These rooms have ventilation (and also usually a heater, cooling, dry mode). The ventilation can be set to 24/7 mode, which runs at a low setting, always on. Japanese houses/apartments also typically have a house ventilation system, meant to run when it's humid. Mold in general is a problem here, so ventilation is incorporated well.
It's fun in the winter when you're running humidifiers but forget to turn off your house ventilation and don't understand why you're still so dry.
> Japanese houses/apartments also typically have a house ventilation system, meant to run when it's humid.
Do they have Mechanical Ventilation and Heat Recovery (MVHR) or is this more like Aircon? I've recently moved somewhere more humid and I'm looking to get a grip on what other countries do.
> Democrats have historically been the party of “vote for me for more free stuff,"
Democrats are more fiscally responsible than Republicans, consistently, for decades. You're perpetuating a myth, pushed by conservatives, that liberals are "tax and spend".
> these vote buying schemes from both parties
Where do you see vote buying schemes from the Democrat side? The only examples I've seen so far of this in reality are this current scheme, and Elon Musk's scheme last election.
"Both sides" are not equal. Republicans have given up on the rule of law and are actively aiming to eliminate democracy.
People in shoes off houses tend to have slippers or house shoes, which never go outside. They also tend to have bathroom slippers, which are only ever used in the toilet areas.
I've lived in both shoes on and shoes off households and I'm sorry, but shoes are filthy. I wipe my dogs paws when they comes in from walks and their paws are filthy and I wipe them every single time they come back in from walks. Shoes are never wiped.
Take a second, get a tissue, and go wipe the bottom of your shoe.
IE's monopoly was replaced by Chrome and Safari's, and Safari only exists because Apple gives you no choice but to use it on iOS. Firefox had a brief spot on top, but it really didn't last that long.
Windows still has the vast majority share of desktop.
Chrome is the outlier there. It didn't come with any desktop OS and still got near 100% market share, even before Android contributed to that. How? It's worth studying.
Yes but that's my point. Monopolies don't last. We have other ones now yes. But that's because the earlier ones died.
And yes we still have windows as the major desktop OS but don't forget, in the 90s/early 2000s windows was equivalent to computing.
These days the desktop OS is much less relevant than it was and many people don't even own a laptop or desktop anymore. They just do everything on their phone. And Microsoft totally and completely lost that race.
If a land value tax would fix rich people from parking money in real estate, it would price regular people out of real estate.
I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford.
LVT simply wouldn't be a good system, if applied in the real world.
You may be confusing LVT with property transfer tax? LVT is a tax on ownership of land - driving down land value, not up.
In practice it disincentivises investment in land (rent-seeking and speculative land hoarding) while incentivising land development. In cities this manifests as more, cheaper, homes, and lower rents, and is highly progressive.
I say in practice because we have over a century of explicit and implicit LVT implementations in the real world to demonstrate this. Most implementations of LVT have gone down as described. Estonia is a pretty fantastic case study - 90% of property is owner-occupier! And you might find this new study of implicit LVT in the US interesting - LVT correlates with higher earnings and demographic diversity: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
The challenges for LVT are really about how to transition the tax in for areas that are occupied, but severely underdeveloped. If a low-density inner-city area ought to be high-density, the owners are being charged accordingly. Long term, it stimulates development and the new housing surplus (splitting the tax burden of LVT across a much greater number of owners) balances things out. But that's no consolation to the people being told they have to pay tax on their backyard as if it's already a block of flats.
Whether carrying cost is higher or lower depends on the taxation LVT is substituting and the counterfactual utilisation of the land. In practice it is usually lower in rural and suburban and highly developed urban areas and (where substituted property taxes are higher or there are more properties to tax per unit of land), and higher in underdeveloped urban areas (with fewer properties to tax per unit of land).
This is, of course, the point. The carrying costs properly incentivise appropriate land use and development, and the land value is reduced, freeing up the capital locked into ownership (i.e. thin air) for productive use.
The better developed land also ends up with more properties per unit of land, so the carrying cost of property decreases universally.
I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electricity. An income tax makes it more expensive to give people jobs, so even if the earner pays it, that burden is also bore by the unemployed. Whoever pays the tax, they just pass it on to the rest of the economy.
But that's ok, because taxes can be paired with other methods like cash transfers or social programs that can effectively redistribute wealth. We should try to raise taxes with methods that have good side effects (LVT, carbon taxes), and then redistribute as necessary.
If your cost of living is higher (due to LVT), the minimum wage you will work for is higher. The amount of discretionary spending (someone else's income) or investment you can make is lower. Obviously these effects on an individual level are small, but when aggregated across the entire economy are very large.
In a world of LVT, everyone pays LVT because everyone lives somewhere. You either pay it as an owner or its passed through to you in rent prices. It will be passed onto you in the food you eat (which was grown on land), in the products you use (which were manufactured in a physical place), in the internet services you use (which are run on data centers on physical land), and so on.
In this way, it is much like all other taxes. What is special about LVT, and not other taxes, is that LVT create a disincentive against land speculation (using land as an investment rather than for living or productive use).
What prevents this system from resource exploitation for more taxable profits? I want to have systems in place that encourage nature and long term sustainability.
Does LVT create a moral hazard? I don't think so. Have we seen municipal governments with liquor taxes rush to run pro-alcohol ad campaigns and relax night life restrictions in order to maximize tax revenues? No. Have carbon taxes motivated governments to promote carbon use? Again, we have no evidence of that. Indeed, for pretty much ever tax ever studied, we find the relationship you would imagine: increasing taxes on X, reduces X.
So in that way, since LVT just adds to the cost to exploit any resource, it will reduce exploitation of nature.
But more importantly, LVT is in no way incompatible with other regulations or restrictions on land use. i.e. you can have LVT and a law against strip mining.
I am wondering what protects normal people. I hear a proposal what prevents the ultra wealthy from hoarding, but I am not seeing how this doesn't negatively impact normal, single family residences.
It seems the goal is maximizing tax revenue, punishing hoarders of land, and pushing for communal living. The exact case I think it is imperative to avoid is removing the elderly (cough, less useful) from their forever home in the guise of progress.
The obvious way would be tax relief on land used for primary residences up to some limit. But the point is the tax wouldn't dis-incentivise land acquisition so long as it wasn't left vacant.
“Most economists” haven’t the faintest clue how money works. Relying on their pronouncements is why we’re in the mess we’re in.
The LVT doesn’t work for the fairly simple reason that value is in the eye of the beholder and requires a bureaucracy, tax is paid from income and rich people have power and therefore just put the prices up to recover the extra cost, which they can do because there are fewer jobs than people that want them.
Legal tax incidence != economic tax incidence
Taxation by estate agent is a non-starter in any democracy. Nobody likes real estate people to start with.
- economists have a good idea of how economies have worked _to date_
- they posit new policy to achieve goals
- these policies introduce second-order effects that they failed to predict
I mean, Friedman's criticism of Keynes was excellent, and forsooth, his policies made stonks go up. But i don't think there economy is any better for them; i think we are, broadly, worse off.
I support LVT, but there will be second-order effects. I guess we are doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis, at a higher level than economic boom-and-bust.
That's probably somewhat better than the current status quo but one of the obvious side effects would be screwing smaller landlords out of the market and replacing them with typical "faceless corp gives no shits about you or anything beyond the legal minimum" type property management companies. Worth it? IDK.
Taxes are not just money taken from people in the abstract. They are, quite concretely, used for specific purposes. In the US (because the OP is about the US), property taxes in particular are used to fund local services like schools.
So if you eliminate taxes on primary homes, you will cripple the public schools.
I disagree with your analysis, but putting that aside, you are ignoring the fact that LVT has been applied in the real world. Denmark, Estonia, Singapore, Taiwan...
Obviously disentangling effects is hard, but there is no evidence that suggests it has the deleterious effects you mention.
LVT: You own the land, you just have to pay these taxes on it every year or we will force you to sell it so we can collect our taxes.
Leaseshold: We own the land, but you can buy a 99-year leasehold, and you can use the land (or sell your leasehold on the open market) as long as you continue to pay the rent. You might also be able to extend your leasehold when it expires, but that is up to the government.
So the expiration part is different, but "taxes" vs "lease rent" is just semantics.
Unfortunately that doesn't really help. It has the effect of eroding the asset value such that it quickly means the owner can't sell.
In other words, if selling removes much of your capital, you then don't gave capital to spend on the next place.
Conversely investors become even more motivated not to ever sell. They can defer the LVT forever, and just use the property as collateral for loans (ie getting liquidity without selling.)
And LVT just becomes an expense built into the cost of rent. The investor never pays it anyway, the tenant ultimately pays it.
I guess that it can be rented or built upon. It's easy to imagine renting a field to a farmer but money is money, so why not letting somebody else build flats over one's land?
I understand where you are coming from here. And there are multiple levers in play here.
The cost of a mortgage underpins the rental value. If there are multiple units for rent then there will be a "going rate" and that's certainly a part of the equation. In that sense some landlords get more cream than others, but that's capitalism in action.
There are however other costs that go into rental calculations. Perhaps the building has a supervisor, or rental agent. Perhaps utilities are included. There are typically property rates and taxes. There may be sectional title levies. That's before we talk about insurance, maintainence and so on. For a group of similar dwellings these costs will tend to be similar, and so the floor is set not just by the mortgage, but by including these costs as well.
If a extra cost comes along, which affects all the properties together, then that will just become part of the rental-floor equation. And yes, it's possible for that to be higher than people will pay, but that tends not to be the driving factor. People have to live somewhere and ultimately will pay whatever keeps them off the streets.
Of course people who own their own home will simply have an extra cost burden every year. There's no upside at all, and will result in more people not purchasing, but rather staying on the rental ladder. Indeed making purchase less attractive allows rents to get higher.
This is the problem with all economics. There are butterfly effects all over the place so "simple solutions" tend to have lots of unwelcome consequences. Trying to solve problems with taxes seldom ends well.
When health insurance companies withhold care and cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people, that certainly ripples out.
When profits of insurance are more important than people being able to get care, that directly leads to the situations that lead to violence. Poor, desperate people commit crimes, especially violent ones at a higher rate.
This simply isn't true, or you'd see these places accept credit cards.
The most prevalent mom & pop approach is either cash only or it's cash and PayPay. You may also see cash, PayPay and IC. PayPay, at first, had extremely low fees and an army of sales people that targeted mom & pops, pushing the low fees. They've since then increased fees as their saturation has increased, and now you'll see shops adding things like setapay or hachipay (which are annoyingly ku specific payment methods that are very low fee).
Larger businesses are owned by massive conglomerates, or are housed in shopping complexes owned by massive conglomerates that require them to accept more payment methods.
Like all businesses, they aim to reduce their costs and increase their margins. They aren't adding payment methods to reduce your inconvenience, unless they think doing so will increase their volume enough to offset the fees.
It happens, but when it does, you need to ask yourself: if the agent is struggling this much to produce something that's working, am I taking the right approach?
If you ask for a particular thing, they'll do it, even if it's not a good idea. When you start running into issues, they'll try to solve those issues for you. They'll do that as long as you keep asking, even if there's no good way to properly fix the issues, because the initial approach was wrong.
When an agent is struggling to produce something, I switch to asking it to re-evaluate the approach itself, and ask it to suggest a less brittle approach. I then chat through the various options, and choose the best approach that makes sense, and then the agent is back on track, producing properly working code without the issues.
Some people just keep pushing through on bad approaches, without questioning it and then blame the agent for being unable to finish it.
Clickhouse has a managed SaaS and it's their primary product. They have a lot of engineers. They're going to do a lot of commits.