My area has seen some wildfire smoke season near the end of summer. It never happened when I was a kid. Now every summer there’s wildfire smoke for several days or several weeks.
The climate appears to be changing and heavily forested areas of midwest US and canada are on fire every summer.
Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.
How do you know whether that is caused by climate change or worse management of forests.
I suspect many governments are spending less on prevention because they can blame the consequences on climate change - whereas if climate change is increasing the risk they should be spending more on reducing it.
> Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.
Trees also change the climate locally so might be part of the solution for that too.
Wildfires are only a problem for the matchboxes filled with trinkets we build adjacent to the pretty trees and live in - the forest likes the cleansing.
Cursor based pagination was mentioned. It has another useful feature: If items have been added between when a user loads the page and hits the next button, index based pagination will give you some already viewed items from the previous page.
Cursor based pagination (using the ID of the last object on the previous page) will give you a new list of items that haven't been viewed. This is helpful for infinite scrolling.
The downside to cursor based pagination is that it's hard to build a jump to page N button.
You should make your cursors opaque so as to never reveal the size of your database.
You can do some other cool stuff if they're opaque - encode additional state within the cursor itself: search parameters, warm cache / routing topology, etc.
If I'm meant to treat a rise in property tax in response to positive change in value as a disincentive to improvement, what difference how the tax increase is computed? It isn't even clear LVT does not create a massive incentive to consolidation, as property tax increasing without connection to improvement kicks off a "Red Queen's race" where anyone unable to capture revenue from improvement, or unable to increase that capture, ends up facing a permanent structural bar to any ownership. It seems as though designed to annihilate even any possibility of an American-style middle class, in favor of an ever narrowing landlord gerousia enriching itself through rent farming.
Well, it makes sense if you hope to be among the winners. But I don't see any Georgists here seeming very interested in addressing anything like that, just a couple who handwaved past it. [1] I'm not an economist, though, nor even very smart. I'm just a Baltimore homeowner who's heard a time or two before of such alternative tax scams. I mean schemes.
[1] And the ones responding at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826168, who seem thus far to present one argument each and retire discouraged by its failure. One hopes someone might come along willing to actually espouse this heterodoxy, rather than just try to feel "based" for namedropping around it.
An LVT specifically targets land rents, yes including imputed rents. Implied is an end to income and sales tax. The effects of this will be to discourage things like a surface parking lot or low rise motel in the dense part of a city.
Suburbs and rural areas nobody really cares about.
I'm very confused about the idea that taxing land ownership more heavily will somehow lead to more consolidation and _favor_ landlords, and simultaneously harm existing homeowners. It's just incoherent. Perhaps I too am not smart.
Perhaps you are motivated not to reason. Forecasting growth rates of revenue from improvement, versus property tax apparently aka "land rent," and observing the possibility exists that one will grow faster than the other especially since many improvements generate no revenue at all, requires not all that much effort. But I had no idea you people were mad enough to argue seriously this should be the only tax of any kind anywhere. Excuse me.
Taxing land ownership reduces returns on land ownership, making consolidation less rather than more likely. Wasn't that your main concern?
And yes, the amount of money to spend and how that money are collected are separate political questions. LVT is just about funding sources. Most Georgists are also for "pigouvian" taxes and taxing negative externalities.
How does reducing returns on land ownership make consolidation less likely, when improvement revenue looks to scale more or less proportionately - and superlinearly - with the area of contiguous property owned?
If you buy a storefront, you can run a shop. If you buy the block, you can build a skyscraper and lease or rent out all the retail space, not to mention the apartments under the condos under the penthouses, all of which also make you money, of course.
But again and still, we see Georgianism as the "camel's nose" for a complete overhaul of the economic and fiscal underpinnings of American society, and while this is a good time for such conversations - everyone else is coming off the fringe! Why not the remaining L. Neil Smith fans, once they've got their trusses and orthotics all in order? - for generally similar reasons I wouldn't expect to encounter a tremendously credulous public.
Buy from a speculator and you get to enter the market at a price of their choice.
Vacant land is land that somebody could have built a home or a restaurant or a storefront or an apartment complex on, except it's being hoarded by speculators, who often refuse to sell at a loss.
In order to build a home / restaurant / storefront on that land, you first have to buy it. Buy it from whom? Ban speculators, and now you have to buy that land from the original owner, who is obligated to hold on to it even though he may want to use his capital for something else.
> refuse to sell at a loss
Speculators who won't sell at a cash loss are a real problem, but it's a problem that can easily solve itself. As the land value fluctuates up and down, the speculators' investment also goes up and down, whether he sells at that price or not. Carrying a piece of land on your books at a loss inflicts economic damage on the speculator.
In a free market, bad investors getting wiped out is just as important as useful ones getting rewarded.
Simply make the "default setting" to allow building things everywhere, and stupid speculators will go out of business more or less instantly. Useful ones will continue to quite literally make money for themselves and society.
> Buy it from whom? ... now you have to buy that land from the original owner, who is obligated to hold on to it even though he may want to use his capital for something else.
There's no obligation to "Own" land, if you want to put your capital elsewhere then either use your existing land as collateral for a loan or otherwise sell it. Technically everyone is actually leasing land from a government, it's not a commodity and it has a finite supply, so unlike corn or even housing, what is a speculator even speculating on?
I also want to be clear I think it would be very silly to ban speculators, the act of speculation is something that we all do when we own literally anything, but speculating on limited finite ground space that no one actually owns doesn't make any logical sense. Just properly tax speculation into a space that is unprofitable to hoard.
People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren
Yes, obviously; there was a much higher reproductive rate. It seems like you're talking about enjoyment or something else, but that really wasn't the focus of this thread.
What do you mean by “great”? It was successful in reproduction. That’s what we’re talking about here. People were having families and raising children that went out to have families and raise children.
Gay couples can’t have children (outside of adoption or surrogacy), so I’m not sure how that is relevant to the topic at hand. Gay couples will not be helping with the next baby boom.
We made a change in the culture, from the standpoint of the species continuing to survive into the future. The change put us on what looks like a worse path. Would it not be wise to question those changes to see where it went wrong and course correct, just like we’d do if this was any other problem in any other domain?
This has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with not having the population collapse, because we've become so focused on pleasure that we forgot why there is a biological advantage to it being pleasureful... to do it more and reproduce more. But modern technology has eliminated that pesky side effect of children.
The pleasure can and does still exist. It's not like it gets removed when sex is ends in a pregnancy. It doesn't have to be some mechanical act, the way you seem to be framing it.
I get the sense that by pleasure you’re referring simply to orgasm during sex itself? Again, that is part of the problem. As for religion, I believe your view is in fact rooted in religion which strategically and historically segmented the sexual experience; not that you’re explicitly espousing a religious view but that it is implicit in what you’re suggesting.
You’ve used the word “great” and “pleasure”, however you’re not specific about what you’re talking about. I’m having to guess at what you mean, and you keep telling me I’m guessing wrong, without clarifying your point. This isn’t productive.
How’s that working out? Overbearing control over sex is not only unnecessary, it’s the problem. It’s also so exceptionally culturally ingrained, people immediately and emotionally come to its defence.
People have always been and will always have casual sex. People didn't used to be perfect Christian monogamous couples until the 60s. We just punish people less for it than we used to which is a good thing.
Before contraceptives, there was no such thing as casual sex (except for the homosexual kind).
Sex produced babies, 2% of women died in childbirth. Children need a father to help provide and protect, without that, babies were often just abandoned in the woods.
This is completely a-historical. Humans have been having sex outside of marriage since that concept was invented and you’re projecting an idealized Western European view on an entire world with a complex history of different cultures. What you’re describing isn’t even true of European history (e.g. read up on hand fasting or the high rates of marriage after pregnancy) and it’s even less so globally. Marriage is in part a financial relationship, and that drive a lot of premarital sex: if men were expected to make a significant monetary contribution (dowry, house/land, etc.) even in the most religious societies many would not be celibate for a decade, they just weren’t having sex in formal legally-binding relationships.
One other key thing you’re leaving out: historically, many women did not have the freedom to choose whether they had children, or often who or when they married. Unless you’re proposing a new take on Ceaușescu-era Romania, that is not relevant to the discussion of fertility rates.
This isn’t a western view, it’s literally how the majority of the world still operates. Marriage is not an abrahamic invention, it happens in eastern cultures, middle eastern cultures, african cultures, it’s basically universal.
Before contraceptives sex outside of marriage results in children born out of wedlock. This is catastrophic for the mothers, their families, and for the child.
In the past they used to build temples dedicated to Moloch for sacrificing unwanted babies. The Israelites looked down on this practice, and instead insisted on marriage with rules: thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. These rules were crucial for social stability.
Why is marriage and punishment for adultery universal? Because a two parent household is the only healthy way to raise kids and ensure wealth is preserved between generations. This has always been true.
Yes..people in the past were celibate until marriage - what? Maybe some were, like som are now.
From World War II into the 1960s, the median age of a married woman in the US was 20. So maybe many were virgins, if they didn't get together with their fiancee. The median age of first marriage for women in the US is now 28.
Alimony is temporary and fixed, whereas careers are not only life-long, but have compounding growth.
There is a significant financial gap between a divorced woman in her 50s with only five years of alimony remaining and a career woman in her 50s with a $400,000 401(k) balance.
You forgot to mention child support which is for up to 18 years. Also, nothing stops the woman from having a career, especially if she cooperatively shares 50/50 custody, but often they prefer aiming for nearly 100% custody because it increases their child support payments, and then still have the option to cry victim that they’re a single mother despite getting thousands of dollars a month and they’re actively preventing the father from being involved with the kids. Happens a lot.
As for a stay at home mom who doesn’t get divorced, she doesn’t need to be entirely stay at home for all 18 years.. kids go to school at 5 and can go to after school programs if necessary while she works. A couple years before that if the kids are in pre school she could get a degree or masters degree or work part time. So the career gap could be minimized.
Probably depends on the state, but last time I checked it was until 18 or high school graduation, but not later than 19, in the state I’m familiar with.
Western Marriage is a contract where one party is rewarded for breaking the terms. The low marriage rates of Millennials / Elder Z [1] are indicative of this new world order. It isn't just "because men!!".
That notion was the origin of the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) movement before it got taken over by misogynistic incels that were never going to get a woman anyways. The ultimate in sour grapes mentality. Like saying "You can't fire me because I quit" before you were even hired to begin with.
Men are avoiding marriage due to the possibility of alimony, child support and courts favoring mother’s custody over children. It happened to my dad, my mom got over $1 million in 2011 when they divorced.
Overall it seems like marriage is a bad gamble for both genders whenever divorce is easy to get.
Divorce laws vary by state. California is equal property, and alimony kicks in immediately (no minimum length of marriage). As a female, higher earner, I paid my ex-husband alimony for a 1 yr 9 month marriage.
Do you feel that this is a fair way to distribute earnings upon divorce? When no children are involved?
My interpretation is that one should not marry somebody who earns significantly less than them due to how courts will force payments with the possibility of jail time.
My take is that the spirit of the law is to compensate spouses for sacrifices and risks they took in support of the other spouse. So for example, if Spouse A reduces their earning potential for Spouse B (ex. a military spouses are disadvantaged in their careers b/c they move constantly, if a doctor moves to a rural area that can support their career but not their spouse's career etc) then Spouse A should be compensated by Spouse B because Spouse B's career growth depended on Spouse A sacrificing theirs. Other examples are if a Spouse stays home to care for dependents, if a Spouse puts another Spouse through graduate / medical / law school etc. It's about acknowledging that you gained because of someone else's actions and compensating for that, honoring your debts as it were.
I do not feel that the alimony I paid aligned with the spirit of the law, but it did align with the letter of the law in California.
What if you think about it this way: By default, a marriage is a contract agreeing to equally pool financial resources. If that contract feels unfair to you, it's usually possible to draft a contract with a different distribution, which people often do if one of the two has vastly more financial resources going into the marriage.
Although I wish billionaires would fix homelessness, I think its good there’s more competition in the space launch industry.