Hacker News: larsiusprime

New comment by larsiusprime in "Why Japan has such good railways"

larsiusprime — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:32:29 +0000

Texas zoning is only “permissive” relative to other states. Relative to Japan it’s quite restrictive.

New comment by larsiusprime in "I put all 8,642 Spanish laws in Git – every reform is a commit"

larsiusprime — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:40:27 +0000

Brilliant!

New comment by larsiusprime in "I put all 8,642 Spanish laws in Git – every reform is a commit"

larsiusprime — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:35:37 +0000

Is the idea that the commits themselves are also time stamped with the date of the legislation/amendment too?

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:55:11 +0000

1. Stop restricting what can be built, especially in the super valuable city centers

2. Shift taxes off of building (which punishes development) and onto the passive holding of land (which discourages idle land speculation)

In other words, change man's laws, not nature's.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:31:06 +0000

We're directly inspired by Urban3 and our hope in releasing these tools is to enable more people to be able to do this work directly themselves and share it with their elected officials!

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:30:00 +0000

If you're talking about the Manhattan effect specifically, I'm sure that zoning has a large effect on the extremeness of it. If you're talking about "land gets exponentially more valuable in the city center", then you see that pattern everywhere and indeed we saw it in the historical pre-zoning period as well. Agglomeration effects are sticky regardless of what time period you're in, what changes is the coefficients on the exponential equation.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:28:22 +0000

Author here: most people know that the city is "more" valuable, but drastically underestimate how valuable. I've asked people how much more valuable they think Manhattan is than the Bronx and they will say things like "5x" or "10x", which is off by an order of magnitude.

They also underestimate what this means. In many cities you can have 50%+ of land value concentrated in a rather small portion of area, and this has huge implications for what would happen is you, say, changed property tax policy to shift the tax burden towards land and away from buildings. Most people assume it would kill the suburbs, but in many of our models single family homes come out slightly ahead, or stay neutral.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:08:33 +0000

It's not just zoning, though that exacerbates it. City centers are where economic activity tends to be concentrated so even without zoning you would see these exponential land value effects as you approach the centers of economic activity (and indeed, we did see these same relative patterns prior to the passing of modern zoning laws).

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:02:48 +0000

Good points! Thanks.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:02:01 +0000

Both. They do understand that it’s worth “more” in the city but they vastly underestimate the magnitude, and they vastly underestimate what that means in terms of where the total bulk of land value is concentrated, and therefore what the distribution of winners and losers will be in any tax shift scenario.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:42:53 +0000

Author here: it’s a cheap rate limiter and something we are looking to remove soon.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:37:48 +0000

Author here. This is the problem we are seeking to solve, we are property tax reform activists:

https://open.substack.com/pub/progressandpoverty/p/enacting-...

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:35:00 +0000

Author here. Our blog generally concerns property tax reform for our regular readership which is admittedly less clear to a new reader coming in cold: the intuitions I’m referring to is the average homeowner kind of assumes any tax reform (such as shifting taxes off buildings and onto land) is designed to impoverish them personally. The purpose of these maps is to show such people where land value in cities is really concentrated - Ie, not the m the suburbs. Mono centric city value might be intuitive to academics, but it’s not among regular everyday people.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Just Put It on a Map"

larsiusprime — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:23:21 +0000

The main purpose of the 3D is to communicate the extreme differences in scale of value, which chloropleth alone doesn’t always get across as it flattens the magnitude disparity. Keeping true north to avoid confusion is a good point.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

larsiusprime — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:31:23 +0000

Diamond prices are famously crashing now due to artificial lab made diamonds (increased supply)

New comment by larsiusprime in "Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam"

larsiusprime — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 04:18:45 +0000

IceFrog was on the Dota2 team, and valve owns the trademark

New comment by larsiusprime in "UBI as a productivity dividend"

larsiusprime — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 18:29:43 +0000

This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents.

https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/P...

New comment by larsiusprime in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

larsiusprime — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:03:43 +0000

Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.

New comment by larsiusprime in "Property taxes going up? The 340B Program might be partly responsible"

larsiusprime — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:33:13 +0000

Although they key thing here is that it's not just that effect, but emergent unintended consequences. In the article, it describes how non profit healthcare institutions have an incentive to buy for profit clinics, because (alongside the other incentives), when they do so, the real estate becomes tax exempt because now it's owned by a non profit, even if the work being performed stays the same.

Property taxes going up? The 340B Program might be partly responsible

larsiusprime — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:09:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pricepoints.health/cp/188296406

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052579

Points: 44

# Comments: 87