Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #3, published by Zvi on February 6, 2023 on LessWrong.

It’s that time again.

Bad News

Guardian analyzes projects from world’s biggest carbon offset provider, finds ‘94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.’ Bloomberg found something similar in 2020, changing nothing. Carbon offsets are not about carbon. Very little that is said or done in the name of carbon or climate change is about carbon. Or at least, not about carbon in the atmosphere.

A fascinating potential flaw in Georgist Land Value Taxes is pointed out by David Friedman. Larger land holdings could be tax advantaged over smaller ones. This is because the improvements on their land don’t contribute to the ‘without improvements’ value of the rest of the land, so owning and building (his example) both a shopping mall and an apartment complex prevents the value of either half from being enhanced by the other for tax purposes. Presumably the solution is to say ‘still counts’ in some form, since the tax incentives here could be very large.

FTC likely to ban all non-competes, notices no reason why there is a fence at this location, nor any harm in banning contracts. Tyler Cowen warns that this will result in less investment in workers and more keeping information segmented. He says ‘it would be better to regulate them’ presumably because bargaining is one of the stages of grief. From what I can tell most non-compete agreements are mostly value destructive, and often obviously so. There are some places where they seem important, and having them not be enforced either will lead to workarounds that have the same effect or do serious economic damage.

Here is a long post arguing against banning non-competes.

Who currently bans non-competes?

Who has them?

If one must regulate at all, not allowing non-competes for low wage workers makes sense to me. The stories of being locked into a non-compete by Jimmy John’s do seem rather predatory. Same with ‘overly broad.’ By default banning economic activity and disallowing competition is destructive. It is not crazy to attempt to limit the damage.

Tyler Cowen warns that future inflation may be higher due to low current inflation and resulting expectations. As opposed to standard inflation expectations, which is where future inflation may be higher due to high current inflation and resulting expectations. I am confused by the claims here as well.

Noma, considered by many food critics the world’s best restaurant, is closing. Instead, it will become a food lab and occasionally open pop-ups, and perhaps the chef behind it will get paid absurd amounts for private service to the absurdly rich. Even at $500 and up per meal, it wasn’t worth keeping things going. Also, even at $500 a pop, he was charging way, way too little. This is the best restaurant, the kind of place people fly to with private jets. Luck or skill was required to score a reservation. I would have liked to see him move to $5,000 a meal and see what happens.

People love free, so it’s not going anywhere.

I am more hopeful. People love free but they really hate obnoxious ads. Virality combined with goodwill and AI is an alternate path to revenue generation. I am confident that my decision to not use a paywall and to not do any advertising is paying off far better than either alternative.

A good point by Eliezer: If you let others scroll through an AirBnB customer’s reviews, a potential host can and will do that, find those who sometimes review hosts badly, and refuse to host those troublesome customers. No way am I going to post negative reviews in such a world.

In the landlord-tenant case.

The same principle applies to other twin review markets, where As (sellers) and paired with Bs (buyers) by mutual consent, and each reviews the other. The review system could in theory survive it, but not in anyth...