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?

This article is in the Guardian, a British newspaper. Whatever it’s trying to do, Canadians can’t do much about it.

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.

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.

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 wouldn’t worry about it too much. YouTube comments are the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of quality engagement. They mostly exist to give people a place to vent when the video creator annoys them!