The Off Topic Topic

[Sheilbh]

There's added dodginess with tik tok with the whole Chinese spy thing too.

Just on this working in a media company, TikTok have a reputation on incredibly aggressive/vast crawling of news sites. It's not always on but there's times when you can see it and it's like more than Google. There are legitimate reasons they might need to crawl on media sites. Given the scale I can only assume they're ingesting a lot for AI building purposes - but I don't think they've said anything about that.

Nothing new in that necessarily given the fights all the media are having with Western big tech over AI, but I feel like TikTok would have an interesting and quite unique basis for building a model given how they're used.

[Josquius]

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[Admiral Yi]

I think in Scotland Halloween is possibly more traditionally important than Guy Fawkes Night which is far, far more English.

A real puzzler why Scots don't go more for the national anti-Catholic holiday.

[Sheilbh]

A real puzzler why Scots don't go more for the national anti-Catholic holiday.

Quite. They're normally all over that

It is celebtrated but it's less of a big deal than in England. A bit like Christmas is less of a big deal in Scotland than in England, while New Year's is a lot bigger. In that case because of Presbyterian suspicion of religious holidays, it only became a public holiday in the 50s

[Crazy_Ivan80]

I think in Scotland Halloween is possibly more traditionally important than Guy Fawkes Night which is far, far more English.

A real puzzler why Scots don't go more for the national anti-Catholic holiday.

I'd guess that Halloween is more 'celtic' than catholic though. The Catholic holy days are the 1st and 2nd of November. But that's just my guess based on living in a traditionally catholic country where Halloween is an American import

[celedhring]

There's few things that I love more than petty town rivalry.

The mayor of my hometown - Badalona - has claimed they will set up the tallest Christmas tree in Spain. This has put the town at odds with Vigo (Larchie's hometown) who claims the same. The trick? The contractor for both trees is the same company, that swears that they have made them exactly the same size, so the tie-breaker will be the ornament placed on top.

[HVC]

There's few things that I love more than petty town rivalry.

The mayor of my hometown - Badalona - has claimed they will set up the tallest Christmas tree in Spain. This has put the town at odds with Vigo (Larchie's hometown) who claims the same. The trick? The contractor for both trees is the same company, that swears that they have made them exactly the same size, so the tie-breaker will be the ornament placed on top.

You guys take your lisp too far

[celedhring]

Blame the ancient Iberians for the similar sounding names of both cities (Barkeno/Baitolo) 

Fun fact, the Roman city was founded as a way to reward veteran soldiers from the Marian army.

[Josquius]

In other corners of the internet I somehow often run into Georgists of all things.
They're a weird sect of neo liberal who use the Japanese learner driver sign for their logo.
Their basic thing is the idea that we should have no tax except for a tax on land value. Through the magic of the markets this will optimise everything and solve all our problems.
Its silly of course.

Nonetheless a random shower thought on how to fix the tax system comes from a watered down version of this insanity.

All taxes being based on land value is mad. But is there not something in the idea of heavily basing taxes around land coverage?
There was a proposal earlier in the year from a think tank about tax breaks for keeping green spaces....I do wonder whether these two might go together.

So. You pay tax per square decimetre of land. Or whatever measure is workable and sensible. Maybe just a metre. Lets say a metre. But decimetres should be more of a thing than they are. Its stylish.

If this land contains something ecologically useless then you pay 100% of the default tax rate on it.
This covers buildings, impermeable concrete and the like.
Reductions available for solar panels and other environmentally useful artificial things.
Much bigger reductions allowed for ecologically useful stuff- a very small one for gravel, a slightly bigger one for a mown lawn, right down to big deductions for trees.
Massive deductions also there if your space is publicly accessible- we'd probably need different laws covering holdings over a certain area to empathise the necessity of this part.
Farms of course are a different story altogether.

Your building's tax rate is based on the land it covers. Thus a 5 story block of flats covering 300 metres square pays the same, as a whole, as a single house covering the same area. For the purpose of simplification lets say this block contains 10 flats of equal size, they'd each pay the 300 metres tax divided by 10 (common areas would be split equally anyway if flats are different sized) vs the guy in the big stand alone house who would have to pay it all himself.

With drones and satellites and AI calculating all this stuff would not be the epic task it would be 20 years ago. Nonetheless people would of course be searching for loop holes...and many of these loop holes are good in themselves. Plants in the middle of your drive? Cool.


Of course, touching the thoroughly broken council tax system in the UK even for a moderate and sensible change of updating values is politically impossible never mind a wholesale change.
But still. Politics aside. Identify the holes.

[Barrister]

All taxes being based on land value is mad. But is there not something in the idea of heavily basing taxes around land coverage?
There was a proposal earlier in the year from a think tank about tax breaks for keeping green spaces....I do wonder whether these two might go together.

You're going to vastly reward companies/individuals who work in tech/cultural industries that use very little land, and vastly punish companies who work in industry that is much more land-intensive.

We should, say, google get away with paying hardly any tax (what do they use for land - some office buildings and data centres), whereas, I dunno, Ford gets to pay huge tax rates because they have all these massive factories?

And I think you wanted to tax farmland differently, but if you followed the idea to it's logical conclusion you're going to get rid of farm land so it can be used for something more productive.

There's a reason countries all have multiple different forms of taxation.  If you only rely on one form you can get all kinds of weird perverse outcomes.

[Admiral Yi]

An economist I met at the IMF mentioned this theory to me.  I didn't get it then and I still don't.

[Josquius]

All taxes being based on land value is mad. But is there not something in the idea of heavily basing taxes around land coverage?
There was a proposal earlier in the year from a think tank about tax breaks for keeping green spaces....I do wonder whether these two might go together.

You're going to vastly reward companies/individuals who work in tech/cultural industries that use very little land, and vastly punish companies who work in industry that is much more land-intensive.

We should, say, google get away with paying hardly any tax (what do they use for land - some office buildings and data centres), whereas, I dunno, Ford gets to pay huge tax rates because they have all these massive factories?

And I think you wanted to tax farmland differently, but if you followed the idea to it's logical conclusion you're going to get rid of farm land so it can be used for something more productive.

There's a reason countries all have multiple different forms of taxation.  If you only rely on one form you can get all kinds of weird perverse outcomes.

Yes. The core Georgist idea of all taxes being based on land is dumb - though note it's land value not just coverage.
This was also thought of in the 19th century when farmland was penny an acre and companies that grow rich without actually making *stuff* were few on the ground. Made a little bit more sense then than now.

For my variant on it though and your what about Google though I would note

1: they do have large data centres.
2: this is just property tax. Office based companies would pay basically the same on this as someone with a comparable size and location home.
Other taxes for corporate profits would remain (and incidentally need big improvement)

[Sheilbh]

I love the Georgists. Such a niche, weird and generally harmless obsessing.

It's like when you discover someone earnestly posting about theosophy.

[DGuller]

Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with just a VAT system coupled with UBI as the entire taxation system.  All the wealth in the world doesn't mean anything until you claim it in the form of goods and services, only then dies it impose liability on others.  The UBI part will make it progressive.

[Admiral Yi]

Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with just a VAT system coupled with UBI as the entire taxation system.  All the wealth in the world doesn't mean anything until you claim it in the form of goods and services, only then dies it impose liability on others.  The UBI part will make it progressive.

No progressivity.