The license was changed. You can't do that to other people's code. It was originally released under GPLv2 and he's changed all the copyright notices to say GPLv3. While the license included in the original doesn't bind the recipients to v2, recipients can't restrict successive recipients to a later version only. They have the option of v2.
That's not what the license says. It explicitly allows derivative works to be redistributed under subsequent versions of the GPL, including GPLv3.
> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
The license says you, as a redistributor, can follow the terms of GPLv2, GPLv3, GPLv(n+1). That is not the same as saying you can relicense it to any future version of the GPL. Every recipient will always have the choice of GPLv2.
The original source code will of course remain available under GPLv2. For the modified version, it can absolutely be modified and distributed under a later version of the license because that's exactly what the license says.
I'll edit out some distracting words and see if that helps clarify:
> you can redistribute...and...modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License...either version 2...or...any later version.
So this means I can redistribute and modify it under the terms of GPLv3, which is exactly what this project does.
Some people do have a problem with this, as you seem to, and that's the reason very notable projects, like the Linux kernel, often edit out the part of the license that allows you to distribute it under later versions, and instead mandate GPLv2, even for derivative works.
Don't read the readme to figure out what the license says. Read the license: the readme only tells you what license. It doesn't tell you the terms of that license.
The actual license used explicitly allows later versions of the GPL to be specified in place of GPLv2.
> Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program
specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any
later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions
either of that version or of any later version published by the Free
Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of
this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software
Foundation.
> I dont see why people would have any GPLv2 rights for this version.
Because the code is licensed under GPL v2. Not or any later versions. In the original distribution there was a filed called LICENSE.txt which is just the literal GPL v2.0 text, which includes the text of the license as well as the explanatory text and instructions on how to apply it. There is a README.txt which includes the line "Licensed under the GNU General Public License 2.0." And then every source code file says:
// This source is available for distribution and/or modification
// only under the terms of the DOOM Source Code License as
// published by id Software. All rights reserved.
>While the license included in the original doesn't bind the recipients to v2, recipients can't restrict successive recipients to a later version only. They have the option of v2.
The program was licensed under GPL version 2.0 only. So no choice to use later versions.
We're not there yet, and the future is famously hard to predict; but it sure feels like you drew a straight line and time continued to move along that straight line even if it's not quite at that destination yet.
We have the term “GOFAI” to distinguish “modern” AI from the older stuff (big bag of if statements, behavior trees, etc., but do we need a new term now to distinguish pre-LLM / Diffusion models (neural networks and tree based models)? Everyone thinks “ChatGPT” when they hear AI now but surely this is something more like XGBoost or a neural network under the hood.
No, we don't use GOFAI, we call it machine learning. LLMs are a subset of the field, and if you want to refer to them just use the term LLM. We don't need new terms when we already have easy to use precise language.
Marketing will abuse any term they get their hands on, and certainly "AI" has been abused, but in the field it usually the umbrella term for all areas of research into making "intelligent" behaviour. Be it expert systems, logic systems, machine learning, statistical machine learning, or otherwise.
The thing everyone misses about Valve in all the endless back and forth whenever this handbook is listed is that it is, at its core, a lifestyle company. It is optimizing for a certain lifestyle. It has pros and cons and tradeoffs and ways reality is different from imagined utopia, but in general it succeeds very well at this goal.
It does not succeed at a number of other goals that people attribute to valve (or imagine that valve should have), but that always strikes me as beside the point.
This is all without passing any judgment on whether valve is good or bad - it just seems like the best model the fits the available facts.
In California Prop 13 makes it so people who bought their properties decades ago essentially have their assessments frozen whereas people who bought more recently get assessed closer to market value.
This means that two side by side buildings can have assessed values differing by orders of magnitude. This has all the inequitable downstream consequences you would expect.
Yep, and that's one of many parts of the supply issues in California. We bought our house 25 years ago. The house right next door is half the size of ours and just sold. Their property tax will be ~3x what ours is.
We might consider moving to a looser market, and therefore opening up one more house in a tight market, but we're retired and a large increase in property tax (plus potentially larger increases every year if it's outside California) is a serious disincentive for us.
Prop 13 is friction that resists the smoothing out of conditions across regions. It reduces market efficiency.
p.s. - It doesn't help the housing situation that we have access to incredible natural features all around us, but that's more about California's demand side.
Most of the value of churches is in real estate. I imagine a lot of the Mainline protestant denominations (typically the most liberal), who have low and declining attendance, would be hit the hardest as they own a lot of historic downtown properties worth in the tens of millions.
Conservative Protestant, and Catholic churches own a lot of real estate too, but they have bigger congregations.
If you have a $10,000,000 property that owes 1.5% property taxes a year, that's about $150,000 in taxes every year.
If you have 15 families earning $100,000 a year who each tithe (or 30 families earning $50,000 a year), then you break even on those taxes (you still have the rest of your church expenses to pay, of course).
I'm not aware of the rate of tithing and attendance in Conservative Protestant, and Catholic churches, but I'm guessing it's higher than in mainline Protestant Churches. I imagine non-mainline churches also have a wider portfolio of real estate; they probably own their own share of prime real estate in downtown city centers, but most of their churches are likely dispersed in suburban and rural areas with much lower value land.
My hypothesis (confidence: 75% sure, but haven't done all the necessary math) is that if you were to push for a full repeal of church property tax exemptions, Megachurches, Conservative Protestants, and Catholics would be very upset about it, but would probably be able to weather the storm, and Mainline protestant churches and other minority religious organizations with high value urban property and low relative attendance would essentially be wiped out overnight.
In short -- if you're a liberal, be careful what you wish for.
Your entire scenario here is based around a local (state and county) tax, and has nothing to do with the federal tax code the parent article is concerned with.
There’s a common rule of thumb in sim game design: “never simulate anything more than one layer of abstraction below what the player can actually observe”
Simulations and models, regardless of whether they're designed for fun or for realism, can still teach you plenty of things about the real world; sometimes not from the simulation itself but explicitly by its omissions. The fact that SimCity famously removed all the parking lots tells you something interesting right away. The fact that City Skylines bites the bullet of traffic and renders it in fairly sophisticated detail -- to the degree that the game often devolves into "Traffic Management Simulator" instead of "City Builder Simulator" -- is another such interesting lesson.
But in terms of "how directly transferable are lessons learned directly from the model" is always going to depend on the model's assumptions.
Fun fact -- have you ever heard of the "Monocentric city model?" It comes up in a lot of econ papers, and a lot of urban economics, and therefore a lot of real world policy is based on it.
The "Monocentric city model" is about as simplistic as it gets -- it models the city as a LINE. IE, you have a bunch of agents, and they live some distance from the city, and they have different travel/commuting costs proportional to their distance from the city center; let's run that and see what kinds of consequences fall out of it.
Turns out it's actually a pretty good model and generates outcomes that are pretty analogous to what we see in the real world! Is it perfectly representative of the real world? Of course, not, it models the city as a friggin line. But if we're talking about sheer complexity alone, SimCity is already orders of magnitude more complex than this famous economic model. But that in and of itself doesn't mean that a successful SimCity city would make for a successful real world city, because it's not just about sheer complexity, it's about the appropriateness of the assumptions.
With some serendipity, I learned about Neom yesterday while surfing YouTube. It doesn't seem to be going well. (Warning: video 25mins long) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e40Ju-zNyXk
Didn't Cities Skylines come out of a previous project by the same developer, a transport simulator called Cities in Motion? It's no wonder it has a heavy focus on transport management.
> The author mentions Decentraland. The whole point of Decentraland, which is a crypto metaverse, was to make land prices go up. They didn't. Decentraland is boring and nobody goes there. But it does work, and it's up and running all the time. There are other crypto metaverses. Most of them never got beyond the hand-waving stage or the occasional demo of a small virtual world, but that didn't stop them from trying to sell overpriced land. Despite all the noise from the metaverse crowd, few of them got very far on implementation.
We are in agreement. I thought the crypto metaverses were stupid and said so loudly at the time and predicted they would fail for many reasons; the point about land speculation with crypto games is that charging for the right to upload UGC is literally the dumbest idea in the world.
The difference between a crypto metaverse and the real world is you can opt out of existing in any individual virtual world. This is all mentioned in the article.
> The supply of land is not limited [in Second Life].
This is mentioned in the article.
> Despite doing things the way this author likes
> You pay Linden Lab a fixed fee per square meter, regardless of what you're doing with the land
A fixed fee per square meter without regard to land use or location is literally the opposite of the system I have described.
As for evidence real-world cities, you might observe from evidence real world cities that have done the opposite of an LVT -- proposition 13 in California for instance. And you might notice states with very high property taxes (an imperfect tax to be sure, but one that definitely puts a higher holding cost on land, despite the inefficient tax on buildings).
Tell me, is housing more affordable in states with high property taxes, or in states with very low property taxes?
Cranking up property tax or land tax still sucks. Sure, maybe you can buy land now, but what if you want to live on it? Your house doesn't earn you income (i.e. what you build on your land is not "productive"), so you're stuck paying taxes on something that doesn't give you any fiscal value.
In practice, this doesn't help housing crises very much, but it _does_ increase wealth disparity! People who could previously afford a home now have to sell their property and either rent from somewhere, or buy a cheaper, presumably worse property.
The increased property taxes also get passed from landlord to renter, up to what the market will bear. This is also bad, because it significantly increases the cost of living.
Overall, there's no direct relationship between more expensive/less expensive housing and whether land/property is taxed. It's usually a challenge of efficient zoning etc.
Now, one alternative that I'm interested in would be an "surplus land tax", i.e., if you own a property for the purposes of living on it, there is minimal or no taxation. Then if you buy more property for some reason, the tax is significantly higher (why do you, as an individual, need more land?). This discourages people from owning a surplus of land, while (hopefully) avoiding the increase in wealth disparity. If you want land for the purpose of a business, the revenue from the business should ideally cover any applicable land taxes.
> In practice, this doesn't help housing crises very much, but it _does_ increase wealth disparity!
Is your claim that LVT increases wealth disparity? Would it be accurate to assert the flip side of that, that laws like Prop 13 in CA help with wealth disparity? Because, uh, that doesn't seem to be how it's worked out, in practice.
The tax doesn't really increase wealth disparity, as your example with no tax requires someone being able to buy the land in the first place. If the land is still very desirable, the person that owns a very well located plot is extremely wealthy by investing when it was cheap, or having a lot of money. The wealth disparity is still there, just with a different winner.
Your surplus idea has significant problems: First, good luck if you aren't owning a single family home, as then you aren't tax free. Second, that you can still massively speculate by buying the highest valued land you can, in the largest plot possible, and then have the best leverage. So prices of land don't go down, but way up! And that's while the land is also less useful to neighbors, as a large plot with a house in it is far worse than, say, a corner store, a park, or an office. So you are rewarding the land use that is the lowest value to neighbors, while theoretically calling that affordability.
If you want more desirable land to be available to more people, the only sensible alternative is to make more people be able to use it at a time: Anything else is just picking a different favorite way to decide who gets to use it/buy it. It also makes the land more useful in general: The bay area would be much lower balue than it is now if it was occupied by a sole proprietor who is the only one traversing its current streets and buildings.
> The tax doesn't really increase wealth disparity[...]
Counterpoint:
Where I live the land values have, at minimum, 4x'ed in the last couple of decades. This used to be a sleepy little retirement town, where retirees lived far away from the city, where nobody was interested in living except for those retirees -- hence why it was so inexpensive.
Those retirees are now being driven out en masse because they can no longer afford their property taxes.
These people retired on salaries and retirement packages (if they were lucky) from twenty and thirty years ago. They do not have an income beyond that. They are not millionaires, or anywhere close. Often, they're retired blue collar workers, barely getting by. They cannot actually purchase an equivalent property if they sell their own even at the higher rates--
--because they can no longer afford the taxes on it, and all the other properties around them have gone up just as much in value. They were driven up by the vastly wealthier tech types. These people have nowhere reasonable to move.
Bear in mind, we're not necessarily talking about multi-acre properties here, btw; we're talking modest homes that these people have been living in for fifty or more years.
They're being driven out because the much richer folk value their property. And to make matters worse? If they do sell the property, they instantly lose what little tax cap protection they had, so they'll be paying even more in taxes.
How is that not wealth disparity? If the tax hadn't gone up, they'd still be happily living there. They're only being pushed out because the younger, richer folk want their land.
If that's not increasing wealth disparity, then I don't know what is.
That's not a problem with land taxes, that's a problem with the pensioners declaring that they should stop working at what turned out to be an economically unfeasibly low age after we extended life expectancy. Often with crazy stuff like final salary pensions that they obviously never paid anywhere near enough for. That no generation, before, and probably after, will be able to afford to be economically inactive for 20-30 years + the 15(+) years from childhood in unskilled or low skilled jobs.
At least until we (hopefully) make a post-scarcity economy.
Young people used to be able to afford a home at 25. Old people used to be able to afford property taxes in their retirement for their family sized home. The old people are in the same boat as everyone else. It's just manifesting differently for them. And the root cause is having to pay for an aging population, which is them!
On top of that, that home might have been modest when they had a family and a job, now it's extravagant. Now they should downsize out of the family sized home they're occupying with 1-2 people. And they'll still make a ton of money out of it.
Again, this is the first generation that can live like that. On previous generations the family home would have had the next generation living in it by now, instead 1 or 2 people are taking up a huge amount of land and rooms when they could be living in a flat.
By its intrinsic structure LVT discourages speculation.
Georgian proponents would say that this should not happen that pensioners are being driven out because land values don't rise as much because there is no land speculation, and they pay the LVT instead of rent, mortgage and/or property tax.
I think you'll find that even as land values have increased, your local city or county has been slashing tax rates, such that taxes paid have not gone up for these people at all, or only slightly. Heck, if you're in California they're probably paying about $10 in property taxes due to Prop. 13.
To be fair, anyone that wants to know where you live can go to your website (that you put not only in your bio, but even in your nickname) and visit the "about" section. But I doubt parent did that.
Since higher demand results in higher prices, you could rephrase that line as: is housing (and land) more desirable in states with higher or lower property taxes? I think it's mainly unrelated. Other things like available jobs, climate, amenities, and so on seem more important?
I've never quite understood whether the land value tax advocates wanted taxes to be higher or lower on average, or how they expect economic activity to vary with tax rates. They seem to expect tax policy to have large effects all on its own, though, and I'm more skeptical that it will make much difference.
Simpler ways of going about it are indeed possible and are discussed in detail in the article; a simple regular leasing of land accomplishes all the benefits of an LVT without any of the more complicated bits.
Also -- you can just make a game where land isn't fundamentally scarce, that's an even simpler option too.
> I'm not entirely sure how this makes much sense if one can't generate any revenue from land and lots are limited to a single tenant - which seems to be the norm.
It's important to remember that just because something doesn't generate "monetary" income, doesn't mean it isn't providing value, and players will pay for value -- either in "hard" currencies like real money or in-game gold, or "soft" currencies like time, effort, and putting up with pain-in-the-butt. Housing in MMOs is typically a vanity item, but consider that social status, vanity, and the like are real genuine utility for human beings.
> If the land can't really be used any more efficiently, outside of repossessing unused plots owned by absentee players, then all this does is ensure the wealthiest players are the only ones who can afford the most in-demand lots (assuming the valuation varies).
If something can't be used any more efficiently (which suggests that it either is already being put to its highest and best use already, or that its potential use is severely restricted, akin to real-world municipal zoning restrictions), then there are several ways to look at that:
1. This is fine, actually; the asset is actually being used for its intended purpose and not simply hoarded
2. The developers could remove restrictions on the use of the thing so that there is a higher and better use for it than currently exists
3. The developers might reconsider their underlying assumptions for making the asset scarce in the first place
Did you have a concrete example of this scenario? That might make it easier to discuss if you provided an illustration from a particular game (or one you could imagine).
