Pierson Palmer

🚈🏗️🔰
Advocating for fairer taxation at Common Ground Aotearoa

[Jack Meyer 🏛️ @Jackbmeyer]

I bet it feels great to be a lawyer who knows a little economics, instead of an economist who knows a little law

[HNL Transit @HNLTransitFan]

Kia Ora, Aoteroa!

Polynesia now has two proper mass transit systems: Skyline and City Rail Link!

CRL has been YEARS in the making (longer than Skyline!) and trends with the difficulties (cost+time) of building mass transit on isolated islands.

This looks fantastic! 🤩❤️

[YIMBY Law @Yimby_Law]

Soft launch of a new strategy today at YIMBY Law:
we're going after the constitutionality of zoning directly.

Today San Jose is considering a significant upzoning of some of their low density single family areas. Local YIMBYs organized to support it, we look forward it passing

[Common Wealth 🍁 @CommonWealth_ca]

The case for Land Value Tax is simple: replace anti-productive taxes on income and effort with a smarter system. Stop taxing what we want more of (work and building) and start taxing what we can't make more of (land).

[Pierson Palmer @PalmerPierson]

Wellington Airport could learn something from Auckland.

[henry cooke @henrycooke]

Carlos Cheung uses Monopoly to explain his opposition to taxes.

Funnily enough, Monopoly was created to promote a land tax and attack the concept of land speculation.

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

1) This is the right call. 2) Anthropic should do and announce the same thing, ideally today, since a main motive to *not* do this is the fear of falling behind the competition.

[Pierson Palmer @PalmerPierson]

It’s pretty obvious what Labour should offer in negotiations with Opportunity. Mandating that existing property taxes in our major cities be levied on the value of land. No new tax, and the growth incentive Opportunity wants.

[Jonathan Birch @birchlse]

I can't get a straight answer out of Claude these days.

[Pierson Palmer @PalmerPierson]

The gondola in QT - if it’s a normal gondola - will be cool and useful. But it’s peak capacity will quickly become insufficient, conflicting with my dream of a metropolis nestled in the southern alps. Invest the money in the bus network and implement congestion pricing.

[M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray]

Thanks to SB 684-1123, Los Angeles' many thousands of vacant lots could soon be the site of a starter home building boom.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

Good morning.

We should take seriously the risk that the “arms race” on AI models will get everyone killed.

https://t.co/m3zDhlrt1F

[Jim @JimHistHub]

Ladies and gents, the Great Filter

[Christopher Bishop @cjsbishop]

After a request by @andrewlittle_nz and @ponekeben I've released an investigation report and launched consultation on heritage planning rules affecting 5 key Wellington sites.

[Pierson Palmer @PalmerPierson]

If you cannot make it but would like to hear specifics about how Land Value Rates would work in Auckland, the CGA team will be getting beers in the CBD that evening.

[Pierson Palmer @PalmerPierson]

I will be in Tāmaki Makaurau on the 22nd of August to discuss the benefits of rating on land value. LVR would incentivise well-placed density and efficient use of infrastructure, while lowering the tax on development.

2 PM at the Howick Club w/ Cr Bo Burns

[Noam Brown @polynoamial]

An internal version of Astra, @OpenAI’s next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science.

We believe it will be a major step for scientific reasoning. https://t.co/iP6cyheZ7i

[Alex Bores @AlexBores]

Anthropic's models hacked 3 companies.

There's many differences to last week's OpenAI admission, but in both an AI model committed a crime.

We're lucky no one was hurt. Imagine if the models targeted a hospital?

We need to decide who is liable when code commits a crime.

[Pierson Palmer @PalmerPierson]

I can see how this would be shocking if you view rates as merely a service charge. But the property wealth she idly sits on is only possible because of the roads, pipes, parks, and other buildings that surround it. She should contribute something for the value being created.

[METR @METR_Evals]

We have reached an agreement with OpenAI to conduct an independent review, with Redwood Research, of the model behavior observed during the Hugging Face incident. We will publish a blog post that describes the terms of our engagement, the scope covered, and tentative conclusions.