There is a tax loophole where you buy a lot of land and donate 90% of it to the government to be "public parkland". However, in actuality, you're the only person who has convenient access to this land and nobody else can build there, so you get nearly all the benefits of this land while claiming a big tax deduction.
It doesn't sound like what is happening here, but I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
What you're describing sounds like what we call "in current use" in New Hampshire. I know Maine has something similar but I can't remember what they call it.
You don't pay taxes on land in current use, but, if you or whomever you sold the land to, wants to build on it, they have to pay the back taxes first. It's a great for conservation.
You can get a hefty tax break on forest land in WA state as long as you have a forestry plan in place, and the same goes for fields in Florida for cattle grazing.
The law addressed this centuries ago. The general rule is that you can enforce such rules for a generation plus twenty years. That may seem like a long time, but the rule prevents the "cold hand from the grave" dictating how living people should act.
It can be done. A basic strategy would be to donate the land,but retain "air rights", retain an easment controlling all biuldings over a few feet tall. This is regularly done to protect views when selling land downhill of a house. Farms and parks would be OK, but not construction of a datacenter.
But governments have eminant domain powers. They can always force a purchase if they really want to.
>There is a tax loophole where you buy a lot of land and donate 90% of it to the government to be "public parkland". However, in actuality, you're the only person who has convenient access to this land
While I'm sure that's happened once or twice and serves as great fodder to get people of a certain ideological bent riled up, for the most part nobody is giving government land that's worth a shit. They're doing it to land that's effectively unusable due to regulation. Like if you own a strip that's a many acre 30ft wide along a steep river bank plus some space for a house (the lot layout could be the result of an old railroad or industrial thing) you gain literally nothing being on the hook for all that and you can't use it. That sort of thing is the typical case in which these sorts of things are invoked. It's more of a "well if you jerks care so much about what I do with it you can have it" type deal than a tax dodge.
There is a huge Bay Area... not sure what to call it - public/private charity? - called the Peninsula Open Space Land Trust, that has a huge amount of donated land in the Silicon Valley, and is a very popular charity with very deep pockets that can buy land to basically turn into parkland.
They have over $300 million in assets and own over 97,000 acres, and have partnerships with quasi-governmental agencys like the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District to administer those lands as parkland.
The idea that noone is doing this is bullshit, and the idea that it is only done as a tax break is also bullshit.
This organization is a leading reason why living in the Bay Area is valuable and isn't complete urban sprawl. I wouldn't be willing to pay Bay Area prices if not for the existance of the land preserved through organizations like this.
seems like this behavior would have a chilling effect on deathbed donations, especially when it sends the message gives: "screw you, we'll do what we want"
I also don't see how this behavior is in the public good, even if the donor has some ulterior motive, governments are free to reject donations
If you take one step further back, you can make the discussion about what deed restrictions are reasonable rather than about breaking the deed restriction.
Like for an example with different dynamics, Menard's will say you can't use the building as a hardware store when they sell to build elsewhere. That's a stupid restriction for society to allow.
This sounds like the better approach. Create a trust that runs a private park open to the public. This prevents the city from owning the land. The trust can also work out a deal with the city for tax benefits for running the park. The trust can also be set up so that a family member is always given an overriding voice while allowing the city to submit plans for proposed use, upgrades, permitting, etc.
Basically you need to pay a lawyer to set up a trust which requires trustees if you care or donate to an institution with their own lawyers who you trust with a presumably long institutional timeline.
Trusts have always seemed to me to be pretty vulnerable. You have to trust the entire line of future trustees to actually implement what's written down in the agreement. Say I donate my property to a trust set up to keep that property a public park for 1000 years. I choose someone I trust to implement it when I'm dead. But, then that person has to choose someone they trust, and so on, and at some point in the future, inevitably it's going to fall into the hands of someone who would rather sell the land and spend the proceeds on hookers and blow.
It'd be nice to have a non-profit that honors these. Made of collective like-minded individuals. Protected by case law. You know, like a government is supposed to be.... But I suppose a big non-profit would work. Make one.
Everything is ultimately vulnerable, especially once you're gone. No institution lasts forever. Some are probably more likely to endure than others but there are no guarantees.
Having natural spaces within communities is vital for mental health. For example, Central Park in NYC is a vital resource for the city allowing people to enjoy nature close to home. Kids need places to go and play. Adults need space to recreate. Pets need space too. Why would you want to have no green spaces within your community?
Central park is way more wild than a playground, which is way more wild than a city street corner.
The Yosemite National Park front country is way more wild than Central Park.
The federally-protected wilderness areas, where it is illegal to use a chainsaw for trail management as that is not sufficiently wild, in the Sierra Nevadas are even more wild, but still have a ton of people, trails etc.
The Brooks Range in Alaska is yet even more wild - no/few trails, take a bush plane in/out, etc.
Allowing a bit more wilderness is always a utility - it doesn't have to be binary wild/not wild (and very little land habitable by humans has ever not been severely influenced by humans)
It's farm land. Sounds pretty wild to me. Also, we have wild land set up as parks as in national/state parks. A park doesn't have to mean slides/swings and a bunch of ankle biters running around.
Because people want/need accessible parks? Texas in particular has relatively very little parkland compared to its size, and its population-to-park ratio is getting increasingly out of whack
It just depends on the size. I know of several 1000+ acre parks that would be essentially considered wild areas with the exception of a few hiking paths.
They are full of wildlife ranging from small rodents to bears.
> I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
On land you contractually purchased with the condition that development be blocked indefinitely? Then why sign the contract? If they wanted a time limit, they could have put it in the contract, or not signed the contract.
Such contracts should simply not be legal. Past owners should in generally speaking terms not be able to limit development and land use decisions of future owners. It’s no longer your land. You sold it. Want to privately limit rights via contract? Consider not selling.
If it gets zoned as parkland as part of a sale - great! You should be able to make that part of a sale contract. But if the governing body then votes to make it something else a decade later, that should simply be part of how things work.
Old people ossifying things to how they prefer via preventing future generations to freely operate is not how I want a society to run. If anything the older you get the less say in the future you should have.
Yes, and they need to be flexible via public policy. If two generations from now some 10acre plot of land made into wildland is now surrounded by skyscrapers it probably makes a whole lot of sense for there to be a means for the local population to vote to remove that protection and turn it into affordable housing or whatnot.
It gets nuanced - but in general speaking terms this sort of thing should never be forever set in stone because someone alive 100 years ago decided as such via a private contract. Many other ways to go about setting aside areas for conservation.
Even conservation trusts make more sense to me. It’s still private, but they have an incentive to stay receptive to public comment and be a bit flexible. They might swap that 10 acres for another 100 acres somewhere else that creates a 1200 acre contiguous wilderness or what have you in order to stay relevant to contemporary needs while still staying true to the 250 year old mission.
I simply do not think you should be able to dictate (via private means) what happens to a property after you sell it. That’s for the next person who owns it to decide - in accordance with current local zoning and land use guidelines.
You're right if the land is sold at market price. If it's sold at a discount because of the restrictions, then continuing to enforce those restrictions is valid. The land's value is permanently reduced due to the inability to build, and the price reflects that.
The price only reflects the future value out so far. The market price is based on a small number of decades. So for the purpose of respecting the discount, that reason dries up after a while.
How is this about old people ossifying things? The land owner chose to effectively give it to the city for free with a clear contract stipulating the use. The city took it knowing good and well what was in the contract.
I see plenty of people here angry when the idea is floated of the US government opening up public land for mining, drilling, etc. You may not be one of them obviously, but how is this different?
I'm sure that they have a fatter margin on the the iPhone, but the iPhone does cost quite a bit more to manufacture. Cellular itself is probably $50 or so. The iPad has more material, so you may perceive you're getting more "device per the money" but the cost of those materials is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing the additional components.
This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.
> This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.
Actually from what I understood, making a small display with modern specs like Apple did on the iPhone mini was MORE expensive because all of modern high-end smartphone display manufacturing is designed for larger, 6+ inch screens.
The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land, so they can choose what they want to do with money from selling that oil including distributing it or purchasing assets. Sanders seem to be proposing to arbitrarily seize half of the companies.
The oil companies are exploiting a public asset, so it's obvious the public would benefit. Who are the AI companies paying for the training data they're using?
In the case of Alaska, the oil is literally on land owned by the State of Alaska (as in, the titleholder of the land is the state itself), and the rights to oil extraction is leased by the state to oil companies.
By contrast, data centers are generally going to be on land owned by the operator, and corporate offices are either owned by the company or leased to the company by some commercial real estate operator you've probably never heard of. In neither sense are they on land owned by any local, state, or federal government.
> It is privately owned only insofar as the state wills it.
you mean as the people/voters wills it. Private ownership of land is pretty sacred law in the US, I don't see those laws being changed any time soon. Even logical things like the concept of eminent domain is very controversial.
Holy shit a realpolitiker. There is a God called "state" that WILLS the laws. Only by the power of prayer can one communicate with the sovereign, who whimsically discards centuries long legal traditions because a midwit read Schmitt or something.
That was then but this is now and now American 'progressives' have caught up and in some cases out-'progressed' their European counterparts. There isn't anything 'moderate' about current American 'progressives'.
> like just setting up proper parental controls on a device
This is literally what is being written into California law. The OS will have an "age flag" that is configured at device setup that passed to other apps. The law explicitly was written such that it wouldn't need identity verification, but that isn't stopping scaremongers claiming it as such.
People had no problem starting clinics in the past and they probably could today if they really wanted to, but there is little incentive to for the past few decades while the stock market has been booming. Why spend 80 hours a week struggling to run your own clinic and paying off loans when you can work 40 hours a week working for somebody else's clinic and invest your savings in the stock market?
Not sure why the left cares so much about CEO to work pay ratio these days, especially when Marx himself recognized that ownership was the true source inequality. A CEO is just a really well paid worker. Even CEOs who become billionaires do so from capital appreciation more than compensation.
A CEO is a worker incentivized to maximize profits to maximize compensation. And nowadays they see other workers not as a profit center, but as a blockage to their next big payout.
So yes, it is a problem when leadership doesn't have long term aspirations for the large company.
A CEO is not "just a really well paid worker", don't be ridiculous. If you have the power of hiring and firing, or have enough money to not have to work for your subsistence, you are not a worker in any leftist sense.
Sure, but ownership being the root of inequality was the one thing that he was actually correct about. CEO to worker pay ratio is something that is completely irrelevant. Companies spend orders of magnitude more money on its shareholders (dividends, buybacks, and reinvestment) than executive compensation.
Maybe others see it differently than I do, but the actual spending isn't so much the issue. It's the fact that these people with so much money exist at all. That much money translates to a tremendous amount of power which allows them to bend the law to their will.
Is there any large-scale economic or political system which does not contain a group of elites possessing "a tremendous amount of power which allows them to bend the law to their will"? Not a theoretical one, but one existing in real life.
Global societies were still mostly agrarian in his time. His analysis doesn't work well for the modern era with <5% engaged in farming. Central planning won't work. You need distributed decision making to be flexible for changing circumstances. You need capital for industrialization and you need a cadre of people who can take risks to invest surplus capital into new ventures. The large disparity in wealth is a problem, but some is necessary.
They'd probably make this a feature for paying customers. I don't think the economics of scalping this at scale would make sense you're spending money for months and risk Spotify banning you if you get caught.
Maybe only a handful of people morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. It's unlikely that Saudi Arabia actually cares if Meta gets themselves kicked out of the nation, but it's easy to blame Meta because money in their pocket is money that isn't in mine. Meanwhile, oil money is ultimately what enables Saudi Arabia to get away with human rights abuses, but don't you dare do anything that makes me pay more at the pump.
"Flash-Lite" is a different product from "Flash", which is more expensive. They couldn't be more confusing with their naming though, especially since they have 3.1 Pro and not 3.1 Flash non-lite.
It doesn't sound like what is happening here, but I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
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