All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.
In particular: sometimes they measure “churn”, which doesn’t show whether the results are better or worse on average. They sometimes only test with one random seed. There are multiple-comparison issues. And they’re not testing Anthropic’s algorithm.
Changing a random seed could either improve or degrade the output. In theory, better and worse outputs should be equally probable, depending on your luck.
They tested this in the research: They found that the statistical likelihood of bad tool calling was higher with watermarking compared to random seeds. At least, that was my takeaway (I read the whole thing).
This is because SynthID and similar watermarking methods for LLMs don't just change the random seed. They take additional steps (that I have yet to read about) in order to detect when someone changes a few words of the output, trying to remove the watermark.
The other takeaway is that just by knowing a watermark is being applied gives an attacker an advantage in working around safety features because then they know the output isn't based on true randomness and can take advantage of that in a similar fashion to how breaking cryptography becomes easier when the RNG isn't truly random.
I'm hoping that by "gets it," he meant that if you start a discussion about the design, it doesn't misunderstand and immediately go off to do the work. Some models tend to do this.
It's striking how much preparedness the SF bay area does. After the 1989 earthquake, all of the following were done:
- All freeway pylon supports were beefed up. They were already on the heavy side, but huge metal supports were built around them. You can still see those.
- The SF bay bridge eastern span was entirely replaced with a new bridge.
- The western span, the suspension bridges, was made more flexible. The roadway was jacked up and stainless steel slide plates were inserted to allow the roadway to slide relative to the towers if necessary.
- The Golden Gate Bridge had been strengthened a few decades previous, after the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster.
- Most, but not all, unreinforced masonry buildings in SF have been strengthened or demolished.
- The backup water system (three hilltop tanks and an entirely separate plumbing system) for fire protection has been beefed up. In 1989, there were some water main breaks and nobody up at the tank to close the valves, and the Twin Peaks reservoir drained out.
- Three new fire boats. (There were zero in 1989, and that was a problem.)
I think the idea is that if the market demand is such that it allows them to raise rents, they'd already have done it, whether or not expenses justify it.
Did tariffs raise prices? Or did prices stay the same because "if the market demand is such that it allows them to raise [prices], they'd already have done it"?
It won't grind to a halt. The owner will sell, because they can't make the business work.
At what price will they sell? At whatever price a buyer who thinks will make it work. And by "work" there are many definitions, from continuing operation at current rents, to building more units on the land so that it generates enough income to pay the tax.
Land value taxes shift tax burden away from productive use of land and on to unproductive uses of land. The people who pay more are land speculators and those with empty lots, and the people who pay less are those productively using the land, which is 99% of homeowners and businesses.
So what happens then? High enough property taxes could in theory result in a situation like Detroit where the land value drops so low that properties are abandoned, with no buyers. But that seems unlikely in California?
At less of an extreme, there are still buyers, but they offer less money so they can still make a profit. So, the property tax basically comes out of land values. The current owners lose money on the property. It's the opposite of the windfall profits that California property owners have gotten from rising land values, taken out of whoever owns the land now.
For the next owner, their mortgage expense is lower, their property tax is higher, and maybe rents and profit margins stay about the same.
Notice that if the demand is there, falling land values doesn't result in lower rents. If your complaint is that the rent is too damn high, higher property taxes won't fix it. Only more housing does that.
I'm a bit skeptical that it would really work out that way. In California, we can have the odd situation where the current owner pays low property taxes, the new owner will pay higher property taxes, and yet property prices get bid up, and whoever buys it has to pay both more property tax and a higher mortgage. But they can still afford it, because there are a lot of rich people out there.
If the assessed land value is actually correct, then someone can make that land work profitably, by definition. That might mean bulldozing a single-family home and building a 4-unit building, for example, but it's doable.
If the assessed land value is incorrect, then that would need to be fixed.
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