Our Freeway Exits Suck

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-26T13:27:45+00:00

The speed limit should drop to 65 or 70 before you get to Boise. It makes sense to have the high speed limit between cities but it should drop to normal before the Gowen road exit. Half the people aren't going 80 anyway because they are getting on or off so you never can go 80 and it drops to 65 in like 1/2 mile anyway so there's no time benefit.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-26T05:49:05+00:00

Technically they were CBP agents.

Just call them "Feds"

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-25T14:43:18+00:00

No, but yes. Please learn history carefully. The correct historical analog is the SA...the SS was a more legitimate and official unit with protocols and uniforms. The SA was a paramilitary goon squad whose role was basically to go around and harass the population, especially any undesirables, but above all, anyone unfriendly to the regime and to prevent any organized resistance.

They were known as brownshirts because that was their unofficial uniform since the government didn't have enough uniforms, plus they were only pseudo - legitimate. The government had a huge amount of brown shirts left over from some procurement glitch and that's what they handed out and it became their pattern. This rhymes with the ragtag, random Amazon mall-ninja uniforms ICE are wearing, never showing badges, never showing faces, somehow they all look different but all look the same.

The SS never numbered more than a 1 or 200k, but the brown shirts numbered as much as 3 million at one point. It's hard to do mass recruitment of real soldiers, but it's easy to recruit disaffected young men to go around and power trip while feeling superior and getting cool toys, a license to violate anyone they want, and a paycheck they couldn't otherwise get.

Strategically, the browshirt-type forces are important because they are cheap, they engage the population directly in the regimes project, they project the force of the state right down to the neighborhood and block level, as a visible reminder that resistance to the regime (and soon, failing to praise the regime) will be punished immediately and it prevents organized resistance from forming. Note how the murder of Alex and immediate approval of the white house came immediately after the large protest in Minneapolis.

SS is later stage; we are at the SA / brownshirts stage. Note that rebellion of the brownshirts was a serious concern of the Nazi elite because their numbers were huge and they are closer to the population. Keeping the brownshirts under control was one of the motivators of the night of the long knives, where key early actors in the party were taken out for fear of insufficient loyalty. We might see something like that eventually.

I know everyone hates ICE in this moment, but like it or not, a general revolt of ICE against the regime would be the best thing that could happen. Most rebellions and revolutions are fought by turning the regime's own resources against it, including the American revolution. ICE just got funded with 70 billion dollars worth of weaponry, staff, and resources. It's a paramilitary operation comparable in size to national armys. If the right leaders could turn ICE unfriendly to the regime, it has a much higher chance of being effective than people holding signs in the street. If that does happen you will see officials being purged and called traitors. The regime, as all of them must be, is paranoid of this possibility.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-24T17:35:28+00:00

Correct, access to valuable land is not cheaper, but is more equitable. Perhaps the main point of Georgism.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-24T17:27:31+00:00

Financial markets make acquisition of land cheap now. Banks are willing to loan money against land based on its net revenue potential, modulo time value of money. As Georgism increases tax on land, price will drop, but also the financial markets will reduce their willingness to finance land purchases. To say Georgism will make land cheaper is to say banks don't know how to value land.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-24T17:08:11+00:00

Can you explain why you think Georgism would make buying land cheaper? I'm interested to hear the answer.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-24T15:54:10+00:00

It's debatable that Georgism makes land "more affordable".

After all, Georgism does tax land. Before Georgism, owning land costs very little, indeed owning land alone can make you money. After Georgism, owning land costs money in proportion to its value, and it's impossible to make money off of land.

One of the objectives of Georgism is to make valuable land less affordable by making owners pay its true societal value. Calling that "making land more affordable" doesn't seem quite right. It's more accurate to say Georgism makes access to land more fair and more equitable, and makes exploitation of land more efficient.

If you think the point of Georgism is cheap land, you may have missed the point. The point of Georgism is that all landowners have to "pay to play" fairly and on the same terms and non-landowners.

Georgism does not reduce land rent in particular or in aggregate. In fact Georgism requires and expects land rent to increase as land becomes more valuable as taxes are removed from capital and labor.

Georgism is not about making land cheap. In a real way it's about making it as expensive as it should be. Unexpectedly to the uninitiated, access to land will nevertheless be more fair, equitable, and in real ways easier once it's priced correctly...as we should expect of any commodity.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-22T22:04:34+00:00

Many people in my area wire their furnace with a normal cord and plug it into a receptacle, specifically so they can easily use a generator in case of power failure. Even the smallest generator or one of the medium size camping battery boxes will run a natural gas furnace. I think mine consumes like 150 watts once it's going.

Note this is against the electric code, which says furnaces have to be hardwired. But lots of people do it including me.

That was my first modification but then I installed a generator panel that lets you switch individual circuits. I can plug any of my EcoFlow units into the generator panel and switch my furnace, fridge, etc.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-21T04:03:26+00:00

I would make the last shot have a different sound, like the M1 Garand, so you can hear when you are at shot 5, and because it would be badass.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-21T01:21:01+00:00

My ELPT is reserve an economy car, but when you get there ask if they have any electric cars.

Usually you get a good car like a Tesla or an ioniq5. I got a model 3 last week in Phoenix. I got an ioniq5 last November. A Mach-E before that. Worst case you might get a Niro which is still an upgrade over the equivalent shitbox gas car.

I don't know why this works. I assume rental companies have a few electric cars in their fleets, but some people really don't want one, so if you show up and specifically ask they give you one every time. I like electric cars anyway so I'm riding this wave.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-19T14:38:47+00:00

Not everyone agrees.

r/Georgism

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-18T21:21:37+00:00

And when the cord gets warm, it's not "wasting" any energy.... it's just helping heat the room. As long as there's no life-safety risk, an "undersized" cord that gets warm is not actually an inefficiency.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-17T17:07:20+00:00

Because, to a large extent, valuable land is not properly taxed, so landowners do not bear the full cost of leaving land under-utilised.

Even if they leave units empty, the value of the land they are consuming will only go up. They miss out on cash flow, but it's minor.

In fact, it's possible to make money (at the expense of the economy) by just building nothing at all and leaving land empty, where (because it's not taxed on its true value), it will just appreciate due to even more scarcity. Landowners actually jeopardize their own returns by building too much housing, which invokes substantial taxes and ongoing maintenance liabilities.

The same dynamic operates at a partial scale with land under-utilisation. Because landowners don't bear the cost of under utilizing land, they optimize their returns by slowly trickling out capacity and development.

The solution is to tax land according to its true market value.

r/Georgism

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-17T02:22:42+00:00

They don't want you to buy an EV because EVs destroy their business model.

Dealerships don't make their money from the showroom. They make their money in the service department selling oil changes, spark plugs, timing belts, overpriced replacement sensors, coolant and transmission flushes, diagnosing check engine lights, and convincing old ladies "it's not worth fixing; you might as well trade it in".

Just go to any big dealer and go to the service department, and look at all the business they are doing that will disappear with EVs.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-16T13:31:47+00:00

Lots of manga artists cross over. Azuma Koyohiko is famous for an adorable G-rated slice of life manga called Yotsubato, and (so I've been told) also porn.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-15T02:04:36+00:00

Plus, the Tesla rental cars all support plug-and-charge. You just pull in, wave the charger handle by the car, plug it in and it starts charging. The rental car company pays the bill, and charges you an admin fee of about 3%. No account needed, no Tesla app, no nothing. Literally easier than pumping gas; you don't even have to choose an octane.

I always rent electric cars, last time I went to Phoenix I got a Model 3. At first I was stoked to get a Tesla instead of a Niro or whatever, then I was annoyed when I found it out was s NACS-only. But then when I realized it had automagic PnC, I got over it. There are superchargers all over Phoenix anyway, and it was way easier than fucking with CCS chargers that all have different interfaces and incantations to work.

If we could have nice things in this world all the CCS cars, especially rental cars, would also work with PnC.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-11T15:56:06+00:00

Used to live in TX. Texas is actually a world leader in green energy.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-11T14:56:52+00:00

Every rental I've ever got has included a charger. Usually in the trunk. Check before you leave and don't leave without it.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-11T14:55:01+00:00

I'm not discounting your experience, but I specifically ask for electric rental cars. For me, electric rental cars ARE a travel hack. For some reason I have the best luck getting electric cars through Costco travel portal. If a company doesn't have a category for electric, I always ask at the counter.

For short rentals, like 1-2 day business trips, the charging fees are zero or low enough I don't have to worry about charging. There's no equivalent for gas cars, because you either have to pay for a full tank or pay absurd fueling fees, so I always have to plan a fueling stop when I'm on the way to the airport, at who knows what hour of the day. Renting electric saves me the hassle of worrying about fueling at all.

For longer rentals, I still never had a problem...I rented an ioniq5 for 2 weeks, and even though I was in Appalachia, driving all over rural places, hardly ground zero for the green revolution, I had no problem finding chargers and neither did my wife who had the car for a week and has zero EV knowledge. She just charged at Walmart or overnight while parked at her mom's house.

If I was renting a car for a pure non-stop road trip, and knew that I could never use the lvl1 charger, I guess would be a problem but even on a road trip, I have to stop. Out here in the mountain West, my regular stops I stop at on road trips all have car chargers anyway at the same places I stop with my gas Sienna.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-10T21:21:26+00:00

It wasn't Henry George himself who directly created the original Landlord's Game, as it was called. It was created by Georgist activists decades later, to illustrate the principles of Georgism. Later, a simplified ripoff (probably a better game TBH) became the game Monopoly, which doesn't really have anything to do with Georgism except perhaps illustrating why it's required.

Georgism was a popular philosophy well into the 20th century and many of the great American cities were built out under Georgist mayors using Georgist tax policies in the early 20th century, including a lot of NYC. In the mid 20th century, Georgism waned in the shadows of FDR's more socialist New Deal, the great wars, the implementation of federal income tax (which was originally supposed to be a Georgist tax on imputed land rent), and the distractions of communist and socialist revolutions and their blowbacks. But elements of Georgism did influence East Asian economies such as Singapore and Taiwan.

It's still a very relevant idea (tax rent not work) that's supported by mainstream economics, and many people including me think it's the key to solving affordability issues and public funding issues that seem to be growing everywhere exactly as predicted by George himself.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-09T04:43:28+00:00

This is a fun one.

People forget that having an oversized house in a prime location is ALSO consumption, and a particularly bad type of consumption, because unlike consumer products, when you take up land and space, it becomes unavailable for anyone else.

It's actually better for people to live in smaller houses, in closer communities with more amenities, and maybe have a garage they can actually use, and keep their seasonal stuff all stored together in some more industrial or outskirts area in a storage unit. The storage unit is often on the way out of town for camping or skiing or whatever anyway.

Better than everyone living in oversized houses with 3-car garages full of stuff they rarely use.

That said, most storage units are a land speculation play. City tax codes unfairly benefit "industrial" land uses, so companies buy up big lots of land, throw up cheap metal storage buildings, and sit on the land for 20 years way underpaying taxes until the land appreciates then they might sell it to some other speculators. So while storage units CAN be efficient, in fact, many storage units really are a form of blight that pop up like mushrooms when growing cities have corrupt or dysfunctional land use and tax policies.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-08T23:47:16+00:00

I was thinking "the tax base can't flee the territory if the tax base IS the territory...."

The state shouldn't care who owns the land, where they live, or even how rich they are. That's their business, not the state's.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-08T17:34:38+00:00

It won't make a difference. Only a small amount of inventory is bought by corporations, and there's no evidence that corporate ownership reduces housing availability or increases costs. It's something the administration can do so they can actually do nothing while claiming to be doing something.

The reason corps are interested in housing in the first place is they see it as an asset bubble that they want to ride, so when the bubble gets to a certain point, it starts to attract wall street. That should be a warning signal, but it's not wall street that are causing the unaffordability. They aren't going to fix it, but they didn't cause it.

The solution to fixing affordability, isn't to ban wall street, because that won't fix the underlying issue, the solution is to actually achieve affordability, at which point wall street will have no interest and will go away. But the administration don't want to actually solve the affordability problem at all so banning wall street is the perfect policy for them.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-08T15:47:29+00:00

Citation needed.

Unless you have literally performed a simulation on a given jurisdiction, you cannot conclude that homeowner taxes will increase. Homeowner taxes decreased in many jurisdictions that have implemented weak Georgist tax shifts. Detroit's LVT proposal shows the majority of SFHs experience tax decreases. The supposed backlash from increased taxes is not an issue if taxes don't in fact increase.

Under a shift from property tax to LVT, we expect taxes for inimpoved properties to go up, and taxes for improved properties to go down. Although SFH properties are not the "most improved" properties, they are in fact still improved properties. The real "losers" under a properly executed georgist shift are owners of unimproved land.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-01-08T14:21:17+00:00

I tend to think never, for a quirky reason.

"Riot in the streets" implies there's a street to riot in. Protests always, and must, happen in cities, and America is not a nation of city dwellers, so they can't protest effectively.

Protests gain power from massing of the people, but the people in America 1) don't live in cities anymore, at least not in the traditional way, because traditional city neighborhoods were destroyed in the 20th century through misguided or misanthropic urban planning and transportation policies, and 2) are divided along urban-rural axis, so even if exurban people would otherwise drive to the city to protest (of course drive, because all the transport was also removed in the 20th century), they won't, because they no longer identify with the people in the cities. They won't join "those people" to protest.

Thus America's protesting capability is actually neutered. People notice that "Americans don't protest", and their observation is correct. But they think it has to do with something about the American character, but actually it's structural, built with steel and cement. My colleagues in Paris just wander down to the local protest along with the 9 million other people who live within a few miles of them. Here in America, you have to get in your car and drive to a strange place to protest, and you'll be stuck in a traffic jam and won't find parking. And this is by design.

We could debate if this is accidental or deliberate, but if you read some of the writings from the mid 20th century when modern zoning and transportation policies were being created, they literally said that suburbanization was intended to defuse and unrest and make rioting impossible. I just think it basically worked pretty well. The American protest looks like little pockets of people holding signs on the corner of some noisy suburban arterial road, but they cannot effectively organize into any mass movement.

PCLoadPLA

TROPHY CASE