bufordsharkley

8 ms·

31.
Paying for Dirt: Where Have Home Values Detached from Construction Costs?(buildzoom.com)
2 points by bufordsharkley 9y ago|0 comments
32.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
This is quite fair. No message to "put all your money in land!" was intended, and indeed we see many cases of localized manias, the galloping of irrational exuberance. Land bubbles come and go, but the underlying cause is the same
33.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
99 year leases have been very, very common throughout history. Simply doing a present value calculation yields the result that to an investor, a 99 year lease and a 999 year lease are approximately the same value today.
34.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
It's no surprise that we're seeing more and more anxiety coalesce around land: this is the classical economic expectation of what would happen as automated output starts to outperform labor, and capital can be automatically produc
35.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
If in the mid-19th century these were gifted to the railroad companies as 99 year leases, the value to the companies wouldn't have been very different, but we wouldn't be in thrall to them today.
36.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
> "we can no longer compete on any remotely level playing field" Competing on level playing fields results in efficient markets, which asymptotically trends towards profits going to zero. Investors don't want honest compet
37.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Repealing Prop 13 is a transitional measure to a full land value tax, collecting all rents on the unimproved value of land. Then you've really got it solved.
38.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
I was looking at that, but ended up buying an Alphasmart Neo2 for $30 instead. No cloud integration; you upload to any text editor asynchronously via USB. It's basically a keyboard with local memory allowing you to type away from distr
39.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
They offer a service that can be consumed for free: physical interaction with product on the show floor. If you consume this and then buy on Amazon, Amazon is effectively unloading the marginal costs of running show floors to the brick-and-
40.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
This is absolutely true in the general sense, but is negated by the rents being given to those who own water rights due to prior appropriation. In the absence of a payment for these water rights (analogous to the payment we pay for spectrum
41.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Another Cincinnatian, now living in the Peninsula. Just to nit-pick one part: > I'm still concerned. Property taxes have grown beyond reasonable limits. There is some truth in this, but only because property taxes are a weird beast;
42.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
It goes to show that it's not construction costs that account for variances in home prices, but rather something location based: land values. Policies that will work to drive down land values (and utilize land values to fund public inf
43.
Matt Krisiloff on Basic Income and LVT on the United Slate(earthsharing.org)
4 points by bufordsharkley 9y ago|0 comments
44.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Here's an interesting article speculating on reasons why policy-makers have an inherent incentive to deny that inflation is taking place (with special note on how it relates to housing costs): http://www.georgistjournal.org&
45.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
A HK resident recommended to me Alice Poon's "Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong" to understand the malfunction in land development that this sort of cronyism delivers; I found it a worthwhile read, and readily recommend
46.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Just as a note for those unfamiliar, there's a whole economic philosophy around the idea of utilizing land rents (and also all other rents) for public goods: Georgism.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
47.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
I don't see a good explanation here about why they need to have a universal set of icons. If they allowed a greater quantity of icons that work better for each region, why wouldn't this simply be better?
48.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
> Free time has filled up. I still get more stuff done, but personal development still requires proper scheduling and planning. The allure of "I'll have time for everything" has gone. Yes: it's not the working for 8 h
49.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Yes, because of Prop 13, assessments have very little connection to current market value.
50.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
> Generalizing to all property markets, particularly ones not as supply-limited seems a stretch at best. Oh, absolutely. But so many of the cities in high demand are supply limited. I wouldn't expect this to hold in a Houston, Atl
51.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Bay Area rents have risen to match the ability of tech workers to pay. There's a general collusion of landlords, insofar as they target what other units are renting for in the neighborhood (which of course has nothing to do with margin
52.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Implementing a tax on the land would remove the tendency to speculate upon it. Currently, why do people buy real estate as an investment? It's not because they believe the actual building materials will become more valuable, but rath
53.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
It's very interesting. I'd worry most about one thing: that the free enterprise system is inherently flexible, and will allow for new inputs its "designers" never considered. It'd be a very poor outcome for a neural
54.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
The plight of a person in such a situation should never be discounted, but it's simply not a viable option to guarantee any land holding to be held in perpetuity regardless of ability to pay for its rent. If you ration off land this wa
55.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
This is essentially accurate, but I have to ask: why do you think that development is often politically constrained?
56.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
That's true for currency from the government itself. But for the stuff we actually use, that's issued from private banks, constrained by partial reserve banking. It's true that to some extent, their assets are land (real esta
57.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
> Pickety's argument amounts to (IMO) that this is the mature state of our current system. Capital generally grows faster than labour and (if it isn't spent), accumulates over time. From the article: > Then there’s the idea
58.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Hell, it's easy to imagine that machine learning could do it. But like any man-made system, how do we guarantee that the system isn't trained on inputs that generate bias? For in a large economy, bias in allocation is a form of hu
59.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
One could say the same thing about the "system" of abolitionism.
60.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
There's a great amount of truth to this; anyway, it's essentially what Michael Kalecki argued in 1943 in his "Political Aspects of Full Employment". Anyway, I find it unfortunate that the most frightening reform in the f

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