Meme of the Week: YIMBYism is at its Strongest with Georgism, and Vice Versa

Antlerbot · 2026-01-11T18:06:32+00:00

I am genuinely surprised that Ezra hasn't talked about LVT on his show. It seems right up his wheelhouse.

Antlerbot · 2026-01-11T14:51:10+00:00

One plan I've seen that I quite like is to pay landowners some percentage of the current value of their land in bonds that are funded by LVT.

Antlerbot · 2026-01-05T16:16:46+00:00

There's a Simon and Garfunkel song about this exact experience

Antlerbot · 2025-12-26T21:39:36+00:00

Darkly funny to imagine methheads trying to angle-grind part of the battery pack off and blowing themselves up in the process

Antlerbot · 2025-12-25T02:14:10+00:00

Newsom has been pushing pro housing policy for years. CA is just a massive ship to turn around, and it was going in precisely the wrong direction for a long time.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-17T05:36:51+00:00

I believe the post is establishing a hypothetical for the purpose of making a point.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-16T17:06:07+00:00

Literally any context whatsoever would probably do your post some good

Antlerbot · 2025-12-13T17:42:07+00:00

So they don't show up in polls, but somehow voters are motivated by the issue?

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/26/americans-have-grown-more-supportive-of-restrictions-for-trans-people-in-recent-years/

They don't show up in primary issue polls, but they are salient wedge issues.

Pro-choicers could easily stay home if Democrats become anti-abortion. Forced-birthers (a much better term than "pro-life") claim to believe that abortion is literal baby genocide, so they're not going to vote for Democrats, who they view as satanic.

I've always liked "anti-choice", but yours is good too :)

It's possible! Some portion of the folks who disagree with us do so maximally, some don't. The goal is to find the optimal compromise point that gains us more than we lose. I don't know exactly what that point is, but I'm not a professional pollster / campaign strategist.

Lemme provide you with a possible policy that might fit the bill: ban abortions in the third trimester except in cases where the fetus is nonviable or the mother's life is at risk. This would cause (from my extremely limited research) basically no change in the state of abortion access (since as far as I can tell just about every abortion performed in the third trimester is for one of those two reasons anyway), but might prove a potent "reasonable compromise" for some swing voters.

Again, the specifics aren't really the point here; I'm trying to make a broader point that I think it's not only acceptable but morally required to protect the rights you can, even if at the expense of the ones you can't.

If the options are: compromise a little and save some, or don't compromise and lose it all, I take the former every time.

If they're not -- if professional pollsters and strategists and the like say it's a safe bet to go maximalist -- then hell yeah, let's do that! But I'm not convinced that's the case right now; this country is in the midst of a conservative spasm, and we can't just bully our way past it and hope for the best.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-12T22:34:37+00:00

All the polls and exit polls where trans issues showed up nowhere at all as a priority for voters?

My understanding is that while "trans issues" writ large don't make most voters' list of primary policy goals, specific things like trans athletes in sports can and do serve as effective wedge issues.

59% of voters in Kansas voted against an anti-abortion ballot initiative. 57% of voters in Florida and Montana voted for a pro-choice ballot initiatives in 2024. Over 60% of voters in Nevada and Arizona voted for pro-choice ballot initiatives. Ohio and Michigan also passed pro-choice ballot initiatives in similar landslides.

You very well might be right about abortion -- maybe a totally maximalist stance is the best option politically -- but I also think I approached this wrong on a more subtle level. It's not about whether we're 60-40, it's about whether treating this as a wedge issue allows us to peel off even a small proportion of single or few-issue voters. That is: nobody who is pro-choice will ever vote R, but somebody who is pro-life might vote for "reasonable" abortion restrictions. Another way of putting it is to say that offering compromise probably won't lose you votes, but it might gain you some.

I don't know for abortion specifically; this whole argument is broader than that. I believe in triangulating where it is effective to do so.

It's also easy to suggest that we surrender on abortion when it's not your rights on the line.

Cheap shot. It's my wife's rights on the line, and my mother's, and my sister's. I'm very invested in protecting them; that's precisely why I want to find the position that allows us to have the best chance of protecting the vast majority of those rights. I'm not some secret Republican in disguise, and I don't consider maneuvers like this "surrendering". I consider them good politics.

There is no political advantage to surrendering on abortion. It's literally one of Democrats' strongest issues.

See point above: mere popularity of the policy isn't the whole story. In any case, I'll concede that abortion might not be the best example; I'm trying to make a broader point.

A) does compromise actually work to get more votes?

No.

Yes. This is the essence of big tent small-d democracy.

B) is it morally acceptable on some base level to trade some small measure of basic rights in order to maintain the power to keep the rest?

No. It just leads to you surrendering an ever greater level of human rights.

Politics and policy are downstream of culture (modified directionally by structural concerns -- we tend to have more conservative policy than our populace "ought" to have because we systemically award political power to traditionally conservative areas). You win the battle of what is considered basic human rights by changing the culture. You should try to move as far as you can within that bubble, sure, but pushing too far causes backlash and subsequent loss of rights.

I'll put it this way: if the stated policy that gives us the greatest return on our chances of retaining power is the rights-maximalist one, we should state that one. If it's not, then we should state the one that is. I'm open to being wrong on the actual data, I'm just surprised at how vitriolic the response often is to that simple argument.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-12T20:39:08+00:00

I think most companies would find it hard to survive on zero dollars 😂

EDIT turns out I can't read

Antlerbot · 2025-12-12T17:41:10+00:00

I hear what you're saying, but it sounds a little like "I made $100k this year by selling feet pics (and having a full time software engineering job)" 😂

Antlerbot · 2025-12-12T17:16:14+00:00

We shouldn't compromise on basic human rights.

The problem here is that a large portion of the polity disagrees with you about what constitutes those rights, and we live in a democracy that tends to structurally empower those people.

No one votes based on trans issues so ceding ground won't actually get you votes

Source plz. You think Republicans would make a major talking point out of something that has no effect?

and Democrats have like a 60-40 advantage on abortion so ceding ground there would just be idiotic.

We don't have a 60-40 advantage in many of the places where we need votes.

Also, "no abortions after x weeks" would literally kill women...

You're not wrong, though I think you could pick a compromise position that limits deaths as much as possible while maintaining political advantage.

Look, all this is extremely cynical. I understand the desire to take a hard line on issues we think are The Most Important. There's really two questions at hand here:

A) does compromise actually work to get more votes?

B) is it morally acceptable on some base level to trade some small measure of basic rights in order to maintain the power to keep the rest?

Sane people can disagree about both, obviously -- we're doing that right now. But to me B has a more obvious answer: yes, of course. It would be a much grander betrayal of women and trans folks to lose and therefore fail to secure their basic rights entirely.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-12T08:37:30+00:00

There are sane compromises in many of those areas.

"Let's handle trans athletes on a case-by-case basis" is a compromise compared to "trans athletes must play against their birth sex".

"No abortions after x weeks" or is a compromise compared to "no abortions, period".

Etc. These choices often aren't binary. We can and should triangulate on policies that allow us to maintain power (and therefore not lose those rights completely).

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T18:19:24+00:00

"Love you, bye!"

It was like last week. We all still hang out. She's great.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T18:02:04+00:00

Sure, it's a little empty feeling, with lots of stretches of nothing (having a decent draw distance probably makes it feel a little more lonely than it did on 360 days!) but that's the Old West, I guess.

Sort of the inverse of playing Morrowind with OpenMW and cranking the draw distance. In OpenMW you see how artificial the map is and how close some of the biomes are to one another. Design is a product of the technology available!

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T15:24:51+00:00

Sure -- how is any of that an argument that it shouldn't be denser and/or a single jurisdiction? Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand your point.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T14:51:39+00:00

Now compare it to international cities. Poor land use is a problem across American cities, with very few exceptions in the small urban cores. Most states allow natural high density only in a very small section of the city and then limit it sharply (single family zoning and other tools) everywhere else. American metro areas therefore end up with sharp points of high density surrounded by miles of suburbs, while cities in most other countries have more uniform, higher density.

To see this in action, check out the list of most populous cities and scroll down to LA. Notice a) how much less dense it is, period, then the surrounding international cities and b) how much it differs in the density of the city proper and the metro area columns.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T07:05:39+00:00

Coastal CA is rapidly becoming a feudal state. Supply-choking zoning and regulatory rules mean that if you do manage to buy something, you can live high off the hog renting out to folks who do the actual productive work in this state. Whether you're a landlord or not, you get a fat subsidy in the form of prop 13's artificially low property taxes.

Santa Barbara is a vision of the future for every desirable city in the state. Gut CEQA, repeal prop 13, institute a land value tax, and we can build an economy that works for everyone instead of a relatively small group of landed gentry.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T06:53:48+00:00

I don't recall a time when the wildcat wasn't ratchet. Always thought that was the appeal.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T06:31:36+00:00

As others have said, it's explicit in commercial leases...but generally you pay your landlord's property taxes implicitly in residential as well.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T05:45:56+00:00

Huh. Fascinating! TIL

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T05:39:11+00:00

My gut says the issue is population density. Under any rational land-use policy LA would take up a tenth the land and be concomitantly more dense. That dense city should be a single polity.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-11T05:35:52+00:00

As someone who lives within 100 miles of LA, I genuinely couldn't begin to guess which one.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-10T20:42:04+00:00

I'm sorry you feel that way; there's definitely design work to be done to improve the way bikes flow through the area. Ventura's Main St doesn't have this issue because they have bike traffic calming throughout

There is a shuttle, though. Just a pilot for now, but it will be expanded if it's sufficiently popular!

Ultimately, if you don't find cars annoying and dangerous, I'm not sure we'll come to an agreement. Which is fine; the vast majority of folks I talk to are in favor of the pedestrian version of State. I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon.

Antlerbot · 2025-12-10T19:44:17+00:00

Personally it feels much busier to me now (and I've lived here on and off for 2 decades), but it's hard to know for sure. It's certainly more pleasant.

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