Would the bulk of the taxes paid by Amazon be paid back? The article said that Amazon would get $3 billion in existing credits (i.e. not deal specific, just business tax credits) and would be paying ~$27 billion. Seems like a steal for NY.
If the basic premise here is that any company should get a tax break if they are capable of hiring enough workers whose tax payments would exceed their employer's tax payments, all you're doing is just shifting the tax burden onto the workers in the form of regressive income, sales, and property taxes.
You assume there is no economy of scale for government spending. For example, building a road to serve 10 million people may be cheaper per capita than a road for 1 million people. Same on the revenue side: doing a single large deal for $27B is probably cheaper than doing a thousand deals for $27M.
For there to be an actual increase in tax revenue for the state via income tax, those workers would have to be receiving higher salaries than they would have otherwise, would they not? Or emigrating from somewhere else, which they would be unlikely to do if they are not receiving an increase in compensation.
I agree with the direction of your idea but I don’t think it applies here. Invasive species are a major cause of loss of biodiversity. Typically, habitats change over a much larger timescale. If you introduce a species that’s suited for a habitat and it has no natural predators, you’re going to end up losing a lot of biodiversity as a result. Why is biodiversity important? Biodiversity gives us new opportunities for research (lots of new medical discoveries come from biodiversity), it allows an ecosystem to adapt to pressure (imagine if there’s a deadly new avian flu and you have 10 vs 100 bird species in an area, it’s a lot less likely that all birds will be wiped out in the second scenario as there’s more varied adaptations in that system that might allow the birds to survive). Change is of course natural for all ecosystems but as you lose biodiversity from things like invasive species, you lose the factors that allow an ecosystem to surmount potential extinction (extirpation?) events.
If you apply this same logic to humans, don’t you wind up with a xenophobic perspective? This seems like an alt-right manifesto but applied to animals not humans.
FWIW, I took this class in person and the subsequent course that moved to Pandas [1]. There was definitely a learning curve to pick up the intricacies of the Pandas module but DS8 allowed me to pick up both the programming skills (specifically Python skills) and data science necessary without having much experience in either prior. I would recommend you review this course only if you don’t know anything about both programming and DS, otherwise just jump to DS100 if you have the requisite programming knowledge in Python.
