The value of the land is a function of the amount of money one could make off the land, which is a function of the overall economy. A coffee shop next to lots of office buildings can sell lots of overpriced coffee which affects the value of the land it occupies. If the economy gets bad the coffee shop will likely not make as much money, so the taxes off the land will be less as well.
If you give away the land to someone else, but still own the building on it, the person you gave the land to would have to pay land value tax and they would pass that onto you in rent.
>I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.
Sam is Frodo's servant. Anarchic societies don't have masters and servants. Then the natural question you should ask is why? Frodo is not a noble and Sam is not a slave, so the only reasonable explanation for why Sam is the servant is because Frodo's family is wealthy and Sam is in their employ.
The court telling an artist they're not allowed to sell their videos to the highest bidder seems like a greater infringement on their freedom. What if no one wants to pay for this person's videos except for an AI company? You're basically telling them they're not allowed to profit off of their work.
>The Viet Cong were able to pay those poor men too, but the vast majority of them chose to fight for and to be paid by the south.
If this is true why couldn't the South beat the North, or at least defend itself on its own? After the US left the South Vietnamese folded pretty quickly.
I feel exactly the same way. The Dispossessed was both one of the best and one of the most boring books I've ever read. There are a lot of things I appreciate about it and I'm glad I read it, but damn was it a slog to get through.
I would say the first few chapters (or rather the first few chronological chapters dealing with his childhood) were a uphill climb. But after that its quite fascinating, and I felt the story was pulling me along forward.
I can't understand this perspective! Even now, just flipping through random pages looking for a quote, I keep getting sucked back in!
> He thanked her, with the simplicity of one who does not look behind the offer for the offer's motive. She studied him for a moment, her eyes shrewd, direct, and quiet. "I heard your speech," she said.
> He looked at her as from a distance. "Speech?"
> "When you spoke at the great demonstration in Capitol Square. A week ago today. We always listen to the clandestine radio, the Socialist Workers' and the Libertarians' broadcasts. Of course, they were reporting the demonstration. I heard you speak. I was very moved. Then there was a noise, a strange noise, and one could hear the crowd beginning to shout. They did not explain. There was screaming. Then it died off the air suddenly. It was terrible, terrible to listen to. And you were there. How did you escape from that? How did you get out of the city? Old Town is still cordoned off; there are three regiments of the army in Nio; they round up strikers and suspects by the dozen and hundred every day. How did you get here?"
> He smiled faintly. "In a taxi."
----
> "I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it."
> "Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?"
> "With the annihilation of space."
---
How can you not want to read more!? I remember this, such a moving scene, from reading it many years ago. The entire story is rife with tension, in my view. How will the destinies of all these many billions of people unfold from the actions taken in these few moments by these few people?
The most interesting part of the book is how at the start you think "this is going to be a book about how Capitalism sucks and is bad for people", but it turns out that the Communists also sucked although their suck was spread out more evenly among the people.
> And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people —TDJP
Why did you "help" (in other words make a post/comment) that person on Reddit? Because you enjoy it, you enjoyed reading posts and comments by strangers, replying to them, and seeing your comments accumulate upvotes and other comments. Reddit gave you that experience for free.
Reddit also occupies the space that otherwise might permit a more useful, benevolent internet platform. From a certain perspective, Reddit is standing in the way of an internet that better facilitates the enjoyment you describe.
You could say that about nearly any good thing in life. Your current job/relationship may be holding you back from an even better one. Those leftovers you grabbed out of the fridge are occupying the space that could be taken by an even better meal. Every minute you spend watching a TV show you've already seen or a videogame you've already played is taking away time from your finite lifespan you could be spending on new, novel experiences.
If there's a better platform for giving you what you want, I'm sure you'd leave Reddit and never look back. If this platform you're imaging doesn't exist, how do you know it even could ever exist?
I've yet to read a clear explanation of how "surveillance capitalism" is any different than regular capitalism with computers. As long as people are trying to make money they're going to try and crunch data to do it better. The only way I see to effect a real change in how companies collect and use data is with regulation.
>I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population.
When you say professional taxi drivers, do you mean people who drive for Uber/Lyft? Because that's who these companies are looking to replace.
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