wdewind

That feels like a way more reasonable effort to signal-value ratio to me. Thanks for sharing.

My experience has been that no one needs a burndown chart to know how a project is going, and, to the extent that you do, it usually points to some mismanagement and an attempt to fix it through intensifying project management rigor. Especially with early stage startups, where the requirements are changing rapidly and throughout the project, I think this stuff represents very real overhead that's just not really that useful. In larger companies, where stuff like this is typically used as reporting up a chain, it can be slightly more useful to get a holistic view of the organization, but again, I'm just not sure it's worth the effort, and I really question resting a significant amount of decision making power on this over qualitative data.

To be clear: I'm not throwing all project management methodology to the wind, but this promises to give you a fancy chart that will "identify bottlenecks in your development process" and I'm sorry if you need a graph to know where those are I think there are probably larger problems in your organization. Identifying bottlenecks is easy, fixing them usually involves much higher level management functions like recruiting and training.

I'm sorry but these arguments are philosophical and completely ignore the facts of the deal:

> So the difference between the state and private citizens is one of choice. You have no choice but to deal with the state

Amazon is an interstate business with $240B in revenue. New York City has $100B in revenue. Amazon has a lot of different cities to choose from. They aren't trapped in any meaningful way, which is why this is a negotiation at all.

> When the government treats two entities differently, the one with the advantage can put the other one out of business if it acts competently. So Amazon would be able to eat all the little guys.

The deal offered to Amazon is the exact same deal offered to any business moving jobs into the state (including any of Amazon's competitors that would like to take this deal). Please look at the requirements for qualifying here: https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program

And if you don't want there to be big businesses in New York State I feel like that's kind of a separate argument.

> We see the gain because it happens in one place. The pain is spread across many businesses -- possibly numbering in the thousands.

This is nonsense. It goes completely in the face of basic economic principles. More jobs creates an increase in aggregate demand which helps everyone. Beyond that, the gain is extremely diffused through taxation.

> It's also worth thinking about the fact that those jobs will be created anyway.

This is totally false. Amazon currently employs about 1/6 of the number of people they would be employing at the low end of the estimates. Will Amazon continue growing their NYC offices? Of course. To the tune of 80-90%? Absolutely not. Those jobs are going to Virginia, and along with them one of New York City's prime chances to diversify away from finance money. Beyond that an additional 11,000 union construction jobs were lost.

> What I'm saying is that no jurisdiction should offer preferential treatment to one company. If you would like your city to have very low taxes, great. But everybody should be able to take advantage of them, not big companies alone.

Again, this is pretty ignorant of the reality of the situation. I don't think there is a single state without economic development programs similar to the Excelsior Jobs Program. These programs are widely supported on both sides of the aisle as being beneficial to everyone. The idea that the tax break to Amazon equates to "very low taxes" is wildly misleading. It's a temporary 10% discount on the city with literally the highest taxes in the country, and again, very very small companies can and have taken advantage of the Excelsior Jobs Program.

> The crack bit was meant to highlight the short-term vs. long-term effects. Short term, Amazon comes to town, many jobs are created, all is great. Long-term, biasness across the country will fail to compete -- some for good reason, others because they couldn't get preferential treatment.

The long term effects are also New York City further cementing itself as a tech hub, diversifying away from finance. This could've been a huge, decisive step in that direction, signalling to other companies our commitment to the future and technology. Instead it was a lost of 36-51,000 good paying technology and union jobs, and a loud signal to this country's tech businesses that we will not be welcoming to them. And again: the preferential treatment thing is just not reasonably true. All companies moving a significant number of jobs to New York City have access to the Excelsior Jobs Program.

What are the other externalities that are not already addressed by taxes? Would they be more adequately addressed by other companies paying the same taxes?

I'm not sure which raw data you'd like, but if you can be more specific I'll do my best to find it.

> 1. The $27 billion number assumes no other development in the land under consideration, which just makes no sense. Nobody to my knowledge has calculated the opportunity cost, and therefore the net benefit, of this deal.

There is no other deal even approximating this one in scale, and so there is no way to do this analysis. The alternative is much, much slower jobs, and thus tax revenue, growth.

"In my 23 years in the State Capitol, three as Budget Director, Amazon was the single greatest economic development opportunity we have had...For a sense of scale, the next largest economic development project the state has completed was for approximately 1,000 jobs."

> 2. We don't know actual the distribution of salaries

Honestly, I don't really think this is a legitimate issue. We know that they are overwhelmingly white collar technology jobs at an average of $150,000. It is extremely unlikely we'd get any surprises here and it's hard to understand what they'd even look like (5000 managers and 20,000 janitors?).

> 3. Beyond the existing Future Engineer program, there is no specific commitment to training and hiring from within NYC (instead of importing talent), beyond a $5 million promise to do.. something? in the Queensbridge Houses.

These aren't requirements we put on any other company going through the Excelsior Jobs Program. New York City is a melting pot city. What makes us great is that we have people from all around the world here. One of the prime things we want to do as a city to make it a great place to live is make it a place people want to move to work. If people aren't moving here to work than New York City is in bad shape.

> 4. We don't have any specific commitments to infrastructure development, again, beyond than a rough dollar amount.

Beyond $27 billion dollars in additional tax revenue. If we can't deploy that money to adequately fix our infrastructure problems it's difficult to see how that is Amazon's fault, or how any other company would do better. In fact: assuming we were able to get anything close to the level of scale we'd get from the Amazon deal from smaller companies we wouldn't be able to get any additional commitments from them beyond the discounted tax revenue, so it's difficult to understand where this expectation comes from. They make no contribution to infrastructure other than the massive one that the law already says they have to make.

> 5. Absolutely no word on handling externalities and market distortions imposed on housing markets in nearby neighborhoods.

Again, it's difficult to imagine the alternate reality you want to live in here, but it seems to be not growing the city.

There is no other comparable plan of this scale, so there is no meaningful way to do this analysis.

"In my 23 years in the State Capitol, three as Budget Director, Amazon was the single greatest economic development opportunity we have had...For a sense of scale, the next largest economic development project the state has completed was for approximately 1,000 jobs."

"If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money if we wanted to,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

"Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental ignorance of basic math by a group of elected officials. The city and state 'gave' Amazon nothing. Amazon was to build their headquarters with union jobs and pay the city and state $27 billion in revenues. The city, through existing as-of-right tax credits, and the state through Excelsior Tax credits - a program approved by the same legislators railing against it - would provide up to $3 billion in tax relief, IF Amazon created the 25,000-40,000 jobs and thus generated $27 billion in revenue. You don't need to be the State's Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner."

"Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental ignorance of basic math by a group of elected officials. The city and state 'gave' Amazon nothing. Amazon was to build their headquarters with union jobs and pay the city and state $27 billion in revenues. The city, through existing as-of-right tax credits, and the state through Excelsior Tax credits - a program approved by the same legislators railing against it - would provide up to $3 billion in tax relief, IF Amazon created the 25,000-40,000 jobs and thus generated $27 billion in revenue. You don't need to be the State's Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner."

> 1 - Medium risk medium reward opportunities exist (a currently unprofitable but otherwise promising startup addressing a 25m niche can't get bank debt or venture funding)

I think one of the main arguments in favor of a bimodal distribution of VC and Bank (or high and low risk) funding is that if you are in that middle "medium risk medium reward" zone it can be really difficult to defend your position for any stretch of time. You will be attacked from both bigger players to whom you've proven a market, and smaller players who are willing to take bigger risks to see if they can blow that market up (or bite off a smaller piece of it).

In order to maintain a medium risk medium reward business you need something approaching a monopoly, but also you need the market in which you have a monopoly to be growing and not attracting new players. Maybe some of these exist, but they are very rare and I suspect identifying them is not significantly easier than identifying startups with high growth potential.

So I think skrebbel's question is pretty fair, though I suspect OP has heard it a lot. I would predict that this fund passes on WAY more deals than even a standard VC fund, and will be required to determine the risk of the investment even more effectively. That's a tough problem, and I do really wish them luck!

Find a study that actually disambiguates between the effects of sugar and of caloric surplus. Hint: you wont. It doesn't exist. What we get is study after study that shows that if you put people (or rats) in front of a buffet of chicken breast and a buffet of cake the people (or rats) in front of the buffet of cake eat more.

It turns out the meaningful question in nutrition is how you get people to comply to a calorically balanced diet when they are depressed and in front of a buffet of both chicken breast and cake, not which is the best one. This has as much to do with social science (and psychology and everything else) as it does biology. In fact, the metabolic part is the easy part: we basically know how that works as well as we need to fix the problem: eat fewer calories.

Now how do you convince 150 million Americans using food as an emotional outlet to stop doing that? Especially when close to 100% of the population that is not experiencing food scarcity does this to some extent, some just worse than others.

It's a lot more complicated than explaining to them that eating too much is bad and that a diet high in sugar is more likely to cause them to do that. It's like telling heroin addicts that opioids lower their life expectancy and expecting them to then stop using heroin. This problem is existential.

> If I search my address, it puts a pin on the map exactly where my address is. I can then look for addresses that are very close to the pin. As far as I know, those locations are pretty accurate.

In my experience they are often off by multiple blocks. YMMV.

> If you don't include a date in your search, I'm not sure why availability would be an issue. If it's no longer on AirBnB, then I'm not really sure what the problem is.

One problem is, for instance, if you are a landlord/neighbor who is trying to prove that your tenant/neighbor broke the lease agreement.

> Can you add and remove listings from the search, while still keeping your ratings?

Yes.

Beyond all of this, it's a somewhat laborious process even if it did fully work the way you described, and for a landlord who owns many properties monitoring could be a significant expense. This is the definition of a negative externality.

Yep, I agree with a lot of your criticisms, but there are a lot of legitimate reasons to not want to live next to a hotel (or farm animals) that aren't about keeping poor people down.

I agree with you that I think we need to be careful about asking corporations to be legislative authorities. I'd say this is very similar to the Backpage scandal in which employees were beyond reasonably turning a blind eye to very illegal, preventable behavior happening on their platform. Why not just allow people to involve the authorities in that situation as well?

What I'm proposing seems extremely reasonable considering AirBnB is, at least in NYC and other major metro areas, primarily used for breaking the law.

Here's the thing I think most people are missing: almost every state, city, municipality etc. in existing has laws against short term rentals. The reason for this is very clear because the issues have already been considered at the civic level. There's no reason to think that just because a platform emerged that makes this illegal behavior easier that the behavior has changed. Zoning exists for a reason. People don't want short term rentals. As far as I can tell the vast majority of AirBnB's business is illegal.

This is different from YouTube in that there is a very large legitimate use for YouTube. There is a legitimate use for AirBnB, it's just not $38B large. Asking them to make enforcement easier for externalities seems like a very reasonable alternative to heavy handed government regulation (ie: requiring short term rentals to be registered with cities, which is what cities are doing now to respond to AirBnB's lack of self-policing).

No. You can't search for exact addresses, it will just show you available listings in the area. In my area, New York City, when I search my address I get hundreds of results. Beyond this there is the additional complicating factor of current availability. If it's only on AirBnB occasionally, no longer on AirBnB, or booked, it wouldn't appear using this method.

Well, real estate is a very close proxy for "this place is worth living" which is a very close proxy for absolute population which isn't a direct proxy but is certainly a deeply contributing factor to all around economic growth/success. So while there are tons of policies we can tweak, and I'm sure there are horrible ones that create artificial bubbles, it's not really fully divorceable for the economy.

Maybe, but AirBnB has also been held up as a positive story of tenacity and disruption in this community as well. It's probably gone on so long it's become a parody of itself, but people keep writing these articles because people keep reading them.

For the same reason we drag YouTube into copyright complaints. You're correct in identifying that there needs to be some kind of fair balance here, but AirBnB makes a lot of business facilitating illegal transactions. I don't really think there are apartments in New York City in which running AirBnB is legal, for instance, and yet NYC is one of their biggest markets. But yes, they also have legitimate, legal business. The trick is it is very difficult for landlords to monitor their properties for this kind of behavior, and also difficult to enforce action against it (getting proof can be extremely difficult, for instance).

Because much of AirBnB's business is flat out illegal due to zoning, property laws, HoAs and leases, I think requiring them to provide a better system for accepting accountability for the negative externalities they create is reasonable.

> I don't really want to live in a world where anyone on the internet can destroy my income via anonymous complaint.

That's not at all what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting an easy way for landlords and others to determine if a property they own or one near them is being listed on AirBnB. After that there are a ton of avenues for justice one could take, and it would probably include, along with government/HoA response, a procedure for forcing AirBnB to take down the listing given proof of ownership or something, similar to DMCA, but this is not an unsolvable problem by any means. It's one AirBnB is choosing not to solve because it would destroy their business.

I'm pretty sick of celebrating AirBnB. They create so many classic externalities problems and are doing basically nothing to address them despite simple solutions being available, like allowing people to look up addresses and file complaints without being a customer (ie: neighbors of AirBnB owners that are adversely affected). It's obvious why they don't do this: they know there are tons of illegal listings that would immediately be identified and pulled down, and they know that's a significant amount of their business.

This doesn't even begin to address the legalities of subleasing, the negative real estate market effects for residents, etc. all of which AirBnB chooses to paper over with ads about how they are helping poor people get additional sources of income.

We should be careful trusting them in having a significant role in our real estate system. As a company they behave irrationally and their values, outside of growth at all costs, are shallow, and as a country real estate provides a huge amount of our economic backbone. We're all still really mad at the bankers about the last economic recession, do we want to blame the next one on the tech companies?

AirBnB: fix your existing marketplace and show that you can run a proper, legal business before expanding.

TLDR: Different kinds of wheat in the flour (softer, with less gluten). The soft wheat flour is sort of hard to get if you aren't a commercial baker, but you can get it on Amazon, although it's $10 instead of $2.50 like regular flour.

Brain Drain.

The problem with mob grazing (and really any kind of similar system) is that you cannot support nearly as many animals per sq ft. in comparison to more industrialized farming.

Salatin's solution is to shift a major portion of the work force/economy into making sustainable food. It sounds amazing from a utopian standpoint but is a total fantasy.

This is HN, the one place you don't need to apologize for pedantry. Right: I meant carbon dioxide. Made the edit :)

> So the irony is that we could grow more beef and pull carbon out of the air at the same time, only if we cared.

I want this desperately to be true as someone who loves meat but everything I've read tells me it's not. There is definitely a nice symbiotic relationship that exists between cows grazing and grasslands but it is significantly more expensive to raise animals this way, and you can raise significantly fewer of them per sq ft.

The main issue with cows is methane, not carbon (edit: carbon dioxide*), anyway.

> The key part is you have to have a massive dataset of historical information.

Why is this historical information not susceptible to the exact same issues today's news is?

Yikes, slow down dude. I was posting it to point out that this is blatantly an advertisement for RtR, and that I don't want to read that kind of stuff on HN, not because I'm trying to blow your mind with this massively insightful analysis.

The suit is back!

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

This time it's rentable.

> That is anathema to what FDR did.

What happens if you reconsider the New Deal from the perspective that the Roosevelt family benefited hugely from increased government power?

> Unlike most of his class, he was cognizant of the fact that if the government could not organize an effective solution to such a deep crisis, the people would eventually rise up and replace it with one that could.

Would this have been such a bad thing?

Ah, I owe you an apology then. I was super confused when I saw it on the list, and found a bunch of stuff related to Slim Fast and sibutramine but I guess I didn't read it close enough. Thanks for the clarification.