The best way to fix the cost of living crisis in the first world is to tax the absolute shit out of land value (not property value, land value which doesn’t include the building)

I’m talking like a 10-20% tax per year on the value of the land. So if a house is worth $1.6 million, and $1 million of that is the land, the tax per year is somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000.

Now you might think, there’s no way anyone could afford that… and you would be correct.

The point of the tax is to do two things A) reduce the value of the land (which in turn makes the tax cheaper) and B) for pieces of land that are still extremely valuable, force them to be developed into dense units (which don’t increase the tax since it’s on the land only) and spread the tax out among more people to make it reasonable.

The tax amounts collected should be returned to everyone via a basic income and/or income tax reductions.

This makes it so that say a family of 5, living in a reasonable amount of house for them, gets enough back to not pay more at the end of the day. While that retired couple with a 5 bedroom house practically downtown gets very little back and a high tax bill, pushing them to sell that to a family or even a developer depending on the market there.

It hurts people who take up too much valuable land, and rewards people who choose to live in condos or townhomes if they want to be in town, or to live further out if they want a detached home.

Side effect, it also entirely fucks over property speculators. Developers can still keep doing their thing, just better because now they don’t have to pay a stupid amount for the land up front. They just have to build at a reasonable pace to reduce the tax bill, rather than holding a project in limbo while the values all go up around them.

Because it hasn’t been trained on significant amounts of dialogue as a primary source for speech patterns. It also isn’t meant to be distinct unless the instructions make it distinct.

Canada restricts hate speech, as does most of Europe.

Yet its the US with the speech suppression issues going on right now.

Being concerned about at technology and being against that technology are not synonymous.

Companies and programmers who are using it for real world development don’t care about $1000. A good programmer will run a company $10k or even $20k a month for their salary. If they can add even 50% to the output from that programmer they will throw $2000 a month at it and not even blink an eye.

The Anti-AI folks don’t talk to that kind of person much. They’re not running in the same social circles.

Meanwhile, I have a working application I built to replace a shitty corporate android app for a product I own that’s used for my side hustle. Built using an agentic harness using a local opensource LLM. Coding such a thing myself was beyond my development skill level, and it probably would have cost $100k-200k to pay a programmer to rebuild it to the level that it’s currently at now.

I only park in one specific aisle at Costco. I will wait for someone to walk back to their car just to get a spot there.

That has nothing to do with the technology. The last crash was caused by a global virus, and the one before that was the banking system…

For an equivalent prompt and similar quality answer, yes. Inference prices are dropping.

However, higher quality answers (or more complex prompt handling) are currently going up in inference price.

The fun part will be once quality hits a point where the average user (or even business) doesn’t care about the incremental quality change any more. Then it’s going to be a race to the bottom for performance per dollar.

Who cares if the not all companies or investors make money? They can make their bets, some will win and some will lose. I just want better tech for cheaper prices.

History loves to repeat itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Some back of the napkin math says about $50 trillion dollars in value for the top 1% in the US. That would pay off the whole US Debt of $40 Trillion, with about $10 trillion left over.

However, there’s a caveat here. Given that’s about 3.5 million people (1% of the US population) that only works out to about $14 million dollars each.

While that’s a lot of money, it’s not really an egregious amount of money. If you limited the 1% to keeping say $10,000,000 each (get rid of the obscenely rich) you would only have about $15 trillion dollars, which doesn’t even pay off half the debt.

We’re all products of our environment.

The ironic part about your statement is that you seem to have negative feelings towards your parents open sexuality, but there are cultures where that’s within the realm of normal. It just so happens that the environment you were raised in outside your home happens to consider the environment you were raised in inside your home dysfunctional.

Especially in areas of extreme poverty, there often isn’t enough space for privacy, so it just isn’t a thing. If you have a single room hut with 14 children… that didn’t happen because the parents snuck off into the bushes every time. It’s not considered improper or dysfunctional.

What defines an ethical company?

That’s an example of a false choice.

The most practical distribution is actually a mixture of the three systems divided up based on industry and other factors.

There is no reason we can’t have communism for the food industry, socialism for housing, and capitalism for clothes and movies.

Marx while influential isn’t the defining authority.

When they start acting like it.

First three always, fourth sometimes, definitely not the last two.

I was going to say a human can’t carry it, but yours is good too.

You still don’t get it.

You don’t need to eat Lettuce to be healthy, you’ve been taught to think that way but it’s not even close to the truth.

Do you think that people 100 years ago had fresh produce all the time? That’s not how it worked for most of human history and they definitely ate healthier than we do now.

Frozen vegetables don’t have extra salt. Canned sometimes does but a) salt isn’t unhealthy and b) you can rinse them to get most of it off if you wanted.

Juice is not healthy. That’s pure marketing bullshit. It’s almost as bad as soda.

Your mindset is wrong. You expect what society has told you to to do. That’s expensive because our society is built around selling you shit you don’t need.

This is only true if you have fallen into the trap of not understanding what healthy means.

Eating healthy can actually be very cheap, you just won’t get to eat the things that societies thinks are exciting or the most delicious. You won’t be getting “I can’t believe it’s not meat” and the latest type of chia seed detox bullshit.

You can eat rice, lentils, onions, carrots, potatoes, oats, chickpeas, beans, tomatoes, bananas, and some dairy products and keep your meal prices down to less than a dollar while filling all nutritional requirements.

A basic Indian Dahl on rice works out to significantly less than a dollar per serving if you buy the ingredients in more than single use packages, 500 calories, 17 grams of protein, 8 grams of fat, and 80 grams of carbs for $0.75 is pretty fucking healthy.

Two servings of oats and a banana for breakfast? 50 cents, for again around 500 calories, 17 grams of protein (mostly the oats), and 7 grams of fat. You could splurge on a bit of yogurt and keep it under a dollar easily.

In terms of “effort” if you consider cooking 10 portions of Dahl for an hour and then freezing them individually to be too much effort, you don’t actually care about the cost of eating, you’re just too lazy.

That last thing could be said for most humans, especially those in the lower salary brackets. We still employ them in droves, and supervisors to supervise them too.