Free Markets Solve Everything

I want to follow up on this post about Amazon announcing that they’re bringing jobs to New York. There were two major critiques of AOC’s victory lap:

Amazon promised 25,000 jobs, this announcement is 1,500, so this is not a win. This one is easy for anyone who knows the history of these IDA (Industrial Development Authority) deals. The job promises are over a period of time (in this case, apparently, 10 years), and the promises don’t have to be kept. Amazon apparently promised 700 jobs the first year, so 1,500 is arguably better than what the original deal would have yielded.

The most important point is that whatever Amazon promised in return for $3 billion in tax breaks, these deals don’t have any penalty for companies that don’t create the promised number of jobs, so Amazon could have promised 100K jobs, delivered a small fraction of those, and paid no New York taxes for years.

Amazon is taking office space in a complex that is the recipient of tax breaks so it’s not as big a win as it could be. This one seems to be reaching, since these IDA deals are almost ubiquitous for large projects, so it would be hard for Amazon to find space that wasn’t the beneficiary of some deal or other. And, at least an IDA didn’t shell out $3 billion more in tax breaks to get Amazon to come to town.

There’s something more important than the details of the Amazon deal itself – there’s the toxic environment surrounding these IDA tax breaks and the Hunger Games lotteries that they engender. When Amazon announced the deal, all of the well-paid development marketers for our area (the Chamber of Commerce and other booster entities), fell all over themselves to show that they were competing for Amazon’s HQ2. The local paper dutifully wrote stories taking the bait, showing how, if you look at the Amazon deal in just the right way, Rochester could qualify. When Amazon chose NYC, these stories took on a tone of self-flagellation about our inadequacy and failure.

What’s taken for granted in all of the publicity around HQ2 is that this is the way business is done. Business isn’t a large corporation choosing to site a facility somewhere that has a good pool of technical employees, good housing and good transit. Rather, its a contest to see which locales can cough up the most tax breaks and other goodies to entice the corporation to come to their town. I can’t hate the player here–Amazon just took the usual IDA game and brought it to another level. But let’s give the politicians and activists who opposed the Amazon deal in NYC their due, because it would have been pretty easy to sit on the sidelines and treat IDA-style development as just part of doing business.

By the way, I’m writing from the perspective of Rochester, which is awash in IDA deals, and there’s been a pretty significant backlash against them here. Some of that backlash is driven by examples of IDA deals that yielded almost no new jobs, or money that was supposed to go to new, risky businesses that instead go to fund expansion of existing businesses like the nicest health club in town. After those deals were exposed, some of the relatively timid local politicians here are opposing them, or at least calling for reform. That’s huge in an environment where these deals used to be announced with big fanfare for the politicians involved, after which they failed in obvilion.

In short, these deals are generally bad for taxpayers, and they don’t generate many new jobs. As voters become more educated about them, they will become politically unpopular. It’s good to see some Democrats leading on these issues, despite the flack they received.

IDA ToxicityPost + Comments (53)

I guess I’m just going to embed AOC tweets for the duration, but goddam is this sweet. Those fuckers at Amazon tried to hold up NYC for $3 billion in tax breaks, cried like little babies when Mr. Backlash made them feel a little bad about themselves, and then they fucking caved.

Ha Ha Fucking HaPost + Comments (64)

Uber issues their 2018 safety report a few days before the end of 2019. All hail the self-regulating free market!

Uber disclosed 3,000 sexual assaults reported in U.S. rides last year in its long-awaited safety report, amidst widespread criticism of its safety practices and pressure to increase its transparency over the issue.

In a lengthy report, which divides sexual misconduct into 21 categories, Uber said it recorded 235 rapes last year and hundreds more reports of assault which could involve unwanted touching, kissing or attempted rape.

The report also examined other safety categories, including violent crimes such as physical assaults and motor vehicle deaths. Uber said there were 107 motor vehicle fatalities in 2017 and 2018 in a total of 97 fatal crashes involving users on the app. The company also said there were 19 fatal physical assaults over the same time period.

Of course we have no context on the deaths and assaults versus taxi services, so I don’t know if they’re better or worse than cabs. My guess is worse, since the barrier to entry to someone who wants to turn their car into a independently contracted grope wagon is lower than a driver who wants to join a taxi service.

Also, is it just me, or is Lyft’s relationship to Uber similar to Target’s relationship to Wal-Mart? Both do basically the same thing, but the bigger one’s business practices are a bit worse, so they get most of the heat.

UnterPost + Comments (68)

Facebook just altered its policies to allow known false advertising by politicians:

6. Conveniently, this new version of Facebook's advertising rules solves a sticky issue. Trump was repeatedly publishing ads with false claims and Facebook wasn't doing anything about it. It's now OFFICIAL POLICY not to do anything about it. https://t.co/4aTevXJIwr pic.twitter.com/0ngI78Ztzs

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) October 3, 2019

Trump pays millions per week in Facebook ads, and they’ll let him tell any old lie that pops into his head.

The life blood of Facebook is engagement. Democrats need to make a concerted effort both to fight and to delete their Facebook accounts.

TrumpbookPost + Comments (107)

Transcripts of private company meetings have Mark Zuckerberg saying he’ll “go to the mat” to stop Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up big tech companies.

Judd Leglum has been tracking Trump’s Facebook ad spend, and Trump is pouring millions into bullshit lies on Facebook:

WOW.

Trump continues to accelerate his spending on Facebook ads. Now up to $1.3 MILLION over the last week pic.twitter.com/gxYgIQfXVw

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) October 1, 2019

Leglum has identified a couple of different completely fake, foreign-influenced astroturf Facebook pages, such as “Police Lives Matter”, which had 170,000 fans and spread misinformation about cop deaths and other police-related news. This page was supposedly run by a police officer living in New York City, but was actually run by people from Kosovo. Facebook took the pages down after Leglum pointed them out but, like Twitter, Facebook is absolute shit at policing their platform. And there’s no surprise why: having Zuckerberg monitor his own platform is like having Jeffery Epstein guard a girls’ middle school. Facebook has no incentive to police their platform because of the ad revenue they receive via all this trolling and fakery.

If Warren is nominated and loses, Facebook will be part of the reason, and Zuckerberg will be quietly complicit.

Facebook Is The EnemyPost + Comments (295)

This blog has been around for awhile, so I inevitably repeat myself from time to time, but I want to say it again. Whenever someone does the whole time travel/kill baby Hitler thing, I always say to myself, “To hell with Hitler, I’d go back and kill whoever was responsible for the first MBA program.” We beat Hitler and recovered nicely, and he never did near as much damage to the country as our current profits over people management. Here is yet another example (and this is a spectacular albeit maddening read):

Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”


Sorscher, a physicist who’d worked at Boeing more than two decades and had led negotiations there for the engineers’ union, had become obsessed with management culture. He said he didn’t previously imagine Boeing’s brave new managerial caste creating a problem as dumb and glaringly obvious as MCAS (or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, as a handful of software wizards had dubbed it). Mostly he worried about shriveling market share driving sales and head count into the ground, the things that keep post-industrial American labor leaders up at night. On some level, though, he saw it all coming; he even demonstrated how the costs of a grounded plane would dwarf the short-term savings achieved from the latest outsourcing binge in one of his reports that no one read back in 2002.*

There is so much stuff that just shocks in here, including the entire chain of events that led to Boeing basically hiding the MCAS system from pilots, but I had to read this several times:

So no more than a handful of people in the world knew MCAS even existed before it became infamous.

Jesus christ.

Mass Murder for ProfitPost + Comments (107)

Apparently the squeaky wheel does get the grease, and a big congratulations to Mayor Shirley Kemp (women- they get shit done) for getting the SWN people to come to town council where we could all yell at them, because they are erecting a 360 degree sound barrier.

That doesn’t solve all the other problems we will eventually have with fracking, but at least we will be able to sleep.

Update on the Fracking PadPost + Comments (88)