u/a-gyogyir

Dear Mr. Burnham,

I am writing this letter in hopes that it will reach you, and that you will soon have the power and opportunity to improve the lives of UK-citizens.

If you are short on time, then here is my tl;dr message: Go all in, no half-measures. Don't mess this up! Long version:

As a Georgist, I read with delight that the UK may soon have its first land-pilled PM since 1955. As an outsider, I have a limited understanding of UK politics, but even I can tell after 7 prime ministers in the span of a decade, that the stakes are high.

In these circumstances, some of your constituents may expect you to tread lightly and some will ask you to move quickly. If I were a citizen of the United Kingdom, I would belong to the latter group, so my humble requests are the following:

• Please do not stop at a measly rate of a few percent;
• But do implement LVT incrementally;
• Please make this national, not just local, this tax can by itself carry enormous fiscal weight;
• Please do exempt buildings for good;
• Please consider turning some of the proceeds into a citizens' dividend;
• Also, at the same time please consider untaxing productive exchanges like labor and genuine risk-bearing enterprises.

If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole of value-capture policies, many of us are happy to help you with working out the details, figuring out ways to communicate these extremely misunderstood and underrated measures, and generally just having your back.

Kind regards.

P.S. An AMA would be super-welcome.

I have become aware of two activities at my workplace that appear to violate current legislation.

The company is registered in Hungary and is a subsidiary of a US-registered corporation. Here is what I saw :

1. A few weeks ago, head cameras / smart glasses were introduced in the production department with the stated goal of improving FDA compliance and product quality. (In my opinion, beyond traceability, this measure improves nothing.) The colleagues working there were asked to sign a GDPR consent form stating that the system is intended to monitor only 'critical' process steps. However, in practice, virtually everything during an 8-hour shift is deemed critical. Several colleagues refused to sign the document. Four employees refused to wear the equipment and yesterday they were dismissed with immediate effect after several years of employment.
2. The company had already been equipped with security cameras prior to this. According to one of my colleagues, the recorded footage is sent weekly by the system administrator to the company's US-based executive via FedEx on a hard drive. We have never received any written notification about this. Today I was able to confirm this with evidence of Fedex notifications and photos of the HDD along with the filelist attached to it. No other docs attached to the folders, and the dates of the folders are approximately 7 days apart on average.

How serious are these violations?