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Amazon's beauty contest did seem completely counterintuitive to me. People with skin in the game are always in the know of things. Even if Amazon had not massiv
by Karishma1234 8y ago
Amazon's beauty contest did seem completely counterintuitive to me. People with skin in the game are always in the know of things. Even if Amazon had not massively advertised its move cities and states would have worked hard to bring them to their shores. I did not understand why ordinary public had to be drawn into it.
Your average joe is always going to oppose a disruption in his otherwise mundane and lazy life.
Apple's strategy is much smarter let the cities secretly do a peacock dance, cut some real under the table secret tax deals and move somewhere else.
- eldavido 8y agoI really don't understand why there's this huge presumption of ill will toward Amazon. HQ2 is a project that will involve hundreds of thousands/millions of people when you add up the employees, contractors who will build it, local politicians/electorate, and everyone else. There's just no way to keep something that big secret. It seems easier to just come clean, announce to the world what you're doing, and be open about it. Plus something of this magnitude is going to require political support so the proposal is as much an appeal to the local electorate as anything else. I, for one, think it would be great if tech jobs spread out across the US.
- advisedwang 8y agoThe complaint isn't that Amazon is expanding into other locations. The complaint is that Amazon is using this to play cities off against each other. It's a race for the bottom designed to maximize gain for Amazon at the cost of the commons.
- Karishma1234 8y agoSorry if I came across as Anti-Amazon. In fact I am very pro-Amazon and I love the fact that Amazon is making cities battle it out. A future where city mayors and state governors have to actively fight for investment and when they fail they are seen as incompetent bozos would be good for democracy and people. Amazon has my full support for their move to pit city against city. My point was that not dragging ordinary people into this might have helped Amazon get a better deal. Why should general public know what deals these mayors and governors are cutting ? (In Amazon's perspective, it is good for democracy if the fight is in open)
- datamingle 8y agoMarketing, that is how it works.
- Shivetya 8y agoI don't want cities to be able to negotiate "under the table" or without public oversight at all. Encouraging this sort of antics is corruption of the system and many large cities already have that in abundance. Apple's system is only smarter if you think defrauding the public is good business.
- briandear 8y agoDefrauding? That’s ridiculous.
- Silfen 8y agoI wouldn't use the word "defrauding," but there is a serious principal-agent problem. The localities that attract an Amazon or an Apple are likely to have winner's curse. That is, the highest bid (in terms of tax breaks and other concessions) for the new headquarters is likely to be from a place that incidentally overvalued the new HQ. The politicians usually know this, but don't care. They get a flashy, public "victory" to campaign on, even if the real value to the local economy is questionable.
- selectodude 8y agoI don't think any of these cities are actively handing Amazon money, just not taxing them. None of the cities on the list absolutely NEED amazon to survive, so they're not going to completely overextend themselves.
- s2g 8y agoChicago promised to give the taxes paid by employees back to Amazon. It's disgusting.
- notatoad 8y agoThe part of me that likes giving big companies the benefit of the doubt wonders if amazon is intentionally trying to show how corrupt the process is by having such a big public competition for their hq2 site. Even if they hadn't massively publicized it, the word would have gotten around to candidate cities and the same sort of bidding war would have occurred. So what benefit did amazon really accrue by creating a media frenzy around their hq2 bid process?
- s2g 8y agoIf the public balks at giving out a massive tax break to one of the worlds biggest companies, run by the (publicly) richest man, then Amazon can just point at the city next door and say "Well they promised us X, but we really like you guys so we wanted to go with you".