Hacker News: amablue

New comment by amablue in "Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?"

amablue — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 15:11:08 +0000

If we are going full Georgist, yes, even the government would pay taxes on its own land, which includes the land for roads and railways.

New comment by amablue in "Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?"

amablue — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 15:09:42 +0000

For what it's worth, it's not uncommon for Georgists to also favor extraction taxes for natural resources like gold.

New comment by amablue in "Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?"

amablue — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 06:05:48 +0000

The Georgist answer is that the government wouldn't decide the value of the land, the market would. If the government is setting it, it's almost certainly not pricing it optimally.

New comment by amablue in "Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?"

amablue — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 05:56:53 +0000

Land is taxed at very low rates, and it's almost always bundled with property taxes. Instead of taxing land at a few percent, Georgism says we should be taxing it at 100%. That's a huge difference from what we have in play today.

New comment by amablue in "Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?"

amablue — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 05:54:49 +0000

I once heard someone say that land value taxes would be worth it even if we burned the tax revenue. I almost agree with that. The point of land value taxes is not just that it raises money, it's so the downstream effects. We want it to change people's behaviors. The incentive structure that it creates for developers, land owners, renters factory builders, and City planners is why the tax is so good.

New comment by amablue in "“I will slaughter you”"

amablue — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 23:36:26 +0000

I've written one small open source library, which I publicized a little bit back when I first released it. Like you said, I wrote it mostly to scratch my own itch, but it was really nice to see it get some use out in the wild, and I have gotten a few emails about it over the years. Personally, I really enjoy getting any kind of emails about it from people who are using it or who have questions. (To be fair, I've never gotten the murdery emails abou it)

New comment by amablue in "At Google, an Employee-Run Email List Tracks Harassment and Bias Complaints"

amablue — Wed, 24 May 2017 16:40:12 +0000

Empirically, this does not happen. It's a company of like 70,000 employees. You're not going to be able to guess the people involved when the company is that size. Maybe if it was a company on the order of 100s of people you'd be able to.

This is a hypothetical worry that doesn't seem to play out in practice.