Live data from Hacker News

Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

smh.com.au

191–200 of 222 posts

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also no-one now alive who voted for women's suffrage, or the banning of the international slave trade, or the right to bear arms.

Non-aggression and property rights are the only laws that truly matter. Natural rights stem from these principals. > women's suffrage If a government doesn't have a monopoly of force, nobody needs to vote or even acknowledge the government. > banning of the international slave trade Your body is your possession. Slavery violates that and the non-aggression principle. > the right to bear arms Who grants this right? Th…

> If a government doesn't have a monopoly of force, nobody needs to vote or even acknowledge the government.

Meaning disputes with a government are settled (resisted) by ... force and violence?

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#192
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe this true. War over the past 20 years has been overwhelmingly unpopular. Have we in the US been able to stop that? What then also of the minority that lives under these laws? I never once consented to them, and yet must submit to the majority.

> What then also of the minority that lives under these laws? I never once consented to them, and yet must submit to the majority. And you receive their benefit too. You might not like paying taxes but you receive the benefit of paying taxes, that is why you are forced to pay taxes like everyone else. Some people get more benefit than others but we all get something from paying taxes. If you don't like paying taxes,…

> If you don't like paying taxes, then you are free to move to a place where there are no taxes and no benefit from them.

That is false for US citizens; the US taxes you on your worldwide income, even if you don't live or work in the US.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#193
post #117

Consider yourself lucky that you can reliably trace land ownership for centuries. Eastern Europe went through multiple upheavals in last 100 years and every time the wheel of history turned, quite a lot of land was dispossessed/repossessed by law. In Slovakia we basically ended up with two versions of land registry (called register "C" and "E") and the ongoing effort to reconcile them. Many properties are said to be…

Isn't there any law saying that "if no one claims it for N years, the state takes it" / "if someone else uses a place for N years and no one else claims it, that person can claim it?" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usucaption

Unsure about Italy, but common law has the doctrine of laches, which many US jurisdictions recognize. It effectively says, "Sure, you have a claim, but you sat on it too long so tough luck."

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#194
post #117

Consider yourself lucky that you can reliably trace land ownership for centuries. Eastern Europe went through multiple upheavals in last 100 years and every time the wheel of history turned, quite a lot of land was dispossessed/repossessed by law. In Slovakia we basically ended up with two versions of land registry (called register "C" and "E") and the ongoing effort to reconcile them. Many properties are said to be…

I found my great grandfather and great granduncle listed on what seem to be (from skimming autotranslations) missing landowner documents in the Czech Republic, dated as recently as the beginning of 2021 (web version linked below). Which was surprising to me, since they immigrated to the US around 1905, before the obvious 20th century upheavals. I guess unless property is valuable enough for someone (including the state) to invest effort in securing ownership of, it can sit with unclear ownership forever, more or less.

https://www.hlidamsikatastr.cz/Katastr/Neznami-vlastnici says unclaimed land will be forfeited to the state in 2023, I guess this must be highly specific to the Czech Republic. Still surprising to me that it'd take 100+ years!

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#195
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has a severe representation issue. Other folks have spoken well about the advantages of proportional representation vs. FPTP but if you're looking for something to blame for an effective lack of representation I'd look there first. Honestly, if the US election before this previous one didn't have primaries and was an open field race there is almost no chance the former president would have been elected - and i…

I like CGP Grey on this issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo I completely agree as far as voting methods are concerned and do think it would be a better system, but I still don't like giving a group of people rights to commit acts considered immoral when done by an individual.

I wanted to first address the question of being overridden. When you enter into any sort of relationship - dating, marriage, inhabiting a city, living in a country - you are agreeing to compromises to grease the wheels of society. Some people are always going to lose sometime - ideally those aren't always the same people and nobody loses an excessively burdensome amount but... If you live in a city of three million you probably fervently disagree with a few hundred thousand of the other residents on some issues you consider particularly important.

On the topic of actions considered immoral (or I'll start with illegal) when done by an individual - war actually only fits into this category in some countries, in a lot of areas murder in self-defense is legal and if 100 ninjas tried to murder you and it was clearly a case of self defense where all other actions were barred your actions might be legal in the US - they would probably be universally recognized as moral by everyone except the most staunch utilitarians which I assume would respond: "Dude - take the trolley in the face, duh - even if they started it it's 100 vs 1 lives lost".

That all said, war is frequently not a case of self-defense and is often abused for silly things like resource acquisition and prestige. Better representation allows us to severely punish governments that either look like they're going to go against the societal will or remove them after the fact - buuut there will be times when a country goes into unpopular wars justly due to either domestic misinformation or classification of information creating a different breadth of knowledge between law makers and the populace - with the former seeming more likely and the latter being pretty repulsive. And the freedom to act in response to aggression is one we need to keep separated from the slow response time of something like a pure democracy. This was actually the case in Athens where Strategos were free to act during their term (assuming an agreement between the then Strategoi) and were only subject to removal during regularly scheduled sessions.

I am strongly against war myself but I would be pretty happy with the US entering and occupying posts in civilian areas on both sides of the israeli/palestinian border to dissuade both parties from continuing attacks - I'm similarly okay with cypric occupation since that situation seems similarly unresolvable. War is pretty complicated but I don't think it's all that distinct from other issues a nation needs to deal with, poor representation leads to actions that go against the public will.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#196
post #117

Consider yourself lucky that you can reliably trace land ownership for centuries. Eastern Europe went through multiple upheavals in last 100 years and every time the wheel of history turned, quite a lot of land was dispossessed/repossessed by law. In Slovakia we basically ended up with two versions of land registry (called register "C" and "E") and the ongoing effort to reconcile them. Many properties are said to be…

> which means all the owners are not known - previous landowner died or emigrated and it waits for their descendants to claim it. It isn't possible to build anything on these lots

In the U.S. there is no central registrar, deeds are recorded at local level, and owners are regularly found by collecting property tax. Back tax is tracked independently of ownership so if true owner fails to pay tax within a few years there is lien or foreclosure.

I'm guessing in Slovakia they might only tax sales or income of property rather than passive enclosure? If back taxes are levied on parcel the owners should immediately make themselves known.

"The Earth belongs in usufruct to the living. The dead have neither powers nor rights over it" - Thomas Jefferson

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#197
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable. Can anyone of the downvoters say a few words? To me this seems both obvious and non-partisan. What we're doing is accruing ever more laws, creating a centuries-old legal code base without ever removing technical debt. This seems unwise.

(I wasn't a downvoter but sure) Law isn't a simple practice due to the breadth of subjects it covers - but it is very simplified by the human factor. When laws are enforced they are done so after advocacy from a pair of humans and by the judgement of a human for penalty and possibly guilt (in some cases guilt is determined by a pool of jurors). This means it's very different from programming where we have a dumb mach…

> This means it's very different from programming where we have a dumb machine that is, at it's best ability, able to look at two numbers and tell you which one is bigger.

And even that can get wonky. Do a search for "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_error_mitigatio...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_epsilon

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#198
post #117

Consider yourself lucky that you can reliably trace land ownership for centuries. Eastern Europe went through multiple upheavals in last 100 years and every time the wheel of history turned, quite a lot of land was dispossessed/repossessed by law. In Slovakia we basically ended up with two versions of land registry (called register "C" and "E") and the ongoing effort to reconcile them. Many properties are said to be…

> which means all the owners are not known - previous landowner died or emigrated and it waits for their descendants to claim it. It isn't possible to build anything on these lots In the U.S. there is no central registrar, deeds are recorded at local level, and owners are regularly found by collecting property tax. Back tax is tracked independently of ownership so if true owner fails to pay tax within a few years the…

There are large swaths of land in the US which are under ownership but unusable because the owners are absentee and the cost and complexity of locating the owner or pursuing a lein are both greater than the value of the property. In my part of the country there are places where this situation has persisted for fifty years, as the auction value of the property is only in the hundreds of dollars per acre and back property tax in the same range ($16 per year)... and these are properties under modern plats. Dairy farms expand acre by acre, sometimes hiring private investigators in an effort to locate owners of adjacent lots to make a buyout offer. This isn't really all that unusual in the rural west, it's a legacy of the post-WWII suburban real estate boom.

Even in higher property value areas I would be surprised to see a tax delinquency action taken after just a few years. The administrative cost is substantial.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#199

and this belongs here because...?

Believe it or not, HN threads are have been a great source of info on global subjects for me. Especially during the day when threads are not US centric

I currently read everything published by Rest of World. It's a new website focusing on tech scenes of countries other than the US. The quality is very high.

Highly recommend.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#200
post #23
post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

Even without going archaic, I had to take insurance when I bought a terrace, because a lease existed on the land at some point but the owning company had dissolved years prior and no lease had been paid for a long time. This is very common in a country (UK) where the State has had strong continuity for several centuries, so land rights and entitlements can be tracked very far back.

In the US there is adverse possession, so if someone openly claims the land (living, using, maintaining, etc) for many years (10-20?), they can end up owning the land.

It helps settle minor arguments between property lines where fences existed for 50 years but the true line was not on the fence line.

Post reply on HN