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Other pressing matters: If one is a gay cuck does that mean you are cuckolded by gay people or that you yourself are gay and a cuckold? 
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Is it just me or are Google results⌠getting kind of bad lately? Specifically them ignoring âwordsâ âIâ âdefinitelyâ âwantâ.
I havenât been tracking in a spreadsheet or anything, but I feel like googling for coding things used to be a slam dunk first or second hit. Now I feel like Iâm going back to 2001, having to resort to things like
âprince of nothingâ AND bakker AND kellhus AND (no-god OR mog-pharau) NOT netflix NOT crown NOTâŚ
I have noticed this too, results are not as good as they used to be without using old school search techniques. Iâm guessing itâs the same sort of algorithm shenanigans as what is going on on YouTube.
https://ktiv.com/2019/02/25/google-seeks-tax-breaks-for-600m-data-center-in-minnesota
Because it worked so well for Amazon.
Weâll see what Minnesota has learned from New York.
Is the tax break thing just a point of pride at this point? I canât imagine money is even remotely the issue when youâre planning on spending 600 MILLION dollars to build a new facility
Why spend my money on a new place if I can spend yours?
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Although that does oversimplify things a bit. Itâs not like New York or Minnesota or anyone else actually wrote a big check to any of those companies for the money they got. Instead they got a promise saying, âIf you do X, weâll give you a discount of Y on your taxes.â
The theory is that the amount lost in tax revenue by those discounts would be more than made up for by the increase in tax revenue that the new business brings in. One could say that the that the locales arenât really giving anything up, per se, because they wonât be in the hole relative to if the company never set up shop there to begin with.
However, on the flip side, there are other issues that are often ignored:
- Generally the companies in question are looking to expand anyway. They have to expand, sooner or later, tax breaks or no tax breaks, otherwise why even spend any money at all to expand?
- Companies are only going to expand in areas where they either have a ready pool of local talent to draw upon or can attract talent from outside the area to move there.
- (The most important IMHO) These tax incentive laden deals are ridiculously rigged in favor of the companies. There have been many examples of a company given a lucrative tax deal in exchange for setting up shop only to later renege on said deal by not delivering the promised jobs or other shenanigans, without any penalty. I mean, if you can keep your $600 million tax break without actually hiring 20,000 new engineers, why would you actually hire those engineers? Especially if people keep buying into your scam over and over and over again.
Number 3 is my biggest point in opposition to these sorts of deals. If deals were structured in a way where if a company fails to deliver, not only does it lose any outstanding tax breaks it may have gotten, but has to pay back any tax breaks it already took advantage of, I could sometimes be more okay with them as you could argue it as a guaranteed investment made by the local community instead of just a corporate giveaway with no guarantee of any return.
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As I mentioned, I got into a bit of an argument with someone about this. My problem isnât that a city fundamentally shouldnât consider âcompetingâ with other cities, but rather something to do with the specific ways theyâre going about it. Selling out your citizens data, lining specific crony pockets, favoritism for specific global companies, âshort termâ incentives that end up being grandfathered in because when they do expire suddenly itâs easier to cut and run, etc. Seems like it always plays out the same way when you choose to participate in this game, race to the bottom, etc. It often seems like a much smaller scale version of other problems, like international tax shelters. And once again⌠I have no fucking idea how to solve it.
Indeed. Thatâs part of the issue I brought up with the ease in which companies can cut and run. You cited a different example where the company holds up its end of the bargain for the duration of the original deal, but once that deal no longer is in effect, threatens to leave (and does so without penalty) if they deal isnât renewed. The deals are weighted too much in favor of the companies and less so in favor of the locals because companies are never penalized for shenanigans like this.
Of course, I was talking purely in the case of tax incentives given that, in theory, whatever tax discounts happen would be repaid back manyfold by other economic improvements in the area. Games like selling citizensâ data and others like you mentioned are way, way out of bounds as they donât have the same sort of give-and-take of benefits. Give up a little cash now to get a lot of cash later, sure, I can see that as a reasonable deal to make assuming everyone involved is forced to live up to the letter of the deal. Selling out data, bribing officials, locking out competition, etc., that doesnât pass my personal smell test.
Iâd be more in favor of deals like this in general (ignoring specifics concerning whether or not the company wouldâve done the same thing anyway even without the deal) if, as I said, there were honest to goodness penalties involved to make sure that the recipients hold up to their side of the bargain both for the duration of the deal and for at least some time afterwards.
Itâs interesting to compare what Virginia offerered Amazon compared to what NY did. Personally, as both a resident of VA and as someone whoâs not in favor of just straight up tax discounts, the VA deal seems much better:
"A big gap in the size of incentives promised by New York and Virginia also stirred concern in the Empire State â and quiet satisfaction in the Old Dominion â that Richmond had cut a better deal than Albany. In the largest single subsidy offered by each state, New York offered tax credits equal to $48,000 per new job, while Virginia agreed to workforce cash grants of $22,000 per jobâŚ
Virginia appeared to have made a better deal, as the state and Arlington County offered direct subsidies of $573 million for 25,000 jobs to place the other new headquarters near Reagan National Airport in what will now be called National Landing.
Virginia and Arlington also pledged investments totaling $223 million for transportation improvements including upgrading two Metro stations â an incentive that will help Amazon and the rest of the communityâŚ
In Virginia, the bulk of the direct incentives will come in the form of workforce cash grants from the state of up to $550 million, based on $22,000 for each job created over the next 12 years.
The state will also invest $195 million in infrastructure in the neighborhood, including improvements to the Crystal City and Potomac Yards Metro stations and a pedestrian bridge connecting the Amazon site to Reagan National Airport. The Potomac Yards station is not yet open.
From Arlington, Amazon will receive a cash grant of $23 million over 15 years linked to incremental growth of the tax on hotel rooms. The county also will dedicate about $28 million of future property tax revenue for on-site infrastructure and open space at the siteâŚ
Although it is not a direct subsidy, Virginiaâs effort to secure Amazon also included an ambitious plan to spend nearly $1.1 billion over 20 years to expand tech higher education in the state. Amazon said this was an initiative by the state and not something that the company proposed.
One aim is to raise the number of bachelorâs and masterâs degrees awarded in the computer sciences and related fields by 25,000 to 35,000 over the next two decades, beyond what was already forecast. The plan includes construction by Virginia Tech of a graduate campus focused on innovation in Alexandria, and expansion of George Mason Universityâs tech program in Arlington."
While VA is certainly giving Amazon some tax breaks, a lot of the money that the state is spending is actually going to benefit the citizens of VA, in terms of infrastructure and education, rather than just lining Amazonâs pockets.
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Google Inbox is completely gone now. GMail is such poop by comparison. How do people live with this?
An extension has been developed to rectify this problem. Does this help?
No, thatâs a Chrome extension and I use Firefox. Also, I donât trust it. Also it doesnât do the most important things Inbox did like trip bundling.