there complain and apartments that used to be 120k eur maybe 20 years ago are now close to 500k eur.
If you want to live next to cows, move to a village, thousands want apartment buildings there, to live in a city.
Repealing all the bullcrap from the last 50yr that makes that artificially expensive to the point of being a non starter if not outright illegal is the hard part.
I'm also less obsessive than some people but I don't want to use anything proprietary or have to pay for a product to track my finances ("Hey you spend a lot, we can help, how about you spend more on us?" is just ridiculous).
I do everything with CSV exports of my bank accounts and credit cards. I drop the exports once a month into a directory and Python scripts (my newer versions of which are mostly written by LLMs) take all the analysis from there, breaking things down by category and by merchant (so that I can see if I'm unintentionally spending more on a particular merchant over time or if that merchant is charging more without notice).
I also have one credit card for strictly recurring expenses ONLY and never put non-recurring expenses on it. That way it's quite easy to see on that credit card bill what changed from month to month. If Comcrap tries to charge me $10 more one month they're going to be getting nasty messages from me pretty quickly.
> I also have one credit card for strictly recurring expenses
I do the same. I have a bank account dedicated to all those recurring expenses I track. Every year I make a budget for those categories, work out the monthly average, and set up a transfer for that amount into that account. Some prices fluctuate quite a bit (like power) while my mortgage has a fixed rate, so I apply a healthy margin to make sure there are no nasty surprises.
Are you me, by any chance? I had been doing exactly this for years. Finally, my income rose enough that I stopped to care - I just pay from my current account and move on. But what astonishes me is that hardly anyone seems to do that, especially people earning less than the current me. It seems such an obvious idea!
I think that lack of sound financial education is the real problem here. Of course, it's country-dependent, but I doubt it's done really well in a lot of places. I have a slightly conspiracy-ish theory explaining why good financial education is not a part of primary school curriculum...
Is there any other way to deal with comcrap? I’ve been doing the annual ritual of calling them to say the bill went up by 50% give me the best rate again. Every year it’s always a short term promo. This year took a lot longer to get through to a human
Meh. If you have the resources, buy whatever makes you happy.
If a bigger house makes you happy because you have space for your hobbies and you don't need to fight with your family members for space, buy a bigger house.
The whole "money doesn't bring happiness" thing is bullshit unless you are a Buddha.
A mansion in Malibu isn't going to make me happy, because I wouldn't know what the hell to do in Malibu. An upgrade from a 2-bedroom to a 4-bedroom home with a garage so I don't have to smell laser cutter fumes anymore and hack a ventilation system out a bedroom window? That very well might.
> An upgrade from a 2-bedroom to a 4-bedroom home with a garage so I don't have to smell laser cutter fumes anymore and hack a ventilation system out a bedroom window? That very well might.
As someone who upgraded from a 2 bedroom flat to a 3 bedroom house with a garage, I concur. Having a place to store my bikes and other “dirty” tools that’s not inside was such an improvement to my quality of life that I tell people to always look for a half decent garage when they buy. Especially if they also like cycling!
> She has agreed to a 10-year ban from holding executive roles in public or crypto companies.
So you can hold an executive role in a wholly owned private subsidiary of a public company, or hold a role in a Cayman Island company instead of a US company and have the Cayman entity buy the US entity. Rules like this don't actually do anything.
The ocean has already absorbed 30% of the CO2 humanity has emitted. It causes issues: ocean acidity rises, which reduces plankton ability to grow. Plankton being the base of the ocean food chain, all ocean life gets impacted.
You'd need to find a way to sequester carbon without it leaching in the water.
Random idea: What if we just sequestered it into elemental carbon pellets and let it sink to the bottom of the ocean? It should not react with the water.
One idea is to charcoal the wood, it makes it harder to decompose and is similar to pure carbon. I'm not sure if it's better to send it to the bottom of the ocean or just to a big hole on land.
People seem to have the assumption that OpenAI and Anthropic dying would be synonymous with AI dying, and that's not the case. OpenAI and Anthropic spent a lot of capital on important research, and if the shareholders and equity markets cannot learn to value and respect that and instead let these companies die, new companies will be formed with the same tech, possibly by the same general group of people, thrive, and conveniently leave out the said shareholders.
Google was built on the shoulders of a lot of infrastructure tech developed by former search engine giants. Unfortunately the equity markets decided to devalue those giants instead of applaud them for their contributions to society.
You weren’t around pre Google were you? The only thing Google learned from other search engines is what not to do - like rank based on the number of times a keyword appeared and not to use expensive bespoked servers
Ranking was Google's 5% contribution to it. They stood on the shoulders of people who invented physical server and datacenter infrastructure, Unix/Linux, file systems, databases, error correction, distributed computing, the entire internet infrastructure, modern Ethernet, all kinds of stuff.
Eh ... I question that 5% ranking is google's only contribution, even if it was important.
Everyone stood on the shoulders of file systems and databases, ethernet (and firewalls and netscreens, ...) Well, maybe a few stood on the shoulder of PHP.
Google did in fact pretty much figure out how to scale large number of servers (their racking, datacenters, clustering, global file systems etc) before most others did. I believe it was their ability to run the search engine cheap enough that enabled them to grow while largely retaining profitability early on.
More specifically on that last point, I remember reading something like Google's biggest contribution hardware-wise was using lots of cheap, easliy-replaced distributed storage with redundancy instead of expensive large singular storage with error-correction? Or maybe it was memory and not storage. Whatever it was I remember them not caring as much about error correction as others, and being able to use relatively cheap hardware because of it.
Isn't it really the other way around? Not to say OpenAI and Anthropic haven't done important work, but the genesis of this entire market was paper on attention that came out of Google. We have the private messages inside OpenAI saying they needed to get to market ASAP or Google would kill them.
In addition, the socioeconomic gaps are wider. So much so that the software engineer rushing to their 10am meeting doesn't want your $50. The Uber driver does, though.
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