On the one hand, you're right. On the other hand, to play devil's advocate, if it doesn't fix the problem the first time, one could always do it again, and eventually you'd presumably get somebody in power who understands that starting wars means certain death and won't do that. On the third hand, allowing that as a policy could start you down a slippery slope to assassination over trade wars, etc., which would be almost inarguably a bad idea.

A better policy would be to get a bunch of countries together and agree that if any country starts a war with them, they will swoop in and end it, regardless of what country starts it — not a NATO-like body that requires specific things from its members, but a mutual defense pact that is open to any country that wants to join, and is invalidated upon a vote of the members to kick you out for taking offensive action without authorization. It might be peace at the tip of a sword, but it would still be peace.

The hilarious part (in a macabre way) is how Trump thinks Russia will agree to security guarantees. I mean, they'll agree to them, sure, but they already made security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for de-nuclearization in written treaty form back in December of 1994, and then almost exactly two decades later in March of 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Russia's security guarantees aren't worth as much as the paper that the formal treaties are written on, and anybody who says otherwise doesn't know history.

The problem is that President Trump doesn't know history. His party is the party of people who failed history in school. It's the only way to explain about half of the things that they do.

See also "people who failed history in school", or at least people who failed to actually understand what they were learning. You never ever elect an authoritarian. It always comes back to bite you in the a**.

But to turn this thread back on topic, and yet stay oddly political, the reality is that throughout history, technology was always promoted as a tool for making workers lives easier. Workers always assumed that this would mean that they didn't have to work as hard. In practice, the reality was always that their employers expected more, and the workers had to work just as hard, but produced higher levels of output. AI tools are just another in a long line of these "improvements".

The problem with this is that their wages haven't kept up with increases in productivity. If they did, then workers could work less and produce the same amount and have more time for themselves. But the system is very deliberately rigged to prevent this. Ever try to find part-time employment in tech? No way. Not gonna happen. Why? Because if workers were allowed to work part time, they couldn't be exploited as easily.

And this is largely caused by the same sorts of greedy people who you're complaining about — the rich billionaires who have no qualms about exploiting workers for their own profits. People like Trump and Musk, if they had to start from nothing, would probably be working in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant for a little bit over minimum wage, because they have little or no people skills, and would not be able to survive without "f**k you money". But because they started off wealthy, they got the opportunity to exploit others to enrich themselves. And for the most part, they give very little back, using charitable organizations more as tax dodges than for any sort of actual charity.

I don't know how to fix this, but a good start would be ramping up the capital gains tax for the ultra-wealthy, treating any capital gains over a million dollars per year as ordinary income, and taxing capital assets (read "stocks") over $100 million every year to encourage people to take the capital gains or donate them to charity.

As for AI tools, I haven't ever found them particularly useful, because the output is too low quality for me to do anything with it, and it is usually hard to fix the flaws (unless you're talking about plain text). It seems like any other fad, except that eventually it won't be, because people with money will continue to push for the tech to improve so that they can fire more workers and make more money, because apparently no amount is too much for them. I really don't get it. Any of it.

Exception: Self-driving car tech. That is useful. There are probably other niche uses that are useful. Most are not.

There are two types of people who have lots of money — the ones who see it as "f*** you money" and don't care what other people think of them, and the ones who donate huge amounts of money to get buildings named after themselves.

The main difference is that in a hundred years, the latter tend to be remembered as good people even if they were awful.

If Zuckerberg really wants people to remember him musically, the best thing he could do is get together with people high up in Apple and Google, and build a concert hall for use by all of the musical ensembles at those tech companies. I don't know about the other companies and groups out there, but our tech company orchestra could *really* use a viable concert venue.

At work, we don't have any rooms that can hold an eighty-piece orchestra with at times 600 or more audience members, and it's rather hard to beg execs to give us a budget for renting an external concert hall when companies are laying people off. But if they built the Zuckerberg-Cook-Pichai Center for the Performing Arts (or whatever) and made it be available for large performing groups in tech, with priority given to musical groups with ties to the biggest half dozen tech companies, it would be a huge win for the community.

It's the sort of thing you do before running for public office. Is he running for public office?

I'm sure Caligula, Charles I and Louis XVI all similarly thought they were untouchable. Well, probably not fair to include poor old Louis, he was more out of touch than malicious. No one is truly untouchable, and even if the guillotine or the assassin's blade doesn't touch you, you're still going to die, and the body of the richest man is worth not one farthing more than the body of the poorest man.

Exactly. Hell, I wouldn't care if it used even more. I have retinal tears in both my eyes from extreme stigmatism, and the floaters in my eyes drive me nuts on white backgrounds, but are almost invisible on dark backgrounds. I pretty much do all my word-processing and spreadsheet work on dark backgrounds.

That's literally the only thing I use it for... and only when I run into a distro that doesn't provide it over HTTPS, i.e. it has been a while.

You're assuming Congress is adults. I mean, by age, sure, but...

Nope. Not a troll. Unfortunately, Slashdot mods have a long history of using "troll" as "disagree".

By President Trump. Anyone who disagrees with him pretty much gets attacked, mostly with lies and half truths, but enough people believe him, so those politicians tend to end up resigning. It's bullying, basically.

That party got a plurality of votes. I'd argue that this constitutes "winning" by any reasonable standard.

Besides, the modern-day Republican Party is effectively a whole bunch of groups with significant differences of opinion. They don't have to choose to bow down to President Trump, but they choose to, or at least were coerced into doing so.

So although the details of the system of government are different, a lot of what's happening is alarmingly similar.

WebKit is open source and always has been.

Except Trump isn't doing that. He's firing people to put his own people in their place, consolidating power as an autocrat would. Thus far, there's no evidence that he has actually moved any meaningful amount of power to the state level, and thus no reason to believe that he actually will.

Historical fact skewed by misunderstanding the German parliamentary system. Hitler won the 1932 election by getting more votes than any other candidate, thus putting more of his supporters into Parliament. That's why he was appointed Chancellor. So I would argue that the GP post is disingenuous pedantry, at best.

It's linked up above in this thread. They showed that when property taxes are raised, the price of rentals goes up to absorb about 90% of the tax increase. So people end up spending more money on housing and less on everything else. Any new tax on property, even if it is just on the land, would have the same effect.

Rising housing costs force people at the lower end of the wage spectrum to move. People making above a certain threshold just absorb the higher cost and save less for retirement or whatever. So basically, it causes gentrification.

How does LVT reduce the acquisition cost? The whole premise is that the acquisition cost is what the market will bear, and that the seller just doesn't get as much of it. So the acquisition cost should be the same, unless you're factoring in squishy considerations like people selling to avoid paying the tax on unused property, which may have a big impact on some markets and no impact on others.

If LVT replaces other taxes, then it's hard to say what will happen, but realistically, that will never happen, because no politician ever gives up tax income willingly, in spite of frequent claims by one party to the contrary. :-)

To be clear, I agree that it's an entirely more fair alternative to property tax. However, I also know that I live in a mobile home park in the Bay Area, and that were it not for rules that make it hard for companies to shut down mobile home parks, the company that owns it could potentially make more money selling it than they would make in 1,000 years of operating it. And the 5% LVT number that I've seen folks throw around would mean that they would owe taxes every year that are equivalent to 50 years of income from the property, and thus would have no choice but to declare bankruptcy and kick 1,000 families out of their homes.

I don't see any other way that it could end. And there wouldn't be any place for those family to move, because pretty much the entire state of California would have the same problem.

That's certainly true in a lot of states, but it isn't universal. For example, about a third of America's strawberries come from the Salinas Valley. That's about half an hour from the edge of the Silicon Valley. The average value per acre in Gilroy is just shy of half a million dollars. You can't really claim that a one-acre residential parcel in Gilroy is worth half a million dollars, while a field a few blocks away is worth a few thousand dollars per acre.

Right now, because of Prop 13, as long as those farmers don't sell their farms, they get to pay property taxes on the 1970s value of that land. Any reasonable re-assessment for an LVT, however, would likely result in their taxes going up by several orders of magnitude, as land that was bought for hundreds of dollars per acre would be assessed at hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per acre. So they would really have no choice but to shut down all the strawberry fields and build high-density housing.

Seeing the pattern yet? It probably would create a lot more housing, but a whole lot of people would also get seriously screwed and lose their shirts.

I've read it. And I've also read studies from MIT showing that in practice, that theory is incorrect. Which are you going to believe — a purely theoretical analysis that says it won't raise people's rent or real-world studies of the effects of raising property taxes that consistently show that it does?

Yes, over the long term, property tax increases discourage improvement because improvements increase the tax, and yes, land value tax doesn't have that problem, so over the long term, the tax increases that apply purely to the land won't have as negative an impact on rent as tax increases that apply to everything, because the former will encourage adding more dwelling units, while the latter discourages it. And maybe in the long term, that might — might — break even. But in the short term, increasing absolutely does increase rental prices unless you live in an location where you can easily escape to an area without the tax, such that cheaper rents in that second area can help limit the extent to which the rent can increase. Unfortunately, in practice, such fungibility is not all that common, because most people don't want to drive four hours to work every day.

LVTs would also either A. discourage sale of property because of the resulting expected loss (which encourages rent seeking) or B. if charged continuously, would cause gentrification, because the poor would not be able to afford the tax. Mind you, this would result in single-family homes being bulldozed and density increasing and lower the average cost of living there, but you're also forcing people out of their homes, which in my mind is morally and ethically wrong, regardless of the eventual outcome of doing so.

LVTs would also mean that farmers would either have to raise the price of food or would end up going bankrupt, because they would not be able to afford the huge quantities of land required to put food on our tables. And food, being something that you pretty much have to have, is another spot where the theory that the cost doesn't get passed on simply fails the basic plausibility test.

Meanwhile, a lot of wealthy companies would make their employees work from home and avoid the tax entirely.

I just don't think it's a very good idea. You can achieve most of the same goals with less destructive approaches, like taxing unused land.

I just don't buy that theory. Demand for housing is largely inelastic, so if the cost of rental goes up, people will still pay it. So any tax that is levied on someone selling or renting something can absolutely be passed on.

If you own a house and you're renting it out and the government starts charging you a tax on the value of the land under it, you still have bills to pay, and those bills don't get cheaper just because you get less money out of renting out the land. So you're going to raise the rental price just as soon as the lease ends so that you don't go bankrupt.

And because everybody in a market is going to be in the same situation, everybody is going to raise their rents as soon as they can, so you won't have much risk of losing tenants to other places that charge less, because they're going to raise their rents, too. The highly inelastic demand for housing means that most of that cost is likely to be passed on, with the possible exception of areas so close to the border with another state that apartments become more fungible with areas that would not have the tax.

And this has been shown repeatedly in a slightly different form. Every time property taxes go up, apartment rents go up to match relatively soon thereafter. It isn't instant, of course, thanks to leases, but the extra taxes are always passed on in the end. And there's no rational reason to believe that this won't also happen with a tax on land value merely because that tax is applied to only a portion of the value of the property.

That said, if it is done in a way that encourages use of unused land by significantly increasing the tax on the land while decreasing the tax on improvements on the land, then up to the point where zoning limits prevent adding more housing density, the construction of more housing on unused land and replacement of existing housing with higher-density units could cancel out some of the increase over time.

Then again, you can do the same thing with a tax on residential-zoned property that is not occupant-owned based on the size of the property and the expected potential number of tenants, with a credit for every tenant who lives there for at least 9 months out of the calendar year, and that will not only have the same effect, but will also actively encourage owners to lower rents to ensure full occupancy, making that an even better approach. It raises less revenue, but it will drive rent down instead of up.