> Well right now I am very skeptical, but I think we have somewhat given quantum computing plenty of time (we have given it decades) unless someone can convince me that it is not a scam.
Shor's paper on polynomial time factoring is from 1997, first real demonstration of quantum hardware (Monroe et al.) is from 1995: Yes, quantum has had decades -- but only barely, and is has certainly only now started to have generations.
To look at the kind of progress this means, take a look of some of the recent phd spinouts of leading research groups (Oxford Ionics etc.): There are a lot of organisations with nothing but engineering to go before they reach fault tolerance.
When I came back to quantum three years ago, fault tolerance was still to be based on the surface code ideas that floated when I did my phd ('04). Today, after everyone has started looking harder, it turns out that a bit of long-range connectivity can cut the error correction overhead by orders of magnitude (see recent public posts by IBM Quantum): The goalposts for fault tolerance are moving in the right direction.
And this is the key thing about quantum computing: you need error correction, and you need to do it with the same error-prone hardware that you correct for. There is a threshold hardware quality that will let you do this at a reasonable overhead, and before you reach this threshold all you have is a fancy random number generator.
But yes, feel free to be a pessimist -- just remember to own it when quantum happens in a few years.
> Borrowing and taxation are completely different concepts. Unless I am the only idiot who hasn't asked for their tax back with interest. Possible.
I get the impression that maybe you are not aware of what is implied by the 'buy, borrow, die' tax strategy that parent is referring to: in effect it completely eliminates taxes on capital gains (in the US). [0] and [1] below are first two Google hits.
I mentioned the tax strategy just to point out that borrowing against unrealised gains is common. (You can also do it in jurisdictions that don't have capital gains taxes. But there you do it for reasons other than optimising your taxes. Eg you might want to mortgage your house (without selling it) to buy a car.)
Ok but why mention borrowing at all. We are talking about taxation.
They are almost completely opposite concepts.
Borrowing literally defers payment to the future. Taxation on your now land value occurs now.
Why does the ability to borrow against unrealised gains (with the lender speculating on the return on those gains) matter compared to paying a tax on unrealised gains (which is due now, not deferred and barely speculative)
> Why does the ability to borrow against unrealised gains (with the lender speculating on the return on those gains) matter compared to paying a tax on unrealised gains (which is due now, not deferred and barely speculative)
You can borrow to pay the taxes. Or you can 'realise' your gains via a sale to pay the taxes. That avoids the leverage that you point out.
>You can borrow to pay the taxes. Or you can 'realise' your gains via a sale to pay the taxes. That avoids the leverage that you point out.
Thats insane, you know that right? You may have invented a worse financial instrument than the subprime mortgage crisis.
Taxation is an ongoing cost. you pay it every year.
Under LVT, the LVT price is entirely subjective.
If I am a bank, and joe blo has a 200k tax bill, and 20k income, I am already disinclined to lend him money to cover that tax bill because of his income. I think this is where you fall over, and the rest of this is just making fun of your nonsense.
The great thing about joe is he is going to get another tax bill next year, even if he parts with 95% of his land portfolio, I have no idea what the value of the remainder is going to be, subjectively, next year. Its an open ended liability. If I was a good banker who wanted to be nice to Joe I would ask him to leave.
However a normal bank might lend him the money just to receive his land as collateral to take it on when he inevitably defaults. But I thought LVT was about the reduction of land banking, not shifting ownership of land to the banks?
> Taxation is an ongoing cost. you pay it every year.
Yes, just like you gain the land rent from the land you own every year.
> If I am a bank, and joe blo has a 200k tax bill, and 20k income, [...]
My broker doesn't care about my income one bit when they lend me money: they lend against my stock portfolio. Similar, here you could lend against the real estate. Why would the lender care about income?
> However a normal bank might lend him the money just to receive his land as collateral to take it on when he inevitably defaults. But I thought LVT was about the reduction of land banking, not shifting ownership of land to the banks?
No, not at all. That's a common misconception, especially prevalent amongst fans of LVT.
As I said earlier, the LVT changes no opportunity costs between land uses at all. So if for some reason it's a good idea to 'land bank' without an LVT, then it'll still be a good reason to 'land bank' with an LVT.
However, being able to finance the government with an LVT might have second order effects on other taxes and regulations, that might make land banking less (or even more?) appealing. I don't know, it depends on what else is happening.
>Yes, just like you gain the land rent from the land you own every year.
But we arent discussing a renter, right? You know that? The example was som
If your "solution" is for the land owner who cant afford his massive tax bill on his land (a tax bill that he incurred because of a subjective valuation) your solution is that he moves off his land, somehow pays to make it suitable for the rental market and then rent it out? And then what? Rents a place himself? How is this desirable?
>My broker doesn't care about my income one bit when they lend me money: they lend against my stock portfolio. Similar, here you could lend against the real estate. Why would the lender care about income?
No one lends money without an expectation of a return. Yes you can lend on collateral. That works once unless it is paid back. That "paid back" needs to be accounted for in your analysis.
>No, not at all. That's a common misconception, especially prevalent amongst fans of LVT.
So we have struck down at least one of the touted benefits of LVT. Thats something. Thats a small amount of progress.
This is exactly it. Especially for the UK offshore projects where sites were auctioned off: All bidders knew that a competitive bid had to aim for an ROI only slightly above market rates, given that risk was very low.
This means that 1 percent on production will easily turn into 10 or 20 percent on profit.
Source: worked on CAPEX and yield estimates for major player operating in this sector for a decade.
Did they factor in the risk that a site upwind of them could be auctioned later basically turning their project unprofitable? If you bid higher ignoring this risk and later lose money, maybe they should have bid a little less
My initial take was to share this with my son who used to built all kinds of things in Scratch, but I know that the lack of simple install instructions will be a deal-breaker for him.
Given that (part of) your audience will be persons like my son graduating out of graphical programming in Scratch, it might be worth spending a little time on non-dev install instructions. Even more so as you can leverage the rust toolchain and just suggest something along `cargo install --git ...` [0], without even publishing as a crate.
Apologies if this comes across as entitled: I just want to communicate that a single README-sentence on top of the work you already put into this would make it significantly more accessible.
There are handful methods of installation documented in the documentation [1]. The easiest one being installing from git and cargo. For people who do not have the rust toolchain installed, the easiest method is to install pre-built binaries released on GitHub [2].
I use a mix of bakers yeast and a wet (1:3) starter/sourdough. Just 2g yeast/kg flour makes a huge difference, even with 150 g starter.
My wet sourdough is 1 part flour to 3 parts water. As noted in a sibling comment, this favors the sour parts (lactic acid?), but compared to a dry starter, there are significant advantages the the starter/yeast combo:
1) Feeding the wet starter takes 10s: pour flour and water onto leftovers and stir quickly with a spoon. No sticky stuff to deal with.
2) The starter seems exceptionally stable, maybe because of the water layer: I only wash my starter jar every two or three months, and the 10g or so that I put back in the fridge after starting a dough, will last for weeks and consistently restart overnight when fed
3) Being able to independently adjust yeast-levels in a predictable way, means that I can easily play with sourness levels and adjust leaving times when I have to match the timings with other activities.
There is the downside, of course, that I need to keep bakers yeast in the house as well...
The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.
Also, nobody in the field disagrees that in the more distributed grid we are seeing today, more endpoint communication and control could lead to more resilience. Whether pricing signals are the best path is a more open question, but they certainly appear to be a feasible option.
> The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.
No it doesn't. The fact that it's being said in a comment full of nonsense tells me that they don't have “above-average understanding”. They probably have read something, once, and now thinks they are an expert, that's literally what Dunning-Kruger is about.
They seem to believe that the equilibrium of supply and demand is all that matters, when it's just one piece of the puzzle and among the easiest to manage. Large, nation-scale, failures like this one are very unlikely to be caused by a lack of supply alone and markets are nowhere near fast enough to help preventing these.
Agreed: this is the key question. One effort I follow in this direction is Terraform Industries[0] who are building exactly this type of system.
Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight.
They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1].
A friendly person on the internet already put up the typst-to-mathml part of this [0]. I have been considering the ultimate yak-shave of building a static site generator around this...
Traveling to awesome places is a perk of (physics) academia that is not widely appreciated. A large fraction of physicist seems to do rock-climbing or other hobbies that align well with exploring the outdoors when traveling.
I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.
[0]: https://excalidraw.com/