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Cake day: April 20th, 2023

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  • He’s free to discuss this article any way that he thinks is interesting. Just because he found it helpful to point out the bias in this case doesn’t obligate him to do it in any other cases. He doesn’t owe you anything.

    Also, responding to someone noting the reputation of your source with what amounts to "ARE YOU ACCUSING ME OF BREAKING THE RULES? ARE YOU SAYING CONSERVATIVE LEANING SOURCES ARE ILLEGAL?” is basically the textbook definition of a wildly defensive response lmao.



  • davitz@lemmy.catoA Boring Dystopia@lemmy.worldGet rid of landlords...
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    7 months ago

    The difference is scale. If a house is a safe investment that makes a reliable 10% return on investment before tax and then you pay 1% in property tax, the remaining 9% is still an extremely attractive return so the investor appetite for housing remains unchanged by this small tax. Change the tax to 9% and you’re only left with 1% return, suddenly other investment options become much more attractive. Once the investors have left, prices can normalize around the price tolerances of people actually intending to live in the space.

    This is a simplification using made up numbers, but the overall point is that the mere fact that property taxes as they currently exist (with very low rates) allow investors to run amok, that doesn’t mean that a more substantial LVT couldn’t change that.

    Obviously taxing in a way that makes rentals completely non viable is probably not a perfect solution, and raising the tax dramatically all at once before prices have a chance to react could be catastrophic, but with a careful incremental approach gradually raising LVT and displacing other taxes (starting with regressive ones like sales tax) with those revenues based on observed outcomes, progress can be made to a better equilibrium where people who want to own a home to live in have better opportunities to do so, people who want to rent still have some options, people aren’t getting rich by ransoming housing at extortionate prices, and more investment capital is funneled toward productive enterprise over plots of dirt, strengthening the actual economy.

    I think it’s probable that the Georgist dream of displacing all taxation with LVT may not be achievable due to diminishing returns on raising the tax as property values react, but I think moving in the direction of Georgist policy could absolutely usher in some better social outcomes



  • Yes, but orders of magnitude less often than random members of the public “doing their own research”. And looking at the consensus of the experts rather than individual experts the error rate is further orders of magnitude below that. You need to let go of the idea that information being a good basis for decisions means that it’s “absolute truth”, because only religion has that; what we have is some sources of information that are less likely to be wrong than all the others, and that’s unfortunately the best you can get.




  • davitz@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlPlato
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    11 months ago

    To oversimplify, it’s a metaphor about what it’s like to go through life relying only on your senses and not using reason to question or analyze the deeper meanings behind your surface impressions. The story goes on to discuss a prisoner who escapes the cave and gets a taste of true reality, that prisoner is meant to represent a philosopher. When the escaped prisoner returns and tells the others of what he’s seen, they reject his claims saying how absurd it would be to believe that there’s anything more than just the shadows. I think in this day and age it’s easy to guess what that interaction represents, but Plato had a particular bone to pick about this since his mentor had essentially been executed for questioning various things.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave?wprov=sfla1







  • It doesn’t seem that way. It seems like at least one person from your instance needs to have interacted with a community on another instance before it’ll be included in partial match search results. If you manually navigate to one of the instances you federate with and look for a very small community there and then go back to your instance and search for some of the words in that community’s name I don’t believe it will come up. But then it you search for the community’s exact fully qualified identifier it should come up and then once you subscribe it should come up if you try the previous search terms again. At least that’s been my experience. As a result, to flesh out my subscriptions I’ve spent time manually browsing to other instances, finding interesting communities in their catalogue and then manually copying the identifier and then tabbing back to my instance to find the community with the identifier and subscribe, which admittedly is far from an ideal experience. Luckily I think there’s a lot that the upcoming client implementations can do to make this discovery process easier.