The "problem" is that we let people claim the "rent" is X for certain people and "Y" for other people--both at the same time. Just stop that.
The "solution" is that you should have to pay tax on what you claim the rent is after a small grace period (Less than 24 months certainly. Probably less than 12 or at least prorated starting before that.).
If your financial agreement requires and claims that the rent is $5000, no problem! Then the tax authority should expect to receive the tax revenue they would expect if someone was actually paying $5,000 in rent to you. If you want to leave the space vacant even after paying the tax on the revenue--have a blast.
That would short circuit all the financialization shenanigans.
The article touches on vacancy takes, and I think this has a similar effect. As the article says, the even if you apply a tax like this, lowering the rent would still lead to foreclosure, so won't happen. So piling a tax on top might make some revenue, and it might make some operators go bust but it won't actually directly* get the property to be occupied.
* maybe if the operator goes bust, the rents on the building can be lowered with a new property value for future loans. Then perhaps it can be occupied. But that's very uncertain, especially if this happens to a whole city at once.
If the property is devalued, the property taxes lower accordingly. Portland, Oregon has been facing this problem recently. The devaluations caused the tax revenues for the city to drop, which in turn has caused budget issues.
For example, "Big Pink" is an office tower in downtown Portland. It's last sale was for about $370 million. Out of desperation in a saturated market, the owners sold it last year for about $45 million. No one - the owners, the city, or the citizens - wants to have the vicious downturn of values, and there is no easy solution. Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.
As citizen I might prefer downturn of values. At least in medium term. Yes there is lot less tax income. But on other hand lowering values would mean lower rents which would mean lower overheads and potentially cheaper prices or more business being viable.
Adding taxes in a downturn obviously adds additional friction. One might ask, what happened to the tax revenue of that $370M transaction, where is it now when the city needs it.
For a professional tool, animations are anathema. They interfere with muscle memory.
Someone who uses a program continuously can be clicking or typing before a dialog box or button is even in the right position.
My wife drives me MAD with this. She has already clicked the cancel button on a popup before I can even read the first word in the dialog box. This is fine when she is working as the dialog box is just a dumbass notification from some idiot UI designer. This is NOT fine when she has asked me to help debug a problem. I have to force her hand off the mouse so that I can read the damn error message before she clicks it away.
I don’t understand this. One of my colleagues drove me mad with exactly this behavior. He opened an internal tool to load some complicated data for visualization. The tool immediately had a popup that said “Loading” with a sole button labeled “Cancel” in it. He reflexively clicked “Cancel” and then complained that the internal tool did not work at all.
The amount of times people asked me for help without even reading the very obvious error message is astonishing. Many people just completely switch off their brain when anything goes wrong.
I believe that every single adder architecture we now use was known by 1980s. The "optimization" is matching the theory to the engineering of the day.
The reason you don't use prefix adders in 1980 is that you can't possibly route them because you don't have enough metal. So instead, you use chunks of Manchester carry chain because the "tapping internal nodes" that everybody cites allows you to route nodes in diffusion and polysilicon instead of having to use metal.
Of course, THAT only works because you have 5V (or more) and can connect lots of transistors in series and still have them work. As your voltage falls you can't connect as many transistors in series, so you switch to architectures that prefer active gates over passthroughs and long chains.
So, as your available metal layers, supply voltage, transistor speed, threshold voltages, capacitive load and power dissipation all shift over the engineering landscape, your "optimization" shifts with it.
> The article’s focus on moral culpability also overlooks the key purpose of the justice system: protecting society from criminals.
I do NOT concede that as the KEY purpose. And when you call "protecting society from criminals" the key purpose of the justice system you wind up with the horribly broken mess that is the US justice system.
Yes, A purpose of the justice system is to remove from society those who cannot be trusted.
But another purpose of the justice system should be to rehabilitate those who can be. And the US justice system is HORRIFIC at that. If anything, the US justice system is a net negative on rehabilitation. The way the US system throws everybody together does more to let old criminals teach new ones their tricks than any improvement from any rehabilitation program can counteract.
Protecting society from criminals (or the violently and severely mentally-ill) is the only function of incarceration that is guaranteed to work. I agree with you that the US justice system is horrific at rehabilitating those who can be rehabilitated - but we don't really have a good understanding of what specific people can and cannot be rehabilitated, or how to go about actually effectively doing the rehabilitation.
Whereas someone who has committed 30 petty thefts and then gets arrested, locked in a cage, and guarded by armed agents of the state, is extremely unlikely to commit another theft as long as he remains locked in the cage.
And he's also extremely unlikely to get shot to death by e.g. a store owner trying to protect his property from theft - another important function of the criminal justice system is protecting criminals from ordinary people using violence against criminals in order to protect their own lives or property.
> Protecting society from criminals (or the violently and severely mentally-ill) is the only function of incarceration that is guaranteed to work.
However in most cases the incarceration is used as punishment, with the length is related to the seriousness of the crime rather than the likelihood for repeating offenses.
Here in Norway we explicitly separate this, where most sentences are punishment, but some are explicitly for protecting society. In the latter case there is technically no end, just a minimum time and after that periodic reviews to determine if the person still poses a sufficient threat.
It's technically classified as a punishment due to legal reasons, like ensuring human rights and due process are respected.
> Whereas someone who has committed 30 petty thefts and then gets arrested, locked in a cage, and guarded by armed agents of the state, is extremely unlikely to commit another theft as long as he remains locked in the cage.
How does that help, if after incarceration that person become a much hardened criminal both because of the lack meaning pathway to integration, and you know spending years locked up with the worst of society.
> but we don't really have a good understanding of what specific people can and cannot be rehabilitated, or how to go about actually effectively doing the rehabilitation.
The theory is that people commit most of their crimes in their prime age of ~15-30. If you lock someone until out of that age, their crime rate will go down on their own. Whether or not this is cruel is another discussion.
This is actually a problem for rehabilitation studies, since now they have to sanitize this effect out of their data on how much rehabilitation treatment actuality works. This and other flaws have tainted some claims that a rehabilitation process is successful.
> Protecting society from criminals (or the violently and severely mentally-ill)
And this is another problem--your "justice system" should NOT be where you place your mentally-ill--they belong in a (possibly secure) medical facility and not with rank-and-file criminals. This is yet one more issue with the US system.
No. For both children and adults, sentencing strictness only deters a SINGLE category of crime--white collar.
Most other forms of crime, especially violent, are almost completely insensitive to the harshness of any possible punishment sentence.
If a brain is sufficiently broken that it no longer has the limiter against harming another human being, prison sentences won't do anything to fix that.
Wikipedia article makes no obvious mention of correlation between sentencing and deterrence. Linked article, in fact, demonstrates that alternative programs provided almost all the improvement.
The "solution" is that you should have to pay tax on what you claim the rent is after a small grace period (Less than 24 months certainly. Probably less than 12 or at least prorated starting before that.).
If your financial agreement requires and claims that the rent is $5000, no problem! Then the tax authority should expect to receive the tax revenue they would expect if someone was actually paying $5,000 in rent to you. If you want to leave the space vacant even after paying the tax on the revenue--have a blast.
That would short circuit all the financialization shenanigans.
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