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> There's no way to turn this into a positive here.

I dunno. It seems like an unambiguous positive to me. The giveaway to Amazon was enormous -- so much so that it seems extremely dubious that New York would ever have been able to recoup that money, let alone increase it.

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It wasn't a giveaway, it was a discount. If I sell cars for $30,000 each, and you negotiate me down to $25,000, have I given you $5,000 ? No.

If they were going to buy the card for $30K anyway if you didn't discount it, yes. Even if they weren't going to buy the car without the discount, but someone else would likely come along and buy it for $30K, then still yes, you would have given away $5K.

Add on to the fact that if you sold that one car for $25K, you end up with other people who would've paid $30K but now want that same discount, so you may have given away a lot more than $5K.

And even if they could that's more money into Big Tech oligopolies. Not something we really need to be supporting.

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