frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Does Georgism work? Five years later

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-years-later
47•silveraxe93•1d ago

Comments

bombcar•43m ago
"Doing policymaker's work for them" is something like 80% of lobbying.

If you have something you want done in your town, and you come with the work done AND not asking for funding, you're likely to get it.

If you come with the work done and a PLAN for getting the funding, you also have a good chance of success.

john01dav•20m ago
Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.

I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.

skew-aberration•31m ago
I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.

Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.

jdjdndndbd•21m ago
Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.
ro_sharp•10m ago
Yes, pricing negative externalities is a good idea. Unfortunately some are more or less expensive to price/enforce
skew-aberration•10m ago
Yes, it's been suggested that all scarce inputs to the economy should be taxed. And yes the idea of Georgism is to let market set the prices and tax based off of that.

It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.

marcosdumay•7m ago
> Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.

As powerful as taxes are to create change, you don't need to use them to solve every problem out there.

nemomarx•9m ago
The good news is that as different things become valuable their value changes, I guess? So if radio frequency stops being useful, the LVT put on it also drops pretty hard.

The bad news is now you have to assess the value of a lot more things in order to do this (the value of clean waterways in a certain state, the value of IP taken away from the common culture) that may not have a direct market value.

moritzwarhier•10m ago
[delayed]
dyauspitr•6m ago
Absolutely terrible idea. So based on this no one can just buy land and settle down. You have to pay the government rent in perpetuity. It’s asinine and unconstitutional.
wahern•6m ago
There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.

Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.

pampas•6m ago
The fact that economically right wing economists like Milton Friedman supported LVT is a great argument against landlord type labelling LVT as far-left and attempting to push the idea outside the Overton window. I think the only valid argument against is it is that a significant LVT would punish those who've worked for their wealth as they've already paid significant income tax. But there are plenty of ways to introduce it gradually. Other arguments boil down to vested interests when I dig into it.

Does Georgism work? Five years later

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-years-later
51•silveraxe93•1d ago•20 comments

DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22978
141•shenli3514•6h ago•40 comments

PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock

https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
311•Qision•1d ago•164 comments

Evolving programming languages in the AI era

https://dashbit.co/blog/evolving-ai-era
16•pjm331•1d ago•9 comments

Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things

https://github.com/reladraw/reladraw
167•jpwalsh234•7h ago•47 comments

An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot

https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/an-agent-used-dns-to-reach-an-external-chatbot/
30•apsec112•20h ago•18 comments

A searchable library of forgotten public-domain film clips from 1915 onward

https://www.movingimagearchive.com/
101•momentmaker•2d ago•23 comments

Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/welcome-to-the-medical-clinic-at-the-interplanetary-re...
41•bucket2015•4h ago•7 comments

LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth

https://basin.la/articles/ninety-feet-a-minute.html
72•big_toast•2d ago•49 comments

Drawgent: Coding agent on a live Excalidraw canvas

https://tangled.org/yanndegat.tngl.sh/drawgent
102•parasitid•8h ago•32 comments

Go Concurrency Distilled

https://antonz.org/go-concurrency-distilled/
11•chmaynard•10h ago•0 comments

Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story

https://lexontech.org/fifteen-years-later-the-apple-cards-origin-story
335•ksec•15h ago•86 comments

Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC

https://www.righto.com/2026/09/8087-tangent-cordic.html
14•pwg•7h ago•3 comments

How one Twitch chat message became code execution on a streamer’s PC

https://blog.scrt.ch/2026/09/22/how-one-twitch-chat-message-became-code-execution-on-a-streamers-pc/
19•tau255•23h ago•4 comments

The Lost Atomic Update on Loongson CPU

https://jia.je/hardware/2026/09/24/loongson-cpu-erratum-en/
108•jiegec•2d ago•6 comments

The Evolution of Vending Machines

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2026/09/from-holy-water-to-frozen-meals-the-evolution-of-vend...
9•ohjeez•7h ago•0 comments

Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers

https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal
142•birdculture•2d ago•57 comments

Generate fonts where every LLM token is the same width

https://ampdot.mesh.host/token-space-fonts.html
21•z-mach9•1d ago•5 comments

ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/asml-says-its-sells-absolutely-nothing-...
136•MC995•1d ago•367 comments

Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons

https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/informationen/fup/2026/fup_26_116-enceladus-cassini-mikroben-s...
12•geox•21h ago•3 comments

How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments

https://thelastsoftwareengineer.substack.com/p/how-i-changed-teaching-after-ai-managed
120•azhenley•2d ago•127 comments

Dutch designer made DE9: Closer to the Edit into a playable web-based instrument

https://www.creativeboom.com/work/why-merijn-straathof-turned-a-landmark-techno-album-into-a-play...
6•ChrisArchitect•2d ago•1 comments

How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs

https://discourse.haskell.org/t/how-to-keep-enjoying-programming-in-a-world-of-llms/14705
148•signa11•14h ago•207 comments

HomeBody: A humanoid that explores, remembers, and acts on its own

https://tml.stanford.edu/homebody/
10•famouswaffles•5h ago•1 comments

Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/9/25/japan-moves-to-tighten-rules-for-foreigners-throwing-...
119•mikhael•6h ago•315 comments

Turning GLM-5.3-Flash into a Jev-like decision model

https://www.privatemode.ai/blog/system-one-from-glm-flash
8•flxflx•8h ago•3 comments

Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia

https://blog.priyan.in/2026/09/analyzing-frontier-model-progress-with.html
55•msephton•1d ago•38 comments

Reading’s Bayeux Tapestry

https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2026/09/readings-bayeux-tapestry.html
10•zeristor•13h ago•1 comments

Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free

https://gultsch.de/posts/breaking-up-with-google-play/
630•ezst•13h ago•249 comments

The Rise of Audio AR

https://www.dbreunig.com/2024/04/10/the_rise_of_audio_ar.html
28•dbreunig•2d ago•10 comments