"Preseed round" is just the small funding when the project is a very early stage. We expect to raise more funding when the endowment matures. There is no ROI, it is a pure charity.
Yep. I tried paying with my card on Steam and it showed me a QR code and I was like 'what do you want me to do, hold my card up against the screen so it somehow magically makes the transfer happen?'. There simply isn't an alternative to PP in many cases. It sucks, but that's the state of online payments today. Crypto would be an alternative if it were the least bit stable. Wero seems promising but at the moment it doesn't work.
It is a 19th century economic observation around the use of coal.
It is like saying the PDF is going to be good for librarian jobs because people will read more. It is stupid. It completely breaks down because of substitution.
Farming is the most obvious comparison to me in this. Yes, there will be more food than ever before, the farmer that survives will be better off than before by a lot but to believe the automation of farming tasks by machines leads to more farm jobs is completely absurd.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Because it is politicaly unpalatable to tax landowners, we tax economic activity instead.
The result is that return on effort are reduced. That mean labor, entrepreneurs, and capital bear the burden of supporting government budgets as opposed to landowners who benefit from the economic activity making their land valuable.
Taxes as a rule discourages whatever get taxed. The exception to this is land, because land isn't created. It already exists in nature.
Then they should be owned by governments outright. Provided that the community consent to it and are aware of the cost.
Government provides crucial services that increases land value, offsetting any losses in tax revenue through public utility. Perhaps the same thing can happen with historical buildings.
However, let us note that cities are for living in. It is not a museum.
Ultimately, only the public can determine the balance of concerns to be struck.
Property tax is an emerging issue. There are movement to end property taxes or limit them across the US.
There is some opposite momentum toward the land value tax, which is a good thing, but these are less visible and likely weaker than a tax revolt by landowners.
Eventually, if the current trend continue for property taxes, we will see a disruption in government funding for basic service, and the contraction of the economy through increased taxation of economic activity to compensate for lost revenue from property taxes. It will be a disaster.
This is the endgame of the expansion of land ownership in the post WW2 era. Exemption from property taxes worsen this crisis.
> There is some opposite momentum toward the land value tax, which is a good thing, but these are less visible and likely weaker than a tax revolt by landowners.
You're breaking my heart here. A land value tax is embraced by anti-tax advocates like Milton Friedman as the "least bad tax" as well as by actual Marxists. However, it does seem like in the current moment a land-owner tax revolt is the likeliest end game.
And if there is a big push towards eliminating property tax, those states will rush towards California-like real estate disasters.
I just wish that all the people who had a hard time purchasing a home or paying rent would act on their own self-interest in reducing the share of our economy that flows to the rentierism of the land owner. Rentierism is bad in all economies, yet we have enabled an overclass to exploit young people and the poor. We live in an asset economy, where there's a big class divide between those who must work to survive, and those who own real estate (especially if it's their own home) and those who own financial assets like stocks. Making capitalism work better requires more class mobility and less inequality than we currently have.
I'm more convinced that the LVT is the least invasive than it being the least bad in economic action, although I can somewhat understand the argument for it. If you eliminated all the other taxes and only used LVT then a large part of the financial surveillance apparatus wouldn't have a leg to stand on. The part about bean counting every bit of income, profit, and gain and then being made to report it to the government under the auspices of just paying your tax is absolutely dystopic compared to LVT.
The biggest challenges of Georgism are that it is basically communism for land (George straight up admits this in one of his books) and creates some issues with efficiently allocating land resources, especially bad with the fact that it can wipe out land speculators which perform an important role in doing time-allocation of land. But it's probably worth the tradeoff if you can eliminate the other taxes.
> creates some issues with efficiently allocating land resources, especially bad with the fact that it can wipe out land speculators which perform an important role in doing time-allocation of land
Interesting, I have always thought the opposite. My undertsanding/reasoning: It's extremely difficult to find land for good purposes because speculators maintain land banks, preventing better uses of it. The speculator causes a ton of market friction, and the tendency for people to hold onto land because of limited supply are a fundamental hindrance to so much economic activity.
If there's a high carrying cost to land, a lot more of it will be on the market and available for people to use when they need it. Especially as land values rise, which is the most important time to reallocate land. Rising land values are exactly the time that the land speculator holds tightest, because they want to sell at the peak, not on the way up.
It is the only tax without deadweight loss. Speculators are detrimental in this case because they make land more expensive without increasing supply and are loathe to make efficient use of the land.
But the real magic happens in CAD while printers are good enough that it gets out of your way.
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