chonglibloodsport

u/chonglibloodsport@lemmy.ca
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I have had trees grow back from being cut down to their roots, to a flat stump on the ground. New shoots can come up around the perimeter of the stump.

Most of the mass of a tree is dead anyway, like our hair or fingernails or outer skin layers. The living part of the tree is like a skin on the outside of a massive, dead wooden structure, with another layer of dead tissue (bark) protecting it.

on Amtrak Airo · c/trains · 2 pts · 34d

Diesel electric locomotives are somewhere on the order of 100 times the efficiency of tractor trailers, which are themselves much more efficient than cars per ton-mile. If all road transit was replaced by diesel electric trains it would cut transit emissions to almost nothing. That of course would still only eliminate a fraction of total emissions, since most emissions are not transit-based.

Vi lets me jump to the place I need to be and make edits to a config file very sticky, simply, and efficiently. But all that came at the cost of the steep learning curve.

You can’t do all of it. HyperCard wasn’t just a system for making pages of content connected with links, it was also a full programming language and it had a built in database. This made it easy to do things like build a recipe app that you could add more recipes to without having to build actual cards for each recipe.

Doing this on a website would involve using a database like MySQL and writing some kind of application server. It could not be done with just plain HTML.

on *Permanently Deleted* · c/fediverse · 58 pts · 2y

Repetition. The front page algorithm frequently shows way too many posts from a single community, often in a row. It also tends to show me a lot of duplicated posts that have been reposted to multiple communities.

There needs to be a better mix in the way posts are selected. Popular communities should not be able to dominate the listing with multiple posts. The more posts they get to the front page, the more they should be down-weighted in order to give an equitable mix.

This complaint applies to All, Local, and Subscribed. If you don’t want to change the default algorithm, then perhaps add the new one as an option?

You must’ve missed the part where Lina Khan built her entire career and reputation on an article she wrote for the Yale Law Journal as a law student arguing that Amazon should be split into separate companies and prevented from re-integrating.

She is considered a radical within the antitrust law world. She is vigorously opposed to vertically integrated monopolies of which Amazon is a star example. This case against Amazon is basically the final boss of her career and her legal movement, the New Brandeis Movement.

on Wishing Well · c/importantimages · 26 pts · 3y

Once you have a ton of money how do you separate true love from people who just want to be around you for your money? Look at the personal lives of billionaires. These are highly dysfunctional people.

Property taxes discourage building. Empty land is really cheap, property tax wise. Once you build on the land, property taxes go way up. This discourages you from building on the land.

Land value tax is the opposite. The tax you pay is based on how much the land is worth, based on its location and supply/demand. An empty lot in NYC would cost the same in LVT as if it had a big apartment full of renters. This makes it very expensive to hold on to unless you’re going to build on it.

The same applies for improvement. If you own a plot with a single family house on it in an area where demand is skyrocketing, your LVT is going to shoot up along with it. This encourages you to either tear it down to build apartments or sell it to someone who will.

The really interesting part about LVT is that it paradoxically makes housing more affordable. One of the biggest problems with the current property tax system is that people’s taxes don’t go up when the value of their property increases. This leads to little old ladies sitting on multi million dollar homes and paying almost no taxes at all in places like the Bay Area. Land Value Tax would force tons of those houses onto the market, causing prices to go down due to increased supply. Truly expensive areas would also have to have apartments built to cover the tax.

The other nice thing about LVT is that landlords can’t pass it on by raising rent. Since the cost of rent in the area directly determines the value of the land, rent increases just turn into tax increases. At some point landlords have to stop increasing rent otherwise everyone would move out and then they couldn’t afford the taxes, so this leads to an equilibrium.

The only thing left to solve in this system is to make sure taxes are used to benefit regular people and not wasted.

These sorts of narrow, “feel-good” taxes are the wrong way to go. People find loopholes to avoid paying them.

Georgist land value tax (LVT) is straightforward and cannot be avoided. It incentivizes owned land to be utilized, otherwise it becomes a huge liability. It does not disincentivize improvements (building stuff) because taxes are tied to underlying land values, not improved property value.

on Pursuing your passion · c/antiwork · 113 pts · 3y

I’m not jealous of rich people’s possessions or lifestyle. I’m worried about the power they wield over other people’s lives. Their power to affect the laws that get passed, their power to close down stores and factories and lay off all the workers, their power to kick people out of their homes.

I’m sorry you feel that way. I immediately felt at home on Lemmy. It legit gave me the feelings I had back when I first started using the internet in the mid 90’s. I thought that internet I knew was dead. But it seems a piece of it still lives on.

on *Permanently Deleted* · c/technology · 7 pts · 3y

Photographers don’t pay that much for inkjet inks. They buy commercial grade printers which cost a lot more up front but have much cheaper continuous feed ink tanks.

Only naïve consumers pay those highly inflated prices for ink. Those people should be buying a cheap laser printer but they’re not well-informed about the situation and so they get the cheapest possible printer which happens to be an inkjet.