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Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

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Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#511

Post by acdha »

ufocia wrote: post #471
acdha wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - I think any such system should at least be restricted to urban areas (I’m not sure I’ve seen it proposed otherwise) and you’d need some careful work to have credits for functional ecosystems without having people try to scam it by claiming that the koi pond & tree on their mini golf course makes it a wildlife habit after a duck is spotted there.

I'm not sure why a tree would not be considered a functional ecosystem. Perhaps giving incentives to people growing even individual trees is the thing to do. Otherwise people without trees are just freeloading of someone else's property.

That’s why I said care. A tree as part of a larger garden in an area where insects and animals can reach it probably is good, but a palm tree in a sterile concrete swimming pool zone is unlikely to help and putting in a ton of invasive plants could actually be a problem. Ideally the incentives could be set based on support for native flora and fauna to discourage attempts to game it. If it’s linked to a tax cut, you’ll see every possible bad faith interpretation tried at least once.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#512

Post by Gormo »

kmacdough wrote: post #410
brhsagain wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with that argument? Doesn’t getting more money from the user mean that the user is choosing to pay more, which reveals their preference?

*In a healthy competitive market with a consumer-base that's well educated on potential consequences of their purchases. I do agree with the principle that a space-hogging marginally profitable business is detrimental to a community. Just that the opposite is not necessarily true; profitability does not imply beneficiality. Humans do not fit the model of "rational self-interested agent" commonly applied for economic…

> Humans do not fit the model of "rational self-interested agent" commonly applied for economic models.

They generally do -- the misalignment comes from analyzing people's behavior according to presumptive interests which have been externally attributed to them, instead of observing behavior in order to ascertain what people's interests actually are.

> Gambling and addictive substances are two hugely profitable business sectors that would not exist if it we're remotely accurate.

No, gambling and addictive substances exist because people enjoy them. Large numbers of people exhibit a manifest preference for short-term pleasure over long-term stability; expecting such people to act in ways that pursue long-term stability over short-term pleasure is itself irrational.

> I'll also preempt someone's inevitable assertion that the burden of verification should lie on the consumer. In informationally antagonistic environment, it's absurd to expect each individual to individually vet every service and product.

Unfortunately, your attempt at preemption has failed. Only the consumer has the relevant criteria necessary to determine how well a given good or service fits his own particular needs or desires. Being rational, most other people intuitively use the experiences and advice of others as Bayesian indicators of product suitability or unsuitability (even if they don't know what Bayesian indicators are), but they're still using those external resources as tools with which to make their own decisions.

> Any rational group would pool resources and have a single org do the research and share it with everyone. Oops we've reinvented a government.

No, you've reinvented Consumer Reports. Except for the "single org" part, anyway -- there's no single determination that could be applicable to all people all the time, so people will naturally develop a variety of parallel solutions that apply different criteria to the evaluation process.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#513

Post by Gormo »

gotbeans wrote: post #404
brhsagain wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with that argument? Doesn’t getting more money from the user mean that the user is choosing to pay more, which reveals their preference?

No, it does not. That the users end up paying more in no way means or should be implied that they _choose_ to pay more. If cheaper options are made less accessible or clearer, and customers are intentionally mislead to more expensive products, as a result they will pay more too.

But people will not pay more than a product is worth to them. The fact that they are willing to purchase the product at a higher price point indeed does imply that that price point is still lower than the consumption utility of the product for them.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#514

Post by Gormo »

lmm wrote: post #351
dinp wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow the idea of perpetually paying property taxes and land value taxes doesn't sound appealing to me, especially since businesses already pay taxes. I don't understand the argument of designing a system to hurt a specific business type such as low value businesses. If there's a loophole such as lack of sales tax for car washes, fix that, but let the playing field remain even. If desirable high value businesses ar…

> I don't understand the argument of designing a system to hurt a specific business type such as low value businesses. The argument is that good business spots are a limited community resource that it makes sense to tax, like radio spectrum. If you can make good use of the space you're taking up, go ahead, but you should compete fairly with other uses of the space. If anything taxing space use makes more sense than t…

> The argument is that good business spots are a limited community resource that it makes sense to tax, like radio spectrum.

I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here. How does the existence of economic scarcity imply that it makes sense to tax anything?

> If you can make good use of the space you're taking up, go ahead, but you should compete fairly with other uses of the space.

But that's already inherent in the nature of scarcity -- the more demand there is for a scarce resource, the higher the price is. So businesses making use of high-value prime real estate are already paying more for it. The law of supply and demand already does what you are proposing. How does paying additional fees to a separate institution with its own perverse incentives add anything to the equation?

> the largely automated facility wasn’t the best use for a prominent Main Street site

This was the personal opinion of a local bureaucrat who thought his personal opinion should be policy. That's why the company is suing.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#515

Post by Gormo »

mindslight wrote: post #377
onionisafruit wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land value tax is turning out to be this year’s universal basic income.

When the wish for a positive solution doesn't pan out, people turn to the spiteful negative. Turn up the pain on others, that will solve things. Never mind that many real estate tax regimes already include a component based on the land value. Presumably to LVT enthusiasts those just aren't high enough. When the right level of pain has created the perfect incentives, wasteful duplexes will vanish and high density arco…

> Never mind that many real estate tax regimes already include a component based on the land value.

It's strange, because almost all property tax systems in the US are based on ad valorem taxation.

I'm personally opposed to the concept as a matter of fundamental principle. Society can't function if people's property rights are constantly under the threat of being usurped by someone whose intended uses might generate more tax revenue for the state. People should have a right to use the property they own in the way that generates maximum value for them -- that's the point of property ownership. It's also why real-world ad valorem tax regimes usually include homestead exemptions or something similar.

Some of these LVT proposals amount to just turning the whole of society into a tax farm, and suppressing all variation and outlier use cases in the name of maximizing tax revenue. Georgism is fundamentally flawed in its precepts, and would result in a rent-seeking political state acting as a monopolist landlord.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#516

Post by eppp »

presentation wrote: post #460
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory of (LVT) land value tax is that it replaces other taxes. LVT has less or no dead weight loss so it's a more efficient tax. > If there's a loophole such as lack of sales tax for car washes, fix that, but let the playing field remain even. My claim is that the playing field is not currently even rather it is massively in favor for low-capital, low-labor, and low-regulatory businesses (like car washes) and ad…

I like Georgism but if business taxes were replaced would internet businesses that don’t need a physical location thereby pay much less taxes than those that do have need for physical location? That does sound kinda lopsided, unless we’re also doing a land value tax on prime domain name real estate.

Internet businesses have physical locations somewhere. Even if they are drop shipping than someone else is paying the land value tax for the warehouses they are shipping from. The land use exists somewhere at some level of the value chain and that somewhere would then be taxed.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#517

Post by fwip »

pjlegato wrote: post #478
fwip wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has never, ever worked in the history of humanity. I think you'll find that the majority of humanity (those who aren't libertarians) actually agree that policing the negative externalities of business should be part of government's function. Stuff like "we're destroying the ozone layer," "L.A's air is mostly smog," and "this factory keeps tearing children limb from limb" were effectively solved by government polici…

It's a long way from "this factory keeps tearing children limb from limb" to "there are too many car washes in this town." I specifically said externalities are real problems that bear addressing. The problem is that once politicians are turned loose, they never stop. They cannot stop. They can't say, "well done, problem solved, let's pack up and go home." That would mean giving up their hard-won power -- and the con…

They're different in magnitude, sure.

But even if I grant you the argument that the same system that bans child labor necessarily leads to the neoliberal brainworms of "let's create a 3% tax credit for businesses that used to be car washes," I'm still very happy we addressed the real problems. And I'd say that government intervention worked, even if some of the laws they pass are stupid or trivial.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#518

Post by Gormo »

alexb_ wrote: post #466
sethammons wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which encourages destruction of natural lands

"Land" is shorthand for all of the natural resources on this earth. That means space, but it also means clean air and anything else extracted. Pollution and extraction taxes are different forms of land taxes.

So the proposal is that people should never be able to use the land they own for their own purposes without the threat of being dispossessed because strangers are willing to pay more for it, even if they don't want to sell?

That sounds like a horrible situation, and it seems clear why real-world tax systems don't take this approach to its ultimate conclusion.

There's also something very objectionable about attempting to use taxation as a tool to manipulate behavior and engineer outcomes. Where taxation is justifiable, it is justifiable solely as a pragmatic means to fund the necessary operations of government, and never as an end in itself.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#519

Post by callalex »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #254
wholinator2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't imagine ever paying a subscription to a car wash! I barely even pay for Spotify, how often do you go? And how often would you go if you weren't paying a subscription?

I need to wash my cars at least once a week or they get filthy.

I just don’t understand this attitude. Cars live outside, of course they will have a little dirt on them! Do you wash your house every week as well?

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#520

Post by Gormo »

atrus wrote: post #168
logifail wrote: post #89

> There are four full-service car washes in town, with a fifth on the way; three are bunched up on a mile-and-a-half stretch of Route 14. Social media complaints about car wash overkill spurred town leaders to take action. Four (or even five) doesn't sound that much? What's the actual problem here? How is a local politican supposed to determine what is the correct density of any particular type of service within her…

> If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right? I find it interesting that we have sayings like this, and sayings like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." > why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? Because the market doesn't price in externalities. Sure the market will figure out which car washes live. But what abo…

> I find it interesting that we have sayings like this, and sayings like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

How can the market be irrational? People either are purchasing enough of these services to make the business viable, or they are not.

> Because the market doesn't price in externalities.

Legal liability for harmful externalities factors directly into the market for insurance and other operating expenses. Preemptive regulation is usually unnecessary, and often entails its own deleterious effects.

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