We rarely agree with socialist Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she’s right to call billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for Amazon “extremely concerning.” These handouts to one of the richest companies in the history of the world, with an essentially zero cost of capital, is crony capitalism at its worst.
.. New York is even more generous, with starting subsidies of $1.525 billion. As Amazon put it on its website, this works out to $48,000 per job. Apparently bodega owners in Brooklyn are supposed to be happy about subsidizing a third of the salaries of hipster techies.
.. New York City is kicking in its own subsidies, though its biggest concession was to waive local control over city land—a privilege other businesses don’t get.
.. Congress created opportunity zones to reinvigorate neighborhoods that have a hard time attracting private investment. But the danger is that Uncle Sam might subsidize investments that would have been made anyway. Long Island City is a classic example as it’s already been undergoing an investment boom.
.. The worst actors here are the politicians who pose as job creators but are essentially job buyers. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo once famously said he’d change his name to Amazon Cuomo if the company located in New York, but he didn’t need to pay such a Queens ransom. Google and other companies have created thousands of jobs in New York without similar subsidies, and Amazon might well have done the same given the city’s intellectual capital.
.. The Governor also says he had to offer subsidies to compete against states that don’t have an income tax, though that admission underscores the state’s lack of tax competitiveness. Mr. Cuomo taxes New Yorkers at confiscatory levels, giving himself more money to spend. Then he turns around and takes credit for sparing powerful interests from those taxes.
The First Rule of Microsoft Excel—Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
At the same time, it has complicated the lives of the office Excel Guy or Gal, the virtuosos whose superior skills at writing formula leave them fighting an endless battle against the circular references, merged cells and mangled macros left behind by their less savvy peers.
.. “If someone tells you that they ‘just have a few Excel sheets’ that they want help with, run the other way,” tweeted 32-year-old statistician Andrew Althouse... “Let’s just say that was a poor use of time,” he said. He advises altruistic Excel mavens to “figure out what you’re getting into” before offering to lend a hand... As an Excel expert, “you become indispensable, and that’s a double-edged sword,” Mr. McIllece said.
Seth Godin: Life, the Internet, and Everything
I’m thrilled that almost everyone I meet has no idea who I am and what I do. Because I don’t want lots of people showing up and saying, “I read this, I read this, I read this. Can I have your autograph?” That’s not the point. The point is, will someone come up to me and say, based on what I learned from you I taught 10 other people to do this, and we made something that mattered.
.. Whereas, the other way to think about it is, how few people can I influence and still be able to do this tomorrow? Because if we can influence just enough people to keep getting the privilege to do it, then tomorrow there’ll be even more people. Because we’re doing something genuine that connects, as opposed to doing something fake that’s entertainment.
.. Oprah Winfrey problem, which is that every writer who wanted to make an impact 15 years ago dreamed that Oprah would pick them.
In a media-saturated world, we want to get picked. Like you, every day people show up to me and say, “pick me, put me on your blog.” If you would just talk about me, then my art will reach everyone I want to reach. But if we distinguish that from Darwin, the first lizard that crawled out of the mud and started walking on legs didn’t say to the media, “please pick me so that more for walking lizards could come along.” That’s not the way it worked; it’s bottom-up. So what I say to people is, I’m not in charge of what’s good. I don’t get to pick what’s a purple cow, what’s remarkable — anything. The world is, the bottom is, everybody, I’m on the bottom too, everyone is. So tell 10 people. There are 10 people who trust you enough to listen. And if you tell your thing to 10 people, if you send your e-book to 10 people, if you do your sermon to 10 people, or show your product to 10 people and none of them want to tell their friends, and none of them are changed — then you failed. You didn’t really understand what was good. But if some of them tell their friends, then they’ll tell their friends, and that’s how ideas spread. It’s this 10 at a time — 10 by 10 by 10. How do you put an idea in the world that resonates enough with people if they trust you enough to hear it. Then it can go to the next step and the next step.
.. I don’t have employees, so that way I don’t have meetings. I don’t spend time on Facebook and Twitter because that would be a huge suck of my time, and I could deny that I was wasting time, because everyone does it. The challenge for me with technology is this leveraging me in a way that makes me uncomfortable — that puts me in a spot where I have to dig deeper to do the work that I’ll be proud of. If that’s what it does, that’s what I want.
MS. TIPPETT: So your answer, if it’s harder, what did you say? If it’s challenging…
MR. GODIN: Right. If the leverage makes it harder for me to do that thing I’m defining as art, then I want to do it. The Kickstarter project I did — I did it because it was interesting, not because it was a financially important thing.
MS. TIPPETT: To raise the money for The Icarus Deception?
MR. GODIN: Right. But it wasn’t to raise money; it was to raise a tribe, to get 4,500 people to say, “we haven’t read it yet, but we trust you, go write it.”
.. Now those are pretty high stakes. And it meant I didn’t have any excuses left. I couldn’t say, well my editor wouldn’t let me do it, or my publisher wouldn’t let me do it because they weren’t a factor. It meant that these people trusted me and gave me a tool that could bring it straight to them. That raises the stakes.
.. the opportunity for each of us to be artists is that it’s precisely when you are doing something that no one has done before that you are not going to get the loudest applause, that you will not get picked. And that then requires us to develop some different kinds of internal resources. Right? I mean, how do we internally have faith in what we care about?
New York Times: Tech Stack Interview
This is the fourth episode of Stack Stories, sponsored by STRV. Hosted by Yonas, Founder & CEO, StackShare and featuring special guests Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times and James Cunningham, Ops Lead at Sentry. Follow us on SoundCloud or subscribe via iTunes.
.. The New York Times is one of the largest publications in the world with 150 million monthly uniques on their own site and 2-3x that number on third-party platforms like Facebook.
.. In the few years he’s been there, Nick has brought the paper from managing their own data centers and using a LAMP stack, to the “modern age” – using React and GraphQL and migrating to Google Cloud.
Listen to the full interview or read the lightly edited transcript below: