“Undevelopable” does not mean “utterly without use”. An area that can’t be paved over and built up because it would cause watershed damage might still be usable for grazing cattle. A city block surrounded by blocks that have variances from the building height code is worth less, not worthless.
Decius
Karma: 1,708
Suffice it to say that there are epicycles that negate the specific problems that you were pointing at. They almost certainly invoke problems that I’m not capable of identifying.
Bidding on tax bonds would set equally efficient prices on them, since it would be the insurance companies’ people bidding on them.
Treasury bonds pay back their principal; deducted improvements would not be added to basis price at the time of sale.
That’s entirely incompatible with the idea of selling the tax liability separately.
If the insurers go insolvent, does the government default?
I would suggest a system where the government sells bonds linked to specific future tax revenues, and allow a property owner to buy the bond for their own property many years in advance, essentially prepaying the taxes at the current bond rate. If property values and taxes, or even just collections, crash, the bond holders take the loss.
Should undevelopable land adjacent to a formerly rural developed area pay taxes as though it were developed, while giving the developed adjacent land two tax breaks?
If someone has a lot of wealth stored in land that has been significantly improved, they could bear a larger tax burden than they would be paying under an unimproved land value tax.
I’m not sure why this is considered a weakness, other than the effect is has on incentives; it is easier to offset that effect on incentives than it is to eliminate it.
For example, tax land at its improved value, and allow the cost of any improvements to be deducted against up to half the tax on the land for the entity that made the improvement.
Improved value can be easily determined by market means; either enforce that the owner can always sell at appraised value, or enforce that any buyer can buy at appraised value. I prefer the option where the current owner determines if they will sell, but I can see an argument for letting the current owner determine the value on which they will be taxed, instead.
Yes, other orders which are conditional on the price can also result in the market clearing price being undefined.
How do you determine what price to trade at? Is it the market clearing price with lowest/highest volume?
I don’t see how you’ve explained how batching transactions is positive-sum; would it reduce transaction costs? Would it somehow provide net benefit to both buyers and sellers as compared to executing trades as they can be, rather than randomly benefiting some buyers at identical cost to the sellers?
Would the magic surplus be greater if trades were only executed quarterly, or if they were executed hourly- why daily, and not more or less frequently? It’s certainly a solid Schelling point, but the math doesn’t care about when NYC wakes and sleeps.
If the end-of-day price is above my bid or below my ask, the stock couldn’t trade, and the transaction never happens. For that reason there is a moderate incentive not to trade FCOJ futures right before the crop report is revealed, because your offers will have to stand but other parties can wait until after the news is out in order to meet them, and the future actors have an insurmountable information advantage.
It also results in some stop-loss order situations being metaconsistent; the trade price is below the stop-loss trigger point IFF the stop-losses trigger, resulting in multiple market clearing prices.
Sometimes the market is wrong but the barrier to competition is so high that if you try to take advantage of it you run of money.
In my experience, cafeterias are more likely trying to be inoffensive to everybody than to be trying to reduce costs, and in any case their costs per person are lower than the per-person costs of preparing comparable food at most, if not all, qualities of food.
The line between cafeteria and buffet restaurant isn’t perfectly defined, and I think that there are already businesses that operate on a cash-per-eater basis that are substantially high-end cafeterias. Shifting to a pay-per-month basis for them seems plausible, but I’m not sure if they get the price per day down to commercially viable levels without sacrificing quality.
I think a tech office cafeteria is going to have a disadvantage in that it is going to provide mostly one real meal per day while also being required to provide snacks and beverages throughout the day, but it might have sufficient funding to be an interesting example.
To test the concept properly I’d want to have a cafeteria located near (within a short walk during lunch break) some (tech?) office buildings that offered monthly memberships as well as daily sales. A company-owned cafeteria for employee use is going to have illegible, although likely higher, value/cost.
Daily seems arbitrary, at least as compared to hourly and weekly settling. Hourly settling would seem to provide the same fairness to small investors while still allowing the market to transact during the entire day, instead of only once per day.
If responding to new information during the day is not desired, then less frequent settling is indicated.
Human architecture means that the best humans do not always lose to Alphago, even with their massively inferior computational resources.
Many meals have prep work which scales extremely well, but are incompatible with small sizes.
A way to take advantage of such a property would be to have a central facility produce lots of high-quality meals for lots of people, serving them hot and fresh at the appropriate time.
Having invented the cafeteria/mess hall model of dining, the problem is in implementing such a result over a large enough scale to be viable. That scale is going to be roughly the number of people that will eat a batch of bread in a sitting while it is still hot and fresh, where the batch size is near the capacity of one person.
Solving the schedule problem and having enough people share mealtimes to make that worthwhile seems difficult on the 10-50 person range, but might get easier above 100 (since the serving window must be longer, so the batches can be timed to be ready at intervals during that window with little extra effort; putting a couple trays of cookie into the oven every 10 minutes is reasonable if you have 10 trays and a 1-hour serving window; having a 1-hour serving window for hot cookies is unreasonable if you are only making a couple dozen.)
Yes, and to fit the lawsuit against the manufacturer of a faulty microwave or the journal retracting a flawed paper into GEM requires adding epicycles.
I think you’ve correctly identified that lots of people believe themselves when they say lots of wrong things, and did a fair job of explaining one part of the ways to reduce that error.
A different alternative worth considering is summarized by “Say enough wrong things that you know for sure that most of them are wrong.” In practical terms that means developing three or more mutually contradictory plausible-sounding reasons for what and why. From there, instead of sharing them in a manner where politeness requires that they not be challenged, share them in a manner where politeness requires that they do be challenged, by insisting that most of them are wrong.
It’s certainly more difficult, but I think it’s better to say a thousand things, 1% of which are right (and know that 99% of them are wrong), then to say three things, two of which are right (even knowing that one of them is likely to be wrong). Say as many wrong things as you can afford to, because if you can’t tell the wrong from the right without saying.
I believe so, but I lack the requisite domain-specific knowledge to extract it, or even to evaluate those reasons once they have been extracted.
The thing about the size of the federal government is that there was a team of people with domain-specific knowledge integrating and responsive to public comments and suggestions from people with and without domain-specific knowledge. Their records *ARE* available, if you can figure out what to ask for.
The general summary is probably fairly accurate, but it would be a major error to think that the actual policy was strictly to highly optimize for the fairly accurate summary.
No, and yes.
For mousetraps, it has the implicit problems with ignoring the effects of marketing on customer decision.
For academic theories, it has the implicit problem where the *consumers* (the scientific community, which is presented with multiple theories and forms a consensus around zero or more of them) is being misstated as the producer.
You can get paid for seeing an error in someone’s mousetrap design and making a design that lacks that error, even if the error is “bad marketing”. You can’t get paid for seeing an error in a mousetrap buyer, especially if that error is “ignores the exemplary marketing or otherwise makes decisions based on the wrong factors”.
Academia pays in prestige, but it doesn’t pay in prestige for “doesn’t join or change the consensus”; it pays a little bit to join the consensus and a fair bit more for publishing results that change the consensus, but joining it is much easier than changing it.
There’s also an element of “past performance is not a guarantee of future results”. It’s possible that someone correctly confidently predicted one thing for exactly the right reasons, and then confidently makes an error in the next thing for almost exactly the right reasons.
Likely, even, because the people who are confident about hard questions are more likely to be overconfident than have superpowers.