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Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence

https://kimik2.com/
1•BruceWok•1m ago•1 comments

Repo to Markdown

https://repo-to-markdown.com
1•ent101•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FaceGrid – I built a tool to generate AI face grids for your pitch deck

https://facegrid.juleslemee.com/
1•jlemee•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a app to monitor your competitors and get only high-signal info

https://champsignal.com/
1•maximedupre•6m ago•0 comments

I Outline Everything

https://literallythevoid.com/why-i-outline-everything/
1•FigurativeVoid•8m ago•0 comments

Tulpa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa
1•libpcap•9m ago•0 comments

We have computation because of weaving

https://maalvika.substack.com/p/we-have-computation-because-of-weaving
1•animadot•9m ago•0 comments

So Microsoft Deleted Some of Our Packages from Nuget.org Without Notice

https://aaronstannard.com/microsoft-delete-nuget-packages/
3•ghuntley•9m ago•0 comments

How AI has changed developer relations

https://medium.com/@jkim_tran/how-ai-is-changing-developer-relations-79aecffe638e
1•jennifer-trin•9m ago•0 comments

Events vs. Privacy

https://blog.avas.space/events-vs-privacy/
1•speckx•13m ago•0 comments

Pentagon Lifts Drone Restrictions, Sending Shares of Defense Stocks Higher

https://www.wsj.com/business/pentagon-lifts-drone-restrictions-sending-shares-of-defense-stocks-higher-e2640351
1•sandwichsphinx•14m ago•0 comments

'Give a positive review': NUS-Yale Researchers Put Hidden AI Prompt in Paper

https://www.asiaone.com/singapore/give-positive-review-hidden-ai-prompt-found-academic-paper-nus-researchers
1•seagullz•14m ago•0 comments

OM System OM-5 II preview

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/om-system-om-5-mark-ii-initial-review
1•PaulHoule•15m ago•0 comments

Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion

https://github.com/GameTechDev/XeGTAO
1•klaussilveira•17m ago•0 comments

ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/07/a-language-model-built-for-the-public-good.html
3•andy99•19m ago•0 comments

Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/
2•xbmcuser•19m ago•1 comments

In Defense of Programming Languages

https://flix.dev/blog/in-defense-of-programming-languages/
1•andsoitis•20m ago•0 comments

One minute of videos from each of the 24 hours on TikTok

https://bendavidsteel.github.io/fullscreen/visual/TwentyFourHourToponymy
1•garrethlee•21m ago•0 comments

Vercel Meetup SDK

https://meetup-sdk.vercel.com/
1•jaredwiener•21m ago•0 comments

Planets larger than Neptune have elevated eccentricities

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07840
1•bikenaga•22m ago•0 comments

Google nerfs Pixel 6a batteries following fire hazard

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/a-mess-of-its-own-making-google-nerfs-second-pixel-phone-battery-this-year/
2•fffrantz•23m ago•0 comments

Web Awesome, the First All-in-One WebComponents,CSS Framework, Is Finally Here

https://thathtml.blog/2025/07/web-awesome-is-the-first-native-component-framework/
1•ulrischa•23m ago•0 comments

Dynamic Chunking for End-to-End Hierarchical Sequence Modeling

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07955
2•Anon84•27m ago•0 comments

Why Coffee Shops Should Embrace Remote Workers

https://studynearme.com/blog/why-coffee-shops-should-embrace-remote-workers/
1•kicksent•29m ago•0 comments

Sizing Up AWS "Blackwell" GPU Systems Against Prior GPUs and Trainiums

https://www.nextplatform.com/2025/07/10/sizing-up-aws-blackwell-gpu-systems-against-prior-gpus-and-trainiums/
1•rbanffy•34m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: When do you compromise your principles, if ever?

1•randerson001•35m ago•0 comments

My First Impressions of Gleam

https://mtlynch.io/notes/gleam-first-impressions/
2•Alupis•35m ago•0 comments

JPMorgan Tells Fintechs They Have to Pay Up for Customer Data

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-11/jpmorgan-tells-fintechs-they-have-to-pay-up-for-customer-data
2•toomuchtodo•41m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How would you build SaaS to $5k per month?

1•foolishgame•44m ago•0 comments

Nvidia Unveils Helix Parallelism: 32x Faster AI Inference

https://www.storagereview.com/news/nvidia-unveils-helix-parallelism-enabling-32x-faster-ai-inference-with-multi-million-token-contexts
1•rbanffy•45m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Some arguments against a land value tax (2024)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCuJotfcaoXf8FYcy/some-arguments-against-a-land-value-tax
42•danny00•5h ago

Comments

greenie_beans•4h ago
land value tax is a regressive tax on middle class homeowners that would ultimately benefit the wealthy. bc middle class single family homeowners would not be able to afford the tax increase or afford the construction to fully utilize the property, which would force them to sell to investors who could afford it.

terrible idea.

not to mention the political debates/decisions over what constitutes "fully utilized". what about public parks? urban agriculture? so many exceptions.

this would be a nightmare policy to retrofit. maybe a good idea if we had started there first, but we didn't.

it's also an ignorant diagnosis of the issue. land values and speculation is not the issue in my location (burlington, vermont) where we have a housing crisis. there are not many vacant lots (i'm guessing maybe a dozen in the entire municipality).

it's just an overly simplified solution to a complex problem.

here is what i believe to be the superior solution: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/07/nx-s1-5119633/housing-crisis-...

jimlawruk•4h ago
> land value tax is a regressive tax on middle class homeowner

Not if you make the tax progressive. The first 200K could be tax free, for example. Primary residences pay a lower % of the value than 2nd and 3rd homes. I bet there are a ton empty vacation homes in Vermont. It can be applied gradually not to shock the system.

nerdsniper•4h ago
That would somewhat defeat the purpose of the LVT. The point is to force landowners to develop their land. A "fix" would be to make access to capital easier.

Optimum development in many areas isn't necessarily a large mid-rise or high-rise. For most areas, the maximum that the roads and other utilities could support would be dense townhomes, triplexes or quadplexes. Outside of the very highest-demand areas, the LVT would mainly encourage land owners to build additional units on under-utilized square footage or build up a bit. Increasing housing in an area necessarily requires access to capital - so that's what should be provided.

It's not perfectly fair to everyone; it would enrich current landowners. But lower-income/wealth individuals would also benefit because they'd get access to more affordable housing in the areas that they need to live.

jimlawruk•4h ago
> The point is to force landowners to develop their land.

The point is to ensure landowners don't sit on land. If taxes go up on your vacation home that you spend two weeks a year in, you will be incentivized to sell it or rent it out more. Both of which benefits the public at large. Not to mention it is a fairer tax than an income tax or wealth tax.

greenie_beans•3h ago
most of the vacation homes in vermont are in rural areas. so they wouldn't get penalized by the tax if the purpose of LVT is to increase taxes in urban areas.
greenie_beans•3h ago
> But lower-income/wealth individuals would also benefit because they'd get access to more affordable housing in the areas that they need to live.

how does this create affordable housing? taxes are only one piece of why housing is so expensive. the landowners would need a return on their investment, which they would get by raising rent. this is the core problem imo -- costs for construction and labor and permitting and taxes requiring higher rent in order to make the investment worthwhile.

the offset of lower taxes will absolutely not pay for the cost to "fully utilize" the property.

some_random•2h ago
The theory here is that people who aren't getting "enough value" out of the land will be forced to sell to developers who will turn them into, among other things, houses.
greenie_beans•32m ago
yes i know, that is the "theory" in a logical vacuum. that just reinforces my original point that it will hurt the middle class and only benefit wealthy people. especially since the tax would make the land cheaper (in LVT theory), so when you are forced to sell it you're gonna have to sell at a lower price than you'd like (that is the entire logic of LVT: make land cheaper to encourage more building).

you can't just wave a wand to build housing if the taxes change to LVT. we all know that developers don't build affordable housing. the margins are much more attractive to build luxury housing...it's the incentive structure. housing is expensive to build, and those investors will require an ROI.

terrible idea! the more you look at it, the worse and worse it sounds.

ljlolel•4h ago
It’s not application of the tax but (relatively) sudden increases in land value that would price out force out neighborhoods
sokoloff•3h ago
I don’t think a land value tax is a good idea, because I’ve never heard a satisfactory way to objectively value the land as-if unimproved.

But making you and I pay a different amount of LVT on the same exact piece of land definitely makes it a worse idea in my view.

eitally•3h ago
Afaict, Prop 13 does this in California. Property tax is based on assessed value, and that assessed value isn't just for the improvements, but also the underlying land. So the fact that I pay about $20k/yr in property tax and my back-fence neighbor pays about $3500 (because we purchased in 2016 and they inherited the 1954 home from original owner parents) must indicate that it's not just the improvements that are covered by Prop 13. I had never thought about this before, but at least in California a potential compromise around LVT would be the modify Prop 13 to allow land values to appreciate at market rates while keeping appreciating of improvements capped.
sokoloff•1h ago
There is a market for land plus improvements. What you actually paid in 2016 is presumably the market value of that combination. You probably referred to other similar parcels that had recently sold when contemplating your offer as well.

It’s trying to figure out “what is the land alone under these improvements worth?” that has no market signal to use as a reference (or an extremely weak signal in areas where unimproved lots do sell on the open market).

If you paid $1.5M in 2016, was the land alone $500K, $1M, or $1.25M? If you disagreed with the city’s assessment of just your land, how would you find comps to argue your case?

greenie_beans•3h ago
like i said, terrible idea with a million exceptions
Aurornis•3h ago
> Primary residences pay a lower % of the value than 2nd and 3rd homes.

I think it's funny how every LVT discussion eventually comes back to some inclusion of other factors to adjust the taxes or provide exemptions, which starts to defeat the claimed purpose of a Land Value Tax.

LVT is a concept that sounds amazing and novel in a vacuum, but starts to look less ideal in the real world. The people who think about it enough start to include factors like structure value and different exceptions for how the land is being used, which starts to look a lot like existing tax code in most places.

some_random•2h ago
LVT sounds really smart when you exclusively talk about car parks in downtown NYC or whatever, it's not actually a good tax framework as soon as the conversation shifts from talking about low perceived social value commercial endeavors.
niam•27m ago
> which starts to defeat the claimed purpose of a Land Value Tax.

What do you think others claim the purpose of an LVT is?

> every LVT discussion eventually comes back to some inclusion of other factors to adjust the taxes or provide exemptions

This argument seems only to follow from a belief that carving exceptions out of policy here is either: inherently bad, lends to a slippery slope towards badness, or is fundamentally incompatible with the professed aims of an LVT (hence my asking).

I don't believe any of those are true, so this sounds to me an unfair indictment against the otherwise legitimate strategy of "keep what's good; change what's bad", which is practical and works for other policy all the time. While I'd scorn the complexity of our current tax code, I wouldn't do so on principle of exemptions being bad, but rather that we've made poor tradeoffs or struck a bad balance.

webstrand•4h ago
Yeah, no LVT proponent has successfully explained to me how it does not cause the erasure of urban or even suburban green spaces, be they public parks, private parks, gardens, etc. If a park increases neighboring land values, then the taxes incurred by the park go up without recompense to the owner (assuming the park is not held by the government).
Nasrudith•4h ago
I think you might be slightly confused. Wouldn't the issue be not that the parks themselves are expensive to the owner tax (not only is thr landscaping not that expensive, as LVT excludes your own improvements), but instead that they are effectively discouraged by increasing the tax on everyone adjacent and thus peversely encouraging NIMBYism of towards a common good by imposing a negative externality which does not exist otherwise? The issue wouldn’t be that it would add a tax burden upon the park owner, but that it turns operating a common good into a 'sadistic' act that pushes costs onto others.

A LVT could thus accidentally wind up like a window tax in that it could wind up discouraging efficient improvements to human conditions out of a misguided attempt at improving perceived fairness.

kfajdsl•4h ago
How many private parks are there? Pretty much every one I've been to has been government run, other than small outdoor spaces next to private buildings and large pay for admission gardens that are usually way out in the boonies on the grounds of an old plantation or manor.

I can't think of how a private, but still public-access, park survives without a rich benefactor eating the losses, even today.

greenie_beans•3h ago
all of my favorite hiking areas in the birmingham, alabama area were privately owned. churches have public areas that you can enjoy as a non-member of the church. i'm sure we could think of more

edit: oh i just realized a huge one in my daily life: the intervale in burlington is owned by the intervale center but the community garden is managed by the city's parks & rec. also there are a ton of public trails on that private property.

tetromino_•2h ago
In New York, you sometimes find unofficial community parks / third spaces on unused plots of land which for whatever reason (such as a strange shape) are difficult to develop. These are maintained by enthusiastic local residents, and the land owners turn a blind eye to it as long as there are no complaints.

If LVT is implemented, land owners will have a financial incentive to sell off the plots, and the spaces will be gone.

ta1243•1h ago
Sell them to who? How much would someone pay for land that's difficult to develop?

If someone else can develop the land, why doesn't the current land owner

kfajdsl•51m ago
What incentive to sell off the plot does LVT create that doesn't already exist, maybe with a marginally lower degree? I'm guessing the reason they can't sell a tiny weirdly shaped lot is that no one wants it. If they didn't want it and they could sell it, they already have ample financial incentive to sell.
webstrand•9m ago
Around here, there are a bunch of private parks in that you pay a fee to enter the park or you can purchase a membership. The fee is minimal and mostly just serves to maintain the park. These are privately held parks, too, not owned by local or state government.

As far as I am aware, they are able to survive on their membership or visitor fees. But major improvements do take larger donation.

renewiltord•3h ago
Parks built for the public benefit as 501c3 don’t pay property taxes.
webstrand•6m ago
I'm not really sure that's a complete solution. Couldn't you just spin up a 501 c3 org to hold onto properties until you want to do something with them, bypassing the LVT?
highwayman47•4h ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
andrewla•4h ago
I agree with many of the arguments here about the theoretical impacts of a land value tax, especially the section "an LVT implicitly taxes improvements to nearby land" which is often overlooked or glossed over in these discussions.

But my main argument is practical. I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel. Any discussion of a practical LVT has to start with the fact that it is an approximation to a theoretical ideal, and define exactly what the basis for "land value" estimation is, because it's really a tax on that process. While some of these may have overlap with the benefits and detriments of a theoretical LVT, they have to be looked at from first principles rather than by comparison with the LVT because the fundamental assumptions are often broken.

Aurornis•3h ago
> especially the section "an LVT implicitly taxes improvements to nearby land" which is often overlooked or glossed over in these discussions.

The claim, which I disagree with, is that spreading those taxes across nearby land incentivizes those property owners to sell their land to someone else who will improve it.

Which gets at another LVT problem that is glossed over in discussions: Everything assumes that selling properties and moving is cheap and easy. If grandma's forever home is surrounded by apartment complexes when she's 85 years old, her taxes would become unaffordable because she's paying her share of those apartment complex value taxes. She would just pick up and move, which we're supposed to assume is cheap and easy.

It can all be fixed by making the tax structure a combination of land value and structure value, which happens to be how existing property taxes are constructed in most places.

pydry•2h ago
>The claim, which I disagree with, is that spreading those taxes across nearby land incentivizes those property owners to sell their land to someone else who will improve it.

The only claim here is that if you own land which makes you $1000 in income and pay $2000 in taxes for that underutilized land you'd probably prefer to sell up.

Which has to be the least controversial part of LVT.

>Which gets at another LVT problem that is glossed over in discussions: Everything assumes that selling properties and moving is cheap and easy. If grandma's forever home is surrounded by apartment complexes when she's 85 years old, her taxes would become unaffordable because she's paying her share of those apartment complex value taxes. She would just pick up and move, which we're supposed to assume is cheap and easy.

We're seeing the net result of your desired policy right now where retired boomers sit on 4 bedroom houses with 3 empty bedrooms while anything resembling this type of family home is unaffordable for actual families.

Personally I think I preferred it when retirees were given tax incentives to sell up and downgrade to a smaller property, because even though moving day is stressful, not easy and costs money, it's not worth sacrificing an entire society over trying to avoid it.

amluto•1h ago
> We're seeing the net result of your desired policy right now where retired boomers sit on 4 bedroom houses with 3 empty bedrooms while anything resembling this type of family home is unaffordable for actual families.

Some of this is due to tax policy, at least in the US. If you own an oversized house that you’ve had for long enough, then most of the value is a capital gain. If you sell it, you pay taxes on all but $500k of that gain, even if you promptly buy a new, smaller house that costs almost as much. If, instead, you hold the house until you die, the tax is waived completely.

California has additional perverse incentives due to property taxes.

bluGill•59m ago
Retirees have been doing this for as long as humans have owned property. Then they die and the house moves on. There is good reason someone will want to live in a house that is larger than they need.

If there are not enough houses don't blame that on existing houses.

strbean•33m ago
> Retirees have been doing this for as long as humans have owned property.

Absolutely not. Extended families lived under the same roof for most of human history. This is a Nuclear Family problem, which only emerged in the 20th century.

jltsiren•32m ago
Multigenerational households were the norm until recently. The eldest son gradually took over the household and raised his family there, or something like that. Both because it would have been terrible waste to have an entire house for some old people, and because household chores were hard work before modern amenities.
majormajor•23m ago
It still happens.

The less wealthy the family, the more likely you'll see it.

So your aggressive taxes will hit those people - displacing additional generations, not just the land-owning-but-otherwise-fairly-poor retiree - before it will hit the stereotypical middle class boomer retiree.

Outside of CA's Prop-13 territory, the multi-generational shabby-old-home-owners pay less taxes currently than their richer neighbors who moved more recently and renovated or expanded. The land value of both is going up, but the improvement value is lower for the poorer family. So now you'll get rid of the improvement value and even it out for both, which will hit the poorer land owners the hardest.

majormajor•24m ago
If you're concerned with "it's underutilized because the population density is low and other people need more housing" than it would be much easier and more effective to directly pursue building housing on low-population-density non-residential land. Direct construction driven by the government, vs a multi-step strategy of "make people miserable with tax payments until they sell, hope the people they sell too will be deep-pocketed developers who will build super-high-density stuff instead of just fancier homes for richer families, and hope all this happens quickly."

Cause a tax amount that goes up based on what people with more money than you do on other pieces of property simply gives more power to the wealthy. "Underutilized" as far as tax implications go then means "people with more money than you would like there to be something else there."

And, of course, this already happens with US property taxes in many jurisdictions. And people absolutely hate it.

"Tax incentives to downgrade to a smaller property" sounds great in theory for retirees sitting in huge properties, but I think is limited in practice. The people with the really big places are wealthy and politically influential, so you'll get Prop 13s, or you'll get the recent cuts to property tax in Texas. "Make housing more affordable by cutting the taxes!" And the people impacted by more aggressive taxes will less be the boomers in giant houses and more be the poorer retirees in multi-generational living situations, or ones in fairly small condos.

sapal•3h ago
> I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel.

Here is an article arguing that yes, it can be done well enough: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-c...

derektank•3h ago
Do you believe you can determine the true value of improved land, given how illiquid a market it is? Obviously, the last sale price provides some true information about the value, but it could literally be a decades old number. Do you believe states and municipalities shouldn't update property taxes for a parcel of real estate unless it's sold? I think we've seen from CA's experience with Prop 13 that this creates pretty distortionary incentives.
andrewla•2h ago
> Do you believe you can determine the true value of improved land

It is at least theoretically answerable. In the extreme, yes. We can simply force the sale of the land. Practically speaking, no, we cannot answer that question in a deeply illiquid market.

For the unimproved value I'm not certain that there is a consistent and useful theoretical definition that can be translated to practice. Even in the extreme the question of the unimproved value of the land becomes difficult. Were we to raze all improvements and force the sale would that give us an answer? Do we include the cost of razing? What counts an unimproved? Can we leave trees or grass?

bluGill•57m ago
Real estate is liquid enough. I cannot sell my house this afternoon, so it isn't fully liquid, but a real estate agent can give me a number to list my house at this afternoon and be within a few % of what I get in a few months in most cases so that is close enough to liquid.
itsdrewmiller•3h ago
This is already part of property tax assessment - I get a separate price estimate for the land and the structure. I also own some undeveloped land and pay property taxes on that. All a LVT does is get rid of the structure part and raise the rate on the land part.
andrewla•2h ago
Saying that they assess the value tells me nothing. How, specifically, do they arrive at these assessments.

In my experience there is often an assessment process that is essentially just made up. And when properties do sell, the sale price is always a "surprise" relative to the assessed combined value of the property.

In a sense the question is "What in particular makes you confident that the estimate accurately reflects the price of the land" but in a deeper sense what does the concept of "price of the land" even mean in practical terms? How would you know that the answer is right even if you were omniscient? And given the practical divergence from whatever theoretical standpoint, does then this value serve the same objectives as a "true" LVT?

itsdrewmiller•2h ago
The assessments are roughly based on the sale price of similar lots and the approximate rebuild value of the structures; usually erring on the low side in my experience (though that is probably more about the direction of the housing market than inherent to the process). I agree there is a qualitative element that strikes me as icky compared to pure quant taxes like wages, but it's already happening so LVT doesn't materially change things.
adverbly•35m ago
> How, specifically, do they arrive at these assessments.

So is your argument that you don't understand something and so it must be wrong?

There's an extremely large amount of existing material that is used by property assessors available for you to look up to research how they do this. It is a well-established field.

Property assessments have been done across a huge number of countries for decades probably billions of times at this point. There are probably trillions of dollars of capital that flows according to these assessments.

pydry•3h ago
>I agree with many of the arguments here about the theoretical impacts of a land value tax, especially the section "an LVT implicitly taxes improvements to nearby land"

Which is more of a feature than a bug.

The alternative to "local land value improvements feed the local tax base" is that schoolteachers who make the local schools good make the local landlords more money.

The idea mooted in the article that developers would be unwilling to build 20 houses on a plot of land because having 10 houses would jack the LVT up for the other 10 is entirely backward. The value of those houses will be predicated almost entirely on infrastructure (roads, rail, schools, etc.) or services (shops) provided by the community you're paying taxes to.

>I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel.

Did you read the wikipedia page about LVT which describes how? Which part is impossible?

andrewla•2h ago
> Did you read the wikipedia page about LVT which describes how? Which part is impossible?

The wikipedia article describes some processes, including assessments, regressions, and interpolation from fixed landmarks.

Those are all means of estimating something, which you can call the "unimproved land value" if you are so inclined, but what exactly is the thing that they are estimating? How do you know if they are accurate?

You can implement a framework based on any of those measures, but crucially as above they are not an LVT, they are a "proportionate tax on total value based on extrapolating previous sales minus human estimates of improvement value according to a rubric" for example, and have different advantages and disadvantages than an LVT even theoretically, so every time you make an argument that "LVTs have such-and-such a property" you have to expand the definition of LVT to be the specific case and verify whether that property makes sense in the context of that particular methodology. As a shorthand it becomes useless.

My point is not that there are attempts to have an LVT that are approximations of the ideal reality; my point is that this ideal simply does not exist in any sort of cogent way so you might as well tax based on how much God loves the property or how many potatoes you could grow on the land.

notahacker•55m ago
> The alternative to "local land value improvements feed the local tax base" is that schoolteachers who make the local schools good make the local landlords more money

Or indeed that a headteacher works long and hard to improve their school and all they get for it is a reduction in their real income because the plot of land their house sits on costs 20% more.

Or the schoolteachers get driven away by a horde of NIMBYs who really don't want to be forced to move because the schools are good...

mNovak•3h ago
>> I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel

There's a decent discussion on that topic here [1], as a starting point. Not saying it's absolutely conclusive, but gives some food for thought. I suppose where determining an accurate value might be most difficult is parcels that rarely turn over, so have little direct or nearby sales data.

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-c...

andrewla•2h ago
It is an interesting discussion, but I don't see anything in there about how to assess the accuracy of any of the methods against some sort of objective truth. I would have to read the underlying papers I think to get at this, but I don't feel a strong need because I feel like the larger epistemic point is unaddressed in any of the summaries.

The closest I saw was one study that compared the model to a human generated data set, which is just kicking the can down the road. The article semi-concludes

> I think it's quite plausible but not a slam dunk. That said, if the objection is, "valuing land separately from improvements is fundamentally impossible, and we can never get better at it, so we shouldn't try," I think that's plainly ruled out.

I do not agree with this assessment -- you can create a bunch of models and show that the models have good intra-model agreement, but the fundamental point has not been touched.

alistairSH•1h ago
Maybe but at some point, isn't your problem the same valuing a single dollar? We can compare the USD against other fiat currency, but they're all valued against the USD or some other bucket of fiat currencies. Or, you could try to tie the value of the dollar against a bucket of goods, but that's also just moving the goalposts around.
andrewla•1h ago
Now we're wandering a bit far afield, but estimates and measurements like this are fine if they are designed for an operational purpose. If I want to know the unimproved value of my land so that I can evaluate whether to buy a similar property and build a similar house on it, then it's fine for me to use whatever estimation protocol is going to help me make a decision. If my protocol is bad then my estimates will be bad then <shrug emoji> it's my problem.

Similarly trying to measure the value of the dollar -- what is the operational purpose of that measurement? This is a real problem in any sort of macroeconomic analysis, and Goodhart's law makes it far far far worse when trying to apply it for practical purposes. Mostly you have to accept that there is not going to be a quantitative metric that captures the underlying squishy concept so better not to think about the problem of, say, inflation, in purely quantitative terms.

adverbly•37m ago
> I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel.

How familiar are you with existing property taxes?

It might surprise you that land value estimation is literally already happening at scale.

Also, you don't need to be 100% accurate with the estimation. Even a 50% lvt would be a huge improvement and would mean that you could literally be off by 100% which is extremely unlikely. How many houses do you see selling for twice the listing price?

patmcc•31m ago
>>>I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel.

I think there's a perfectly fine way; you estimate it the way we currently estimate properly values for tax purposes. If they owner doesn't like that value, you allow them to contest it, and we immediately accept any contested claim and value it as the owner desires, with two small caveats: a) they pay tax on the claimed value, to ensure they don't over value and b) they are required to sell to anyone at claimed value + 10%, to ensure they don't under value.

baggy_trough•30m ago
What a terrible way to live that would be.
delecti•23m ago
> sell to anyone at claimed value + 10%

But the point of LVT is that it doesn't include the value of the stuff on the land. A house can easily be worth more than 10% of the land it's on, my house is valued at about twice that of the land, or 20x what your plan would require me to accept for the house.

spjt•4h ago
The most obvious argument for me is that I don't even think that developing land as much as possible should be a desired outcome. I'd rather have some billionaire sitting on a huge plot of wilderness than turn it into another shopping center.
potato3732842•4h ago
Many states have adopted various sorts of watershed protection or conservation laws that make many areas undevelopable in any profitable way. The cost of the hoops one must jump through to prove some small project will not run afoul of these laws is a non starter....unless the developer is professional capital fueled operation looking to put in a chain store, strip mall or 5-over-N. That drags up adjacent values enough that the suburban subdivision developers show up and start buying the farms, etc, etc.

So in a perverse sort of way you basically get what you want, wide swaths of low/no development wilderness, but it's paid for by the everyman not the billionares.

sc68cal•3h ago
> I'd rather have some billionaire sitting on a huge plot of wilderness

I'd rather not have a billionaire sitting on a huge plot of land. If we as a society want that wilderness to be preserved, it should be a state park or national park, that should be relinquished to our government.

rufus_foreman•3h ago
They tried a land value tax in Hawaii. The results are described in the lyrics of the Joni Mitchell song "Big Yellow Taxi":

"They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot"

thrance•1h ago
I'd rather the plot be a national park be yes, no need to pave the entire country in the name of efficiency.
seanalltogether•4h ago
LVT should be incorporated with an occupancy tax, it's the only fair way to fund government services. If I own a farm, and my neighbor sells their farm to turn into a housing estate with 99 single family homes, then it is fair to say that my land is now more valuable and I should pay more to keep you it, but it isn't fair to say that my taxes should rise to cover half of the local budget just because I own half of the land in region
tartoran•3h ago
In this scenario your property value would go up and with higher taxes you'd be incentivized to sell for a profit and move your farm farther away in a different zoning.
thow58406•3h ago
The incentives you've presented are correct. However, my friends from rural areas always complain about rich outsiders moving in, buying everyone else out, and raising the cost of living. If LVT is just a way to "[incentivize farmers] to sell for a profit", why would people in these areas support LVT? I'm afraid it would just turn into another partisan issue, regardless of merits. And I like LVT!
eitally•3h ago
Perhaps a solution is to create "LVT Zones" in metro areas, and perhaps replace current residential / commercial / agriculture / industrial zoning with them?

And LVT that replaces zoning basically just lets the highest bidder do whatever they want with the land. An LVT that augments zoning could perhaps be tenable but I would argue that in VHCOL areas there's already something of an LVT in place. My SFH in San Jose is assessed as having equal value for the 8800sqft as it is for the house built on it. What I wonder is how the actuaries and policy makers responsible for assessing property values for county taxation actually do that, and how much of the formula is already based on land value.

Aurornis•3h ago
This is how every argument about LVT goes once people start thinking about the details: They start thinking of various edge cases and exceptions that highlight how it's not as fair as proponents claim, until eventually we're back to the current taxation systems where land value is part of the tax, but other factors are also considered.
pydry•3h ago
An LVT would need relatively few exceptions and rules in order to function well and is unavoidable by design. What we have right now for most taxes is the exact opposite of that - e.g. with sales, income taxes, etc.

Mostly there are just pearl clutchers complaining about how elderly cash poor people sitting in large old houses on expensive land they've lived in for 20 years would be financially nudged into downgrading.

The real roadblock for LVT is not in the slightest bit technical, but simply that it would undermine a lot of privately held oligarchic wealth.

kemotep•2h ago
Land owners make up a plurality of voters. In some cases those land owners are retirees living in a house they bought 45 years ago others are people who own 500 houses.

The land value tax “equally” punishes them for their inefficient land usage. But at some point we need to pay our fair share on taxes and the later group hiding behind the former group is how you end up with California’s dumpster fire of a housing crisis.

daveguy•2h ago
I agree with this. I really do not know why in the hell one person or entity owning 500 houses wouldn't pay more in taxes for the 500th house than the 1st house. You pay more income tax on the 500,000th dollar than the first dollar. Land is taxed regressively in favor of oligarchs.

First house is claimed as homestead and gains on sale aren't taxed, but the yearly property tax should work similarly.

bluGill•54m ago
Where I live homestead status affects yearly taxes as well.

This is a negative for anyone who is renting since they now have to pay more rent to cover those taxes. (taxes set a floor on rent long term, though of course tax is only one factor in rental prices)

ifyoubuildit•1h ago
"Mostly there are just pearl clutchers complaining about how elderly cash poor people sitting in large old houses on expensive land they've lived in for 20 years would be financially nudged into downgrading"

I wonder if you wouldn't be clutching your pearls if you were being forced (sorry, "financially nudged") out of your home of 20 years?

These cash poor elderly folks aren't exactly "oligarchic".

sealeck•1h ago
They can move somewhere cheaper? And then the high value land can be used more productively (e.g. higher density occupancy).
strongpigeon•28m ago
What a lot of jurisdiction do to deal with this situation is to allow elderly folks to accrue what is essentially a lien on their house for the property taxes going up more than a certain amount.

This way these folks don't have to pay much more than before, can stay in their house and the county gets its share when these people die or move out.

xnx•3h ago
Would it be even more fair to assess taxes based on services allocated?
bitshiftfaced•3h ago
Isn't this case just revealing the opportunity cost of keeping the land as a farm in that location? For example, what incentive is there to buy an acre of downtown Miami and convert it to farm land? Should we lower that acre's property tax now?
ta1243•2h ago
Why would the cost of local services be related to the tax on the value of the land?
cma256•3h ago
Why are we pretending like LVT doesn't exist already? I pay taxes on my land. Those taxes are calculated based on size and location. The Disney example is particularly egregious. They pay taxes on the land AND the structures they built but the article acts as though they would be disincentivized from building if we _removed_ taxes on the structures? Huh?
bitshiftfaced•3h ago
The idea is not to disincentivize developing on the land. To me, it only really works when you remove the friction/gaming of all the other taxes and put it all into LVT, but that will never happen of course.
xvedejas•2h ago
If your land can be treated as an asset, then we don't really have LVT yet. The goal of LVT is to tax land to the point where it is no longer an appreciating asset (and, not too much that it becomes a liability)
xnx•3h ago
What's the societal value in trying to financially engineer land development? Is it to better utilize existing infrastructure? Charge each property proportionally for the road system and fallow land will naturally be developed to handle the taxes.
derektank•3h ago
Property taxes are attractive because land doesn't move (unlike other forms of wealth) and it's easy to account for by tax collectors. There's also zero dead weight loss as you can't create more land. Taxes on land improvements are unattractive because they disincentivize owners from investing in their property. This leaves us with taxes on unimproved land being a very attractive option funding the government.
xnx•3h ago
Good overview. What's the imperative for a government to incentivize owners to invest in their property? Seems like it's fine if the owner invests in their property or not.
Mikhail_K•3h ago
"Ratinalists" are basically libertarians that are coy about it.
antonvs•3h ago
They're more culty than libertarians.

They're a lot like the modern-day version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, which is also libertarian. I remember people getting involved in that at university in the '80s and thinking how cult-like it all was - people feeling they had "found the truth" and wanting to recruit new members.

Rationalism seems to be playing a similar role for a certain type of person in Silicon Valley today, fulfilling an emotional/religious need.

Another way to look at it: Scientology, but replace Xenu with Yudkowsky and volcanoes with Harry Potter, or something.

krapp•3h ago
It will never cease to amuse me that people calling themselves "rationalists" wound up recreating Pascal's Wager from first principles, just with time travelling robots, and drove themselves to sometimes murderous insanity over it. And that their Bible is essentially a Harry Potter fanfic.

These are the dipshits conspiring to shape our future, control our destiny and create the Machine God in their image. They make the billionaires messing around the big owl at Bohemian Grove look positively tame and... rational.

antonvs•2h ago
In my more benevolent moments, despite not being religious, I take a Jesus-like attitude: "Forgive them, they know not what they do."

It all seems to have been a very predictable consequence of the de-emphasis of teaching any humanities at all in favor of STEM uber alles.

It's like the line from "Kung Pow: Enter the Fist": "Pay no attention to Wimp Lo, we purposely trained him wrong... as a joke."

Except it wasn't a joke, it was an economic strategy.

> time traveling robots

Won't someone think of the children, I mean, future simulated me?

lanfeust6•1h ago
You don't know what you're talking about. There are just as many socialists among them.
pydry•3h ago
>Take, for example, the case of surveying land for oil. Imagine a landowner invests significant time, money, and effort into exploring their property to determine whether it contains untapped oil reserves.

LVT is for building property or occupying land. Mineral rights are under many if not most legal systems treated separately from land ownership (e.g. they are auctioned off) because unlike land, oil wells eventually run dry.

This does not seem like an honest criticism of LVT, because it deliberately blurs land and mineral rights.

>This is important because it implies that, under an LVT, landowners with large plots of land are disincentivized to create any improvements they make to one part of their property, as it could trigger higher taxes on nearby land that they own. For instance, if a developer owns multiple adjacent parcels and decides to build housing or infrastructure on one of them, the value of the undeveloped parcels will rise due to their proximity to the improvements.

A problem with not having LVT is that you aren't incentivized to make improvements to land that you own. Without LVT if I'm lazy I can just build a car park on highly valuable city center land I inherited and collect fees, still making a tidy profit. With LVT I need to A) develop it to its actual potential, B) sell it to somebody who will or C) eat losses.

That's the kind of market discipline we are currently lacking which the author of this piece apparently does not want.

On the other hand, a developer who builds 10 houses on one plot of land is not going to magically make 10 houses on another plot of land double in price.

>Even in its simplest "naive" form, the LVT has a narrow tax base. The reality is that the vast majority of global wealth is created through human labor and innovation

This last criticism is A) wrong and B) only applies to single taxers, not proponents of LVT.

some_random•2h ago
>>This is important because it implies that, under an LVT, landowners with large plots of land are disincentivized to create any improvements they make to one part of their property, as it could trigger higher taxes on nearby land that they own. For instance, if a developer owns multiple adjacent parcels and decides to build housing or infrastructure on one of them, the value of the undeveloped parcels will rise due to their proximity to the improvements.

>A problem with not having LVT is that you aren't incentivized to make improvements to land that you own. Without LVT if I'm lazy I can just build a car park on highly valuable city center land I inherited and collect fees, still making a tidy profit. With LVT I need to A) develop it to its actual potential, B) sell it to somebody who will or C) eat losses.

You're missing the point entirely. When your small business, single family home, little ranch, whatever, becomes in increasing proximity to improvements your tax goes up. If you own a big ranch and decide to split some of it off, build housing or whatever and sell, then your tax on everything goes up per LVT.

tom_•3h ago
See also, perhaps, Killer Arguments Against Land Value Tax... Not: https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/p/index.html
noqc•1h ago
You should always be wary of arguments from people who name themselves "The correct people". Less wrong, and the "rationalists" generally, are engaged in magical cult-like thinking.
some_random•1h ago
Could you go ahead and cite an example of such thinking from this article?
noqc•1h ago
Sure, but my point stands regardless.

All taxes that generate revenue are taxes on good things. This is a fundamental rule of economics. Using this as an argument against LVT just means that you are opposed to taxation generally as a way to generate revenue. This essay doesn't defend that position though, because it is engaged in magical thinking.

Calling yourself a rationalist is just branding. It means that your opponents aren't rationalists. It's dishonest.

some_random•1h ago
That is an absolutely hilarious argument, made even funnier by accusing other people of magical thinking. I don't even know where to start with it, "All taxes that generate revenue are taxes on good things"? A fundamental rule of economics? Is your argument that LVT generates revenue therefore you can't criticize that it could suppress development in some cases?
noqc•20m ago
>Is your argument that LVT generates revenue therefore you can't criticize that it could suppress development in some cases?

No.

zahlman•1h ago
> Calling yourself a rationalist is just branding. It means that your opponents aren't rationalists. It's dishonest.

This frankly comes across as projection.

noqc•22m ago
>projection

Please elaborate. I do not know what you could possibly mean.

lanfeust6•1h ago
> Calling yourself a rationalist is just branding. It means that your opponents aren't rationalists. It's dishonest.

Consider, are you exceptional in the sense that you would not place yourself in any camp whatsoever, ascribe to any ideology? You're neither left or right? Actions dictate identity.

Having an interest in something is not the same as having a superiority complex.

noqc•19m ago
If your name for your "ideology" is "better than yours", then yes, I consider this to be a superiority complex.
bluGill•52m ago
> All taxes that generate revenue are taxes on good things

I think a majority would agree tobacco is not a good thing and yet we tax it.

noqc•23m ago
taxing tobacco is not to generate revenue. That is, in fact, exactly the point. Taxing tobacco is to discourage tobacco use. The point is to have close to zero tobacco use, which results in close to zero revenue.
itsdrewmiller•49m ago
The author is quite clear that they are just pointing out that the LVT has some downsides, and are not trying to make any case about its overall value. It's good for LVT supporters to understand the counterarguments and be able to weigh them and rebut them (or change their mind! but hopefully not in this case because the counterarguments are very weak).

I don't understand your "fundamental rule of economics" claim - carbon taxes are a clear counterexample, I would think.

zahlman•1h ago
Rationality (not "rationalism") does not present anything like such a mindset. The entire point of the name "less wrong" is that one is still wrong.
sealeck•1h ago
In fact commenters on Less Wrong are often _more wrong_!
lanfeust6•1h ago
The rat-adjacent types are not a monolith and are not of the same worldview. The distribution between left and right, politically, approximately matches the general population. What they're about is approaching the best data we have in good faith and being open to updating perspectives.

Sounds like you wouldn't fit in.

advisedwang•1h ago
Do LVT proponents believe economic activity that requires minimal land ownership relative to the profit should be untaxed?

E.g.

* Offshore oil drilling

* Tech companies

* Fully remote CPAs

* Electricians

* etc

It seems very weird large sections of the economy become virtually untaxed, requiring a MASSIVE tax burden on the others. The simplicity of the LVT plan kinda hides that it implies a huge restructuring of the economy.

yesfitz•1h ago
Proponents of the Land Value Tax as a single tax would probably say that those activities should be untaxed.

Proponents of the Land Value Tax, but not as a single tax would probably be more mixed.

Restructuring of the economy isn't a hidden part of the Land Value Tax, it's the point.

closeparen•1h ago
Georgism holds that productive economic activity gets absorbed into land value.
itsdrewmiller•46m ago
I don't think very many LVT supporters think it should be the sole or even primary source of taxation. The main point I see being made is that property taxes as designed today discourage development, whereas a LVT would encourage it. Property taxes are only about 10% of overall US taxation, and a switch to LVT would have its intended effect even if they became a smaller piece of the pie.
wankerrific•1h ago
Wealth tax on holdings over a billion. Let capital “flight”.
tonymet•43m ago
every tax discussion i've ever read treats taxes in the abstract without spending. The assumption is "how do we raise as much tax as possible".

When you actually learn about public agency spending, you'll see that 2/3 of it is completely unnecessary.

I'm not saying companies are any better, but they generally don't have the mandate to take your house from you if you are not a customer.

Focus on the spending first, and make sure it's essential. Then figure out how to fund it.

If you can get spending scope reduced by 90% (where it was before FDR) , you'll find the tax situation solves itself. You won't have to invent taxes on every activity.

adverbly•41m ago
I think I disagree with this?

From pragmatic standpoint there needs to be some spending and it obviously makes sense to think about how best to raise revenue.

Does that make sense?

tonymet•17m ago
if spending is 90% lower than today, coming up with revenue is trivial.

Until 16th amendment, Federal revenue was from excise tax. Income, fees, capital gains were not necessary.

So degree matters. Of course you're going to have to keep inventing new tax revenue streams if spending is 6-10x more than it should be.

We may keep the property tax, but talking about tax revenue absent of spending is like talking about how to deal with a headache caused by a nail in the head, without addressing the nail.

flenserboy•35m ago
LVT is envy written into law — "how dare someone use what belongs to them in a way which doesn't benefit me?!?", whether individuals or groups are speaking. It also puts a wonderful tool into the hands of decision-makers to reward friends & punish enemies. No.
wahern•29m ago
> The government has incentives to inflate their estimates of the value of unimproved land

In fact, the opposite is the case. In the few US cities--historically and present--with an LVT, the political pressure was and is to consistently undervalue the land. Because the quickest way for your administration to get voted out of office is for your tax assessors to be hard-asses about applying the LVT formula, let alone inflate assessments. As the article highlights, one of the problems with LVT is that your assessment can rise preciptiously through no "fault" of your own, which engenders a strong sense of insecurity wrt your property. That has tax-payer revolt written all over it.

Yet underassessing has its own problems--it erodes legitimacy of the government. Prior to Prop 13 property assessors were consistently underassessing the property of senior citizen homeowners. But this engendered a sense of capriciousness that was felt most acutely by, ironically, senior citizen homeowners.

None of which is to say LVT could never work, but it requires a tremendous shift in the political culture. The legitimacy of the existing property tax structure and its relationship to our conception of property rights is baked into our political culture; shifting to a new system will necessarily be incredibly difficult and destabilizing.

gruez•10m ago
>As the article highlights, one of the problems with LVT is that your assessment can rise preciptiously through no "fault" of your own, which engenders a strong sense of insecurity wrt your property. That has tax-payer revolt written all over it.

Isn't that an issue with all property tax regimes that don't have the prop 13 carveout, regardless of whether it's LVT or not?

adverbly•28m ago
Happy to answer anyone's questions on LVT if they have them!

It sort of breaks your head the first time you try to think about it because we are just not used to thinking about supply and demand in cases where supply is actually fixed, and that's where all the magic benefits come from. Happy to answer any questions people have.

Full disclosure though I'm a huge proponent!

As with any policy, there are some advantages and disadvantages but I think on the whole LVT is probably the single best policy change we could make as a society.

adolph•7m ago
@patio11's podcast, Complex Systems has two great episodes that discuss much of the context about land value tax and property tax systems in general (from a US perspective).

How we tax property, with Lars Doucet: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/property-asse...

Tax the dirt, with Lars Doucet & Greg Miller: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/tax-the-dirt-...