If your land can be treated as an asset, then we don't really have LVT yet. The goal of LVT is to tax land to the point where it is no longer an appreciating asset (and, not too much that it becomes a liability)
Roads don't scale well regardless of whether the cars are self-driving. Once you get enough cars on the same highway, there's an inflection point where speeds drop quickly. This only gets worse as you increase the radius of viable commuting distance, since that increases the total number of commuters.
Most cities need more limited access highways not just more lanes. Suburbs extend much further along highways for obvious reasons, yet they get built on the way to somewhere else not just for regional transportation.
A perfect example being the south east of DC getting extremely underdeveloped relative to the west. But you can see the same pattern around many US cities.
That would be a lot more land devoted to freeways, and the associated maintenance cost. But beside that, the bottle necks are mostly not the number of highways, but rather the number of exits near the urban center. I'm skeptical that the roads in the urban center can scale much beyond what we already see in the most car oriented commuter cities in any roughly 2d configuration.
> That would be a lot more land devoted to freeways, and the associated maintenance cost.
The benefits more than make up for those costs, ensuring those who benefit also contribute to upkeep is a delicate balance but things like congestion pricing can go a long way.
Part of the solution is to have more freeways and thus spread exits more evenly across the city. Another part is to adjust city streets around those exits so they can accommodate a large influx of traffic. Similarly you optimize traffic flow inside the city by eliminating things that limit flow like street parking etc.
Going at least a little 3D is definitely required, but not necessarily big dig levels of 3D.
I don't think people living in cities want this, and so it's probably not going to happen. At least not in my city, which only has about two freeways, and people keep talking about tearing more of them down. I live half a mile away from one, and the noise pollution and tire dust pollution are both noticeable.
Maybe it's great from a suburban point of view still.
You don’t need to extend the freeway into the city for it to cut down commute times, removing street parking is one of the ways to then speed up flows within a city. Often you have a ring road around the city with people migrating for there, but such rings can have more spokes going out and often more bridges going in.
Alternatively, going underground removes the noise and dust assuming the city wants to pay for it.
DC had a rather powerful lobby that tried to prevent building highways, particularly inside the District's limits, so very little got built in the DC-controlled areas (like the southeast).
The west was in Virginia and didn't face nearly as much opposition. 50 years later, the economic growth has been concentrated in Virginia where adequate transportation facilities were built.
> A perfect example being the south east of DC getting extremely underdeveloped
Are you talking Belvior/Mason Neck or King George/Westmoreland/Northumberland counties? If it's the latter, a lack of development would be tied to the extra distance of working back up the peninsula. (I was born in the former)
Right now the derive macro requires `T` be `Clone`, but what we actually want to require is only that each field is clone, including those that are generic over `T`. eg `Arc<T>` is `Clone` even though `T` isn't, so the correct restriction would be to require `Arc<T>: Clone` instead of the status quo which requires `T: Clone`
Safe rust is a safe language. Yes, it is built upon unsafe rust. But I still consider Python to be a memory safe language despite it being built on C. I can still trust that my Python code doesn't contain such memory errors. Safe Rust is the same in terms of guarantees. That's all that anyone is claiming.
The main problem now is that there isn't a platform that has the tooling or infrastructure to prove, including through formal methods, that they are correct and free from bugs in the spirit of the seL4 project.
Surely the reduction in vehicle count is more than enough to cancel this out, but a moving vehicle does emit more exhaust and tire dust per unit of time than does a vehicle idling. For the environmental improvements it's more about the reduction in the number of cars than about the better traffic flow.
Right. Presumably a car idling for ten minutes produces less pollution than a car being driven for ten minutes, but a car that is driven for ten minutes and idled for an additional ten produces more pollution than either of them. Any pollution produced by cars idling in bad traffic is superadded to the pollution produced in transit so improving the flow of traffic should reduce pollution even if the total number of cars remains steady.
If the trip costed 10 minutes moving, yes the comparison would be between a car moving for 10 minutes and one that idles for some time and then moves for 10 minutes. But congestion makes the cars move slower, and at congestion speeds the amount of pollution increases very quickly with reduced speeds.
I think that depends on the motivations of the driver. You (and I) are probably thinking of a trip that is motivated solely by getting from A to B (or A to B to C to A). In that case, any pollution from idling is strictly additive.
But a taxicab working an 8 or 12 hour shift is about the only case where I think GP's math/logic applies. (And to be fair, there are a damn lot of yellow cabs in Manhattan.)
And more emissions. Idling is pretty efficent, as is driving at a constant speed. Repeatedly stopping or slowing, then accelerating is not. This is also an unintended consequence of "traffic calming" devices e.g. speed bumps or chicanes. People slow down, then hit the gas again which is awful for emissions.
I’ve sometimes pondered if a traffic calming device could be made which would allow vehicles to pass unimpeded if they are at or below the speed limit, but subject to an increasingly large bump if they exceed it. The problem, I suppose is that it must be extremely robust which would make it expensive and potentially more complex than a simple passive bump on the road.
I wonder whether pedestrian collisions will be slightly more deadly, since one effect is that traffic flows faster than before. Great for drivers but probably more dangerous for the jaywalking new yorker.
> With fewer cars on the road in the congestion zone, there have been fewer car crashes — and fewer resulting injuries. Crashes in the zone that resulted in injuries are down 14 percent this year through April 22, compared with the same period last year, according to police reports detailing motor vehicle collisions. The total number of people injured in crashes (with multiple people sometimes injured in a single crash) declined 15 percent.
What matters in a pedestrian collision is the speed of impact. Traffic flow is about the average speed over time. Cars that spend less time stopped don't become significantly more dangerous when their maximum speed is still limited to, say, 30 km/h (20 mph). Certainly not for those who are aware of a constant traffic flow.
I'm personally most worried about increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders. It's what we've seen happen in the SF bay area rents in response to tech fortunes. I don't see UBI actually increasing welfare much without a tax on land value to make landholding less profitable and redirecting the value of land into the UBI fund.
I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity.
You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.
Why wouldn't they? It's an easy and profitable way to pump their property values. Obviously they make an exception when they stand to profit, but I invite you to attend any county zoning meeting ever if you think this doesn't happen. The meetings are nothing but catfights of this exact description.
I've always marveled at how it's 100% accepted to talk about poor people employing six dimensional chess and dubious strategies to scrape undeserved pennies from the system, but it's somehow unthinkable to even so much as contemplate the possibility that rich people are pulling obvious levers to extract millions. The double standard is absolutely wild.
Rent is charged monthly, and everyone consumes the value at the exact same pacing of 1/30th the rent per day. Consumers has no leverages, save for weak protections that won't be statistically significant, against price hikes. I think it's reasonable to assune it's more efficient at capturing UBI than regular commodities that can be rationed or splurged on.
> I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically
It's one of the few things that are real (ba-dum-tss). And given that demand for housing is inelastic, it'll absolutely absorb any extra money injected into the system as UBI.
Put differently: whatever you set UBI to, it'll always be just barely enough to cover rent on a shack today and not enough tomorrow.
One workable version of UBI was Communism (as implemented in the Soviet Union, not in modern-day China). There you explicitly take the fundamentals like housing out of the economic system and make it a crime to exchange them for money. Prices of staples are tightly controlled, and excess income is to be used for aspirational expenses. It turns out though that it's hard to implement in practice because without a way to regulate demand - the supply side tends to fall over.
what if UBI led people to think "i can go live wherever i want, regardless of job/market conditions"?
herds of young idealists and artist-types deciding to take over cheap realestate in rust-belt towns and rural areas because they no longer need to be next to a big urban center to 'make it'.
we started to see this during covid WFH, but true UBI would be even bigger
This only seems to be an issue if the marginal cost of building is too high to expand supply, though, right? Otherwise if people have more money, they bid up housing, then new stuff gets built, and supply profits decline.
Of course, restricting supply is a problem. I also think this logic might break down in tightly restricted areas that are already vertically built out - Manhattan, for example, because costs per housing unit tend to follow a U curve with respect to height, where they decline with density but start increasing again at very high density, but that's not an issue in most places.
This can broadly be alleviated by regulations that make it far cheaper and easier to build.
Currently, demand is the only access by which housing markets are dictated in heavily NIMBY areas like SF. Supply is an underused level due to cost and permitting issues.
The human nature. The moment UBI is set at X amount, the cheapest rents will jump, so will the price of a coffee, of a burger & fries in a fast-food, etc.
Greed will take over and try to get the _most_ out of the UBI as if we/you/they owe it to those people.
Wouldn't reducing the profitability of landholding via taxation discourage the creation of apartment buildings, thus reducing the supply of housing and making it more expensive?
It would make land cheaper and improve the profitability of doing the conversion. Paying people to sit on land is hilariously inefficient. Welfare for the rich.
> increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders
More than 200 million Americans own their home. They are your real estate holders. So what if they absorb some of these increases?
If your concern is housing for those who don't own a home yet then say that, and the solution to that isn't not doing basic income, but to relax the obsolete local zoning laws that require e.g. 1 acre per home in rural area or "nothing higher than 30ft" in suburban areas, basically flat out banning any density increases.
I don't think "most economists" have a favorable view of it. It is a fringe theory from the 1800s that has never been implemented.
It is super regressive and effectively replaces everything with a housing tax and food tax.
It would be a massive tax break for the rich. IP, stock, and service income would be tax free.
It is primarily popular with a narrow band of white collar technology workers because it would benefit them immensely as their 500k SWE salary become tax free to be picked up by some poor school teacher living next door.
Teacher can’t afford to live next door because a retired couple that bought for 2 times their salary in 1975 live in a million pound house. They instead rent an hour away and already pay a tax for land use, just they pay it to the land owner.
i haven't read much about this, but i think that the point is that land taxes should incentivize people to make their land work ad produce an income. the problem is that this only works if you have lots of land that can be meaningfully exploited. if the tax is applied equally to every one then small landowners will suffer because you can't make a profit from a house and a garden that you live in yourself.
The supply and demand curves are not straight lines. There is not one unit price that consumers value a good at, that's why the marginal price that a consumer will pay depends on the quantity produced. The first most eager buyers would pay a higher price than the rest of the buyers you can find at higher quantities produced (but a lower price).
Tariffs eat into consumer surplus and producer surplus not just by raising prices, but also thereby reducing quantity. I think the only times you'd see no effect on consumer surplus via a tax are when the consumers are always going to pay a fixed amount regardless of quantity they can get (perhaps in some budget-constrained scenario), or if the amount of the thing that can be produced is fixed regardless of price; neither of these scenarios describes consumer goods.
They are relatively popular legal pets in Europe - though not sold in many mainstream pet shops. 100% of those kept as pets here are bred in captivity.
Having kept them before, they are genuinely about as hard to care for as goldfish but need bigger tanks and a little bit more cleaning.
Also super easy to breed, we let the spawn hatch once and ended up with about 70 larvae, they cannibalize quickly but 6 grew to full size and we sold them on very easily.
Also note most goldfish are abused, they need huge tanks 40G+ if I remember right, and not the 8-16 fl oz bowls they're stereotypically kept in. And they need filtration and would do better with a water heater. So idk if pointing to goldfish is the best indicator, even if imo you're technically correct - the refrigerating system isn't really a lot to maintain and that's the main difference.
To add to this, ideal temperature is 16C to 18C (we use a Pi to keep a running graph of the temperature). Lower is generally ok, apparently if it gets into the mid-20's they get so stress they try and escape the tank. We have a chiller, though we have also used the fairly common trick of putting ice bottles in the tank as needed (milk containers filled with water and left in the freeze for 24 hours work well).
Indoor water temp was fine for us, maybe depends a lot on the climate where you live, cool is easy here!
Hopefully we kept them well. We had them for years and in that time they spawned regularly, ended up giving our original pair up for adoption when we moved house.
Tank was smaller than 40g. You're right though bigger is better, that's the general advice with all pets (including goldfish which can grow huge!).
