An LVT would fix that

Housing supply is extremely inelastic. So when occupancy is 5%, it's fine. When occupancy hits 0%, prices might shoot up 5X, 10x... because people gotta have a place to live, and they are bidding on not being homeless. And those with the means will win the bids and many will be homeless.

Housing demand is also inelastic. Better than housing supply, because people are mobile and housing is not. But just "move to another city" isn't exactly like picking a different brand of cereal.

The actual solution is to make zoning restrictions that waste land and restrict housing supply illegal, probably by pre-empting them at a higher level on human rights grounds.

That will make increasing housing supply possible. And then implementing land value taxation, which will make increasing housing supply profitable.

Nothing will change until the profit incentive changes, and then it will change quickly.

Some taxes do in fact improve and help the economy, in real, big-picture terms. Namely taxes on land monopolies, other natural or artificial monopolies, and pigovian taxes on areas of market failure, such as certain resource extraction or pollution.

Taxes improving the economy is possible because certain market failures, some of them endemic, are also bad for the economy, so taxing them turns out to improve the economy overall. In some cases, such taxes can even improve the real economy even if the proceeds from the taxes are used unproductively or "flushed" from the economy altogether. This is not economically controversial, and has been known for hundreds of years (since Adam Smith at least), but "good" taxes are not widely understood and not widely implemented. This is because these market failures, although they harm the overall economy, make certain people fantastically rich, and the people benefitting from them generally have political power and don't like to be taxed. So instead we tax labor and petty capital, which actually does damage the economy exactly as you say, but this is simply because laborers and owners of petty capital do not have political power, and so they are targeted for taxes. We tax what we tax because we can get away with it politically, not out of any calculation that those things are the right things to tax.

The fact that all of our current taxes are harmful does not imply that all taxes are harmful. "Good" taxes do exist, and are also capable of generating large amounts of money while simultaneously objectively improving the economy by extracting harmful economic rent, such as certain natural resource taxes, land value taxes, and carbon/pollution taxes. These taxes do exist piecemeal across the globe but they are usually a small part of the tax picture if they exist at all, for the reasons described above.

I remember like 10 years ago in SFO airport they banned plastic water bottles to save the environment. The vendors responded by selling aluminum "reusable" bottles that people threw away anyway. The trash cans in the international terminal were overflowing with them.

Puppetmastering behavior through whack-a-mole bans accomplishes nothing except indulging the self-justifying power fantasies of petty bureaucrats. If you want to actually help the environment, the solution is to apply fees and taxes to pollution and then let the market decide how to optimize around minimizing pollution. Make polluting expensive. Nothing will change until the money changes, and then it will change fast. Make saving the planet the same thing as making more money, and watch everyone unify around saving the planet.

This post is on-point, but what it really does is illustrate why, instead of puppetmastering the economy by handing out subsidies, tariffs, and incentives, we should just tax the emissions and let the market allocate resources accordingly.

Incentives will always be gamed. And incentives working depends on the bureaucrats choosing the right incentives and policies to actually reduce emissions, which they aren't smart enough to do because they are never smarter than the people gaming the incentives.

Just Tax Emissions. Let people decide for themselves how big of a house to have, how much to spend on insulation vs. solar panels, and what kind of car to drive. Let the price of goods in the market actually reflect their emissions contributions. Nothing will change until reducing emissions becomes cheaper, and then it will change rapidly.

This illustrates how all harm reduction efforts revolve around the substitution effect. In other words, the way goods and activities are substituted for each other is critical to understanding the related phenomena, and also difficult.

Vapes are probably unhealthy. But vapes are probably healthier than smoking. Thus easy access to vaping might improve public health, reduce public health, or all points in between, depending on how many people are vaping as opposed to nothing, and how many people are vaping as opposed to smoking, and this might (probably will) change as the substitution progresses.

You can substitute things besides the original thing. My pet theory is that we went from a world where most people smoked, to a world where most people are obese. Provable? Very hard. If the criteria is "we stopped smoking", then the campaign against smoking was an undeniable success. If the criteria was "we are healthier or happier", it's much harder to say (lifespan is not improved for one thing).

A similar thing happens in other public policy, sometimes in greenwashing. Paris just re-banned e-scooter rentals. They were supposed to reduce car trips and help the environment. Their data showed they mostly did not replace car trips; they replaced walking trips, thus making the environment worse actually.

Human behavior is really hard.

People's brains are completely warped by car-brain disease, and this topic is a good example.

Notice that society put speed limiters and performance categories on E-bikes and E-scooters basically from the minute they were invented. Ever wonder why? For safety of course. Most people think that it's a good, reasonable idea to have e-bikes and scooters have speed limiters. Because without them, they assume people will go "too fast", drive in an unsafe manner, injuries and carnage will ensue, etc., even if there's very little evidence of this being a real problem. Everyone has heard of "that one time" somebody got killed on an E-scooter, or how "like 3 people" in their city have been killed on e-bikes (usually the people actually got run over by a car, but the news will still call them an e-scooter accident, and not a car accident).

Ask the same people if we should have speed limiters on cars, and they start foaming at the mouth about muh freedums. So if it's a 2hp, 40lb vehicle, speed limiters are definitely a good idea, not an imposition at all, or if it is, so what it's worth it because of safety. But if it's a 6000lb, 350hp vehicle, that kills 40,000+ people (many of them children) and injures 100's of thousands of people people every year, "it's the drivers' responsibility to drive appropriately for the conditions" (even though that demonstrably doesn't happen) and anything else is communism.

If it weren't for car-brain disease, cars as a phenomenon would not exist, and if you proposed introducing them (let's give standard Joes off the street a multi-ton vehicle, and let them drive towards each other in close proximity to people on foot, with no safety interlocks, nearly zero training, etc.) you would be considered crazy or dangerous for even proposing it.

Speed has a huge impact on car fatalities. A person hit by a car traveling at 35 miles per hour is five times more likely to die than a person hit by a car traveling at 20 miles per hour.

I don't think safety wire would have helped, because to me it's obvious the bolts were never tightened in the first place.

The fuselages are made by a subcontractor who probably bung the door plug in "temporarily" and ship it out to Boeing or the airline or whoever else is in the outsourced-to-hell supply chain. The assumption is that somebody downstream is going to take the plug back out for installing the interior, painting, or whatever, and then put it back in and torque it and all that.

Don't tax the profits. It's too easy to make profits disappear. And profits are besides the point anyway. If it's carbon dioxide, pollution and environmental impact that is the problem, then tax carbon, pollution, and environmental impact. Let them keep the profits; hell let them figure out a way to raise profits, as long as they reduce their impacts who cares?

When we first went after tobacco, we levied a tax on every pack of cigarettes. Everyone seemed to understand that if you want to do harm reduction, taxing tobacco companies profits is not the smart way. You have to tax the actual externality. The problem is that unlike tobacco, there is no contingent of the population that's not addicted to oil m Everyone is addicted to oil, and so nobody wants to actually quit or reduce it.

Why do people focus on inductive charging when overhead catenary already works efficiently and reliably to transfer megawatts of power at up to 200+mph, with low maintenance, for electric trains?

Why a solution that doesn't exist when there's already a solution that does exist?

There is no rub or complexity. They have only convinced you there is a rub and complexity because they have political and propaganda power, and they don't want to be taxed. Those without such power don't get to use the same excuses; we just get taxed anyway.

This pretending that we somehow can't know the wealth of people whose wealth is in assets, or that it "doesn't count" or "only theoretical", is the most basic nonsense. We routinely tax assets that have much less straightforward values in the form of property taxes, and we do it every year, regardless if those assets are bought or sold! Common sense valuation seems to work just fine if you are poor! But if you are rich, and the value of your assets is calculated by millions of people every millisecond on public exchanges, "we don't know how much it's worth, and the price might change before he sells it, so we can't tax it until he sells it". Right? So what if the price goes down in the future...what if the price of my house goes down in the future? Nobody cares; you get taxed on what it's worth NOW, just for owning it, because we need tax revenue. This practice is hundreds (thousands?) of years old. We just don't do it for stock, because rich people don't want it!

It is not a "daunting exercise" to figure out what assets are worth, but ESPECIALLY this is true for stock holdings. The number of shares they own is publicly recorded, assuming they claim ownership. And there is no price in the universe that is more accurate or widely-agreed-upon than the price of securities on major exchanges. There is practically nothing in the financial universe that is known better than the price of publicly-traded securities.

Of course stock prices fluctuate, but we already value stocks all the time for donation, estate, and tax purposes by using price averages, or using the "greater or lesser of the price at the start or end of the period" or any number of other methods.

I'm only pointing out the incredible double-standard that comes up any time somebody proposes a wealth tax. But as a policy, both "wealth taxes" on capital, as well as the way we usually calculate property taxes (usually based on actual improved market value), are not very "good" taxes because they are a tax on capital, which is a product of labor, which is economically inefficient and has the effect of suppressing labor and driving up rent. Instead, tax-the-rich schemes should be calculated based on imputed rental value of scarce assets or land held. Calculated that way, they would be a tax on Ricardian rent, which would be economically neutral or even beneficial compared to taxing capital. I think we should tax the rich, but we shouldn't do it by taxing their capital, we should do it by taxing their land and rent. But pretending that taxing capital is "hard" is BS. My local county assessor seems to be able to figure it out every year when he drives by, looks out the window at my house, and decides what I will be paying in taxes!

More on land / rent taxes as wealth taxes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/048661349402600101
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/land-value-tax-housing-crisis/
https://www.elibrary.imf.org/configurable/content/journals$002f001$002f2022$002f263$002farticle-A001-en.xml?t:ac=journals%24002f001%24002f2022%24002f263%24002farticle-A001-en.xml

There's that fag talk again

The problem is, you can't build anything bigger than a model railroad in your basement without dealing with the FRA. FRA even claims jurisdiction over self-contained tourist railroads, cable cars, and rideable toy/model railroads like the one at Knot's farm.

The FRA is, of course, a captured organization that was created in 1966 to make sure nothing happens that threatens the private railway companies in the US, including HSR. The existing railroad companies have no interest in passenger rail and only see it as a nuisance at best or a threat at worst. So FRA's real purpose is to stop development of any passenger rail in the US, which has been working admirably for decades.

This debunking has been debunked as well.

"Total electricity generation" is basically irrelevant because nobody cares about the giant 3-phase arc furnaces, and other industrial users that use the other 79% of the electricity, and have their own substations anyway.

When people talk about "the power grid" in the context of electric car charging, they are normally talking about the "residential electricity grid". i.e. "people's houses". That's the "power grid" that all these cars are going to be plugged into, and what's NOT being upgraded, or talked about being upgraded. The entire residential grid accounts for only 21% of all electricity consumption. https://rpsc.energy.gov/energy-data-facts.

It's not wrong to say switching cars to electric would be an increase of about 19% of total electricity generation, but you forgot to mention that the entire residential sector only accounts for 21% of all electrical generation, period. So switching everyone to electric car charging at home will basically double the load on the local grids. This is easy to see, if you just look at normal house service panel and car charger side-by-side. The biggest appliance in a typical house would be something like a clothes dryer or range that pulls 5kW for an hour or two a day. A level 2 car charger pulls up to 19kW, and could take a couple hours to charge a car. Not insane, but still going to easily double both the instantaneous load that each house has to be able to draw, and the total electric that has to be available. Doing this to every house in a whole country would require major grid upgrades.

Car charging is like residential solar. It doesn't require much of an infrastructure response as long as there are few % of early adopters out there doing it. It's a rounding error. But for any kind of wholesale migration to electric cars, the charging problem is still a serious problem, if not for generation, then for delivery, and there should be an answer to this, besides smoke-and-mirrors. All the governments that claim to be planning such a migration and are NOT talking about massive, tens-of-billions-scale grid upgrades, are either 1) lying, and the transition isn't really going to happen 2) incompetent, and we can expect worsening problems from over-strained grids 3) both?

Note, fast-charging stations aren't really a big problem. When you build a fast-charging station, you will just have to provision the required power to feed it. Whether that's adding a new substation or just plopping down a big industrial transformer to feed it, we do this kind of thing all the time whenever we build anything new. But when you build something new you DO have to provision the power to feed it. The residential charging problem amounts to people claiming we can build a new massive home charging network and we WON'T have to provision any power to feed it, which is magical thinking and BS if you think about it for 5 seconds.

An LVT would fix that.