Georgism? In the big 2026? Now that's a blast from the past!
Now, land value taxes obviously have their place in the gamut of different taxes to levy, so I don't wish to badmouth them too much. But as a consumption tax, VAT also does have its place. Sure, they are absolutely regressive, but this also helps them to act more like Pigovian taxes, since they can be used to make certain categories of goods and services more expensive. And so if one can afford to pay the value of the negative externalities, why not. And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.
> And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.
As a counterexample, tobacco taxation is less effective for reducing smoking than alternative policies [1]. So, yes, we can hope that higher taxes help people make better choices. Or we can implement better policies that are known to be more effective.
Some recent studies have shown that a properly implemented LVT avoids harming most homeowners, in fact you may come out ahead if other taxes are eliminated. (LVT alone is adequate to fund government spending and entitlements.) The homeowners who will typically feel a pinch are those who have inherited very large estates which don’t generate income. They may need to sell or develop part of their estate.
Land speculators, however, will be in serious trouble.
Yep. Take every seat, make it 15 seats. Ideally we’d have ranked choice and STV. Something like how Australia has a quota system for Senators being elected. People who achieve 1/16th of the votes get a seat, distribute preferences, repeat until all seats are full.
I still think biased sortition is the way: after voting, eliminate any candidate with less than (say) 1/11th the vote. Choose the winner proportional to the number of votes they received. It has the following nice properties:
1. Extreme candidates have very little chance of winning;
2. The system is (formally) fair in the long run; and,
3. It secures the election against tampering from both domestic and foreign actors.
Also, frankly, the sort of person who's good at winning an election is almost diametrically opposite from the sort of person you want as a leader. It's hard to combine "ideologue" with "rational compromise ready actor".
The problem is that open codecs can still be encumbered by patents and the holders will sue. VP9 and AV1 have their own patent pool for that very reason. Google may have open sourced its codecs but if they don’t indemnify users people who think they’re safe might be in for a bad time.
100%. Just because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others. Since everyone and their brother saw how they can milk the patent system for money, they got patents that cover all "next-gen" video technologies (AV1, HEVC, VCC) a long time ago and will sue anyone that uses them. Ironically, since there are so many patent holders, each of which want a larger piece of the "licensing pie", it's making the new video technologies impossible to license. You may license HEVC or AV1 from one patent pool, but the other two and hundreds of other individual patent holders could also sue you. This is why many brands like Synology, Dell and HP have just started to simply remove these codecs from their products. I wouldn't treat any video codec as "patent free" until AT LEAST 20 years after the spec was release (AV1 = March 2038). This kind of infighting will guarantee that HEVC or AV1 will never become a ubiquitous standard for at least 20 years the way AVC/h.264 did.
I, for one, am happy about this. Nothing makes me happier than to see patent trolls eat themselves alive. Also, being an open source advocate, I appreciate when propriety technologies that are "good enough" can finally be used by open source applications. Unless you are pushing a ton of video, or working with high resolution (4K, 8K)/ high bit-rate videos, AVC/h.264 is perfectly fine.
The electorate does give control but they get bored after a few years and want to wreck everything all over again. It's goldfish levels of political memory in this country.
Getting pristine resampling is insanely expensive and not worth it.
If you have a mixer at 48KHz you'll get minor quantization noise but if it's compressed already it's not going to do any more damage than compression already has.
And we learned zero from the change after shutting down the Purdues. The electorate just wants to see drug users punished, not treated. Even though treating cheaper, more humane, and has way better outcomes.
Fuck him and people like him. There's no good reason to have a 70 hour work week other than insecure management needing it as a security blanket like some nine year old child. Researchers keep showing how human beings have a maximum productive time each week but instead he and his ilk want to go against this research for the sheer optics of it.
Errors work just like exceptions especially if you use the ? operator and let the error bubble up the chain. This is the Rust equivalent of an unhandled exception and the ripcord being pulled.
In C++, functions are error-colored by default. You write "noexcept" if you want your function to be infallible-colored instead.
(You usually want to make a function infallible if you're using your noexcept function as part of a cleanup path or part of a container interface that allows for more optimizations of it knows certain container operations are infallible.)
Rust makes infallibility the syntactic default and makes you write Result to indicate fallibility. People often don't want to color their functions this way. Guess what happens when a programmer is six levels deep in infallible-colored function calls and does something that can fail.
.unwrap()
Guess what, in Rust, is fallible?
Mutex acquire.
Guess what you need to do often on infallible cleanup paths?
Put a tax on the value of land instead of the property improvements. Then you'll start to see some wealth flow away from the UHNWIs.
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