TIL Amazon sells Banana Republics and we all clamor for canoes and paddles.
Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
131–140 of 227 posts
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#132San Francisco-ization it seems. Liberals going against their own interests. Reminds me of an apartment complex under construction in SF that was forced to include a larger amount of low-income units. The builders found it would no longer be profitable, and ceased building. So lose-lose, prisoner's dilemma, vocal social media forces "won," lacking the cooperative biases that humans normally have. They all end up with…
Should shelter, a basic human need, be for-profit? If so, why?
Here's a thought; do you want to rely on the goodwill of people you don't know, that live hundreds or thousands of miles away, to get up at 4am to farm and create food (a basic human need) for you?
Or do you want to rely on the profit motive? If not, why?
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like there's plenty of stuff to blame besides low-income people wanting a place to live.
Yes, but getting more units in a building that won't be build doesn't help said low income residents. This is a moral argument that does not fit the facts we know, and hence can't have a morally good outcome.
I was not trying to make a moral argument, but an observation that many seem ready to believe any statement by the powerful no matter how dodgy, while the powerless are assiduously made invisible.
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#134I understand the tragedy of the commons, cities' race to the bottom, Amazon not needing breaks, so on. I also think some of this could have been avoided if people felt like they were part of the process, instead of being told by the state "Hey we negotiated with a behemoth company for them to take over your community - trust me, you'll like it".
You cant involve public with everything, or it would lead to big overhead
Efficiency over democracy, everyone is doing it these days!
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#135This reads too much like a one sided political letter by a state functionary. It's curious no such 'open letter' was forthcoming from any public functionary accounting for the losses due to the long list of bank frauds and bailouts? Many here swear by free markets, fair competition and a level playing field and yet do not see the contradiction of letting large companies play regions against each other to extract conc…
These people you talk about don't live in those communities and haven't lived in communities that have been destroyed and made worse by big corporations like this. How's Seattle doing? Great for the rich, but not for anyone else. Walk the city streets in Seattle, head down to city mission in Pioneer Square, you'll figure out what the word "despair" really means. I'm glad the public stood up. The workers have power. G…
Unfortunately, some other community will have to suffer having so many high paid workers.
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#136I suspect I'll never get why the notion of giving a tax handout to a company that's one of the most valuable in the world shouldn't be a non-starter. > Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental…
> What about the Google jobs? Do those count as infinite return? If so, more infinite returns, and less 9:1 returns, please.
I could give you one cent tomorrow in exchange for nothing, you will have an infinite return in a day. Or I can given you $2 tomorrow in exchange for $1 today, a relatively modest 100% return in a day.
End of the day you either gained one dollar or one cent. The dollar buys you more thing. That's the difference between a handful of Google jobs and tens of thousands of Amazon jobs.
Could you repeat the one cent thing? Maybe a few times but it will also take a few more "days", and probably won't reach one hundred repetition any time soon. This is a shallow and/or low-throughput well, only so much water can be drawn from it.
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#137The problem is old, going back, one example after another, continually to a famous quote of Jefferson about sewage news at
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_spe...
So, for a fix, first, mostly ignore the newsies (a word from a Bogart character in the movie The Maltese Falcon).
Second, much of politics is trying to get votes from name recognition from shocking statements based on gossip, lies, distortions, made up nonsense, etc.
Well, then, the newsies and the politicians have a strong interest in common: For name recognition for votes the politicians want their shocking stories told, and for ad revenue from eyeballs the newsies want shocking stories to tell. There was a similar remark in the movie Lawrence of Arabia.
So, the second step is mostly to ignore the politicians.
A third step is, for information that might be in the news, fall back to and insist on at least common high school term paper writing standards, rational, responsible content with thorough references to objective, credible, primary sources. With this third step will entertain:
Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see and still will believe twice too much.
Measure twice and saw once.
Essentially everything you see in the media was put there and paid for by someone who wants to influence your opinion (Sharyl Attkissson).
It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you do know for sure that just ain't so (In the movie The Big Short and there attributed to Mark Twain).
Will conclude that for nearly all the news, printed on paper it can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet is useless for wrapping dead fish heads.
A hope is that the Internet will enable many more new information sources with some with lots of credibility and narrow specialization and that the best of these sources will help the US and civilization.
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to somehow ban the concept nationally, fine, but otherwise if a city/state doesn't play the incentive game they will probably just lose out to others that will.
NYC, San Francisco, and a few other areas have absolutely no need for incentives. They're very robust, energized areas, and don't need to beg for employers to come there and leverage the dynamics and workforce. Amazon's ridiculous dog and pony show -- which wasted outrageous amount of public time and money -- was absolutely dystopian: Company that already is one of the largest in the world, with an enormous competiti…
Long Island City is not Manhattan. They do benefit from giving incentives as they are not a robust, energized area. Thus the plastic factory/ superfund site with no jobs.
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#139I suspect I'll never get why the notion of giving a tax handout to a company that's one of the most valuable in the world shouldn't be a non-starter. > Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental…
You are addressing the quote: > You don't need to be the State's Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner. I think you are here making a moral argument of sorts. Why is it morally better to get 100% of nothing than to participate in a project with incentives that give you 9 times return plus create 24-40k jobs? I simply don't see a viable argument that this was morally right, a…
> Why is it morally better to get 100% of nothing than to participate in a project with incentives that give you 9 times return plus create 24-40k jobs?
Because people who rail against deals like this take zero responsibility for any of the consequences. It's all of the fun moral policing and none of the downside. It's great to be an activist.
Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it just means that this particular transaction was net-negative for unions.
So your argument is that the unions should have just taken the deal as dictated to them without considering their larger self-interest?
Yes? "As dictated to them" is a weird way of putting it, since they were the ones making the demands.