Part of the problem is that prosperity has been conflated with power. It’s not a war on prosperity, rather it’s a war on a sort of economic tyranny.
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And displacing current residents, yes a common complaint against the move. If your plan for improving a city is to import white collar workers to displace locals, all you’ve accomplished is…making it a different city.
Is there any evidence that without Amazon, these rooms or properties would have been vacant? Property and hotels are extremely hot in NYC, not really worried. And not going to shed a tear for NYC real estate agents and hoteliers. Corcoran seems to be doing just fine.
I’m genuinely confused by this. Why would a city government have the authority to reduce a company’s federal tax burden?
Oh the company themselves?! and geez, they don’t have any reason to fudge the numbers, right?
In summary, the same bullshit pitch that EVERY sports stadium ever gave, that always ends in heartbreak and confusion when the benefits fail to materialize.
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Economists have basically claimed to have discovered the utilitarian calculus* and they say the unit of happiness is the dollar. In philosophy there’s a classic question about the idea of that calculus: what if there is one person who just really appreciates everything to the point that we generate more happiness by giving everything to them than we do by sharing everything around? It’s an outlandish hypothetical somehow made real by our economic metrics.
* A formula to numerically evaluate the good of all people to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number
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I really wish in this instance and many others that economists would STFU! IMO money only buys back the amount of happiness sacrificed to the process of making money necessary to stay alive for most people. Also I don’t owe anyone a dopamine kick and none of these rich assholes are making me happier. People who try to shift real world problems to arguments about angels on pins make me bristle, I have to admit.
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Yeah, money is a gamed system, the stock market is baseball cards for the rich. We need to stop measuring the health of society in a way that doesn’t actually make anyone healthier.
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Jesus. We got so derailed in the Amazon deal - that had little to nothing to do with AOC - that when I wanted to come back and check on how the “NYC Amazon Deal” thread was going, I couldn’t remember which thread it was in.
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Did you know that some fish dinners can be squeezed like a wet towel?
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@beschizza found a locked safe in the back of his closet!
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I bet he found a banana in it. And that right now, as we type, he’s just . . . looking at it.
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And photoshopping its mouth where its eyes used to be.
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