Yes, that's exactly the idea. In Chicago, where I live, there are surface parking lots in the middle of the downtown surrounded by skyscrapers. In a logical system, the owner of those parking lots would have to pay just as much in land taxes as the skyscraper owners next to them -- and since they couldn't possibly afford to do so, they'd be forced to sell to someone who would develop the land and put it to more productive use. Under the current system, though, the parking lot owner pays peanuts while the skyscraper owner is effectively penalized for putting the land to use.
The gentrification situation is similar: if someone is living in a single-family home in an area that is filling up with apartments, they're using the land much less efficiently than a replacement structure would. As land values slowly increase, the owner would be prompted to eventually sell to someone who would put it to higher value use. You could have some speed bumps in the policy to make sure this doesn't happen too fast, but if you stop it entirely you're just giving up on productive land use.
It's worth noting that property taxes have the same dynamic, since they also incorporate land value in them. The difference though is that _property taxes discourage development_, which contributes to higher rents. Land value taxes do not have this problem; a world where we suddenly swap to LVTs is a world with many more buildings and much lower average rents.
And right now they can afford to wait forever! But with an LVT they have a big incentive to either develop it immediately or sell to someone else who will.
It's no coincidence that people who support LVTs are typically YIMBYs -- we want to reform urban planning and land use to make it easier to build things.
> But with an LVT they have a big incentive to either develop it immediately or sell to someone else who will.
An LVT gives no such incentives. LVT is explicitly agnostic about how the land is being used. You pay the same, no matter how the land is being used. That's why it's economically efficient.
However, a conventional property tax (and also income tax and capital gains tax etc) disincentivise developing. An LVT can help raise enough revenue to be able to lower or eliminate those other taxes, and thus indirectly help remove disincentives to developing.
I think you might be missing the context. The scenario we're discussing is a parking lot surrounded by skyscrapers in the middle of a major city. Under a property tax regime, the owner pays little taxes because the structures on the lot are not valuable. Under an LVT, the owner pays the same (high) taxes as the skyscrapers next to it, which would be obvious uneconomical.
So under property taxes, the parking lot owner can afford to wait and have the lot sit empty; under an LVT, they have an incentive to develop.
Yes, a property tax system disincentivises developing compared to not having a property tax.
The LVT has no influence on building.
If you draw a two-by-two matrix where the columns are property tax yes/no and the rows are LVT yes/no, you will find that the rows have no influence at all, and it's all about which column you are in.
Yes, that's exactly the idea. We have a problem in the US where many metro areas do not have enough housing, in part because building big things is penalized by the tax code. By changing the tax code to not penalize construction, we hope to get more construction.
Shifting the tax burden from homeowners and productive businesses onto idle land holders means that those that drive the community will penalize investment less and use limited resources in more effective ways.
Efficiency helps the wealthy, but it can help those with less even more, as it matters more.
How many of those houses are on the fringes, and how many are in the CBD? If there's a vacant plot next to the town hall then it doesn't really matter how many vacant houses are a 1-hour drive out, that town-hall adjacent plot is being wasted.
> How many of those houses are on the fringes, and how many are in the CBD?
Take a look for yourself[0]. This is just outside of the downtown area. Loads of vacant lots. This is theoretically prime real estate, and would be ripe for development. The problem is, it's the fucking hood and no one wants to live there. Detroit emptied out over the decades and those empty lots _used_ to be decaying crack houses. So several years ago Detroit had them leveled to reduce blight. Now they're whining that people are just "speculating" by sitting on the empty land. If there was even the slightest hint that developing this land made sense economically, someone would have done it by now. It's just too convenient to the downtown area. And yet, no one has. Perhaps there's more at play than just people trying to sit on empty land.
Maybe property tax should be inversely related to improvements, considering that improved land generates tax revenue in other ways, e.g. wage tax, sales tax, etc.
Then you have to come up with a way to evaluate the improvements, which might be tricky and subjective
It seems easier to just have a land value tax, so you don’t specifically disincentivize development. Then, you can spend that tax money to provide services that promote the other stuff: beautify downtown and add public transit, that sort of thing.
A lot of property taxes go to funding schools, so...more housing = more kids = more money need to educate them. It is nice that they use property taxes from businesses as well, but to completely detach the education need formulas from tax formulas sounds really dangerous.
Are any school districts outside of Prop 13 California funded by primarily income or sales tax? But ya, you would need to do something like that if you were to tax land rather than improvements given schools, police, and lots of infrastructure needs scale up with improvements.
A significant part of the educational budget of the US comes from federal funds and federal funds are almost entirely income taxes (some other sources exist).
Most schools receive very little funding from the federal government. Maybe the poorest school districts this makes up a significant part of their funding, but for most school districts it doesn't.
The table implies funding origins via taxes (local vs. state taxes, for example). I don't think any ED money is going to CA first before going to the districts. CA is also a special case where more funding is state level (due to Prop 13).
I appreciate this guy taking the time to test this stuff out, but... 2.5 minutes per application seems really reasonable and short? Even the Post Office application that took 10 minutes seems fine. I get that you might have to apply to a lot of different jobs, but at that rate in 2-3 hours of focused work, you could apply to nearly a hundred different jobs.
The fact that it's that easy to apply belies the tone the article takes, which generally bemoans how hard job applications are. But they didn't demonstrate that it's hard at all! Moreover, the author even says in the beginning that they didn't use any of the products that help you, like LinkedIn Easy Apply.
Anyway seems interesting but this mostly just confirmed my perception that applying to jobs is pretty easy. Interviews, on the other hand...
When I apply for a job it takes me at least an hour if not more. I adopt my resumé, write the motivation letter. If I spend less then 15 minutes it means I'm doing it as a requirement from the social benefits agency, for a job that I don't want.
Funny story. When I was going the coop workshops in uni they invited in some people from microsoft to talk about what they look for in a cover letter and they straight up said they don't read them.
That's good to hear because I stopped writing them because I started to feel like it discouraged companies from looking further.
I believe people in the hiring process are looking to work efficiently and a cover letter is just more stuff to read. They want to just read your resume because that's what will get passed around and what matters. Anything in your cover letter is mostly things they want to know in the interview.
This thread is interesting to me because I was told by my manager that my cover letter was a big reason they decided to interview me for my current job. Granted this was nearly 5 years ago, so things may have (read: have definitely) changed on the hiring front since then.
The actual application step might take that long, assuming you have all your supporting documents ready. The trouble is you often need to adapt your CV to the job & write a cover letter at a minimum. Depending how much you care about the job, this might include studying the job description carefully, reading the company website, and maybe even contacting the company to request more information. Then proof-reading and editing everything. It probably takes me at least an hour for most jobs, even if the actual submission of files only took 1 minute in the end.
2.5 is fine, but 10 feels incredibly long when half the time companies don't even both emailing back a rejection. Gives the thought "since they probably won't even see it, why don't I skip the 10 and apply to 4 2.5s?".
I also don't think 2.5 minutes is unreasonably long or much of a barrier. After spending an hour looking for relevant postings at companies I'm interested in, another few minutes to actually apply is not a big deal.
What is truly annoying though is creating new accounts for each company's application portal.
> 2.5 minutes per application seems really reasonable and short?
That's what I thought as well. I suppose 2.5 minutes feels incredibly long if you're spending your day watching 10 second reels on TikTok and Instagram.
I think it's a fair point that bots should strive to be useful and not just mock people's mistakes, but in the 8 years since this was written the whole "punch up, not down" idea in comedy has gotten a lot of criticism and is kind of passe at this point, at least in my experience.
Human beings simply do not exist on a single monolith spectrum of power; who is "up" or "down" often depends quite a lot on context. If an underemployed white male comedian makes a joke about Kamala Harris, is that punching up or down? _Parasite_ is a movie that mocks a rich family even as it portrays their poorer help as scheming and untrustworthy - is that up, or down? To steal an example from this excellent Freddie de Boer post on the topic, if an adjunct professor runs afoul of a student, are they really the ones in the position of power?
In this comment you seem to be reading "punch up not down" as a very binary, fixed rule, as if it is a being used as a commandment. I don't think many people think of it that way. Of course you can make comedy about poor and disadvantaged people if you want to, the point of the phrase is that when you do so you you think carefully about it.
> In this comment you seem to be reading "punch up not down" as a very binary, fixed rule
de Boer's blogpost paints it as the opposite: it's a nebulous, indefinite phrase used to try and simplify a complex reality into something that's easy to understand. de Boer reckons that the only consistent usage is "up" referring to "people I don't like", and "down" referring to "people I like".
Yes, I disagree quite strongly with the blogpost. He writes
> For it to make any sense at all, human beings would have to exist on some unitary plane of power and oppression, our relative places easily interpreted for the purpose of figuring out who we can punch
I think this is obvious bullshit. You need a strict, easily interpreted hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed in order to implement this strawman version of the punching up/down rule. This straw man is what I was referring to when I described it as a "commandment" in my previous comment.
On the other hand when the "rule" is interpreted in a more realistic way. Which is something like "make comedy about whoever you like, but consider carefully why you want to make fun of these groups of people, and consider the context of what you're doing", then you don't need this strict hierarchy at all.
To be explicit: I don't think the concept needs a consistent definition of "up" and "down" in order to be useful.
No, that kinda is right - under special relativity, as your apparent velocity from a fixed reference frame increases, it takes more and more energy to accelerate closer to light speed, so _moving_ faster than light is disallowed.
Another way of putting this is: we know because of special relativity that you can't just strap a lot of rocket boosters on a spaceship and expect to go faster than light. That won't work; if you want to _travel_ faster than light, you have to do it another way.
For a particle travelling faster than light (a tachyon) it takes more and more energy to decelerate the closer to light speed you are, and at zero energy velocity would be infinite. At least via a naïve look at what SR says.
Allowing the foreigner from a country with no reciprocal permission for us to build in their country works against this though. They're sucking capital out of their country which in the example used of Russia/China would build several more housing units and instead building fewer units in the US. Couple this with lack of reciprocity and what you did was a relative loss in housing potential.
We need to be forcing reciprocity to make sure we're actually maximizing available housing.
>I would simply avoid having a housing crisis by allowing people to build more housing. Seems pretty win-win to me.
The housing crisis is primarily driven by wealth inequality and poor financial decisions by the US government. Not building is a secondary problem.
I'm all for building more and denser housing, but if all the units are snatched by banks and wealthy investors, its not going to make the country more affordable.
It's bizarre. I live in Chicago and don't have to deal with anything like this. The West coast has a really strange set of blinkers on about these problems.
I spend a lot of time in Chicago and always find it safe and pleasant. Yet when I talk to some people, typically of a conservative persuasion, they describe it as an urban hellscape in the same way some posters here describe SF or Portland.
A failed city that people are fleeing, with impossibly high taxes, no remaining police, rife with crime, and with corrupt bureaucrats suckling on the government teat at every turn.
I can't square the circle. I know so many people in Chicago and it doesn't seem like they're even describing the same city.
So when I see these hit pieces against the governments on the west coast, and hear anecdotes from west coast Republicans fleeing to the south to escape their purported failures, I take them with a massive gain of salt.
I have no doubt that Portland has its issues, but I can't take these pieces very seriously. As with the mythical failed version of Chicago I keep hearing about, I suspect there is a group of people pushing an extreme version of a narrative that is only loosely based in reality.
As you can see, Portland proper is nearly entirely Democrat. I'm a registered Democrat as well (I'm OP). Prior to this I lived in San Jose. Portland is a lovely city, but talking about what's going on here doesn't make folks Republican.
I have the same reaction to stories about Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco policing. The impression I get is that these cities have deeply mismanaged police departments.
What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set?
I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.
> What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set?
What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica?
What's the difference between writing down a conversation from memory, and recording that conversation?
What's the difference between making a nude painting of someone, and taking a nude photograph?
What's the difference between going out in public among human beings, and going out in public where there's a facial recognition camera on every corner feeding everyone's movements into a centralized database?
What's the difference between the grandma who knows everyone in the village, vs the social media company that knows everyone in the world?
Social customs evolved in a context of fundamental, sharp limits to human cognition and skill. When technology smashes through those limits, those social customs don't work anymore. Copyright law didn't exist in a world where you couldn't copy things mechanically. If you apply the old rules naively, you end up with a nasty world that nobody wants. So we have to invent new rules to limit how people use the new technology, otherwise people get exploited and life becomes intolerable.
"What does copyright law say about this" doesn't even make sense as a question. Copyright was invented before AI was. The question should be, "what would a society someone would want to live in, say about this?"
> What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica?
But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, for the same reason that most people's artistic rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate than their rendition of an anteater.
The entire AI art debate is a symptom of the fact that society is structured such that labor-saving technological advancements can harm more people than they help, and it's baffling to see otherwise intelligent and ideologically similar people fixating on this single, relatively minor technology rather than the much more consequential, broader issue of the fact that automation always moves wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.
That was a fact during the industrial revolution and it’s quite possible it will happen now with the digital revolution.
The average height of Englishmen actually went down during the industrial rev. presumably due to malnutrition. New histories of the period think of it as potentially as one of the few times we know where there was an enormous economic boom alongside a general collapse of quality of life.
>But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, for the same reason that most people's artistic rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate than their rendition of an anteater.
In other words, a technology that has never existed before and doesn't follow any of the categories and schemas we dreamt up to organize the world. So we need to make new rules.
For humans the inspiration can be something else than the medium to use. Watching reality can provide inspiration for creating a video. And I'm pretty sure that's wher most inspiration comes from. It cannot for AI. Of course in a world where everything exists AI doesn't need inspiration from other sources.
Then what was it saying? It said that humans can take inspiration from outside art, from the real world. You can do the same thing with AI by training it on pictures from the real world.
Always back to the same debate then.
Why aren't human minds glorified functions, that perhaps deserve their glory a bit more than current state of AI?
Obviously they're not currently equivalent. But obviously there are similarities.
If I can take copyrighted images and feed them into an AI, why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? How do you justify the existence of something like the GPL?
Is it ok to scan copyrighted works. I think Google Books' win at the Supreme Court shows that yes it is.
Is it ok to process them down to the rawest information?
Is it ok for people to generate content from the raw information (and ok for them to charge for it)?
The last two I don't have an answer for, but I understand the fear of artists and the anger that their hard work is being shovelled into the monster that is going affect their work. But also more broadly the make-up industry, the lighting industry, studio spaces, lens makers, paint manufacturers, etc etc etc.
> why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler?
a compiler is not transformative. You translating a book into another language doesn't make it a new work.
But an AI that takes billions of images, and uses it to synthesize something different and new, is fairly transformative under my eyes, and deserves new copyright. Unless the AI generated image is largely composed of a small number of works, i don't see why anyone should have copyright ownership of such an output!
its actually exactly the same thing, the ai doesnt "synthetize" anything, its following its programming and data based on training sets
if anything I would argue that human taking code from multiple places and making it compile into something more useful is much more synthetiz-ing than AI...
What's the difference between a programmer looking at lots of open source code and github copilot looking at open source code? (And I'm talking MIT licensed code here).
Does CPSC not have the authority to fine Amazon or otherwise get them to stop selling these things? That seems like it would be much more effective than a post on a website.
The gentrification situation is similar: if someone is living in a single-family home in an area that is filling up with apartments, they're using the land much less efficiently than a replacement structure would. As land values slowly increase, the owner would be prompted to eventually sell to someone who would put it to higher value use. You could have some speed bumps in the policy to make sure this doesn't happen too fast, but if you stop it entirely you're just giving up on productive land use.
It's worth noting that property taxes have the same dynamic, since they also incorporate land value in them. The difference though is that _property taxes discourage development_, which contributes to higher rents. Land value taxes do not have this problem; a world where we suddenly swap to LVTs is a world with many more buildings and much lower average rents.