They really can be beautiful, and there's always new features that you probably never really appreciated on the same buildings you pass many times.. Especially some of the older ones with really intricate brickwork and other designs.

Rights only protect you from government overreach, you're not free from the ridicule of other people for voluntarily showing how much of a dumb asshole you are.

People who aren't scumbags unwilling to pay 2 dollars for the public service they are taking advantage of

Their total grants would have been close to $3billion, only half of which were contingent on reaching the jobs milestone.. I'm not arguing that your wrong about the rest, but I don't think anyone should be bending over backwards to accommodate some of the world's largest companies.. I don't feel bad for all the owners of empty office towers, I think a correction may be a good thing so instead of the dick measuring contest of trying to build the tallest and most expensive things we can maybe the city will focus on improving things for the average person rather than the 1% top earners.. it is theoretically a good deal. But with their track record and the fuckery in this city, sounds like it could go bad.

Them having been built is kind of irrelevant to this deal, unless at the time you were able to tell the future. Part of why they haven't been built, yea is there was a global pandemic that totally shifted the way everything is done.. companies are leaving at an increased rate now because of something unexpected that happened afterwards, that's irrelevant to the point in that context.. and again my point is they didn't care about or need the tax break. So yea they planned a few thousand new jobs, not to get the tax break, but would still save hundreds of millions of dollars vs if they tried to purchase the land in a private sale.. as they and others have done across the country numerous times now, the tax breaks don't matter because they almost never actually reach the proposed goal.

Affordable housing in this case is kind of a misnomer/misleading I guess if you want to be pedantic. It doesn't mean affordable to everyone, it means relatively. Pixall owned most of that plot and had plans for new high rise buildings with 5000 units. 1500 of which would be classified as affordable housing. That doesn't mean tenement level, projects.. affordable housing has specific criteria which these units met.. so take up your issue of that definition with the city not me.

Regardless, 5000 new homes, many of which are relatively "more affordable", would greatly improve the housing situation in that area and around the city. There is a shortage, and building newer nice units for people who can afford them theoretically frees up other units for more people to move in.

The tax break was tied to jobs yes. But the tax break wasn't the only benefit nor the biggest for Amazon. Hell, does amazon even pay taxes? Getting the land in the first place would've been a battle and they would've had to pay a lot more. Cheap real estate without public push back is what they want. Check their track record, they never meet the big milestone of x number of jobs or whatever. That is like honey dicking the public, bc the politicians and media can say 25k jobs will (potentially) be created, but there is nothing holding anyone to that number for the deal to go through.

They still get preferential treatment and save lots of money, the politicians get an easy win and probably funding or some cushy job when they're done. Meanwhile their actual plan was a few thousand new local jobs. NYC doesn't need to give companies hundreds of millions of dollars to create a few thousand new jobs. That happens organically.

Remember amazon is supposed to be all data driven too. No way that contest was real they wouldn't just randomly pick their new hq location. They had a short list of places they wanted to be and pitted cities against each other to see who would bend over backwards for them.

Affordable housing in this case is kind of a misnomer I guess if you want to be pedantic. It doesn't mean affordable to everyone, it means relatively. One company owned most of that plot and there were plans for new high rise buildings with 5000 units. 1500 of which would be classified as affordable housing. That doesn't mean tenement level, projects.. affordable housing has specific criteria which these units met.. so take up your issue of that definition with the city not me.

Regardless, 5000 new homes, many of which are relatively "more affordable", would greatly improve the housing situation in that area and around the city. There is a shortage, and building newer nice units for people who can afford them theoretically frees up other units for more people to move in.

Nah that Amazon stuff is bullshit. They never intended on creating 25k new jobs that was just one milestone and the additional tax benefit wasn't where they stood to gain the most.

The deal meant they could bypass city/public council approval which would have added many hoops to jump through. It gave them a sweetheart deal for a lease on prime real estate that was otherwise earmarked for affordable housing preventing amazon from getting the land they wanted without paying through the nose and angering the public. Having the city hand over the land for cheap in exchange for "more jobs" avoids those issues..

Even without the tax breaks, they would've saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Their plan was to consolidate several thousand employees already in NYC to one main campus, transfer high level employees from Seattle and then fill the remainder (a few thousand, but still nowhere near the 25k) with new local workers.

Everywhere amazon has done this before, they treat the community like shit, are almost universally disliked and fail to meet whatever job/economic promises they make. They don't care about the community or these promises, they are simply taking advantage of flaws in cities economic development policies. That is, there is no accountability when they fail to meet a target. Often these deals have no real contingencies they are based on good faith. The city is promised benefits from all these jobs and new growth in exchange for their support. Usually with a bonus if the company reaches a milestone. BUT no one ever talks about what happens if they fail to meet that target as is most common with these large corps.

It is a shitty move all around. The companies are trying to spend as little as possible. While the politicians can claim an easy win right now. It looks good to have a photo op in front of a large high profile project, the intricacies don't matter cause most people won't get into it. You know what else would create 25k jobs and stimulate economic growth in NYC? Investing in infrastructure, but you can't really have a ribbon cutting ceremony for stuff like that..

Nice I gotta try it out! Most of the stuff I've gotten on the street is kindaⁿ trash compared to curaleaf..

Yea not free but if we stop paying rates that support entire industries profiting off peoples sickness, it would probably end up saving tax money and boosting the economy.. it might even be better than free.

Right guns are well known for making people more level headed and less emotional!

The law is about employers using AI for hiring, they need to be audited/approved to avoid innate bias in the process. The selection AIs are trained on existing employment data. There is bias baked into the system, because humans are naturally biased. So the law is about filtering out/unlearning those biases, or the very least not introducing more. For example, protected groups tend to be underrepresented. Using an AI that learned in an environment lacking protected groups, minorities, women, just institutionalizes those issues across any companies using those AIs.