u/OutrageousPair2300

I've seen a number of suggestions here that we could implement an LVT gradually by phasing in the rate over some long period of time (sometimes decades) and others pointing out why that wouldn't actually work, due to land capitalization.

Instead, what about another way of having a gradual transition in which the LVT goes to 100% immediately, but one property at a time?

This could be accomplished by means of a "government mortgage" in which new buyers take out a traditional private mortgage for purchase of improvements, but then have the government acquire the land on their behalf in exchange for giving up any claim on the appreciation or future land rents, and an agreement to pay the full 100% LVT amount going forward, rather than a mortgage payment for the land.

Sellers would be compensated for the sale of their land pretty much the same way they are now, except that the government would be providing the funds (through mortgage origination) rather than a bank.

Buyers would have a lower down payment requirement (as they only need one for the improvement portion) and lower initial payments. From their perspective it would be similar to an interest-only mortgage with no down payment and an adjustable rate, except that the rate would adjust according to demand for the land, not arbitrary (and predatory) interest rate increases.

For the government, they would see many of the benefits of an LVT right away without having to wait decades, and the whole process could be implemented gradually (allowing the economy to adjust) without running into problems of crashing asset values or seizing up the real estate market.

Ever since learning about them, I've been fascinated by non-spectral colors -- those colors that can only be perceived through activation of multiple cones by separate beams of light each of a different wavelength.

For example, there is no such thing as purple light. There is only red light and blue light, and when the corresponding cones are activated at the same time, we perceive purple.

Where does this structure come from? Why does color space have the structure that it does?

Sorry I don't really have a question but this sub randomly popped up in my feed and I thought "oh neat, a color sub, this might be the only place where other people tend to ponder such things."

First off, let me share that I have discovered not only an astounding counterexample to the Collatz conjecture but also have determined the final digit of Pi at the same time!

The key is to extend the Collatz process to apply to 10-adic integers. Since the odd/even testing can be determined based on just the rightmost digit of the 10-adic integer, this presents no problem to applying the process.

It turns out that if you write out the 10-adic representation for Pi, then this serves as a counterexample for Collatz in that the value will never collapse to 1 no matter how many steps.

It also allows you to represent Pi in a form that has a "last" (rightmost) digit, at the same time!

Unfortunately I forgot the digits as soon as I woke up, so other than knowing that the 10-adic representation of Pi is the unique counterexample to Collatz, I am unable to say anything more.

I am about 50% sure that the last digit of Pi is even, though.

I believe that the traditional breakdown of property value into land value and improvement value is incomplete, and that this incompleteness is what gives rise to many of the complications that come up with trying to separate land from improvement value.

Consider a house on a residential lot in a city. The market can help us determine a fair market value for the overall property, but how do we separate that into land value and improvement value?

We might use the replacement value of the house itself as an estimate of the improvement value, or the depreciated replacement value, or something along those lines. We could then subtract that from the property value and the treat the remaining difference as the land value.

If there is a nearby empty lot of approximately the same size, we might consider the market price of that empty lot to be equivalent to the land value for both lots. We could then subtract that land value from the overall property value and treat that difference as the improvement value.

But what if there's an interested buyer who wants to tear down the existing house and put up an apartment building? Sometimes people claim that this means the house has a negative value, at least for that buyer. But does that actually make any sense? Perhaps other interested buyers would want to keep the house.

My claim is that there is actually an overlooked third component to property values, which I'll call "placement value" and which represents the additional value (possibly negative) of there being a particular improvement on a particular piece of land, at the current time.

This is not improvement value. I do think improvement value is probably best estimated by looking at depreciated replacement value. If it costs $200k to build a house identical to the one on my lot, and if my house is relatively new, then it should have an improvement value of around $200k.

Placement value is also not land value. My land is not more valuable than the identical lot next to it, in virtue of having a house on it.

To the young couple who wish to buy my property and live in the house, the placement value might be significant. Sure, they could buy the empty lot next door -- let's say for $150k -- and pay a builder $200k to construct a house identical to mine, but that takes time. My property has a house on it right now and there is value in that. So maybe they'd be willing to pay $400k for my property -- $50k more than the combined improvement value and land value -- for that convenience.

To the developer who wants to tear down my house and put up an apartment building, my property might have negative placement value. It might cost them $50k to demolish my house and get the lot in a state similar to the empty lot next door. So to them, my property has a placement value of negative $50k.

Improvements that are well-placed can produce significant placement value, while those that are ill-suited to their location may have low or even negative placement value.

I'm not quite sure how Georgism should view placement value. Should it be taxed the same as land value? Should it be exempt from taxes, the same as improvement value? Does it fit somewhere in between?

I'm interested in hearing what others think.

While still wildly unlikely, a tie among the other voters is still more likely than the average probability for all the outcomes where red wins.

If we treat the red button blue button puzzle as an optimization problem where the goal is to maximize the expected number of lives saved (treating the lives of others as equal in value to our own life) then we can actually calculate that value if we assume a certain probability distribution.

Some have suggested using a "coin flip" model with a biased coin, which for a simple example using 21 voters looks to give a plausible model:

With 21 voters, a simple coin-flip model with a biased coin always saves more lives from pressing blue, because ties are very likely.

However, if we scale that coin flip model up to eight billion people, then the probability of a tie shrinks dramatically:

With eight billion voters, the probability of a tie is astronomically small, making red the clearly best choice for nearly all coins with even a slight bias toward red.

However, note that the uncertainty has shrunk to just 0.0005% which is implausibly precise for a personal estimate. If you were to ask somebody "what percentage of the population do you think will press blue" and they told you "I think 48.982% of the population will press the blue button, plus or minus 0.0006%" you would think they were crazy. Eight billion coin flips with a biased coin where we know the bias to three decimal places is not a reasonable model of the scenario, any longer.

Instead, we can look at a more realistic predictive model using a beta distribution, where we can control not just the mean (our best guess for the final results) but also the degree of uncertainty in our guess. It would mean an answer more like "I think 45% of the population will press blue, plus or minus 8%" could be modeled.

With 21 voters, the results look similar to the smaller coin flip case:

Using a more configurable beta distribution model, we can see that a much wider range of parameters can result in blue having a net positive expected number of lives saved, when pressed.

However, unlike with the coin flip model where increasing the number of participants made the odds of a tie shrink so rapidly that red quickly overwhelmed the outcomes, increasing the number of participants to eight billion simply improves the resolution of our plots:

The beta distribution model maintains the same overall shape and expected outcome distributions, independently of the number of participants.

The takeaway here is that by using a more realistic model for a participant's predictions regarding possible outcomes, we can show that blue is a better choice over a wider range of possible values.