I think you’re using the typical aesthetic definition of fantasy vs.
sci-fi. You’re right that under that one, Tower of Babylon would be considered fantasy.
Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems.
Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1].
I built a similar system for my school’s CS club. I considered using a door sensor, but the eventual solution I settled on was a light sensor, because it’s almost always true for us that the lights are on iff the door is open.
This way, we don’t need to mount anything on the door, we just have a microcontroller plugged into one of the machines.
Our previous solution was a webcam that pointed to the lights that did a similar thing (implemented by someone before my time) but then it stopped working due to some driver issues, and I didn’t want to spend time investigating them.
Asking people to pay property tax doesn’t imply “kicking out old ladies” though. Many people who could afford the new property tax (and thus aren’t being kicked out) might choose to downsize anyway to save money.
> Yeah, let’s kick old ladies out of their houses so we can get a piece.
If the problem is "kicking old ladies out", why not just allow seniors to defer their property tax, instead of what we have now, where even corporations pay the same fixed tax? Seems a little absurd to give the entire state a tax break for a problem that only effects 10% (at most).
The "old ladies" argument was just a cover for the real reason, and you've been duped.
> I’d like to see an example of increasing taxes on a good or service somehow making it cheaper.
It's fairly well known that a land value tax actually has negative deadweight loss, because it incentivizes more efficient land use. It definitely can't make housing more expensive, since the supply-demand curve remains the same (the supply of land is fixed).
> I'd be careful about directly comparing prices, real estate taxes (by rate) in Texas are significantly higher than in California.
The two are directly linked, so this makes sense. A higher property tax means that the future annual rent (real rent if you're a landlord, imputed rent if you're a owner-occupier) you get from property will be reduced, so the capitalized present value will decrease correspondingly.
I don't know much about Go, and I'm one of those people who mostly sees the downsides, so I guess I'll ask you about one of my biggest issues with the language (in the hopes of broadening my perspective on this): what is the upside of returning a value and error, rather than a value or an error? Or I guess, more precisely, why is that the default and only way to do things [1]?
For context, I'm a big fan of explicit errors and errors as values over exceptions as a general principle: my preferred language is Haskell, where Either (essentially Result) is the main way to doing error handling, and exceptions are very rarely used.
[1] - I can see a few cases where returning both is useful, but I can't see it being what I want most of the time
Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems.
Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1].
[0] - better explained him here: https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html, see “You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?”
[1] - I don’t know if Chiang intended this, but I think you could probably draw a parallel to missionaries to the new world.