How do you collectively make political decisions about what gets built where?

It sounds like the planning system. The planning system is a big part of why house prices are so high. The suburbs are not allowed to have anything but single family zoning. Commercial areas are not allowed to be built in residential areas. Why? Because people keep making rules to protect their land values. NIMBYism is a huge constraint to the supply of housing whether present at local hearings for a specific building or when making land use plans. One problem is that landowners (which most homeowners are), are severely overrepresented in a system where plans are decided collectively. Even if all the renters in the city also showed up, these collective plans will never include potential people wanting to move to the city cause they will not be part of this. This creates a bias towards plans that don’t allow for new housing because the residents are more likely to already have their living situation covered. This hurts: people seeking to move, renters, anyone wanting to move to the city, newer generations who don’t own property.

There are a number of other problems with this:

It’s impossible to plan for the future. People’s needs, wants and desires change constantly and you can’t plan for that. Even collectively. Cause what is planned collectively now, will not be the same decision if the plan was made a year later cause wants and desires have changed.

It also inhibits the optimal functioning of development. A plan may have height restrictions to prevent views from being interrupted or from shadows being cast, but this plan assumes that the value of these views and sunlight will in perpetuity be worth more than the supply of housing being prevented. Let’s say a plan includes the appearance of buildings in building codes. This missed all the individual creativity present in local communities. The people who know best what their community needs are the individuals living there. A lot of creativity is lost when one plan takes over the plans of many individuals. The historic centers that we love so much everywhere that we make them indestructible legally are all designed by individuals with unique ideas in ways that couldn’t be planned.

It also goes against the rule of law. Laws should be predictable, simple, and general. Planning laws are neither of those. Their lacking predictability increases the risk of every building project. Their lacking simplicity increases the legal costs for any developer making it hard for smaller players to compete with the big ones. Their lack of generality makes it possible for officials to give preferential treatment to certain owners. Do you know how much a plot of land increases in value if a planner decides that it’s suddenly allowed to have more stories built there? Let’s say these plans are created with a 51% majority vote. What about the 49%? None of this would have been necessary if people had more freedom.

This is not advocating for neoliberal society. You can make the rules more general. You can say buildings are not allowed to be 50% taller than its neighbors. Simple, general, predictable. You can say industrial areas are not allowed less than 400 meters from residential areas. Etc. You can have local land trusts.

Cities are so complex, that it cannot be planned top down. And bottom up approaches that attempt to democratize top down planning, is still top down. It’s authoritative and prone to corruption. Jane Jacobs argued that what makes the city are the millions of interactions and actions of its citizens, not a planning board.

Of course you need coordination. You can plan infrastructure, and the rules that filter out what are undesirable outcomes, but don’t plan the life.

A land value tax is exactly that. If someone wants to buy the rights to a plot and build something or if someone wants to buy the rights to live in a house, that price will already include the land no matter if it’s technically publicly owned or privately owned. Henry George agreed with you, he said that land should be public property, and that the best way to do that is to tax it according to its value.

Thanks for sharing, the link doesn’t load though.

I see that, and I have signal, I just know I won’t make my friends move there unless there’s a big shock that moves everyone. I’m also not convinced signal is future proof in terms of privacy (open to your argument against, it’s just a hunch)

Let me explain the power of the stickers. We have made and shared stickers with each other for many years. These stickers are ourselves, edited memes, pictures we have created from videos. They are extremely contextual and can’t be replaced with packs. I don’t think we should underestimate the power of this. It sounds ridiculous but it’s like forcing a friend group to stop with half their inside jokes that have built up over years.

WhatsApp doesn’t own the concept of stickers. It was invented by a Japanese messaging app. I think its possible we can push for a requirement for messaging apps to sync stickers across platforms.

Most countries used to tax land. The taxing of wages and capital is a fairly new concept. And many countries have currently adopted land value taxes in a smaller scale. Pennsylvania has experience with it. Denmark adopted it because of Henry George. Many countries have public land leasing like China and Singapore and the Netherlands.

I think people don’t really realize that land makes up more than 50% of wealth. Unlike wealth taxes, it doesn’t produce inefficiency. However, you’re right that monopoly power in business is also a problem to solve. We need the return of antitrust, public ownership of natural monopolies, standards where needed, unions, and public R&D funding with public patents. But there is nothing that can effectively stop landlords from taking all the gains made by increasing wages and causing a divergence between renters and owners that will only get worse as long as demand in cities increases. Unless you tax land. Much of the stock market is also attached to land appreciation in the assets of stock traded companies.

I don’t know, I’m in Europe, and my country introduced it because of Henry George. And it’s gaining traction in economics and urban planning.

I get the problematic dualism in that statement. But what I mean is that his idea of a land value tax is both efficiency improving and equality improving.

Ah gotcha

I share your frustration, it’s yet another trick such that WhatsApp doesn’t have to compete.

Everywhere I’ve searched the solution is to transfer only one at a time.

Stickers are quite big in some countries. They are slightly bigger emojis that use gifs or pics that people themselves can make. Some of my group chats are filled with memes with my friends faces on them. We communicate a lot through these. Make up our own moods and ways to express ourselves. When a new sticker is used in another group chat we sometimes find it so hilarious that we share it in another. WhatsApp makes it very difficult to transfer stickers away. You have to do it one by one.

Guys, y’all should read up on Henry George. It’s so logical that it is accepted by both sides in politics.

What do you mean by “Il’s”

All the stickers you have in WhatsApp. For almost all my friends it’s one of the main thing that keeps them from switching. I also just noticed it doesn’t have live location.

I can imagine live location and stickers. Like all the stickers from WhatsApp can’t be transferred.

Yeah I didn’t care as much about degoogling 3 years ago when I got it. And I hadn’t opened my eyes to what lengths these companies do to limit your freedoms for their gain. I will definitely look into the pebble when it comes out.

Syncing to your phone and analytics. But Fitbit doesn’t give you the option to get those analytics through third party apps.

I bought vivoactive and sent it back because its app couldn’t do what I wanted.

I just hate how you’re locked into their app regardless. I want more control of what metrics and reminders I want to get. Fitbit can give you a reminder if you havent done your 250 steps this hour. Garmin can remind you to make steps every now and then. What if I want custom reminders like “vibrate if heart rate has been below x for y minutes” or choose graphs that I can put as widgets. No control over any of it.