31–40 of 119 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who cares where it comes from. Tax payers are out 5 billion does it matter how?
I believe the point of the gp is that the money isn’t coming from anywhere. No one is out $5B. There is no budget line item you could point to that identifies the expenditure “$5B for Bezos”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Billion Oyster Project partners with more than 70 restaurants in New York City. The businesses save up their oyster shells rather than tossing them, and a collection partner for the Billion Oyster Project rounds them up and carts them off to Governors Island, a small island due east of the Statue of Liberty." It seems unclear to me whether their deal with restaurants is limited to collecting shells from restaurant…
> One hopes the oysters being served are not local. Whether you're consuming the local waste or waste from somewhere else doesn't make much of a difference.
Imagine if the project was given the 5 billion tax dollars handed to Jeff Bezos instead of a measly 4.5 million... This is why the environments a disaster - not because you decide to buy an SUV
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the point of the gp is that the money isn’t coming from anywhere. No one is out $5B. There is no budget line item you could point to that identifies the expenditure “$5B for Bezos”.
It still lost income. That money could have gone to New York, or another city, or another country. Instead it remains with Amazon.
Short of implementing a federal law against it, there is no scenario where cities were not going to compete to lure Amazon. Fortunately no such federal law exists, which enables cities great leeway to compete for both citizens and businesses, through tax and regulatory structure, incentives, zoning laws, et al.
If I'm Detroit and I want to rebuild my collaped city, one great way to do that is to forgo some purely theoretical new near-term taxes - which you're not actually getting anyway because businesses don't want to move there - and offer up incentives such as tax breaks for businesses to go there instead of somewhere else. For a place like Detroit, that also means jobs, luring population to rebuild the tax base, rebuilding the housing stock, rebuilding the small business base that services that population, and so on.
Question: Do oysters clean the water by "eating" the pollutants ? If so, after oysters die, wont that pollutant still be in the water? Or is it in a stable form and does not harm us.
"3. In the wild, oysters set on (or attach to) old oyster shells. When oysters grow in the wild in oyster reefs, they typically attach to old oyster shells (for the calcium carbonate — see above). Because of this they tend to grow in clusters and one on top of the other. This is also why wild oysters typically have “gnarly shapes,” says Chris, instead of the nice round shape and deep cup you associate with farmed oysters."
https://www.thekitchn.com/island-creek-oysters-grower-tour-1...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all semantics - I don't understand why people want to defend a multi-billion dollar corporation, but, lets say, that NYC didn't write off 5 billion to Amazon. Could the city have budgeted more for the failing subway and nasty harbor given that they received more in taxes? Maybe.. if they really cared for the city. All these corporations do with their profits and tax-incentives is hoard them overseas and spend th…
> "lets say, that NYC didn't write off 5 billion to Amazon. Could the city have budgeted more for the failing subway and nasty harbor given that they received more in taxes? Maybe" You do realize NYC is not collecting less taxes because Amazon came? If Amazon goes to another city, they collect 0. if Amazon gets a tax break, they collect 0. now you could argue that Amazon provides some sort of extra burden on city res…
You pick your preferred baseline, fair enough. But since we're talking about a discriminatory tax break here, it's perfectly reasonable to choose as baseline a world without discrimination. And in that comparison, NY de facto pays the 5 billion or whatever it is. Of course, this is also choosing an ultimately arbitrary baseline for comparison.
You can ping pong this discussion indefinitely because there is no absolute, divine baseline to compare against.
Question: Do oysters clean the water by "eating" the pollutants ? If so, after oysters die, wont that pollutant still be in the water? Or is it in a stable form and does not harm us.
We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know what it was like just a century ago. I’m always surprised by facts like in this story and similar like https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b... And https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-sm...
Sometimes I think our only options going forward are a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated, or an eco-fascist regime enforces pollution (and thus effectively population) control on the whole planet.
That's probably the way we'll have it, but there will be artificial-natural habitat, eg. "reservations", that could grow to even be country-sized or half-continent-sized if we manage resources right. (Though probably they'll be smaller since we're going to have to some pretty large scale heavily-engineered-and-very-unnatural-agriculture to prevent famine in the face of climate degradation.)
The second option sounds somewhat enticing... but it would likely severely diminish speed of technological progress, hence diminish our even-longer-term changes of survival (think encounter and warfare with alien civs etc. - the universe is huge and if we/our-mostly-artificial-descendants survive long enough we'll have to compete with strains of life much more virulent than ourselves today).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who cares where it comes from. Tax payers are out 5 billion does it matter how?
> Who cares where it comes from The city gave away $5 billion in tax breaks to ensure billions more in tax revenues. The deal was tax-positive. What those extra billions get spent on is up to us. The Amazon thing is a massive red herring. Yes, it’s distasteful. But it’s also tiny. Giant political deals are being struck in Albany right now—Amazon is a distraction.
i'd like to see evidence of that. Amazon could've have still chosen new york for the HQ building. There's plenty of incentives already.
Therefore, only if there's reason to believe that amazon won't have built it in NY would the 5 billion tax break have been worth it.