I had a similar experience recently, where I logged in to Facebook after not using it for years and was shocked by how much garbage was there. My spouse does use Facebook somewhat regularly so I looked at her feed and it was much more reasonable.
I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.
I would assume inactive accounts get "sold" to the algorithm's lowest bidders. If you're not generating new information, there's nothing to scrape or sell. You must be pretty locked down outside of Facebook as well (you've actually toggled privacy settings, ever).
I logged in to instagram after like 5 years and my whole feed is literally just thots and AI generated content, even though I follow a crapload of accounts.
I did "not interested" & "This post makes me uncomfortable" for a solid month and now have a reliable feed of comedians, tacos, golden retrievers, classic jazz drummers, etc. The algorithm thought I turned Mexican and gave me exclusively Spanish content for a month but I just kind of went along with it.
I found that "not interested" didn't work for me, that I had to explicitly state what I was interested in and only then did my suggestions become relevant. It will at times revert to slop and then I have to go through the process all over again.
Not just thots but thots with inevitable links to their OnlyFans pages. It seems that FB and Instagram's primary purpose has become funneling people into OnlyFans. I wonder if Zucc has caught on to this and is at least getting some revenue share from OF.
He has testified to congress that IG/meta does not promote sexual content, which is nuts, because anyone who’s spent 5 mins on the platform knows this absolutely not the case
In my experience it’s mostly sexual adjacent content with just enough plausible deniability that you could say it’s a comedic sketch or something. They’re not funny, and the punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic structure of a joke.
Agreed.
I'm over 50, so I'm 'allowed' to use FB ;-),
for those few posts of the last remaining family and friends there.
Using FBP, I only see new posts of friends in chronological order.
But FB still f*cks you, because it does not show all updates of everyone.
When the algo decides you've had enough, you simply reach the 'end' of your feed.
Well when FB, sessions keep getting shorter and shorter...
There are some EU laws in the making that might change things, though.
Not sure why people are downvoting this, it's absolutely true. I watch a lot of youtube on my TV and I can tell in milliseconds if it's logged me out and I'm seeing the default feed. It's fully insane and inane.
It only takes me a few seconds of scrolling in a private window to hit an AI-generated cat head on pregnant human woman barfing rainbows on the floor: 63M views. Really makes you believe in the dead internet theory, just that they're all in their own little slop algorithm world. Or maybe it's ipad babies after all.
Now and then it gets things right, but I find a lot of YT recs to be pretty dubious, and find it is trying to bias me in this direction or that direction. It's pretty pathetic.
The search function is also useless. About the only Scottish history content I ever get rec'd is Scotland History Tours. While I like his channel, it is not the only show in town and it doesn't go very deep.
When I got my last YT account I could see it was trying to access which news I should see. It was trying to link me to one American party or the other. I just clicked "not interested" into most of the partisan bait content. Not my circus, not my clowns.
Interesting. I have a very different experience with YouTube, to the point I consider it my favorite social network thingy. My search history and subscriptions are carefully curated, and I mostly get "more of the same", with pretty good recommendations for stuff that usually interests me. Also, zero "thirsty" stuff.
Logged out, YouTube suggests me endless videos about MMA fighting or trash for children. I only use the YouTube app for commenting. I use Brave to avoid constant adverts.
I do notice though that YouTube is always trying to bias me in one direction or another. I have a friend whose feed is full of Trumpbait and stuff about how Putin is about to die and the Ukraine war is about to end. (Sounds fine except these videos have been saying that for four or five years.) Whatever one things about these things, the videos he gets are very propagandistic and have ridiculous AI thumbnails and titles. Usually of Putin or Trump scowling at something. He also gets suggested a lot of food videos (okay, I suppose) and often ones about Nazis and WW2 (a bit fetishistic, but to be fair he did history at university).
My non-political YouTube suggestions tend to be about popular music from decades ago. I emphasise "about". I notice the algo more rarely suggests actual music itself. I suspect this is because YT has to pay out money for music but not videos about it. I get some local history stuff (which is interesting but usually not about areas I know well). I very rarely get suggested much in the way of Scottish, Irish or Welsh content, in spite of viewing a lot of it. Never anything about what's happening with Scottish politics (always from a London perspective) or the parliament here.
I still log in fairly regularly and get a bunch of reasonably targeted content, but also a ton of ragebait ai shit like protestors attacking cops. So it’s a bit of both, they’re just flooded with bad ai posts. It’s changed drastically in the past year, from a bunch of posts you could argue make sense, to mostly posts of rage. But the number of actual friends posts is basically zero
Every social media algorithm is like this now. Accidentally viewing certain types of videos are like dropping a nuclear bomb in your carefully nursed algorithm.
> But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.
It would start being more "relevant" but not necessarily more reasonable.
I hadn't used Facebook regularly in many years but recently posted a story about the passing of my 18 year old cat. I did this as a way of informing friends and family I don't communicate with on a constant basis that I was going through a bad time (I was very fond of my cat).
My Facebook algorithm is now just almost entirely a solid wall of people I don't know announcing the death of their cat. A non-stop parade of personal tragedies.
I can see the connection of how one thing led to the other but it also highlights how clumsy and soulless these algorithmic systems are.
I think it just throws the most engaging content at you hoping you get lured into using it more then the algo will update once it sees how you behave.
For me, it's almost all thirst traps for several years. More recently it learned that I like 90s/00s rock, which is a fad again, so it started showing me some of that. Also, I am a sucker for stand up comedy clips and it feeds me that now. So that was a hint that it does start to become more reasonable. But, if I start to scroll it only goes 3-5 posts deep before thirst gets put back in the rotation no matter what I do.
I've been using it more than ever in the last ~2 years, just because my old friends started sending me videos to the music related stuff so I click it and it opens in FB. We chat on messenger and I guess that little DM airplane logo is how they found a way to get me into it on occasion. Granted, my friends send me like 5-10 videos a day and I only watch them about once a month to get caught up, I can tell it's trying really hard to make a DAU out of me.
Yeah, this makes sense. It does sort of imply that new users would just see a bunch of garbage, which you'd think isn't ideal. On the other hand, how many new users could possibly still be signing up for Facebook? So maybe it's not a problem as they just manage the decline.
It's nonsensical rage/click baiting garbage. You are the product, not the user.
Anybody who hasn't used FB in a long time almost certainly has 100s if not 1000s of posts from friends and family that they missed. Instead of this garbage it should be "Hey, we haven't seen you in awhile! Here's all the fun and important stuff you missed out on."
That might actually get me to engage with the platform because that would be putting my needs first and foremost. But that's not what FB does and not what FB ever did. Zuck never had our best interests in mind, so why would it put our interests first?
It does make me wonder if that system is a net positive or a net negative. For me, I go, see suggested stuff which is all trash, and never want to engage with FB ever again. I stay only because of friends but only check once a week or so. Where as, if they got rid of all suggested stuff and instead it was 100% friends and family and every 5 posts, an ad. I'd engage with it far more often.
My facebook page, which is where I have friended everyone I met between like 2004 and 2017 is absolute garbage.
But I have a secondary account where I follow a few specific niche groups on a specific topic that are only on facebook. This page is actually fine, and is pretty good at suggesting related pages.
Not sure what the takeaway is for facebook though.
Same here, I use it once every year or so. I get AI slop when I log in that is mostly like this blog post.
My wife, who uses it maybe once or twice a month, does not AI slop, she showed me her feed. Nor does my friend who uses it daily. It's definitely based on usage or lack of usage.
From seeing the feeds of a few categories of people near me (some using it semi-professionally, some just personally, some like me that avoid it unless strictly necessary)... it really does seem to be all of them. Absolute garbage is a majority, and they all complain about missing things they actually care about (though to be fair this has been true ever since it left colleges).
Facebook is truly awful to everyone. I can't believe people don't try harder to leave.
I wonder this too about X: when I sundowned my Twitter account when I started seeing 80% "no question literal nazi-posting" by bluechecks on my feed, I unfollowed everyone and kept the account just to prevent someone posting on what was my username for over a decade.
So now that I follow no one, when I click a link from Reddit or HN to X, my "For You" page is:
- Asian pornography; AI generated "vibes" videos of machines doing "oddly satisfying" things; Elon Musk; American right-wing politicians and pundits screaming about "woke" or jerking off ICE videos; AI or real public sex outdoors at festivals?
Of course, I don't use X, and don't seek this stuff out, and only see it there.
Will it not get all bunched up near the poles though? and maybe have seam where the ends of the tiles meet?
edit: Perlin noise and similar noise functions can be sampled in 3d which sorta fixes the issues i mention , and higher dimensions but i am not sure how that would be used.
Yes, you can use a 3d Perlin noise field and sample it on the surface of the sphere, to get seamless texture without any anomalies at the poles or projection distortion. That applies to any 3d shape, not just spheres -- it's like carving a solid block of marble. And use 4d Perlin noise to animate it!
It's easy to add any number of dimensions to Perlin noise to control any other parameters (like generating rocks or plants, or modulating biomes and properties like moisture across the surface of the planet, etc).
Each dimension has its own scale, rotation, and intensity (a transform into texture space), and for any dimension you typically combine multiple harmonics and amplitudes of Perlin noise to generate textures with different scales of detail.
The art is picking and tuning those scales and intensities -- you'd want grass density to vary faster than moisture, but larger moist regions to have more grass, dry regions are grassless, etc.
I've thought about this before, and I think there is some way you could find to do it. For example, you could generate on the mercator projection of the world, and then un-project. But the mercator distorts horizontal length approaching the poles. I think it would be complex to implement, but you could use larger windows closer to the poles to negate this.
You're still going to run into problems with mercator because under mercator the poles project to infinity, so you'd need an infinitely large texture or you special-case the poles. Many renderers do this so it is viable!
There isn't a zero tradeoff 2D solution, it's all just variations on the "squaring the circle" problem. An octahedral projection would be a lot better as there are no singularities and no infinities, but you still have non linear distortion. Real-time rendering with such a height map would still be a challenge as an octahedral projection relies on texture sampler wrapping modes, however for any real world dataset you can't make a hardware texture big enough (even virtual) to sample from. You'd have to do software texture sampling.
I worked on something very similar for my master's degree.
The problem I could never solve was the speed, and from reading the paper it doesn't seem like they managed to solve that either.
In the end, for my work, and I expect for this work, it is only usable for pre generated terrains and in that case you are up against very mature ecosystems with a lot of tooling to manipulate and control terrain generation.
It'll be interesting to see of the authors follow up this paper with research into even stronger ability to condition and control terrain outputs.
I came here to say this. My masters was on procedural generation. Perlin, fBm, etc. The things these noise functions have that an LLM doesn’t is speed. 1-D perlin is just a dozen or so multiplications with a couple random coefficients. The GPU can do 4-D Perlin all day long every frame taking up a 4096x4096x32 texture volume.
While I do like the erosion effects and all, having a few height texture brushes that have those features that you can multiply on the GPU is trivial. I still welcome these new approaches but like you said, it’s best for pre generation.
My masters was also on procedural generation. Now I wonder how many of us are out there.
At any rate, given that this paper divides the terrain in regions and apparently seeds each region deterministically, it looks like one could implement a look-ahead that spawns the generation on async compute in Vulkan and lets it cook as the camera flies about.
I think it's catnip for programmers, myself included. (See also: boids, path traced renderers, fluid simulations, old fashioned "generative"/plotter art, etc. - stuff with cool visual output)
Boids, Game of Life, Genetic Algorithms, Pixel Shaders...
All so satisfying to play with.
One of my favorites was when I was sure I was right about the Monty Hall problem, so I decided to write a simulator, and my fingers typed the code... and then my brain had to read it, and realize I was wrong. It was hilarious. I knew how to code the solution better than I could reason about it. I didn't even need to run the program.
Which is what a sane terrain system would do. Just beyond the far plane you would load/gen the tile/chunk and as you got closer, increase the resolution/tessalation/etc. (or you start with high and each level away you skip vertices with a wider index march for a lower lod).
In any case, like I said, I welcome any new advances in this area. Overhang being the biggest issue with procedural gen quad terrain. Voxel doesn’t have that issue but then suffers from lack of fine detail.
There are still some features that a miss from Google photos. There isn't any way (that I know of) to auto add pictures to an album based on the face. I used to have dedicated albums for family members, and it was nice to have the auto updated.
Face recognition in general just isn't as good as Google Photos.
It's still an amazing piece of software and I'd never go back, but it isn't perfect yet.
Are we using the same Google Photos? I've found Immich face recognition and context/object search to be miles better than Google Photos. In particular, Google Photos is exceptionally bad at distinguishing non-European looking faces (though it's not great in general), and it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people.
Almost all my Google Photos "people" are mix-and-matched similar looking faces, so it's borderline useless. Immich isn't perfect, but it gives me the control to rerun face recognition and reassign faces when I want, even on my ancient GTX 1060.
My google photos doesn't even seem to support facial recognition, maybe I turned it off somehow at some point, but it doesn't seem like google photos supports manually selecting a face (a face that isn't detected), which is something I use a ton with Immich, it is very convenient, even if a bit tedious if going through a backlog.
Annoyingly you can't create a person that way yet with immich, but that's where digikam helps.
Immich manages to detect my kids faces much better than expected. I only have two years, but it is spot on with kid #1 from newborn to 2yo, and it manages to not mix up the new baby photos of #2 with the baby photos of #1.
In my 44k photos there are zero statues face detected, the only flukes are a few photos from a restaurant with a celebrity picture wall.
Diffusion LMs do seem to be able to get more out of the same data. In a world where we are already training transformer based LLMs on all text available, diffusion LMs ability to continue learning on a fixed set of data may be able to outperform transformers
Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing. I don't have the expertise to come up with a specific number, but I'd wager that getting half the admin costs back would be the absolute best case. I still support simplifying means testing for benefits programs, but not because it's going to magically free up a consequential amount of money.
> Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing.
Exactly. The same conversation happens with discussion about eliminating private health insurance: Other countries with nationalized health care still have their own overhead. It's less than the overhead of a private healthcare system, but not by as much as everyone assumes. You could completely eliminate the overhead of private health insurance in the United States and it would only change the situation by a couple percent, though most people assume it would be much, much more.
Precisely, people on the left wildly overestimate the admin overhead while people on the right wildly overestimate the fraud.
In the end, we have a gradually increasing idea of what the "basics" are which we should provide the poor / the elderly / everyone, and a decreasing working-to-retired ratio.
That is - the spend side is increasing faster than the income side. Europe is about 10 years ahead of us on this problem, but we are catching up fast.
I think the other problem with UBI, besides the fact that we can't afford it .. is that its probably actually bad for society.
Many problems come from an increasing lack of purpose in society. Getting paid to do nothing will not solve that for probably 99% of the population. Lots of idle time for lots of bored people is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
UBI isn’t “getting paid to do nothing”, it is “removing rapid clawback from means-tested welfare so that there isn’t a significant range in the working poor to middle income range where additional outside income as reduced impact because it is offset by welfare clawbacks.”
Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
Otherwise broad flat cash distribution from the government generally causes inflation and all the money ends up workings its way up to the wealthier. So if you do not tax it back, it actually ends up being regressive.
The mechanism is something like - the poorer you are, the higher % of your income, by necessity goes to spending on basic needs. You have a zero or negative savings rate. The richer you are, the opposite. You have savings you put into income producing assets (stocks which are fractional ownership in companies, real estate, etc).
So if everyone gets $25k/year, the bottom end will spend it all on goods & services (food, clothing, rent) that are owned/produced by the wealthy. And it compounds as the wealthier then are able to buy more and more income producing assets from the middle class.
> Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
That’s not what I'd call a problem (its part of most concrete UBI proposals), but, yes, whether you look at it through a classic fiscal lens or a macroeconomic impact lens, you have to raise taxes concurrently if the UBI is significantly greater in aggregate payments than the means tested welfare it replaced (which it must be to maintain the same base benefit level, and many proposals would increase the base benefit level), and any sensible implementation will do it progressively starting somewhwere above the middle of the income distribution.
Its actually simpler on both an initial and, even moreso, ongoing basis to eliminate multiple means tested programs and replace them with a single UBI with clawback through progressive taxes than to adjust the numbers in all of them in a way which has the same effect and then administer that on an ongoing basis througn the separate bureaucracy attached to each program. (Especially since the UBI itself, as well as the clawback, can be built into the tax system simply by “adjusting the numbers” in that system. Which is why “negative income tax” is a name under which a policy identical to UBI+tax financing has been proposed.
Negative income tax is probably a more straightforward to implement this.
Explaining to middle class people that they are going to get $20K UBI but their taxes are going up $18K isn't going to go well.
Remember whenever you setup a "good" government program thats dependent on 1-2 other "bad" government programs in unison (UBI + progressive tax increases) then the risk is future admins remove the medicine but keep the candy. Then the whole thing becomes unaffordable and the good program gets wound down.
Or you end up with crazy stuff like the UK triple lock pensions.
Two mitigations would be gradual adjustments, and a willingness to delay reductions a bit.
People shouldn't be sweating bullets about help being pulled prematurely as a direct result of trying to get past the need for it. Or have the marginal impact of increasing their earned income actually reduce total help+income.
I know somebody in an extremely bad health situation, and dealing with both of those perverse issues. Attempting employment would carry a lot risk. And with kids to be cared for, playing roulette in an already challenging situation is a real barrier. (In this case, it isn't government help, but a situation with similar logic.)
A large number for sure, and completely agree likely too much.
However that's against a projected total spend of $6 trillion in 2027, so 13% accounting for all profit for every level in the medical system (insurers, providers, pharma, medical equipment, etc) .
If you were to wipe that to 0, maybe medical costs go down 13% in US. I don't think US is seen as obscenely expensive and bad value (outcomes per spend) because of a 13% difference.
For example per capita medical spending is 2.3x higher in US than UK, so wiping out all profit will bring us to.. about 2x UK costs.
It's a deeper structural problem of utilization (lifestyles, behavioral), high labor costs (AMA cartel), incentives (pay for treatment not outcomes), etc.
This exactly. For parents it is not a choice, you absolutely must have a parent sitting by a young child. The effect of not automatically putting parent and children next to each other would just be making tickets more expensive for parents.
Playing devil's advocate here, as a parent this sounds great! Have your young children sit next to a couple strangers a few rows away: now you get some peace and quiet while other people have to deal with their seat-kicking, drink-spilling, whining, crying, bathroom trips, diaper changes, requests for entertainment, etc.
You know this is going to happen too: there are going to be some subset of parents that are not going to pay extra and will just choose to let the airline make their kids some complete stranger's problem. Hope the general public enjoys it.
And? They are your kids. Why should someone who has paid to reserve their seat have to move because you were to cheap to pay to choose your seat.
Also see, I’m not going to work extra hours because a parent can’t work late. Just because I have grown children doesn’t mean that I don’t have a life outside of work.
Ah yes I love modern society "they're your kids" until every busybody on earth calls CPS or police at the first sign of doing something they disapprove (happened to me because I shit you not, my kid is a different race and that was 'suspicious' to be a kidnapping -- thanks FOIA for the bodycam revealing that bullshit).
Or when it comes time to tax the shit out of the grown kid made possible by the massive time and money investment made by the parents, the lion's share of the total. "No no no, that was society's investment -- now they owe us those taxes as part the social contract!"
When it comes time to do the gangster shit it's all on the parent, but when it comes time to reap the benefits suddenly "we're a society."
Haha, it's very true. Everyone is an individualist when it comes to paying for kids but when it comes to social security, we should raise that to high heaven so that the current kids will be slaves to the geriatric majority.
"I don't mind paying more money in taxes" they always say, knowing full well that the majority of the incidence is on the next generation.
There is a huge difference between funding education, health care etc which I’m all for paying taxes for and subsidizing your flight.
And if you expect me to defend the police or Karyns about anything, let’s just say I grew up on NWA and “F%%% the police” and my mom constantly told me that don’t think because my White friends could get away with minor criminal mischief that I could.
Well actually she said “don’t let your little white friends get you in trouble”. But close enough.
If you want to deregulate airlines you have no complaint from me. I couldn't give a shit if there's anti-kid airline who's advertising message is "Fuck dem kids."
If you're talking about a private company choosing who to subsidize once government regulations are removed, then I don't see how you have room to complain. It's not like taxes. You can charter a flight or rent a cessna to pilot if you don't agree to the private terms of carriage of anyone offering tickets.
Taxes are way worse because a guy with a gun can show up and put anyone who disagrees with the majority's idea of charity or subsidy into a tiny cage; if you disagree you can't even escape it by leaving the country because the USA has worldwide taxation. I would classify private flight subsidization as a much more ethical, moral, and wildly less violent regime than taxing people for the healthcare of others.
I personally have no problem with the current state of affairs or with the state of affairs that the airlines are proposing. I fly Delta, I don’t buy the cheapest ticket so I can cancel a flight up to the time the flight is scheduled and get a credit.
From the little I do fly other airlines, only the cheapest fares don’t at least give you credits for cancelled flights.
Every airline has a credit card that gives you free luggage where the annual fee is cheaper than the baggage fee for a couple flying round trip.
My wife and I also have status with Delta (Platinum Medallion), lounge access, TSA PreCheck, Clear etc so we can do our best to not deal with families and once a year vacationers. We live in Orlando now.
But if I did have small kids. I would definitely pay for reserve seatings.
Don't want to play the devils advocate... but if you _must_ sit next to a person in need... you have to reserve the seats. Doesn't matter if it's a child, a dependent parent or a colleague that you need to run through an upcoming presentation with.
Currently, it's just the case that parents get a discount on the seat reservation fee.
With the current implementation exposed to the end customer, yes, that's required. Reserving specific seats isn't fundamental to the constraint that some people want to sit together.
Plus, the current reservation system is predatory in its own right. When booking you're dumped into a page strongly suggesting you must choose a seat, and all available options cost more than the base ticket.
Well, any half decent operator will put you next to each other and the other half at least lets you select seats during the check-in process. If that 90% certainty is not enough for you... just reserve the seats. Yes, it'll cost money, because otherwise there won't be any seats to reserve as anyone will do it.
Honestly I would be happy if the 5x the price, and I'm a parent. I hate flying with a kid and it would let me convince the wife to drive or take a boat the next time.
I basically only fly with a kid because everyone else is willing to subsidize the massive externality I impose on them.
The nature of Chinese censorship makes it difficult to provide hard numbers, but it really is worse. America's handling of censorship is certainly not the best, and it has gotten worse recently, but it is not on the level of China.
At least the Chinese have the courtesy to be obvious about it. The American and European powers pretend we’re free and open societies while actively undermining public speech that it doesn’t like.
Your links (at least the ones I could translate) seem to describe a system very similar to a Credit Score like you have in Western economies. At least it seems very different from the propagandized version of a score that tracks your every action and determines "how good of a citizen are you".
You're completely right, it is very similar to the western style credit score, and is often either accidentally or deliberately misrepresented. That being said, it covers behaviors not covered by western credit scores that does have elements of tracking "how good of a citizen are you".
I think this article from Beijing University does a great job of highlighting some of the issues.
I agree that the American understanding of the Social Credit System is flawed, but to suggest it doesn't exist is an extreme overreach.
Furthermore, it clearly is a system that is important to the CCP and has an effect.
From the Baidu page:
建立社会信用体系是保持国民经济持续、稳定增长的需要
Establishing a social credit system is necessary to maintain sustained and stable growth of the national economy
Certainly Mainland China does need a credit system, and undoubtedly the Social Credit System will and has helped in that regard, but it does have legitimate flaws with regards to privacy.
Its goals extend beyond ensuring creditworthiness to
社会信用体系具有揭示功能，能够扬善惩恶，提高经济效率；
The social credit system has a revealing function, can promote good and punish evil, and improve economic efficiency;
And its integration with the National Healthcare Security Administration, and other government and private entities extend its reach far beyond what the Western credit systems do.
there's a paper that compares both when it comes to promoting organized political action (which is the only type of censorship that is not morally justifiable under any semblance of democracy) and both countries scored the same low points.
both got high passing grades on allowing meaningless complaining about government.
Here is a list of items that matter for an American. It is much worse if you are from Hong Kong or Taiwan.
1. Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter (basically all major American social media platforms) are not accessible without a VPN. Some major VPN providers have also been banned as well. The counter argument is that many Huawei products are also banned. But I actively use Harmony OS on my Huawei smart watch. I can view Bilibili content, XiaoHongShu, QQ, and other platforms on any device without issue.
2. State media propaganda. My first time seeing state movies was shocking how in your face the propaganda was. It is completely blatant. From talking with locals about it, they recognize it as propaganda (although the Chinese word for propaganda doesn't have the same negative connotation as in English). I haven't watched state sponsored news to get a feel for their bias, but from the amount I have seen they are certainly selectively with their content. Everything focuses and the achievements Xi JinPing has recently achieved. The idea of a media outlet reporting on something silly the president has done is absurd.
3. The surveillance infrastructure in China surpasses even the UK. The number of cameras almost looks like a gag. Once again, the nature of how opaque the government is means it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty what they use the data for, but they certainly collect a lot.
How would you respond to the critique that it makes that tax associated with a property dependent on the improvements to adjacent properties? I could see a situation where a single family home owner would deliberately oppose improvements (i.e. parks/bike lanes), because their derived utility from those improvements is less than the potential increase in taxes.
I would say that this is largely a feature not a bug :)
Let's look at what the author said about this:
> For instance, if a developer owns multiple adjacent parcels and decides to build housing or infrastructure on one of them, the value of the undeveloped parcels will rise due to their proximity to the improvements. As a result, the developer faces higher taxes on the remaining undeveloped land, making development less financially appealing in the first place.
> This creates a counterproductive dynamic: developers may hesitate to improve their land or invest in new projects because they know that any improvements will increase their tax burden on adjacent parcels.
This is exactly correct analysis, but this is good not bad! LVT is preventing hoarding land during development. Of course someone who acts according to the old system's incentives will lose in that model!
First, let's talk about why the existing model is bad though: right now, developers make a huge part of their money not directly from actually building, but from the increase in the land value that happens during construction. This means that developers need to acquire huge sections of land and then only build one house at a time. This is insanely inefficient! It literally prevents anyone else from building in parallel or at lower cost! There is zero competition!
In a world with LVT, a developer would be incentivized to acquire and start work in smaller increments, leaving the door open top more competition and for more companies to enter the space - lowering costs and increasing the speed of construction.
Under an LVT, almost all of the value of the surrounding improvements would be considered part of your land value, since even an empty lot in their vicinity would benefit from the surrounding improvements. Thus, a 100% LVT would capture 100% of the value someone might gain from the presence of those surrounding improvements. In the worst case, you personally benefit far less from those improvements than a typical renter would (e.g., bike lanes if you don't own a bike), so their presence is a net negative to you.
That's why income taxes are less than 100%. But some people advocate for a 100% LVT very seriously.
A) that's an argument against a 100% LVT, not against LVT. Some people (communists) also advocate very seriously for what is effectively a 100% income tax. That doesn't provide a good argument against income tax in general.
B) a 100% LVT would theoretically be equal to the rental value of the property each year. You as the owner would still be seeing your net worth increase. It's not like you're paying the entire value of the land as a tax each year. Such a scheme would essentially just undo all real property ownership.
I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.