I’ll look into it, thanks
Sable
Karma: 1,521
Well said, and I agree with everything. Especially the LVT bit!
Thanks!
I’ll admit that this is problematic, but there are rules about what you can and can’t do with land owned by a property tax-exempt entity, I think.
In my ideal world, of course, nothing would be exempt from the land value tax, not churches or charities or universities. Land use is land use, and the tax is meant to incentivize the best possible use for it; if you can’t afford to pay it, go somewhere else and let the land be redeveloped for a use that can.
I admit that this is politically impossible and plausibly unconstitutional (taxing churches gets into the separation of church and state; I feel that a simple rule saying that no religion-owned property can be taxed at advantageous or disadvantageous rates compared to the surrounding properties satisfies this, but I understand that many other people feel differently), so I’m not trying to make it happen in real life.
In real life, if you (say) rented office space for a for-profit company out of a church to get around paying property taxes, I suspect (although don’t know for sure) that that’s tax fraud of some sort, and a crime.
When I researched this, I found that proving that molecule XYZ get a person high in a specific way in court involves getting expert witnesses to testify. The opposition then brings in their own expert witnesses, at which point a jury of ordinary people have to decide who to believe between disagreeing experts on the topic of psychopharmacology, which isn’t great.
I’m curious: Do you have a strategy in mind to fix the underlying issue?
Very true, although I’m a whole lot less qualified to weigh in there.
In my experience, resolving underlying issues psychologically takes a large amount of focused work, and most people have neither the ability nor the inclination to do it. Many don’t even want to try, even with the help of a therapist.
I agree that most people are aware that parks and wilderness are different. That being said, I think most people, when they make appeals to nature, are picturing the park, or something similar. If they’re picturing a real forest, they’re not picturing one where people get eaten by wolves very often.
I’m contending that natural has only become desirable as humans adapted nature to their desires, so appeals to nature are often not arguments in favor of, as you would put it, true wilderness.
Conservationism—wanting there to be genuine places where humanity doesn’t go—isn’t a bad thing at all, nor is having many different options along the scale of how “tamed” a “natural” environment is. To each their own. But there’s a motte and bailey used in marketing, where e.g. bottled water is advertised as “natural” water, when actual water in the wilderness can have any number of illnesses or parasites in it. “Natural” is used as an aesthetic, not a reference to actual pre-human wilderness.
As to whether or not prehistoric life was unrelentingly miserable, well, I’m not sure that’s my claim. Humans hedonically adapt, and if that life is all you’d ever known you’d probably be fine with it. My claim is that it’s absolutely horrifying from a modern perspective, so anyone being nostalgic or sold on how things were better when they were “natural” is mistaken.
Fair enough!
I simply see a lot of appeals to nature in everything from advertising to politics, and I’m making the point that the “nature” they’re appealing to is something humans have already greatly adapted for their own comfort and safety.
I tend to use “creation” personally for referring to everything that exists, as in “everything in creation”.
I’m gesturing more towards the latter points, yes. Specifically, that the rhetorical device of an appeal to nature is using nature in the aesthetic and Instagrammified sense, not the way the natural world actually is, which is another way that appeals to nature are fallacious.
I’m really happy to hear that this helped! Remember, all models are wrong, but some are useful. This model is useful for me; use it as long as it is useful to you.
This is awesome! I totally should have thought of it, thanks!
That’s awesome that you’re doing that research!
My biggest question is probably what the distribution looks like for people who get TMS for depression—how many of them are “cured” in the sense that they never need TMS again? How many need it again after a year? Two years? And so on.
I do think there’s something to that idea—physical injury and pain is a very universal and visible experience, whereas mental illness is difficult to parse for those who’ve never experienced it. I also think there’s some sense in which ‘treatment’ and ‘cure’ are treated differently for mental and physical illness.
A doctor wouldn’t just prescribe painkillers for a broken arm and call it a day because your symptoms have been dealt with; they’d want to actually fix the problem. Depression, on the other hand, doctors seem perfectly fine with merely mitigating the symptoms. Perhaps because that’s all they’re confident they can do?
I didn’t, but I’m not surprised your sister had that experience. It’s a loud, repetitive noise going off next to your ear. My clinic offered me earplugs, which I didn’t need, but perhaps your sister could have used?
That would be useful.
I suppose their calibration might be cause for concern. You’re with yourself all the time, so you’ve been witness to your own highs and lows, but others might only see your highs (for example, if you only leave your house when you’re above 50%, their scale would bottom out at 50%).
I would love to try psilocybin, but can’t because of where I work. I have tried Ketamine and am now trying TMS, which are the two FDA-approved ‘nuclear options’, and have been seeing some success with them.
That’s really interesting! I’m no expert in neurology, so thanks for the heads up!
True. I just happen to have the ‘very hard to do anything’ kind, so that’s what I describe.
Well thought out, and thank you for the reply—some of these are diabolical!
Question: we currently have property taxes, and yet I’ve never heard of anyone trying some of these—I wonder if there are reasons we’re not aware of? I suspect some of them might be considered tax fraud.
You’re right that there are a lot of considerations which go into the valuation of land, but the data and methodology to value it exists; in fact, basically everywhere in the first world does it regularly, because they all pay property taxes!