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larsiusprime
Joined 5,983 karma
I'm a real estate mass appraisal researcher, author, and former game developer.
This is my company: www.landeconomics.org
This is my book: www.landisabigdeal.com
This is my personal website: www.fortressofdoors.com
This is a game I worked on: www.defendersquest.com
- larsiusprimeInteresting. So basically an individual out in the sticks can genuinely get by with Internet but not plumbing, but urban life would be impossible at scale without plumbing, and without urban civilization at scale we probably wouldn’t be able to maintain the internet at scale?
- > Socialism might work in that world
Technically, what you've just described is Georgism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
The real question is, in a truly post-labor future, how do workers have enough leverage to negotiate for any particular change in the economic system?
- If all labor is automated and nobody can earn anything selling their own anymore, all that’s left are the other two factors of production: capital and land.
Land is scarce and cant be produced, so whoever already owns it will benefit after the change.
Capital can be produced, but what produces it? Labor. Even worse, capital depreciates over time so just owning some now doesn’t guarantee you an income in the post labor future.
In a fully automated world where human labor is truly of zero value it seems the main returns in the long run are to those who can gate keep valuable land, natural resources, and other fundamentally scarce assets.
- Because a revenue neutral implementation lowers taxes on net on improved active sites that do something with land, and raises it on net for vacant abandoned sites that do nothing, shifting the incentive to do something with the land or sell it to someone who will.
- Scott Alexander is in fact an MD
- What on earth does the discovery institute amd creationists have to do with Alzheimer’s research? Come on. Most of the people I’ve seen criticize the amyloid hypothesis are secular.
- Cmon the puritans were one of many different founding cohorts. Quakers, borderers, cavaliers, etc. America was never of one mind on the subject of religion.
- Higher property taxes and low income taxes is preferable actually, it keeps the housing market from getting massively distorted.
- There’s a full write up. Audio is streamed as button presses.
- Can someone provide some context for those of us who are utterly out of the loop?
- I work in the mass appraisal space, and I use QGIS all the time. The professional alternative is ESRI's ArcGIS.
A lot of shops I know (private and public) will use ArcGIS still, but I'm noticing an increasing number of people (particularly younger researchers/analysts) who are exclusively using QGIS.
QGIS is powerful and full featured, but it is admittedly a bit rusty around the edges, especially when working with very large datasets. If they keep working on fixing some of the sharpest edges I think it will go on to have a good future. Just in the past few years I've noticed significant improvement.
In many ways it feels like Blender -- long ignored and dismissed, but slowly but surely improved over time, and then suddenly became quite a big deal.
- > As a final thought to recursively illustrate this. The very best artist can utilize sound waves and directly manipulate energy to build one of the Pyramids at Giza by hand. However, the most efficient way for someone without that ability or time to master those techniques is to draw the design of a pyramid as an artistic rendering on paper or a computer screen and have 24/7, nonstop nuclear/solar powered robots build it.
???
- That’s still arguably a classic Phrygian cap design. Whatever or not that was the intention/inspiration, it does resemble them - the hats you just showed are not perfectly conical, there’s a flip at the top.
- All the subdivisions in Texas that have “ranch” in the name are that way for a reason
- The single largest (legible) landowner by acreage is some timber magnate. Over in Australia a few ranching families own so much land it makes the American figures look like rookie numbers
- Indeed. One of the chief causes of high land prices for farmland is unmet demand for housing in the urban core, so farm and ranch land gets bid up to development prices.
A lot of advocates of building restrictions did it in the name of preserving nature/farmland/greenspace, but in many ways it’s had the opposite effect:
- My contention is if it’s going to just give me a Wikipedia summary, I can do that myself. I just have greater expectations of “PhD” level intelligence.
If we’re going to claim to it is PhD level it should be able to do “deep” research AND think critically about source credibility, just as a PhD would. If it can’t do that they shouldn’t brand it that way.
Also it’s not like I’m taking Matzat’s word for anything. I can read the primary source documents myself! He’s also hardly an obscure source, he’s just not listed on Wikipedia.
- Okay, so let me break it down for you:
The Silagi paper makes a factual claim. The Silagi paper claims that there was only one significant tax in the German colony of Kiatschou, a single tax on land.
The direct primary sources reveal that this is not the case. There were multiple taxes, most significantly large tariffs. Additionally there were two taxes on land, not one -- a conventional land value tax, and a "land increment" or capital gains tax.
These are not minor distinctions. These are not matters of subjective opinions. These are clear, verifiable, questions of fact. The Silagi paper does not acknowledge them.
ChatGPT, in the early trials I graded, does not even acknowledge the German primary sources. You keep saying that I am upset it doesn't agree with me.
I am saying the chief issue is that ChatGPT does not even discover the relevant primary sources. That is far more important than whether it agrees with me.
> For example, just to continue with socialism, it's common for socialist believers to argue that this or that country is or isn't socialist in a way that disagrees with mainstream historians.
Notice you said "historians." Plural. I expect a proper researcher to cite more than ONE paper, especially if the other papers disagree, and even if it has a preferred narrative, to at least surface to me that there is in fact disagreement in the literature, rather than to just summarize one finding.
Also, if the claims are being made about a piece of German history, I expect it to cite at least one source in German, rather than to rely entirely on one single English-language source.
The chief issue is that ChatGPT over-cites one single paper and does not discover primary source documents. That is the issue. That is the only issue.
> I am saying you are seeing distinctions as more important than the rest of the literature and concluding that the literature is erroneous.
And I am saying that ChatGPT did not in fact read the "rest of the literature." It is literally citing ONE article, and other pieces that merely summarize that same article, rather than all of the primary source documents. It is not in fact giving me anything like an accurate summary of the literature.
I am not saying "The literature is wrong because it disagrees with me." I am saying "one paper, the only one ChatGPT meaningfully cites, is directly contradicted by the REST of the literature, which ChatGPT does not cite."
A truly "research grade" or "PhD grade" intelligence would at the very least be able to discover that.