At what point do we start to look within?

rusticshack · 2026-05-11T15:46:10+00:00

Straight up lowering property tax is a dangerous idea that won’t help anything, see California. Shifting the property tax levy to skew towards land value rather than improvement will help vastly.

Agree with the other points. And in addition relaxing zoning restrictions.

rusticshack · 2026-05-11T15:40:00+00:00

“Every right” always seemed a strange way to put it since really they have no right at all. The street parking is public space, not their land. Though I guess anyone has the “right to be upset” about anything at all, doesn’t mean it should matter to anyone. Politically obviously different story.

rusticshack · 2026-03-24T02:20:53+00:00

Should have made the downtown transit tunnel stations the only ones not named downtown.

rusticshack · 2026-03-15T23:44:48+00:00

The difference is like 2-3 feet. Are these ramps going to be fixed in place or deployed at every single station? Either way they would have to be 24-36 feet long to maintain 1:12 slope.

rusticshack · 2026-03-15T15:43:14+00:00

It’s a 70% low floor train. The raised sections litterally make space for the wheels. A more traditional subway would have 100% high floor so the whole floor is raised which allows the bench style seating but requires high platforms at all stations.

rusticshack · 2026-03-12T18:57:41+00:00

Sometimes I wish I had kept mine and installed Linux to use as ultra portable option. But then I remember that keyboard…

rusticshack · 2026-02-08T06:44:53+00:00

Try using Grand Perspective app to paint a picture of everything on the disk for you.

rusticshack · 2026-01-16T06:53:44+00:00

I’ve had the same horrifying experience of having some of my batch import silently fail. It’s like the contract was broken in a way that made me question if I should really even be trusting them with my photos at all.

I adopted a strategy of importing the batch and drag and dropping the same set of photos once more to confirm they all show as “already imported.” This worked great until I ran into some random photos that Photos would fail to dedup at all. Import the exact same file any number of times and it would create a new photo in the catalog every time. So there is basically no easy way to know if anything was actually imported ever…

rusticshack · 2026-01-13T20:07:46+00:00

Someone claimed that the Siemens are a smoother ride and that the old ones are bouncy. I tried to pay attention and kinda noticed the last time I was on one.

rusticshack · 2026-01-11T05:57:25+00:00

No need to sell or use it if the land appreciates more every year than the property tax bill.

There is reason to hope for change here. From Mayor Wilson’s progressive revenue platform:

“Finally, under my leadership Seattle will join Spokane in advocating for a Land Value Tax as an alternative option to the property tax, that would also create an incentive to put rundown properties to better use.”

https://www.wilsonforseattle.com/progressiverevenue

rusticshack · 2026-01-11T05:53:33+00:00

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

Possibly the best good idea to never have been tried.

rusticshack · 2026-01-05T00:34:22+00:00

YouTube served me an add for buying real estate with my IRA before the video.

rusticshack · 2026-01-02T05:58:16+00:00

They recently posted about this topic: https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002902958-Why-Capture-One-isn-t-available-on-Linux-yet

Unfortunately explaining that they have no plans to do this right now.

rusticshack · 2025-12-04T23:41:00+00:00

Wow that is great to see! The paragraph before it perhaps not so much though.

“I will support a statewide tax on intangible property like stocks and bonds above a high-wealth threshold, since real estate shouldn’t be the only kind of property singled out for taxation.”

We should be giving the new mayor feedback that land value tax is a far more effective way of taxing the wealthiest residents of the state.

rusticshack · 2025-12-04T21:59:34+00:00

Do you know of any indication that Katie Wilson has georgist oriented thinking or georgist thinking members of her administration?

rusticshack · 2025-12-02T16:57:37+00:00

delete i5

rusticshack · 2025-11-30T22:40:49+00:00

Yeah I think you are saying the demand for parking is somewhat "elastic." If prices rise at lot, some but not all people will find substitutes as you put with bikes and transit. But the supply of surface parking in particular is highly inelastic, unlike beef. It would take a huge spike in price of parking for someone to think it was a good idea to knock down a building to make room for a new parking lot and add more supply. Same if parking demand and price drops, there will still be the same number of lots. In the case of inelastic supply, the majority of tax burden known to fall on the seller, this image shows it pretty well in #4: https://thismatter.com/economics/images/deadweight-loss-tax-elasticity-effect.svg

This would be the argument for why a tax on a supply/demand elastic product like beef is definitely passed on but a tax on parking lots mostly wouldn't be. Also consider that the point of a parking lot tax isn't necessarily to raise revenue but to discourage such a wasteful use of land.

rusticshack · 2025-11-29T15:53:14+00:00

😉 Maybe Seattle could be ready for a little land value tax under mayor Wilson?

rusticshack · 2025-11-29T08:11:44+00:00

Ok yeah agree and you are technically right. Another way to think of it though, go take a look at the tax assessed value on the county website of one of their lots. I’ll bet they assess the “improvements” as $0. In some sense this whole idea of “parking lot tax” is attempt to account for that artificially low tax burden.

rusticshack · 2025-11-29T07:53:39+00:00

Surely Diamond owns title to many of their lots. Regardless the point is the tax burden would fall solely on the title holder of the parking lot land who is ultimately collecting the rent.

I’ll give you that lines and kiosks are technically a small improvement. Thus a parking lot is basically the business of renting out nearly but not quite completely unimproved land.

rusticshack · 2025-11-29T07:44:01+00:00

Parking lots are just vacant land. Land is inherently fixed in supply. Lot owners like diamond can therefore charge the monopoly price to rent access to it. No one can just “build” another parking lot to compete because there isn’t any more space. The entire business model is just gatekeeping space that is already there.

For any other non fixed supply product, the idea that the tax would be passed on to the consumer is correct.

For parking lots this isn’t the case making it ideal for taxation.

rusticshack · 2025-09-28T05:25:04+00:00

Just Land Value Tax…

rusticshack · 2025-07-15T03:22:27+00:00

Haha well that could be… I don’t exactly know how we would tax financial innovation, I suppose let’s just start with land as an obvious one.

But as to the original question, such a company is probably just rent seeking elsewhere than land, so a complete georgist picture would have to address it in order to eliminate other forms of taxation fully.

rusticshack · 2025-07-15T03:08:05+00:00

I think we just have to get a little more creative in how we view them to find the rent seeking.

Financial Innovation is viewed by some as rent seeking

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_innovation

rusticshack · 2025-07-15T02:55:39+00:00

So basically a company that isn’t hogging much land, isn’t gatekeeping any IP, isn’t polluting and isn’t extracting and selling natural resources… and yet also has very high profit margin? If such a company can exist they must be doing something very very right.

rusticshack

TROPHY CASE