But the economic benefit was estimated to be tens fo billions for the city?
Only if you ignore the alternative businesses that get squeezed out or never created, because of high taxes, high rents, and lack of available workers.
The decline in violence and poverty mirrored that of the rest of the country
Actually, the decline in crime in NYC preceded the national decline by several years. Steven Levitt of Freakonomics attributed it to New York State legalizing abortion years before RvW. This hypothesis is not widely accepted, but the actual reasons for NYC's earlier and deeper decline in crime are not well understood.
Or the net benefit Amazon brings far exceeds the amount they aren't paying.
By some estimates the net benefit was $0.
By some estimates the net benefit was $27 billion.
Do you also believe in the Easter Bunny?
Robbing Peter to pay Paul sounds great if you are Paul. But the net benefit is zero. Or even negative if Peter moves away because he keeps getting robbed.
It takes money to run a city. If Amazon is paying less, then someone else is paying more.
If a mugger leaves the cash in your wallet do you consider that some kind of gain for you?
Getting mugged happens randomly. We should be making our tax system less like mugging by having fair and uniform rules.
People were buying apartments
For every buyer, there is a seller. What you are really saying is that prices increased from their already sky high levels.
developers were planning to build, new businesses would have been created.
Developers in NYC are always planning to build... and their building permits are denied 90% of the time. If NYC wants more construction and more businesses, they don't need to spend $3B. They can instead spend $0, and just stop saying "No".
these would have been jobs for locals
The local unemployment rate is at 3.8%, which is an historic low. The locals already have plenty of jobs to choose from. Amazon would have just bled workers from other companies, who couldn't match Amazon's wages because they weren't getting the same subsidies.
For the same billions, they could probably attract hundreds of smaller companies that would have far more impact on the city.
Exactly. What NYC should be doing is improving their overall friendliness to commerce. Better transportation infrastructure, fewer restrictions on the construction of housing, fewer petty regulations, and a more streamlined bureaucracy. It should not take six months and 17 forms to open a taco stand, and nobody should need a license to paint fingernails.
Many growth friendly policy changes would cost nothing. Others, such as infrastructure improvements, would be expensive, but are badly needed, and will benefit the city for many decades to come.
There's an important distinction between being paid, and incentives that mean you pay less.
There is indeed. But both are wrong. There should be equality before the law, even for businesses. One business should not be taxed to fund tax breaks for another "more worthy" business.
In their rush to be virtuous and socialist,
Only some deal opponents were socialists like AOC, who objected to the handouts to a rich company, although she doesn't object to handouts in principle. But many more objectors are free market capitalists, who don't think the government should be "picking winners". It was an alliance of left and right, standing together to oppose corporate welfare.
This is not something to celebrate.
Yes it is. Hopefully other locales will learn a lesson from this, and these corrupt handouts can stop.
My recommendation list is full of crappy French movies. My wife is Chinese, so we frequently watch Chinese movies. So Netflix sees that, and figures we like foreign films, although we have never watched any film in a language other than English or Mandarin.
Their recommendation algorithm could use some improvement.
Because the people responsible have already resigned or been fired. Destroying the company would serve no logical purpose, would harm thousands of innocent people, and reduce competition in the industry.
to go with that, so they'd know where, based on financial data, people were in bad or good financial shape and therefore where they could foment anger, frustration and discontent leading to poor decision making.
Aggregate local unemployment rates and debt default rates are already public information, and are more up-to-date than a data dump from 2017.
No, it makes a ton of sense if you're thinking like someone who has billions of dollars and government supercomputer access. With this data, all they need is some purchasing history to feed into the simulator with it and they can make a full psychological profile on you and everyone you've ever met.
How does having someone's SSN help you access their purchasing history?
If you have someone's SSN and purchasing history, how does that help you psychologically profile them any better than just having their purchasing history (which they don't have)?
How is the SSN helpful?
How would an SSN help them identify "everyone you've ever met"?
Tech companies spend way more on payroll than they make in profit. Each of those tech jobs supports 2 more in the wider economy. So the way to "share in the wealth" is to get a job.
I just wish they'd hurry up and start recruiting space miners to go to the asteroid belt.
You read too much sci-fi. IRL, when miners go to the asteroid belt, they will be robots, not humans.
There is no practical reason to send humans beyond earth orbit. Robots don't need life support, they don't need expensive ultra-reliable gear, and they don't need to come back home.
Studies on salt itself say too much salt affects some people negatively, but not all.
This is race related. East Asians tend to be the least sensitive to salt, sub-Saharan Africans the most sensitive, and Caucasians in between. This correlates with the historical availability of salt. In much of Asia it has been available and affordable for millennia. In Africa, it was historically difficult to obtain. So Asians evolved to excrete salt, while Africans evolved to retain it.
He just doesn't want to say that there isn't enough money, never was, and it was a dumb idea from the very start.
As someone who predicted many years ago that billions would be spent, and then reality would set in and it would be cancelled, I want to take this opportunity to say: "I told you so."
The usual argument against stopping spoofing is that the average person won't answer the calls from a cold caller telemarketers.
That should not be a problem. If a telemarketer with a call center in India or the Philippines wants to spoof an American number, that is fine. But they need to own both the originating number and the spoofed number, and it needs to be traceable back to them, so they can be held accountable for illegal behavior.
But spoofing to random numbers in local prefixes, inflicting blowback on the innocent people that own those numbers, and misleading the call targets, should be illegal. It is unconscionable that we allow the telecoms to get away with this behavior.
it will make make some people think twice before becoming a criminal
Not really. Most scam calls originate outside the US. This "one guy" is atypical, and is not where the FBI should be focusing their resources.
He was also an idiot who provided a valid callback number that was registered in his own name. So the message from the FBI is "We only catch the dumb ones", which isn't much of a deterrent.
What we need is a change to telecom regulations that make call spoofing so easy. Most other countries are far less welcoming to scammers, and have much less of a problem with it. Even India makes spoofing illegal for domestic calls, although obviously not for outbound international calls.
If an entity owns and controls multiple numbers that can be tracked back to that entity, then "spoofing" those numbers has legitimate uses. But there is no valid reason to allow anyone to spoof a number they do not own and do not have a right to use.
Feds: You need to fix the spoofing problem. Telcos: We can't. It is technically impossible. Feds: Starting next week, we will fine you $1000 per spoofed call. Telcos: Oh. We'll have it fixed in five minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
But the economic benefit was estimated to be tens fo billions for the city?
Only if you ignore the alternative businesses that get squeezed out or never created, because of high taxes, high rents, and lack of available workers.
The decline in violence and poverty mirrored that of the rest of the country
Actually, the decline in crime in NYC preceded the national decline by several years. Steven Levitt of Freakonomics attributed it to New York State legalizing abortion years before RvW. This hypothesis is not widely accepted, but the actual reasons for NYC's earlier and deeper decline in crime are not well understood.
Or the net benefit Amazon brings far exceeds the amount they aren't paying.
By some estimates the net benefit was $0.
By some estimates the net benefit was $27 billion.
Do you also believe in the Easter Bunny?
Robbing Peter to pay Paul sounds great if you are Paul. But the net benefit is zero. Or even negative if Peter moves away because he keeps getting robbed.
I just tried it, and got a picture of a normal looking young woman. Not "horrifying" at all.
The site is really slow, and sucks up a lot of local CPU running JavaScript.
What does "fund a tax break" mean?
It takes money to run a city. If Amazon is paying less, then someone else is paying more.
If a mugger leaves the cash in your wallet do you consider that some kind of gain for you?
Getting mugged happens randomly. We should be making our tax system less like mugging by having fair and uniform rules.
People were buying apartments
For every buyer, there is a seller. What you are really saying is that prices increased from their already sky high levels.
developers were planning to build, new businesses would have been created.
Developers in NYC are always planning to build ... and their building permits are denied 90% of the time. If NYC wants more construction and more businesses, they don't need to spend $3B. They can instead spend $0, and just stop saying "No".
these would have been jobs for locals
The local unemployment rate is at 3.8%, which is an historic low. The locals already have plenty of jobs to choose from. Amazon would have just bled workers from other companies, who couldn't match Amazon's wages because they weren't getting the same subsidies.
For the same billions, they could probably attract hundreds of smaller companies that would have far more impact on the city.
Exactly. What NYC should be doing is improving their overall friendliness to commerce. Better transportation infrastructure, fewer restrictions on the construction of housing, fewer petty regulations, and a more streamlined bureaucracy. It should not take six months and 17 forms to open a taco stand, and nobody should need a license to paint fingernails.
Many growth friendly policy changes would cost nothing. Others, such as infrastructure improvements, would be expensive, but are badly needed, and will benefit the city for many decades to come.
There's an important distinction between being paid, and incentives that mean you pay less.
There is indeed. But both are wrong. There should be equality before the law, even for businesses. One business should not be taxed to fund tax breaks for another "more worthy" business.
In their rush to be virtuous and socialist,
Only some deal opponents were socialists like AOC, who objected to the handouts to a rich company, although she doesn't object to handouts in principle. But many more objectors are free market capitalists, who don't think the government should be "picking winners". It was an alliance of left and right, standing together to oppose corporate welfare.
This is not something to celebrate.
Yes it is. Hopefully other locales will learn a lesson from this, and these corrupt handouts can stop.
My recommendation list is full of crappy French movies. My wife is Chinese, so we frequently watch Chinese movies. So Netflix sees that, and figures we like foreign films, although we have never watched any film in a language other than English or Mandarin.
Their recommendation algorithm could use some improvement.
Or the NSA swiped the data, and didn't cover their tracks well enough to go undetected.
How can Equifax still be in business?
Because the people responsible have already resigned or been fired. Destroying the company would serve no logical purpose, would harm thousands of innocent people, and reduce competition in the industry.
to go with that, so they'd know where, based on financial data, people were in bad or good financial shape and therefore where they could foment anger, frustration and discontent leading to poor decision making.
Aggregate local unemployment rates and debt default rates are already public information, and are more up-to-date than a data dump from 2017.
No, it makes a ton of sense if you're thinking like someone who has billions of dollars and government supercomputer access. With this data, all they need is some purchasing history to feed into the simulator with it and they can make a full psychological profile on you and everyone you've ever met.
How does having someone's SSN help you access their purchasing history?
If you have someone's SSN and purchasing history, how does that help you psychologically profile them any better than just having their purchasing history (which they don't have)?
How is the SSN helpful?
How would an SSN help them identify "everyone you've ever met"?
How would "supercomputer access" be helpful?
it spans 5 time zones. Its kids must have even more problems.
The Chinese have figured out how to stagger school opening times. The students in Xinjiang go to class much later than students in Heilongjiang.
Apparently the Indians haven't thought of that yet.
A country can try to solve more than one issue at once.
Especially when the solution is obvious: Just start the school day an hour later in the west.
It would still be a good example of "them" pulling numbers out of their asses to justify whatever.
Sure, except it is a completely different "them".
If you want to pick a random group of "bad" people to make a false equivalence, why not just use the default: Nazis.
"And they can't just pull a number out of their asses." And yet they do, including MAFIAA
That is for copyright violation, and has nothing to do with contract law.
Tech companies spend way more on payroll than they make in profit. Each of those tech jobs supports 2 more in the wider economy. So the way to "share in the wealth" is to get a job.
Will that be before or after the san andreas fault opens up and swallows the whole lot?
San Andreas is a transform fault.
It slides laterally. It does not "open up".
It is actually Washington and Oregon that are in danger of being swallowed up. So sell your Microsoft and Amazon stock.
California has a gun homicide rate of 3.3/100k. That is above average, worse than 31 other states.
Gun violence in the USA by state
I just wish they'd hurry up and start recruiting space miners to go to the asteroid belt.
You read too much sci-fi. IRL, when miners go to the asteroid belt, they will be robots, not humans.
There is no practical reason to send humans beyond earth orbit. Robots don't need life support, they don't need expensive ultra-reliable gear, and they don't need to come back home.
https://xkcd.com/695/
Studies on salt itself say too much salt affects some people negatively, but not all.
This is race related. East Asians tend to be the least sensitive to salt, sub-Saharan Africans the most sensitive, and Caucasians in between. This correlates with the historical availability of salt. In much of Asia it has been available and affordable for millennia. In Africa, it was historically difficult to obtain. So Asians evolved to excrete salt, while Africans evolved to retain it.
He just doesn't want to say that there isn't enough money, never was, and it was a dumb idea from the very start.
As someone who predicted many years ago that billions would be spent, and then reality would set in and it would be cancelled, I want to take this opportunity to say: "I told you so."
The usual argument against stopping spoofing is that the average person won't answer the calls from a cold caller telemarketers.
That should not be a problem. If a telemarketer with a call center in India or the Philippines wants to spoof an American number, that is fine. But they need to own both the originating number and the spoofed number, and it needs to be traceable back to them, so they can be held accountable for illegal behavior.
But spoofing to random numbers in local prefixes, inflicting blowback on the innocent people that own those numbers, and misleading the call targets, should be illegal. It is unconscionable that we allow the telecoms to get away with this behavior.
I'm pretty sure that the extra two years was for being really really stupid.
But wouldn't it make more sense to give the smart criminals extra jail time?
it will make make some people think twice before becoming a criminal
Not really. Most scam calls originate outside the US. This "one guy" is atypical, and is not where the FBI should be focusing their resources.
He was also an idiot who provided a valid callback number that was registered in his own name. So the message from the FBI is "We only catch the dumb ones", which isn't much of a deterrent.
What we need is a change to telecom regulations that make call spoofing so easy. Most other countries are far less welcoming to scammers, and have much less of a problem with it. Even India makes spoofing illegal for domestic calls, although obviously not for outbound international calls.
If an entity owns and controls multiple numbers that can be tracked back to that entity, then "spoofing" those numbers has legitimate uses. But there is no valid reason to allow anyone to spoof a number they do not own and do not have a right to use.
Feds: You need to fix the spoofing problem.
Telcos: We can't. It is technically impossible.
Feds: Starting next week, we will fine you $1000 per spoofed call.
Telcos: Oh. We'll have it fixed in five minutes.