I think they try to stay pretty explicitly neutral about advocating a particular density, it's just that they want people to be realistic about how much a particular kind of development costs. Suburbs are perfectly fine -- but if they were taxed to a degree that reflects their actual infrastructure cost, it would be much more expensive to live in them. There's currently a bizarre pattern where poorer, older, higher-density urban neighborhoods end up subsidizing richer suburbs.
Likewise, it's fine if you want to live out on a farm well away from other people -- but the town shouldn't pay a million dollars to run a paved road and water supply out to your house, when a dirt road and a well is good enough.
The problem is that we all want something for nothing. We all want to live in low-density suburbs like you love, but since charging enough in taxes to pay for them would not be very politically popular, instead we've run up massive infrastructure liabilities, depending on unsustainable exponential growth for funding to fix the old infrastructure.
Would you still love the suburbs as much if your property taxes were 2x or 4x what they are now? If you would still want to live in a suburb, great, no problem. But many people would probably rather choose to move to a denser area and pay a more reasonable tax rate.
I had a similar reaction, after trying out Ansible at my last job. We ended up switching to fabric, which is all in Python. It was mostly good but had some awkward warts, which it seems that they've mostly addressed in fabric2. Anyway, it might be worth a look, based on my understanding of your use case.
Fabric seems more down to earth, but doesn't itself solve the problem of actually defining the configuration of each host.
Having said that, I am to the point where it would be really nice if my ssh pushes ran in parallel, which is one of those robust niceties you give up by going your own way. So I'll have to revisit Fabric because it would be complementary - thanks for the reminder!
For anyone who wants to know how they can help with this, personally: Citizens' Climate Lobby is a nonpartisan group that is trying to get a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend (The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, H.R. 763) through Congress. https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ CCL promotes a measured approach, focused on this single task -- it's not about protesting or venting frustration. I personally think it's the most effective way to make a real difference.
And H.R. 763 has strong support of both climate scientists and economists as an effective way to reduce our emissions and mitigate climate change.
I'd suggest to first fix the accounting. So you introduce a tax which is exactly nulled by a subsidy. This is much easier to get through Congress. Once you have the accounting in place, you can start pushing to lower the subsidies.
Seconded! Also, the criticism in this article about lack of diversity doesn't apply very much to Worm (and its sequel, Ward).
To give some examples -- one of the protagonists of Ward is gay, as are two of the antagonists. One of the protagonists is trans. One is black. Two are Hispanic. One of the side characters (a hero) is a recovering homophobe. Another side character is a white supremacist who's trying to turn over a new leaf.
One of the main villain groups in Worm are white supremacists -- and one of the heroes is a kid who leaves that life. Two of the protagonist villains (brother and sister) are black. There's a lesbian couple -- one a hero, one a rogue/villain. There's a character who I think would be called genderqueer? One of the protagonists is asexual.
It sounds like a lot, but there's a huge cast of characters, and it never felt tacked-on to me.
And so much of the story is about really, really traumatic stuff. It's really dark, sometimes horrifying, sometimes tragic, sometimes awesome, and overall really gripping. It's sort of ruined mainstream superhero media for me -- it seems so flat and predictable in comparison.
One half of the lesbian couple is of Arab descent as well. That part of her, as far as I have read, is only important with respect to her backstory / trigger event and helps the reader understand her behavior and actions better.
These stores have massive invisible subsidies in the form of tax breaks and infrastructure built to support them. That's a huge factor in how they're able to undercut local shops. The city is really footing the bill.
A local butcher shop takes up a tiny amount of area, and therefore a tiny amount of infrastructure. It pays way more in taxes than Wal-Mart, compared to the amount it costs the city to support.
One can look at it from another perspective -- when Walmart comes to town, typically they'll receive a tax break, which is an unfair advantage over a local grocery store. They'll also typically get a massive investment in terms of newly built infrastructure -- roads all around the lot, pipes, electricity, etc, compared to a local grocery store.
When you compare the revenue the WalMart (or any big box store) brings in compared to the amount of space it takes up (with a massive parking lot), it's typically WAY less than a small neighborhood grocery store built in the older traditional style. It's only because towns and cities have effectively subsidized these big-box stores that they've taken over. They're really a terrible deal for municipal governments in terms of economic benefits.
In many places (such as Texas), people don't consider space to be valuable because it's so plentiful -- which is true in one sense. But it's not just space we care about, it's infrastructure-supported space. Space that has roads to access it, water pipes, electricity, police and fire services, etc. will ALWAYS be scarce. These resources are expensive, and the more spread-out things are, the more money we're forced to spend on infrastructure.
This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly.
> This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly.
If people were ideologically consistent in their views, yes.
However, look at the reaction here on HN and elsewhere to where AOC opposed such a tax-break for Amazon's NY HQ, and blamed her for Amazon deciding to not build the 2nd HQ there.
Exactly. Taxing property encourages speculation and under-development.
Showing an alternative, Pennsylvania has several towns and cities with a split-rate tax, which means that there's a higher tax on the assessed land value than on the assessed value of the property. Taking this to an extreme, you can tax only the land value, not the property, providing a very strong incentive to make the best use of desirable land. A split rate tax just lets you turn the dial between typical property taxes and a land tax.
Many arguments in favor of the land value tax are based in concepts of economic rent and fairness. While I'm sympathetic to these arguments, I think the best argument is that it seems to work, both in theory and practice. Places that implement a split rate or land value tax tend to have fewer empty lots, parking lots, single-family homes in the middle of downtown, etc.
And not just that, but typical property taxes provide a disincentive to even improve your own property, since you'll pay more tax. They encourage blight.
It's not just California, it's everywhere. Tax policy isn't the only thing stopping us from avoiding sprawl by "thickening up" valuable areas of towns and cities, but it's a big one. Parking minimums are another, and of course zoning is yet another. All of them are important in terms of making our cities walkable, amenable to public transit, and sustainable environmentally.
*edit -- I should clarify that Prop-13 makes this effect worse in California than many places, though.
Under Proposition 13, you are not taxed on the land value or the property value. Instead, you're taxed on the land+property value at the time you bought the property.
If you make a "substantial change" to the property, the tax is reassessed. That's what generates the "empty lots, parking lots, single-family homes in the middle of downtown, etc." -- if you replace your empty lot with a useful building, your property taxes immediately spike.
Extending Prop 13 to cover property redevelopment would do as much to solve the undeveloped-land problem as repealing Prop 13 would. (Obviously, those two policies would differ in other ways.)
I think it's a mistake to focus too heavily on "should we tax land value" vs "should we tax property value". You're correct that taxing property value disincentivizes development, and that is bad. But we're talking here about cases like someone's small personal residence in the middle of downtown San Jose with $4,000,000 of land value and $200,000 of property value. (Numbers completely invented.) If they were taxed on assessed value, land+property, which is the default in most places, that immense land value would quickly make it prohibitive not to redevelop. The tiny property value is a rounding error.
> And not just that, but typical property taxes provide a disincentive to even improve your own property, since you'll pay more tax. They encourage blight.
A good old wealth tax on everything would fix that.
Not really. If a wealth tax is implemented, you'll be amazed at how soon everyone moves their wealth outside of the US. You'd be very hard pressed to tax wealth outside the US.
Distributing the tax across property, a progressive capital gains tax, a progressive corporate tax, and a small wealth tax is a much better option than a flat and high wealth tax.
>Not really. If a wealth tax is implemented, you'll be amazed at how soon everyone moves their wealth outside of the US. You'd be very hard pressed to tax wealth outside the US.
Taxing income outside the USA already happens. Taxing wealth would also happen.
There has been a huge push in the last decade to tighten up "anti-money laundering" (but usually anti-tax) laws. The cliche of the swiss bank account offering secrecy for Americans no longer exists - the Swiss now report holdings directly to the US and similar locales do likewise.
Most OECD countries have dropped wealth taxes. They don’t work. In 1990, 12 OECD countries had wealth taxes, now, only 4. A wealth tax has a lot of unintended consequences and while it sounds good as a populist sound bite, reality isn’t so simplistic.
> And not just that, but typical property taxes provide a disincentive to even improve your own property, since you'll pay more tax. They encourage blight.
A land value tax still does this, albeit indirectly. If you improve your property, the area gets marginally more desirable and land value rises.
The solution for this in UK is to remove capital gains tax for the main home of owner-occupiers, and a transaction tax (stamp duty) paid by the purchaser.
You're correct, but it's a completely different incentive. If you hold out and everyone around you improves their property, your taxes go up almost as much anyway! It punishes speculation and rewards productive use.
So a virtuous feedback cycle is created, where everyone is incentivized to improve and develop their property to the point where they're best taking advantage of the land it sits on -- or to sell it to someone who will.
I'm familiar with stamp duty -- it has a lot of problems, mainly around the fact that it discourages people from moving. It seems significantly worse than a land tax, to me.
This is why I think H.R. 763 (in the US) is a well-designed bill. It taxes everything, and has a built-in tariff to serve as incentive to other countries to implement similar carbon taxes. I hope it passes. I believe it starts out at $15 per ton, then goes up by $10 per ton each year, with adjustments based on whether we're falling short of our greenhouse gas reduction goals, or greatly exceeding them.
For reference, Canada's is $20CAD/tonne currently, going up $10/year up to a cap of 50. So the US $15 is about the same to start, but ramping up a bit faster when you figure exchange rate.
There is a third way. Suburban single-family zones full of cul-de-sacs are designed to be metaphorically put under glass and never changed. Building massive towers, on the other hand, is very drastic and has the potential to destroy the character of a community.
I like the approach advocated by the Strong Towns movement: allow the next increment of development by right, everywhere. So a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes should allow accessory dwelling units (mother-in-law apartments) and conversion to duplexes by right. A neighborhood of duplexes should allow conversion to triplexes or quadplexes by right. A neighborhood of those should allow conversion to even denser development like townhomes, and multiplexes, etc. This allows a town or city to grow gradually and naturally.
The way they put it is, "No community should have to experience extreme change... but no community should be exempt from change". Wanting to build massive towers to address housing shortages is not ideal, but it's an understandable reaction, when it's illegal to address the shortage by having every neighborhood in the city "thicken up" a bit.
This is how the great cities we love all over the world became great -- through gradual, incremental change and intensification.
Which puts the neighborhood under glass. If you are going to rebuild that means your payout needs to pay for the current value of the building, tear down fees, and new construction fees. If the neighborhood is in decline no problem - land is cheap and the buildings are not being maintained, but there is no demand to build anything there so nothing gets built. If the area is in demand land values are high, the people living there maintain their property (to ensure it keeps the value), and so the costs of building one more floor are always greater than the costs of keeping the building.
This is a common source of confusion, but carbohydrate intolerance is a symptom of diabetes, not a cause. Diabetics that go on Keto diets are still diabetic. If you give them a piece of toast, their blood sugar goes through the roof. It's like that joke about going to the doctor and saying "It hurts when I do this" and the doctor says "Well, don't do that anymore".
On the other hand, eating a whole-food plant based diet can actually reverse type 2 diabetes. People stabilize their blood sugar even while eating things like whole wheat bread, potatoes, rice and fruit, and generally have to have their insulin reduced and then eliminated to avoid hypoglycemia.
There is a theory gaining traction that insulin resistance is caused by fat in our muscle cells that somehow blocks the activity of insulin. So eating a very low-fat diet allows this fat to clear out, allowing insulin to work again, so you can eat carbs without your blood sugar spiking.
The fat in muscle cells is called "intramyocellular lipids". We know that it's associated with insulin resistance, the only debate is whether it's the cause or the effect, or if something else is causing both. Based on what I've read, I subscribe to the theory that it's the cause.
Being overweight usually is tied to overconsumption of calories. Most people don't consume too much fat or protein: it's just difficult to eat a jar of crisco or an entire ham. However, in western cultures, overconsumption of calories is largely associated with highly processed, sugary foods. Chips, soda, snacks, etc.
I will concede that's not the reason for everyone who is overweight, but for many, it is the case. It's predominantly too many carbohydrates.
Likewise, it's fine if you want to live out on a farm well away from other people -- but the town shouldn't pay a million dollars to run a paved road and water supply out to your house, when a dirt road and a well is good enough.
The problem is that we all want something for nothing. We all want to live in low-density suburbs like you love, but since charging enough in taxes to pay for them would not be very politically popular, instead we've run up massive infrastructure liabilities, depending on unsustainable exponential growth for funding to fix the old infrastructure.
Would you still love the suburbs as much if your property taxes were 2x or 4x what they are now? If you would still want to live in a suburb, great, no problem. But many people would probably rather choose to move to a denser area and pay a more reasonable tax rate.