Books read in March 2021

 New: 

 1. No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs by Lezlie Lowe

Reread:

1. Survivor in Death

Things They Should Invent: filter online shopping products by weight

Latest pandemic malfunction: my 18-year-old TV finally gave up the ghost.

I bought a new TV easily enough, but it's a bit too big for my existing TV stand. So I'm shopping for some kind of TV stand or table or cart or something to put it on. 

Problem: the products that catch my eye keep being heavier than I can lift. 

Under normal circumstances this isn't so much of a problem. Normally, we can have furniture delivered. Normally, it's not a huge imposition to ask someone to pop by and help me move or assemble something. 

But during a global pandemic, this isn't an option. My building's pandemic rules prohibit delivery people from coming up to apartments, instead telling them to leave the deliveries at the concierge desk and residents will bring them up. My building's pandemic rules also prohibit visitors, and public health rules are also telling me not to have contact with other households. (Sometimes public health rules let single people bubble with another household, but there are zero people in my life whose risk factors permit visiting me and aren't already bubbled with another household.) So during the pandemic, I'm limited to what I can lift myself and assemble myself.

Online shopping sites could help me with this by letting me filter products by weight, so I only see those that are light enough for me to bring up to my apartment myself and assemble myself.

The websites already have this information - it tends to be listed right under dimensions.

The websites already let you filter by various variables, such as price and size. I can already tell the website "show me all the TVs under 35 inches", so why not "show me all the TV stands under 40 pounds"?

Building on this, they really should let you filter by any characteristic that is listed on the site. Country manufactured, inseam length, number of USB ports, anything. People have all kinds of oddly specific requirements, so, especially in this pandemic era where more shopping is being done online than ever before, why not let us pinpoint exactly what we need?

The Toronto Star should print URLs next to QR codes

During the pandemic, I've been reading the epaper versions of the my newspapers rather than getting my usual home delivery, and I've noticed an annoyance: links to further information on the Toronto Star site are provided as a QR code, without a corresponding URL provided.

This is an annoyance by itself in the print version, because it only gives you the option of opening the link on a mobile device, even if you'd prefer to read on a computer.

But it's all the more annoying in the epaper version, because epaper readers are already reading on their preferred device for reading a newspaper electronically! If I'm reading on my computer like I usually do, I could, theoretically, grab my phone and scan the QR code. But what if I was already reading on my phone? Surely there are many households that don't have extra mobile devices just sitting around unused for every time you want to click a link!

If the Star would simply print URLs next to (or instead of) QR codes, everyone could access the links by the means most convenient to them, thereby maximizing the number of eyeballs on the Star's website. Using the QR code alone is inconvenient to many and impenetrable to some. There's no reason not to continue printing URLs, like they have since the advent of URLs.

The mystery of the semantically null Amazon reviews

I was recently researching a potential purchase and reading a lot of Amazon reviews to do so, because Amazon had the most reviews for the most different products.

 

And I discovered something really weird: five-star reviews that aren't actually positive reviews of the product, and very often provide no information whatsoever.

 

Examples: "I bought it as a gift from someone else." "I haven't received it yet." "I haven't tried it yet but I'm sure it's fine."

 

Why would you write a review like this when you could just . . . not?

 

 

Then the universe provided me with what might be the answer!

 

I try to avoid Amazon whenever possible because of their labour conditions, but I ended up ordering a couple of products there because I couldn't find them anywhere else. 

Each of these products had a card inserted in the packaging saying the seller would give me an Amazon gift card if I wrote a review of the product, and sent them an email with the order number and a link to the review.

One offered me a $10 gift card for a review of a $25 purchase, and the other offered me a $15 gift card for a review of a $35 purchase.

 

I can certainly see how this might incentivize people to leave a review even if they have nothing to say!

I didn't leave any reviews so I don't know if they actually send you the promised gift card. (Apparently my sense of "I don't want them to win!" is worth more than $25 to me.) I don't know if they only give the gift card for a five-star review (the cards didn't say anything to that effect) or if these semantically null reviewers think Amazon is like eBay and sellers will be penalized for reviews that are less than five stars.

But, in any case, there's something very, very wrong with the system if sellers are incentivized to turn over 40% of the purchase price in exchange for a review!

Things They Should Study: would replacing property tax with a municipal income tax meet our needs better?

The pandemic is adding to the cost of delivering Toronto's city services, while some residents and businesses find their incomes drastically reduced as a result of pandemic-related shutdowns. (And a small number of other businesses find their revenues increasing!)

So our property tax rates are being debated, and city council finds themselves in a catch-22.

It's time to very seriously and thoroughly study an alternative: replacing property tax with a municipal income tax, which would make a point of including  (but not being limited to) rental income, business income, and revenues from selling real estate.

 

The primary concern expressed about property tax is that the value of your home can go up while you're just quietly living in it, even though your income and budget are unchanged - even if your income decreases!

 

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this. If your income suddenly decreases, your tax would decrease commensurately, regardless of what's going on with local property speculation. 

 

 

At this point, some people point out that if a home has appreciated significantly, the owner is sitting on a high-value asset and should be taxed on this.

 

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this. It would totally tax property owners on the money they make from their high-value asset, it would just take the more user-friendly approach of levying that tax at the moment they actually have that money in hand.

 

People also point out that real estate can be a revenue generator, because you can rent it out.

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this by taxing landlords on their rental income. But, at the same time, landlords wouldn't be incentivized to raise rent to cover taxes, because they'd be taxed a percentage of whatever rent their charge, rather than being taxed a specific number.

These two factors converge to address the the so-called "condo tax", where commercial property owners are taxed on "highest and best use" - i.e. what their property would be worth if redeveloped - and then that tax is passed on to the business that rents the property as a rent increase. 

 

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this by taxing property owners on any money they make selling their property to developers, but would take the more user-friendly approach of taxing them at the moment they actually have the money in hand, and the taxation burden would not be passed on to small businesses because a building that's being sold for redevelopment wouldn't be occupied by tenants.

 

 

Another argument in favour of property tax is that it's intended as a wealth tax, but property ownership provides an incomplete picture of wealth. Jeff Bezos could buy the condo next to me, which is absolutely identical to mine, and would owe the City of Toronto exactly the same amount of taxes as I do. Meanwhile, I'm fully leveraged whereas he could buy the condo outright with the money he made in the time it took me to compose this paragraph.

 

Replacing property tax with income tax would address this inequity, by taxing this hypothetical Jeff Bezos on the billions that he makes, while taxing me on the tens of thousands that I make.

 

 

Speaking of rich people buying condos, another problem that exists in the Toronto real estate market is absentee owners buying up condos as investments or a place to park assets, sometimes not even living in them or renting them out! (This has often been covered in the media as a "foreign buyers" problem, but the real problem is that they aren't living in the home, not that they are from another country.) 

 

Replacing property tax with income tax might address this issue. Perhaps people rich enough to casually buy real estate that they aren't even using would be disincentivized if they had to pay income tax in a whole nother jurisdiction? (It doesn't seem like enough of a disincentive to me, but the way money people tend to talk about taxes makes me think they find taxes more of a disincentive than I do.) And if they don't find it a disincentive, it's more money for city coffers.

 

 

Q: But don't you know that municipalities aren't legally permitted to levy income tax?

 

A: Yes! That's why we need to very thoroughly study it, so that if it does turn out that income tax is more appropriate, we have a compelling case for the levels of government with the power to change those laws.

 

Q: But don't you know that rich people rarely pay taxes?

 

A: Yes! That's why we need to very thoroughly study this, so it can be executed in a way that doesn't leave any loopholes to wiggle out of.

 

Q: What about sales tax?

 

A: I have no objection to studying sales tax too, and it may even have already been studied because I do hear people talking about it from time to time. But it seems to me that income tax is more likely to address the flaws in the property tax model, while also being closer to its original intention as a wealth tax.

 

 

Property tax is the oldest surviving form of taxation, dating back thousands of years. It's quite possible that, like many things dating back thousands of years, it isn't the very best way to meet 21st-century needs. 

The pandemic only magnifies the flaws of the property tax model. As we plan our pandemic recovery, it's time to seriously study an alternative to property tax.