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Amazon Picks 20 Finalists For 'HQ2' Second Headquarters Location (nbcnews.com)
bigpat writes: Amazon took in hundreds of proposals and narrowed it down to twenty places for its "second" headquarters, with up to 50,000 new jobs promised in the next 15 years and millions of square feet of office and research space. The cities include: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Montgomery County, Maryland, Nashville, Newark, NJ, New York City, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Toronto and Washington D.C. Amazon said that it will now work with the candidate locations to examine their proposals more closely and request additional information to "evaluate the feasibility of a future partnership that can accommodate our hiring plans as well as benefit our employees and the local community." The company said it would make its decision later in 2018.
I don't understand why anyone would want their city to win this. Your taxes will go up to bring in Amazon, and that gets you... what?
The way the EU has structured things, with incentives for relocation being illegal, seems far superior.
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Kinda jumping the gun on Texas there. Still a few more years before that flips.
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"Seattle Hundreds," this is going to be a disaster. I've lived in Austin, near Atlanta, Denver, and LA. The people in those cities are lazy and won't work much over sixty. I've also done extended contract work in Alexandria, VA, Nashville, and Baltimore. They worked even fewer hours.
I wonder why? You red-state folks seem to [sic] warm and welcoming...
In my experience, the people you meet in most red states are wildly more affable, warm, friendly, and polite than most you'll meet in the increasingly effete, shrill, divisive, identity-politics-obsessed wastelands of political-correctness-paralyzed lands of blue. Your comments is a sure sign that you never get out of your holier-than-thou bubble and echo chamber. Give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised that the people you hate are actually a lot nicer than the people you feel you're supposed to like because they vote the way you do.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
which are much better systems of Democracy. Our system was built from the ground up to protect the interests of the wealthy (especially land owners, but mostly because at the time being wealthy meant owning lots of land). We're not really a democracy. We've got dozens and dozens of systems in place to make it so we look like one but at the end of the day the laws don't reflect popular opinion. Heck, our head of State lost the popular vote by 3 _million_.... And that's just one example. There's our Senate, built from the ground up as a buffer between the population and wealthy land and slave owners. There's Gerrymandering. There's all manner of flavors of voter suppression. I could go on but the depressions making me want to stop...
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the reason is bribes, which are essentially legal here in the form of Political Action Committees, campaign donations and jobs handed out after completion of a term in office. If we were sane we'd regulate PACs, only let people donate to candidates they can vote for and even then limit the amounts and give anyone who served a significant public office a pension for life and require them to retired without owning stock.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Giving this to Chicago allows the politicians to claim their reckless spending is working (it isn't), and it means that the sales taxes we pay on items purchased from Amazon go from the low "state rate" to the outrageous Chicago/Cook County rates.
. . . I'm a little disappointed that they are choosing a city for their new HQ.
I would have preferred something more obscenely, conspicuously techie, like on a floating barge in the middle of the Pacific Bermuda Triangle. Or at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft, housing long term nuclear particle detection experiment.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Native Detroiter here, and I'm glad we didn't make the cut. At first I was somewhat excited that we might possibly land the second HQ (our biggest strength was being close to Canada, make of that what you will), but the more I read about what cities who try and land these mega factories or HQs have to give up in return the more I thought it was a bad idea. Not only do you have to bend over backwards in tax breaks, but the jobs created never make up for what had to be given up. It's true that Amazon is far less likely to close up shop in 20 years than say the FoxConn factory that WI sold their souls for, but I honestly don't think the jobs brought in would have covered the additional costs. I also don't think Amazon would have been a good 'cultural fit' with the area. My money is on Austin or possibly Denver as the ultimate winners.
but then walmart would develop their own mine shafts and there would be a min shaft gap
It brings in jobs, and the workers pay taxes. At least that's the theory.
As someone who pays state income and sales taxes, I assure you it is no theory.
Even if you give a company a lot of tax breaks there is by necessity a TON of revenue brought to a region that has any large company. It's not just the workers, but all of the support that goes into a large office - construction, office supplies, cleaning, etc.
On top of that a few larger businesses generally attract other businesses to the region as well. It has a halo effect when a large company someplace well enough to set up a large office there,
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is the same, lame argument that is used by politicians who want to build stadiums for their high-net-worth donors.
Why did Ottawa even apply? The city doesn't even respect the criteria set by Amazon.
Amazon said that it will now work with the candidate locations to examine their proposals more closely and request additional information to "evaluate
In other words, it will pitch them against each other in a race to the bottom for tax breaks and other "incentives".
It disgusts me so much when countries or counties think they are in a competition against each other. That mindset is what created 0.01% tax havens. There is just something the wrong way around when governments compete to please a corporation.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Please please please keep them out of Los Angeles! We already don't have housing for the people that live here.
Only I can judge you.
My money's on one of these: Austin, Boston, Denver, New York City, Northern Virginia, Toronto, Washington D.C.
Seems like anyone who owned property pre-Amazon would benefit. You pay more in property tax as the value goes up, but it's also worth more. Also anyone working in tech or engineering prior to Amazon's arrival.
By your logic, Seattle would benefit if every employer left town whose "product" is not directly tied to Seattle residents and whose workforce is disproportionately high-income. So, like, Detroit.
Ottawa itself doesn't have the population but with the city across the river, Gatineau, it passes the threshold. The two cities are known as the National Capital Region. If the Ottawa River wasn't the boundary between the provinces of Ontario and Quebec the two cities would probably be one city. Many people in one city work and live in the other. Ottawa also has a history of high-tech businesses. Many business are smaller now but Nortel and JDS Uniphase used to have a big presence in the city so we can handle large high-tech companies.
Cities are blue, even in Texas. Mainly because that's where the brown people live. Suburbs are red. Slightly less red than the hinterlands because the populace is generally more educated, but still deeply red.
Your comments is a sure sign that you never get out of your holier-than-thou bubble and echo chamber. Give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised that the people you hate are actually a lot nicer than the people you feel you're supposed to like because they vote the way you do.
And that's how you got Trump. We voted for him because of people like you.
Another person who doesn't get out much.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As someone who grew up in small towns amongst different red-states, my experience has been that the politeness is because of societal pressure, not any desire from the people in general to be courteous. You greet every person and wave and say thanks not because you know the person or are happy to see them or appreciate something they did, but because it's the expectation. This is how you get phrases like "Bless your heart".
It's also my experience that such politeness tends to fall away when you go into the denser cities even within red states.
From what I've learned about external views of America, this "affable" mannerism is just a more pronounced form of general American politeness (again, as a nurtured habit not actual good will.) So in America we'll open conversations with strangers using the line "How are you today?" to which the expected reply is something brief like "Good" or "I've been better" and anything longer is often seen as ingratiating. I have heard first-hand accounts about how this greeting has confused people in other countries.
I agree with people needing to get out of their bubble, though.
I was expecting to see Luxembourg, Monaco, Gibraltar, Nicosia, The Nobodyknowswheretheyare Islands ...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As someone who pays state income and sales taxes, I assure you it is no theory.
As someone who also pays state income and sales taxes and municipal property taxes I assure you the theory barely holds up in actual practice.
For example, Wisconsin just gave Foxconn $4.5B in incentives to build a plant that will be largely lights-out - which means its almost fully automated with a minium support staff on hand just to keep the automation running. And on top of that, they gave foxconn special legal status that lets them unconstitutionally bypass most local courts.
If these 20 cities were smart, their mayors would ban together and make a "no incentives" pact. Let Amazon come to them, instead of selling out their citizens for 30 pieces of silver.
No doubt the set of white people willing to live and work in an urban environment where there are brown people is self-selected to skew blue. But having a much higher concentration of non-white voters who skew blue doesn't hurt either. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this map, but, if accurate, then the only city in Texas where the whites voted Blue was Austin. Dallas and Houston, then, which went to Clinton, must have done so because of the brown vote.
They can't really offer tax breaks, Trump would go ballistic if Amazon chose a city outside of the USA and the income taxes are higher. Health care costs would be a lot lower and corporate tax is slightly lower that doesn't make up for the lack of other breaks and the higher income tax on employees. Plus it would be pretty brave of Amazon to choose a city outside of the USA and a real slap at Trump.
than most you'll meet in the increasingly effete, shrill, divisive, identity-politics-obsessed wastelands of political-correctness-paralyzed lands of blue
That may be, but apparently from your comment, you red state people also partake in the same generalizations about entire geographic regions of the US just like you think those awful blue state people do. So I guess we are at an impasse.
Give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised that the people you hate are actually a lot nicer than the people you feel you're supposed to like because they vote the way you do.
Then why do they keep electing a preponderence of dickheads to office ?
Hint. Trying to convince people how nice you are by being a holier-than-thou asshole about it doesn't work. You know, just like it didn't work for the person your objecting whose comments you didn't think were very nice.
And BTW shrill yelling and screaming about liberals was the original shrill divisive politics that originated in the red states.
Holy pot-kettle batman !
Absolute statements are never true
See? This is the sort of ignorant, political cheap shot the Left loves so much. They don't need to actually visit these places and talk to the people, they can just say things that they KNOW are true because they read it on the media. It's not going to get any better until the Left decides it has compassion for the little people, and I don't see that happening. It's just too satisfying to speak truth to the powerless.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In my experience, the people you meet in most red states are wildly more affable, warm, friendly, and polite than most you'll meet in the increasingly effete, shrill, divisive, identity-politics-obsessed wastelands of political-correctness-paralyzed lands of blue.
...as long as your skin is the same color as theirs.
It is interesting that you think that. My sister is very left wing. A few years ago she moved to Portland, Oregon, at least partly because it is such a left wing city. She was shocked to learn how racist the city is. I had to bite my tongue when she made that comment over a family dinner when she came home to visit, because anyone who studies the history of the progressive movement knows how racist it has always been.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I wonder why? You red-state folks seem to [sic] warm and welcoming...
In my experience, the people you meet in most red states are wildly more affable, warm, friendly, and polite than most you'll meet in the increasingly effete, shrill, divisive, identity-politics-obsessed wastelands of political-correctness-paralyzed lands of blue.
As long as you're not black, or Asian, or suspected Liberal, or foreign, or have a funny accent or use words with more than 2 syllables.
As a foreigner, the warmest welcome's I've received have been from the least conservative cities and states. The worst people I've met are from dyed in the wool red state. I've met a few nice Texans... mostly from the Houston area but for every one of those I've met I've half a dozen complete wankers. Going through from Jacksonville to NOLA for work last year (with a truck of very valuable demo merchandise from the UK) we were treated with utter contempt from the moment we left Jacksonville to the moment we reached New Orleans because we had funny British (or in my case, Australian... not that they could tell the difference) accents. Once in NOLA we received some famous southern hospitality, up until then we only got infamous southern hostility.
Hell, a black Londoner, who's family had been Londoners since before your country even existed was told to "go back to Africa, damn ni**er". It was a shock because to us he wasn't a black Londoner... to us he was just a Londoner. We here in the Evil UK just dont notice shit like that any more.
And it's not like the logo of our company wasn't emblazoned on our lorries or jackets... its just that no-one there knew who this world famous vehicle manufacturer was (if they had of asked, they could have seen the supercars in the trucks).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
that fear of non-whites which is at the core of the GOP
Oh, please. If you really think that fear of non-whites is the core of what it means to not agree with Democrats on who should hold office and why, then you need to spend perhaps one or two minutes a day actually talking to people who aren't locked up on the Democrat plantation.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I always love it when breathlessly race-fetishizing lefties lecture people about not being colorblind. Hilarious.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Pay for it yourself Amazon! Bunch of free loading hippies, always wanting free stuff...funny how Capitalism requires Socialism (government subsidies) to work...
In my experience, the fact that I don't go to church turns that affable, warm, friendly and polite welcome into icy stares and shunning.
(They find out about my atheism because the 2nd or 3rd question upon meeting a new arrival is "What church do you go to?")
A lot of comments here seem to be missing one important angle: Recruiting.
Your city could be quite lovely. But if nearby universities aren't pumping out the CS and IT graduates Amazon wants to hire for this HQ, and at a rate such that Amazon can get some for cheap, then that's going to put it lower on the list.
It's amusing to me how conservatives ascribe every foible of their own to "blue state liberals". I live in a red state, near a blue city. I see first hand the hateful and divisive conservatives values.
Sure, you can blend in and pretend your the same, but as soon as you challenge their assumptions or question the groupthink, the knives come out.
And let's not pretend that red statists aren't masters at contorting their opinions and speech to mask the true intents behind their policies. This is probably the root of their hatred for "politically correct" speech.
Cheap storage VM.
When a majority of people are more liberal and accepting, those who are not don't just disappear. The often dig in their heels, as evinced by our national dialogues.
Cheap storage VM.
No shit. I live in Texas, therefore I'm privy to many Republicans' views. By far the most worrying thing for them is the government taking the money they've earned and giving it to others they feel are less deserving of it.
I don't think it's fair that this modded flame bait. There are many people who are warm, friendly, and polite who hold loathsome world views enabled by shocking amounts of cognitive dissonance. It's not hard at all to like individuals and hate groups. I've seen plenty of people disparage entire ethic groups even while claiming to have "friends" in the group. Because they are "warm, friendly, and polite" they may never tell that person that they actually think quite poorly of the group. And they genuinely like the *individual*. They accomplish this by declaring the individual to be an *exception* to the general rule. i.e. "I like William. He's black, but he's not like most black people. But I would never tell William that I don't like black people." I have nothing against being polite or warm Just saying that they aren't the most important human traits.
Prediction, Toronto wins. It is the only non-US option listed, and Jeff Bezos gets to stick it to Donald Trump.
Trump wants Amazon to pay more taxes, pay more to use the US Mail service, accuses Amazon of being a monopoly, and has been highly critical of the Washington Post to which Bezos owns.
Moving the Amazon HQ to Toronto not only thumbs the nose to Trump, but also sends a strong political message.
Of course at the same time, at this scale, if Trump were to extend the olive branch and shuts the heck up about all those things above, Bezos being a businessman might decide to locate the HQ in some red state to which Trump can take credit for creating jobs etc... I'd say the likelihood of that happening is such that the HQ is probably going to be located in Toronto by the end of it.
I'd have put Waterloo on the list, they've got a bit of a tech hub going there fed by University of Waterloo CS students, and literally down the street is Wilfred Laurier University turning out decent business grads. Cost of living for employees is significantly lower, and there's plenty of room for building as there's a lot of 'country' more or less immediately outside the already built-up areas.
It's only an hour away from Pearson Airport (which... oddly enough, is sometimes less driving time than it takes to get to downtown Toronto), and Waterloo has a regional airport that could handle smaller aircraft directly if you want American execs to fly in. There's talk of putting in a high-speed rail corridor to Toronto by 2025, too.
[And just prior to hitting 'submit', I see that the 'Toronto' proposal somehow includes Waterloo, and Waterloo doesn't expect to actually get it because of Trump]
However, the city council here has zero interest in dealing with auto traffic, other than adding speed bumps to roads. There hasn't been a single road widening or improvement since 1995 on the major highways here, other than the state's toll roads.
San Antonio is the same way. It's amazing how many times they shut down 1604 then reopen it a year later with the same number of lanes. Same with all the city roads. That, or they add a lane that doesn't even make it to the next exit.
They tried to swtich us to toll roads but the city/state lost that fight. I feel like they are deliberately trying to make things worse hoping that we will beg for the toll roads.
That explanation would make sense except the examples of racism she gave were from the left wing political establishment of the city...you know those supposedly "more liberal and accepting" people who implement the policies so beloved by the left.
My sister explicitly stated that her experience is that the majority in Portland are racist.
It should come as no surprise that progressives are racist. They always have been. The KKK was founded as the militant arm of the Democratic Party. The founder of Planned Parenthood was a eugenicist who spoke at KKK rallies and Planned Parenthood today has more clinics in minority neighborhoods than not. Woodrow Wilson resegregated the U.S. government and screened the movie "The Birth of a Nation" (the 1915 one) in the White House.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The way you reacted maked me think you live in a blue state and are one of them.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
...Stadiums is listed as one of the plural forms of Stadium in my "compact" OED, New Edition, 1991.
Indiana is not blue and I hope they don't choose Indianapolis because I don't want the influx of "progressives" that it would bring and the resulting Californication.
Give us some post civil rights era examples. You do realize that's what imploded the GOP. They embraced the racists fleeing from the Democratic party.
My statement still stands. Nasty people are much louder about their hate and drown out other voices, cut urban areas can certainly be racist and espouse racist policies. Our job is to root them out and expose them to the light so they shrivel up and die.
Cheap storage VM.
I grew up next to Dallas. Amazon correctly chose to drop them, and the remaining choice in Texas is the correct one.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Portland is very liberal, but it is also very white. This means you can be loudly racist and mostly get away with it because the people around you, while they might be disgusted, probably won't do anything to you. But if you act like that in a mixed race crowd you are more likely to have someone call you out on it or kick the crap out of you. This doesn't mean the percentage of racists is higher in northern, mostly white cities, or that liberals necessarily trend more racist, it just means racists are emboldened when they look around and see only people who look like them.
Seriously. Buy a huge chunk of Detroit, put up a village ( Ala University of Southern California) and move in.
Did you notice that Planned Parenthood has more clinics in minority neighborhoods than anywhere else? You know, the organization which was founded by a woman who spoke at KKK rallies performs a disproportionate number of its abortions on black women and I am supposed to think that is not because of race?
Perhaps you have not heard about Senator Byrd? The KKK Senator?
Perhaps you are unaware that it was Senator Ted Kennedy who sponsored the Immigration Act of 1965 which set up an immigration system which suppresses wages for African-Americans?
Or, just look at Portland, one of the most leftwing and most racist cities in the United States.
Or look at the results of Democratic policies in many of urban centers.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Then why do I only see this racism among progressives?
It is especially hard to buy your explanation when you look into the history of progressivism. This article discusses how progressives thought it pointless to give African-Americans academic training: https://www.edweek.org/ew/arti... Most of the key thinkers who laid the foundation for modern, progressive thought on education are listed as supporting this effort.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Leave town. If enough do, they'll have to pay more.
Granted. Urban white populations in Texas (and presumably other red states) are not "deeply red". Replace that with "somewhat red" or possibly "purple, leaning towards red".
How am I ignoring the facts? The numbers you cited for Dallas County indicate white residents voted exactly as I described: "somewhat red" or "purple, leaning toward red". White people, in general, skew red. The ones that live in cities less so, but "red" still outweighs "blue" most places, even if only slightly. The reason you get cities like Dallas, Houston, and Austin going blue in deeply red Texas is a combination of 1. brown people, who are overwhelmingly blue, and 2. white people being only 60/40 red/blue instead of 80/20 like they are in rural settings.
This is the invitation for all these locales to submit their best and final offers. I'm guessing Bezos already has the spot picked out, but just wants to make sure he's gotten the sweetest deal they can be induced to cough up.
Despite the politicians' and bureaucrats' best efforts, Missourians will not be blessed with the costs of providing government services to Amazon while getting little or no tax money from Amazon to cover them.
Sometimes, ineffectual pols and red tapers are just what we need.
From all of us in the vicinities of St. Louis and Kansas City, thank you, thank you, thank you.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.