Ivan Kirigin

"what, does Arc auto-remove vowels?" - Ivan Kirigin

"Those that receive that currency as pay will find it valuable, as will those who want to provide services to them." - Ivan Kirigin

"I came up with a scheme that is un-dodgeable (kinda). Print money to pay expenditures, and limit expenditures to keep inflation in check. The tax is implicit, so you can't avoid it. Those holding the currency can't help but give a percentage of the value to the government. It's perfectly flat too. The only way to get around it is to operate in another currency. But if there are any expenditures at all, they are going to pay someone in the currency, and need to be spent somewhere. This would work best with minimal government expenditures to minimize the motivation to avoid using the currency. It would be pretty easy to make the implicit tax small enough to not only discourage avoiding the currency, but actually make the currency more stable than others tied to governments that don't know how to control spending." - Ivan Kirigin

"Ohh, another idea: if there is a single dial to adjust, correcting for distortion is easier. If the effects of the distortion are more costly on society than diminishing government expenditures, then the government should shrink and collect less tax." - Ivan Kirigin

"If the concern in the distortion is that people don't pay taxes, my comment is valid. If the concern is for the people themselves, I'm not sure what the problem is with low population density. It doesn't even need some government program to correct if we decide it is bad for society. People already have social and economic incentives to live near eachother. Also, I'm surprised you would suggest that law makers give a shit about the distortion taxes cause, and hope to minimize it. A politician's actions can pretty much always be directly tied to motovations to increasing influence and getting elected. Altruistic politicians that actually care about society don't exist." - Ivan Kirigin

"I think you have it exactly backwards. The more points of attack, the larger the vulnerability. There are laws passed for specific corporations to reduce tax liability. What's wrong with low density? There is a real economic value to variety and a minimum density to support certain kinds of commerce. You can't take this to a limit assuming there is no cost (if only opportunity cost) to moving to a less dense area. Also, at least in the easy coast, the least dense areas are typically already state or national parks. Wyoming is the exact opposite. 5 digit license plates are common there." - Ivan Kirigin

"The real value in Hacker News for Paul and YC is to get people interested in startups and aware of YC funding. Keeping it tied to the ycombinator.com domain is a big part of that." - Ivan Kirigin

"Taxing land (and not the buildings on top of it) would incentivize people to improve the buildings to add value. Currently, other taxes such as capital gains disincentivizes improvements to the property. The biggest benefit to such a simple tax system is the simplicity itself. It isn't just that a complex tax code makes for dead weight loss in paying taxes and the loopholes to evade them. The process of creating loopholes is extremely corrupting. If you want a heathly democracy, keep things simple to disincentivize corruption. The US is not a healthy democracy, largely due to the incredible size of government and extreme corruption of our tax code. Other problems such as unfunded liabilities or overly influencial corporations stem from this core issue." - Ivan Kirigin

"As mentioned, the regulations are the biggest problem. Rather than scheming, just make secure webapps from a new country. Having thought it through a bit, I'm pretty confident micro nation building is easier than taking on banking regulations." - Ivan Kirigin

"someone from boston should also make a microsite, is_it_raining_in_boston.com def index( request ): return HttpResponse('yes, damnit')" - Ivan Kirigin

"why? expensive to host?" - Ivan Kirigin

"Hacker News is written in Arc and is open source. New Mogul isn't just the same format as Hacker News, but the same code. http://arclanguage.org/install" - Ivan Kirigin