And things like vertical bifacial solar panels can work especially amazingly on grazing land that isn’t suitable for crops.

Counter-intuitive as they may look, they actually have a number of benefits:

1. The panels face east and west, meaning they generate peak power in the morning and evening, which corresponds to peak demand => less need for energy storage to bridge the gap between the mid-day peak in production from traditional PV and the aforementioned morning and evening demand peaks.
2. The panels are vertical, which makes them easier and cheaper to maintain, as dust, snow, and rain naturally shed from their surfaces.
3. The panels get less direct energy during mid-day, keeping their surfaces cooler. Turns out cooler solar panels are more efficient at converting light energy into electrical energy.
4. The arrangement lends itself very naturally to agrivoltaics, which means you can derive more yields from a given piece of land and use less land overall than if you had segregated uses.
5. The compatibility with agrivoltaics allows farmers to diversify their incomes streams and/or become energy self-sufficient.

I agree that I think worker coops elegantly solve certain problems (notably the principal-agent problem), but they also have certain drawbacks. Notably, they have more difficulty raising funds, they tend to be more risk-averse, they tend to be more growth-averse (people don’t like to dilute their own stake within the company with more people, but this means they don’t typically scale as easily or quickly to benefit economies of scale), and they tend to pay worse than hierarchical companies (counterintuitive as that may seem at first if the whole goal of market socialism is to have workers get more of their value back).

So is the solution to just throw our hands up and say, “Screw it, nothing we can do but let hierarchical organizations win”? Not quite. We still do see plenty of successful coops, notably in the form of credit unions. We also have unions and syndicalist solutions. We still have minimum wages (which are supported by most economists, as it turns out you can raise minimum wages a certain amount without raising unemployment because there’s often a non-zero amount of monopsony power in the labor market).

Further, I do think a Georgist system would empower labor much more than now. Without a housing crisis (thanks to LVT and YIMBYism), with a citizen’s dividend, with quality public education (education has positive externalities and thus deserves a Pigouvian subsidy), with more jobs (thanks to more economic growth and less rent-seeking), and with public works projects (essentially Pigouvian subsidies for things like environmental cleanup), I think labor would have much more bargaining power with employers.

For instance, the professional class right now gets good pay and generally good quality of life , despite rarely having unions or worker coops, precisely because they have high negotiating power with prospective employers.

My inclination is to strive for a more Georgist system, encourage unions, use minimum wages and government spending technocratically, and then see if more is yet needed.

But society already values flexibility as well. As a basic example, I was hired in my current job in large part because I have a relatively broad range of skills within my field, rather than being hyper-specialized in one particular thing. Sure, in an abstract world where replacing employees is frictionless and firms are all megacorps with tens of thousands of employees (or more), tremendous specialization would probably be more commonplace. But in our real world, companies value flexible employees who can respond to changing projects, requirements, conditions, etc., because just firing and hiring a new specialist costs times and money, and many companies (startups especially) can’t afford having thousands of specialists in every niche they touch upon.

Further, even specialists have to communicate and collaborate with other specialists, and they need to be able to understand each other well enough to do so. If you wanted to build robotics to pick tomatoes automatically, for instance, it would be ridiculous to hire one tomato farmer and one roboticist who know nothing about each other’s respective specializations. If neither has any flexibility or breadth of knowledge, it will be very difficult for them to communicate and collaborate to get the project working.

People live in an artificial binary where they believe communism and capitalism are the only two economic systems in the entire world.

I’ll be bold and say it outright: communism is a fundamentally broken idea and sucks balls, and so is capitalism, but both in similar-yet-different ways.

Communism is faulty economics and fails to differentiate between man-made capital and god-given land and natural resources, grouping both as “the means of production”. The problem with this is land and capital have very different properties. Where land (and natural resources) cannot be created and are zero-sum, capital must be created and is not zero-sum. Communism blatantly ignores this and has a zero-sum view on capital, meaning it suggests policies that fail to effectively produce new capital, and thus fail to effectively produce new wealth and prosperity. Further, when the state takes monopolistic control over land and capital (in addition to its existing monopoly on violence), it concentrates far too much power, which is why communist countries keep on becoming brutal dictatorships.

Capitalism, on the other hand, also fails to differentiate between land and capital, but in a different way. Instead of socializing both, it privatizes both, allowing massive rent-seeking and exploitation as a result of monopolization of land and natural resources. It also often willfully ignores that negative externalities and other market failures actually make society, on the net, poorer and less prosperous. Further, this concentration of wealth into the rent-seeking, monopolist class grants them more political power to make it even easier to rent-seek, further concentrating their own power and wealth.

What I want instead is a Georgist system that correctly identifies this distinction between land and capital, and then uses economically proven policies that respect the inherent differences between land and capital.

Yeah, I certainly don’t regret moving to Montreal, as it’s where I met my wife and now where I’m working full-time. But yeah, I got the sense that attending Rose-Hulman would have meant being in a college bubble for 4 years and never doing much outside of that bubble.

http://gameofrent.com/content/can-land-be-accurately-assessed

The key downsides of income taxes, though, are it requires tracking everyone’s income, and it’s very easy to hide income by doing under-the-table work and getting paid in cash. In contrast, it’s impossible to hide land.

Wow, even Terre Haute. Almost went there for college (Rose-Hulman), but decided against it in part because the city itself was so small and sprawling. It must’ve been 1000x livelier back in the streetcar days when things were probably more densely built and less obscenely car-centric.

Also, Trump got elected, so I was like, “Nah, I’m moving to Canada”, which is how I ended up in Montreal instead.

Similar with Montreal. A whole grid of streetcar lines just got torn up and replaced with buses. We now have a nice metro now at least, but it certainly wasn’t made from pre-existing tramways.

I think part of the problem is that what we refer to as landlording includes two separate roles: landlording and property management. The former isn’t a legitimate job, gathering its profits from economic rents borne of land and housing scarcity, while the latter is a legitimate job, earning its profits from the labor of managing and maintaining rental housing.

And so with a sufficiently high LVT, approaching the full rental value of land as Henry George proposed, and a much more YIMBY regulatory environment, I think we would likely see landlords converge towards being mere property managers.

That said, you are fully correct that the non-zero costs of moving would still give landlords a little leeway to rent-seek, and I’m curious what solutions may exist to remedy that.

Regardless of whether it 100% solves landlording, I do think LVT and YIMBYism do largely solve real estate “investment” as the meme talks about. Since LVT and abundant housing stop the “line goes up” phenomenon, and LVT in particular punishes real estate speculation, I think they would largely, if not entirely, eliminate the phenomenon of people buying up land/property just to resell later after appreciation. Because, well, housing wouldn’t appreciate under a sufficiently heavy LVT and a strong YIMBY regulatory environment.

Land value tax would fix this

And abolishing exclusionary zoning, parking minimums, and other anti-housing land use policies

Just today I saw this list of the largest tram networks in history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_tram_and_light_rail_transit_systems_ever

The largest existing one is Melbourne, at a little over 250 km of tramways. Los Angeles at its peak had over 1700 km of tramways.

Truly insane what we tore up. A crime against humanity.

My main issues with vacancy taxes are three-fold:

1. The cities with the worst housing crises are typically the ones with the lowest vacancy rates. This makes sense, as if vacancy rates are super high, potential tenants have a lot of negotiating power against landlords, so they can demand lower rents. When there are very few vacancies relative to the number of prospective tenants, landlords have all the negotiating power and can demand high rents.
2. Vacancy tax focuses on shuffling ownership of existing units and doesn’t do anything to encourage densification and development. Own a detached single-family home right next to a metro station in the middle of Manhattan? So long as someone lives in it, you pay no vacancy tax, despite the fact it’s clearly a massive waste of some of the most valuable land in the world.
3. It’s easier to evade and thornier to implement. For instance, there are a lot of “statistics” thrown about regarding “millions” of vacancies, but many on-paper vacancies aren’t what you or I imagine. For example, “vacant” technically includes student apartments where the student lists their parents’ address as their permanent address. Getting back to the point, if you can just on-paper claim a unit is occupied, you can evade the tax, which means the government then needs to actually go out and check if someone us actually living there at least 180 days out of the year, which is way harder to enforce.

Altogether, vacancy taxes are a pretty marginal solution, and I think our focus is much better spent on land value taxes and YIMBYism (e.g., zoning reform).

What about Henry George, then?

Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.

Personally, I think our philosophy of taxation should be “tax what you take, not what you make”.

Because there’s finite land on Earth and nobody has created it, you occupying any parcel of it necessarily denies others from its benefit. Hence, a land value tax in proportion to the value of land you have taken from the rest of society.

Similar for finite natural resources. There are finite mineral deposits, finite oil deposits, finite phosphate deposits, etc., and anyone who extracts them takes something from the rest of society. Hence, we ought to have a severance tax in proportion to the value of the resource you have taken from the rest of society.

And also similar for negative externalities. When you pollute a river or the atmosphere or cause any other negative externality, you are forcing those around you to bear some of your costs, that is you are taking value from them to give to yourself. Hence, we ought to have externality taxes (aka “Pigouvian taxes”) in proportion to the amount of harm you have caused to society.

Further, I think taxing along this principle leads to the best overall outcomes, not just from an abstract sense of “fairness”, but from pragmatic economic outcomes.

Take land value taxes: economically speaking, LVT is just a great tax with great properties that has seen great empirical success.

Or severance taxes: Norway has used them brilliantly to solve the resource curse.

Or Pigouvian taxes: basically all economists agree carbon tax-and-dividend is the single best climate policy.

But yeah, absolutely everything else should be tax-free. The government shouldn’t even be tracking your income, much less taxing you on it. Tax the land hoarders and polluters instead.

This can probably answer your questions.

A key idea of land value taxes is it’s on land value, rather than land area. Urban land is faaaaar more valuable than urban land on a per-acre basis, so someone who owns 1 acre of land in Manhattan will pay vastly more than a farmer who owns 1 acre in rural Nebraska.

As for appraisal, we already sorta do this with property taxes, as property taxes tax the land value + improvement value. With land value taxes, we simply seek to tax just the unimproved land value. Why? Property taxes can disincentivize development and incentivize land-hoarding and speculation. In contrast, even a milquetoast land value tax has been shown to reduce land speculation.

Good solution is to tax land. The land value tax cannot be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.

Plus, it’s just a super good tax. Progressive, hard to evade, super efficient, incentivizes density and disincentivizes sprawl. It’s so good that economists of all different ideologies agree, from free-market libertarians like Milton Friedman to New Keynesians and social democrats like Joseph Stiglitz.

We should be taxing land, not labor.

Plus, no human created the Earth, so why should we be able to place arbitrary boundaries upon entire regions of it and restrict others from crossing them based solely on their having been born in a different closed-off region of it?

There is no moral or logical argument in favor of anything but moving towards global freedom of movement one day.

Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.

Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!

Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.

This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.

Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.

Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.

One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.

In Bibi’s eyes, every day that Hamas continues to exist is a good day. If Hamas ever ceases to exist, Israelis might go back to questioning his corruption charges.