So it is. Other than that, the remaining details I needed were:

2740 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley
94705
habryka@lightconeinfrastructure.com
Oliver Habryka

Assuming all went well, I just donated £5,000 through the Anglo-American charity, which should become about (£5000 * 1.25 * 96% = £6000 ≈ $7300) to lightcone.

I had further questions to their how to give page, so:

• You can return the forms by email, no need to post them. (I filled them in with Firefox's native "draw/write on this pdf" feature, handwriting my signature with a mouse.)
• If donating by bank transfer, you send the money to "anglo-american charity limited", not "anglo-american charitable foundation".
• For lightcone's contact details I asked on LW intercom. Feels rude to put someone's phone number here, so if you're doing the same as me, I'm not gonna save you that step.

not sure if that would be legit for gift aid purposes

Based on https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-detailed-guidance-notes/chapter-3-gift-aid#chapter-344-digital-giving-and-social-giving-accounts, doing this the naive way (one person collects money and gives it to the charity, everyone shares the tax rebate) is explicitly forbidden. Which makes sense, or everyone with a high income friend would have access to the 40% savings.

Not clear to me whether it would be allowed if the charity is in on it and everyone fills in their own gift aid declaration. But that's extra steps for all parties.

Thanks - I think GWWC would be fewer steps for me, but if that's not looking likely then one of these is plausible.

(I wonder if it would be worth a few of us pooling money to get both "lower fees" and "less need to deal with orgs who don't just let you click some buttons to say where you want the money to go", but not sure if that would be legit for gift aid purposes.)

That's not really "concrete" feedback though, right? In the outcome game/consensus game dynamic Stephen's talking about, it seems hard to play an outcome game with that kind of feedback.

Beyond being an unfair and uninformed dismissal

Why do you think it's uninformed? John specifically says that he's taking "this work is trash" as background and not trying to convince anyone who disagrees. It seems like because he doesn't try, you assume he doesn't have an argument?

it risks unnecessarily antagonizing people

I kinda think it was necessary. (In that, the thing ~needed to be written and "you should have written this with a lot less antagonism" is not a reasonable ask.)

For instance, if a developer owns multiple adjacent parcels and decides to build housing or infrastructure on one of them, the value of the undeveloped parcels will rise due to their proximity to the improvements.

An implementation detail of LVT would be, how do we decide what counts as one parcel and what counts as two? Depending how we answer that, I could easily imagine LVT causing bad incentives. (Which isn't a knock-down, it doesn't feel worse than the kind of practical difficulty any tax has.)

I wonder if it might not be better to just get rid of the idea of "improvements to your own land don't get taxed". Then we figure out the value of land in fairly broad strokes ("in this borough, it's worth £x per square meter") and just tax based on how much land you own in each price region.

Disadvantage is that improvements to your own land get taxed. I guess most of the time the tax is fairly low, because that tax is distributed over all the land in the price region.

Advantage is less implementation complexity. No need to figure out "how much is this specific land worth without improvements". (Suppose there's a popular theme park here. Nearby land probably gets more valuable. When you want to assess the value of the land under the theme park, as if there was no theme park there, how do you do that?)

Asking the question for "land in this general area" seems, still hard, but easier. (Lars Doucet was on the Complex Systems podcast recently, and said one way is to look at sales that were shortly followed by demolition. "This person paid $1m for the land and then an extra $500k to demolish what was there, so the land itself was probably worth $1.5m.")

I've read/listened about LVT many times and I don't remember "auctions are a key aspect of this" ever coming up. E.g. the four posts by Lars Doucet on ACX only mention the word twice, in one paragraph that doesn't make that claim:

Land Price or Land Value is how much it costs to buy a piece of land. Full Market Value, however, is specifically the land price under "fair" and open market conditions. What are "unfair" conditions? I mean, your dad could sell you a valuable property for $1 as an obvious gift, but if he put it on the open market, it would go for much more than that. Likewise, it's not uncommon for a property that's been foreclosed on and hastily auctioned off to be re-listed publicly by the auction winner for a higher price.

Oh, I think that also means that section is slightly wrong. You want to take insurance if

and the insurance company wants to offer it if

So define

as you did above. Appendix B suggests that you'd take insurance if $V\left(W_{you}\right)>0$ and they'd offer it if $V\left(W_{them}\right)<0$. But in fact they'd offer it if $V(W_{them}+P)<0$.