This stuff is not for consumers. It's for the military. That's why they cost so much and put so much emphasis on features that seemingly don't have any purpose (a bar code scanner and modularity but bad specs? auth readers but a terrible display and keyboard?)
As someone in the military, these are everywhere - that's their main customer. When judging this product, realize that's what it's built for.
Capitalism has nothing to do with this, because land is not capital. Land, as a non-fungible asset, is monopolistic by nature. There is no free market involved because competition cannot exist. Furthermore, because you must occupy some piece of land, it commands a monopoly price that ends up taking absolutely everything that the poorest can possibly pay, ensuring the continued existence of poverty no matter how much we progress as a nation.
Land ownership should not be confused with capitalism because it is not a free market, and the advantages of location are not capital.
Weirdly confident and passionate rant here about nonsense.
Capital is not defined by non fungibility. Land is not “monopolistic” by nature. Competition can exist for land. Monopolies don’t define free markets. Land is not capital but not being capital does not mean it’s unrelated to capitalism. You’ve described land as having inelastic demand but that’s not correct, it’s actually inelastic supply. Demand for land is definitely elastic even if you “must occupy some land”.
This is like a puzzle to spot as many factually incorrect claims as you can.
Correct. It's defined as wealth in the course of exchange, coming from labor. Whose labor created land? Nobody's.
> Land is not "monopolistic" by nature
Completely false. By definition, if you own a plot of land, you have a complete monopoly on that location. Nobody else can compete with the price you put on that slice of the Earth. LAND is defined by its non fungibility. A plot of land in the middle of San Francisco is not the same as a plot of land in the middle of Arizona.
> You’ve described land as having inelastic demand but that’s not correct, it’s actually inelastic supply.
You can clearly see how land has an inelastic supply, yet you continue to think of it as capital which can be produced. The demand to exist in a piece of land has everything to do with the rents of the land. If you can make $30,000 more a year in valuable land than worthless land, using the same labor/capital expenditures, the land rents become $30,000 a year. Land values have nothing to do with the cost of production, but with that value of location.
> Completely false. By definition, if you own a plot of land, you have a complete monopoly on that location. Nobody else can compete with the price you put on that slice of the Earth. LAND is defined by its non fungibility. A plot of land in the middle of San Francisco is not the same as a plot of land in the middle of Arizona.
A plot of land in the middle of San Francisco is very similar to another plot of land in the middle of San Francisco. People don’t describe ownership as a “monopoly over a specific object”. That’s just silly. Monopoly is a descriptor of a market. Not specific assets.
> You can clearly see how land has an inelastic supply, yet you continue to think of it as capital which can be produced.
… no I was pretty explicit that land is not capital in those exact words
> The demand to exist in a piece of land has everything to do with the rents of the land.
No, rents (prices) are a function of demand.
> If you can make $30,000 more a year in valuable land than worthless land, using the same labor/capital expenditures, the land rents become $30,000 a year.
Capitalism, as commonly understood today, by non-Economists, has everything to do with this. (Which, yes, is a major social problem.)
Vs. (IIR) Classical (Adam Smith era) Economics viewed rent as Feudalism - not Capitalism - and took a very dim view of all such "as much gold as you can squeeze out of others, without doing any real work yourself" schemes.
There are plots of land in random, remote places that continuously go up for sale for extremely cheap prices. You won't find these on NMLS listing services :-)
Also, modern local regulation (not capitalism) is largely to blame for housing prices. NIMBYism and similar attitudes are usually behind it, although distrust of potentially corrupt officials can also factor in. Smart city planning can help here. There are good developers out there with money to invest.
Finally, there are vast swaths of undeveloped, unused land, and not all of it is owned by the BLM. This represents an open opportunity for developing housing and townships.
All of the above are not easy to take advantage of -- there are significant hurdles involved. But having multiple clear paths forward does imply we're not under some thumb of tyranny with regard to housing and real estate.
(Edit: removed comment about homesteading; thanks for the correction!)
> The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 ended homesteading; by that time, federal government policy had shifted to retaining control of western public lands. The only exception to this new policy was in Alaska, for which the law allowed homesteading until 1986.
> The last claim under this Act was made by Ken Deardorff for 80 acres (32 ha) of land on the Stony River in southwestern Alaska. He fulfilled all requirements of the homestead act in 1979 but did not receive his deed until May 1988. He is the last person to receive a title to land claimed under the Homestead Acts.
Capitalism has _everything_ to do with this as while the _amount_ of land may not be growing, the economic system does _nothing_ to cap the price of this essential commodity. The only cap on the price of land is the amount someone is willing to pay for it.
To say that the advantages of location are not capital (or equivalent to capital) is just ignorant. There are plenty of pieces of land that act just like capital - access to natural resources, access to a coastline, fertile for farming, or in a location where a toll road or similar could be employed.
It becomes very difficult for someone to build and own a sapphire mine if they don't have the capital to buy the land that has the sapphires in it!
I think point of gp is that land is _not_ a commodity. It thus cannot be treated as capital, the way it is more traditionally understood. Supply/demand dynamics in a market does not make something capitalism.
That's exactly right. Land is not a commodity, in fact it is the absolute furthest thing from a commodity. Plots of land are different, and command different valuations based on location. It is not produced by anyone and has an unchanging supply. To call it a commodity is so completely backwards.
There are supply and demand dynamics in the land market. However much excess value you get from occupying a certain location on Earth, is how much people will be willing to pay for that. The demand will always be high as long as the value from the location is higher than the cost to occupy. This cost will soak up any advancements in society, which is why despite everything we have done to progress the state of man there is still a class of renters giving everything extra they make due to societal advancements to landowners.
I'm excited to see how this ends up like the rabbit r1, completely crashing and burning. This is going to be a trainwreck, there is no chance that the on-board AI works well and even if it did exactly zero people want this....
How out of touch do you have to be to think this is a product anyone would ever want near them? This is such a horrible idea I don't even have the correct words to describe it.
A ton of people in the comments are talking about Google Slides. Does nobody use PowerPoint anymore? What advantages does Google Slides have over good old fashioned PPT?
If we eliminated all other methods of taxation, what do you think would happen to rents? Would they increase, decrease, or stay the same? How do you think this affects the amount collected through a Land Value Tax?
The value of the land is a function of the amount of money one could make off the land, which is a function of the overall economy. A coffee shop next to lots of office buildings can sell lots of overpriced coffee which affects the value of the land it occupies. If the economy gets bad the coffee shop will likely not make as much money, so the taxes off the land will be less as well.
> I think GP's point stands that rolling back LVT would be highly desired by big landowners (who could then return to do-nothing land appreciation for their profits rather than be required to actually _do something_ with the land to earn over its taxed value), while the average Jane couldn't care less, because it wouldn't really impact her tax bill.
I think the average person actually cares an incredible amount about property taxes, especially when it comes to local politics. Local news stations talk all the time about "property tax relief", and there's a general sentiment from just about everyone involved in local politics that property taxes are a useless drain. Which in some cases they are - property taxes really only "work" when they roughly approximate LVT, but it leaves suburbanites feeling overtaxed (because they are, compared to the value of their land) and they have massive political power.
I think that if LVT was simply touted as a "Property Tax Relief Plan", you could make it have massive, massive support. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could give eveyr single person a massive tax credit based on what LVT revenues would bring in, and make up for that tax credit with the LVT.
For example - if you lived in a city of 100,000, and total LVTs bring in $200,000,000, you could give every single person a $2000 "Tax Relief Credit" deductible from all city taxes. You change nothing about how much money is raised, only the distribution, and in a way where 95% of people visibly see their tax bill go down. Good luck getting rid of that!
>Local news stations talk all the time about "property tax relief", and there's a general sentiment from just about everyone involved in local politics that property taxes are a useless drain.
That is because they are not marginal, and they are not land value taxes.
You basically get rewarded for leaving a large piece of land undeveloped in the middle of an urban area. You do no work, and reap all the gains of appreciation while society around you does the work of making the place desirable to live, hence making the land desirable to buy.
You also get armed protection via military, police, and courts, and all of their salaries are disproportionately paid by everyone else doing work.
Earned income instead of property tax is the biggest and most perverse subsidy from working people (especially young) to non working asset owners (and older people) and hence collect rent.
On top of that, we give lower tax rates to capital gains, and on top of that, we let land owners indefinitely defer taxes via 1031 exchanges. Exactly the opposite of what a just society would want to incentivize. We take from laborers and give to owners (and their descendants). And then dream about becoming owners ourselves.
I like this angle... Focus first on the fact that I'm having to pay taxes to put a roof over my head while the developer down the road is driving up land prices by squatting on an empty lot while paying pennies!
> I like this angle... Focus first on the fact that I'm having to pay taxes to put a roof over my head while the developer down the road is driving up land prices by squatting on an empty lot while paying pennies!
As a resident of the northeast, I've only owned 2 homes in the suburbs of a city. For those, the value of the land comprised 63% and 57% of the overall value of the property. I imagine that ratio changes as one moves away from the city.
As someone in the military, these are everywhere - that's their main customer. When judging this product, realize that's what it's built for.