16 ms·

Behind Amazon’s HQ2 fiasco

149 points by pdog 7y ago

ryzvonusef 7y ago
> When Elon Musk secured $1.3 billion from Nevada in 2014 to open a gigantic battery plant, Jeff Bezos noticed. In meetings, the Amazon.com Inc. chief expressed envy for how Musk had pitted five Western states against one another in a bidding war for thousands of manufacturing jobs; he wondered why Amazon was okay with accepting comparatively trifling incentives. It was a theme Bezos returned to often, according to four people privy to his thinking. Then in 2017, an Amazon executive sent around a congratulatory email lauding his team for landing $40 million in government incentives to build a $1.5 billion air hub near Cincinnati. The paltry sum irked Bezos, the people say, and made him even more determined to try something new.
- luckydata 7y ago
  This is so 100% pure CEO thinking it hurts.
  - blibble 7y ago
    it could easily be a line out of Silicon Valley
  - me_me_me 7y ago
    It really feels to me comically childish behaviour. You are at the top of the world and yet you still need more marbles then anyone around you. But why would you care?
    - konschubert 7y ago
      Matt Levine in “Money Stuff” yesterday: One thing to say here is that the people who are Econ-101-rational tend to be the ones who make the most money. Every time you read about a workaholic billionaire and think “boy, not me, if I had a billion dollars I’d be on the beach,” the answer is always “well that’s why you don’t have a billion dollars.” If you have the characteristics that enable you to make a billion dollars, you don’t usually turn them off once you get there.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      How is it childish behavior? If I'm paying top dollar for something (in this case, lobbying governments for tax breaks), then if I don't get top results, I'm wasting money, which is disappointing.
    - ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
      You do not get that rich without the motivation to maximize profit. He could have sold Amazon in 1999 and not worked an hour since and still have millions. But that's generally not how these people operate.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjc50 7y ago
      It does make me wonder why people are worried about paperclip maximiser AIs when paperclip maximiser CEOs are out there and just as dangerous. The world is full of people who'd cut down every tree in the rainforest so long as they kept getting paid for it.
  - ksec 7y ago
    What would you do if others are gaining a competitive advantage from Government while you get nothing?
    - luckydata 7y ago
      CEO?
aguyfromnb 7y ago
So this is what we've devolved to: ultra-rich tech overlords competing with each other for government handouts. Things are fixing to get interesting if Bernie gets the nomination...
- Nicksil 7y ago
  >ultra-rich tech overlords competing with each other for government handouts. Mate, I reckon we met that goal long ago.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Tax incentives are different than handouts. At any rate, it's certainly nothing new and you could attribute this sort of thing as playing a part in the United States's economic success.
  - TheOperator 7y ago
    Tax incentives are where entrenched power get to take from the collective social good while not pitching in. How are they not handouts? It's like taking food from the lunch lady and paying half the price because your dad is rich. States fighting amongst themselves to give the most generous handouts doesn't ensure national success. Perhaps that makes sense in regards to national tax incentives but not state ones. Spinning getting divided and conquered and screwed into offering an unfair tax deal just to get Amazon in your state as the key to economic success is some trickle down shit. Why not have solidarity amongst states and tax Amazon fairly? Instead of having to shoot yourself in the foot economically years down the line when you have to adopt costly self-destructive measures to reverse the economic inequality you entrenched for no good actual reason?
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      I grew up in Florida. Disney transformed central Florida from a rural agricultural economy to a thriving tourist destination in the 60s thanks to economic incentives which included exemptions for state building codes. Yes, Walt Disney World has its own building codes. Almost 60 years later and Orlando is thriving. I think the fact that tax and regulatory incentives work so well should underscore the importance of keeping taxation and regulation to the minimum necessary. When taxes are high and regulations are too stringent, it can choke an economy.
neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/pGGNV https://archive.md/pGGNV
satya71 7y ago
How was this a fiasco? They got $762 million to do what they were going to do anyway.
- dx87 7y ago
  It may have been a fiasco for the local governments bidding on it.
  - jburwell 7y ago
    I live 1.5 miles from the Crystal City HQ2 site in Alexandria, VA. Are there affordable housing, transportation, and public safety issues we have to address? Of course. Will we benefit from addressing these problems to add 25,000-35,000 jobs? Far more than the cost/difficulty of solving these problems. We are thrilled to have them. We would much rather contend with growth problems than a loss of tax revenues, reduced property values, list employment, or low quality jobs. We have subsidize part of their expansion, but the growth will pay back that investment in 5-7 years. We can live that ROI. EDIT: cleanup/clarification
    - remarkEon 7y ago
      I'm sympathetic to this view ... but on the other hand, every major metro area basically just set a floor for how much they're will to give out in tax breaks and perks to rich tech companies to bring in fancy real estate deals. There's something deeper going on here, where tech is investing money they seemingly don't know what to do with in land.
      - ethbro 7y ago
        > There's something deeper going on here, where tech is investing money they seemingly don't know what to do with in land. ... And before tech, video media. ... And before video media, radio. ... And before radio, railroads. ... And before railroads, newspapers. ... And before newspapers, ship captains. ... And before ship captains, cathedrals. ... And before cathedrals, banks. ... And before banks, kings. If you're the currently atop the economic pyramid, you inevitably splurge on real estate.
jorblumesea 7y ago
Amazon is so heavy handed in how they interact with the public. They don't seem to understand or care that much for PR and give off this hyper capitalistic vibe that turns off many people. Even for American society, they feel extreme. As the article states, "Fuck you, we're Amazon".
- Infinitesimus 7y ago
  > They don't seem to understand or care that much for PR and give off this hyper capitalistic vibe that turns off many people Markets keep rewarding a behavior/product so nothing is going to change. Amazon.com is convenient and fast for most people. Kindles are great for most people. AWS is default for most people. 2-day shipping is great for most people. As long as most people find their products and services preferable, I'm afraid bad PR won't change a thing (see: stock performance )
  - throaway1990 7y ago
    is that a bad thing? Shouldn't the local governments be smarter in giving fair incentives to tech companies? If $760 M is fair for HQ2, I don't see a problem if it isn't fair then the onus is on elected officials to explain their decisions. I see value in Amazon's product and services, why should I care how they operate and whose arms they twist? If I don't see value in Amazon I am free to buy products and services from other companies.
  - jorblumesea 7y ago
    I don't see a super strong connection between Amazon's business power and how they present themselves. You can make boatloads of money and also still come off as somewhat presentable and not some uncaring monster. There are plenty of companies that operate like that. Amazon just chooses not to. As the article pointed out, it's how Bezos rolls, for better or for worse.
    - true_religion 7y ago
      That’s true, but do you want PR or truth? For better or worse, Bezos has always been true to himself and his vision for the company. Without any market pressures to dissuade him, he has never lied and pretended to care about anything more than money, status, and further company success. There is nothing wrong with this. The purpose of government is to set up rules to harness the market so even uncaring monster companies still must do “good” in order to succeed and walk away with money.
danhak 7y ago
What a beautiful illustration of how ego-driven decision making can be at the highest levels—both Bezos’ decision to solicit incentives to compete with rivals, and local NYC officials’ plan to torpedo the deal out of spite for being left out of the process.
throwawa66 7y ago
Bezos repulses me. He was smart to have built his empire, but as a human he did not demonstrate much. Quite the opposite, he built initially a useful tool, the early amazon was a great shopping experience. Now it’s a profit squeezer, theres tons of counterfeit products, I personally would give my business to others even if i pay a bit more. Bezos’s intentions are egotistical. Musk, imho really has better intentions than Bezos, he really wants to make the world a better place, he has some geeky dreams that may be an outreach but his intentions are genuine. Bezos.. he’s the greedy d—-head in my books.
- stoops 7y ago
  Just curious, have you ever used AWS?
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    Ah, the UI trainwreck that powers half the world
    - scarface74 7y ago
      The CLI and SDKs are fine. If you’re spending a lot of time in the UI, you’re doing it wrong.
      - tomc1985 7y ago
        For light usage I would beg to differ I'll never forget getting told off by the S3 PM at Reinvent because I had the nerve to ask for global sort in the S3 file browser. "Do it yourself!" he said... like, I need to find one file, sorted by date, about once every other month. You want me to learn the CLI and write a custom script for THAT?! Un-effing-believable They have a bajillion highly-paid programmers (and enough infra to power God himself) and yet one basic feature present pretty much elsewhere in both the online and offline worlds is too much to ask
        shats 7y ago
JackFr 7y ago
It's easy to look at Jeff Bezos and say ego-driven billionaire jealous of Elon Musk. That's a fun narrative. On the other hand, why should Amazon leave money on the table to be happily scooped up by other companies. Forget Tesla, Washington state was giving billions of dollars in subsidies to Boeing, while Boeing was cutting jobs in Washington. The city council of Seattle was feuding with Amazon for "for making the city too expensive". The city is complaining that Amazon is making some of their citizens too rich. I think his frustration would be understandable as businessman, and not as envy. Of course the whole system is perverse and corrupt, but hate the game, not the player.
- danhak 7y ago
  Amazon's mistake was not that they sought government incentives--it was that they did so in an ostentatious, tone-deaf way and turned it into some sort of strange game show. They did not play the game by the (unspoken) rules.
  - paulcole 7y ago
    > They did not play the game by the (unspoken) rules. That's how they got to where they are. Not surprised they felt untouchable.
- Angostura 7y ago
  > The city is complaining that Amazon is making some of their citizens too rich. The city would prefer that Amazon's presence has benefits for citizens as a whole - or at least didn't make their live worse - rather than enriching a few. Seems reasonable to me.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    And it does: "anchor" industries are what brings in wealth in general to a city or metro area. Wages for unrelated jobs in Seattle are still higher than average. That said, the problem is that average wages don't rise as fast as the cost of living does. But that housing is so expensive is a failure of local government policies, and by extension, the voters who support those policies. Housing doesn't have to be super expensive; voters actively choose policies that make it so. People are getting what they voted for, and they're mad as hell about it.
natmaka 7y ago
"Employees with experience negotiating deals around the country anticipated problems, but their red flags were ignored by those eager to please Bezos" ... this is eerily similar to one of the major drawbacks of an authoritarian regime, where everyone tries to please the Great Leader while no-one dares to express any unpleasant truth.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  One person's "ignored" is another person's "accounted for." It could easily be that the folks who made the decision recognized this risk, but decided it was worth it. That looks about the same as ignoring the risk to someone who is not privy to the machinery that makes the decision. I see this happen all the time in the organization I work for. Some folks say that X won't work, product team tries X, and if it ends up not working, they say, "You ignored our feedback on X!" But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons. IMO, the "ignored" narrative is pretty uncharitable, even if it is the natural and easy one to assume. It feels good to be vindicated. It feels less good to think about how teams are dealing with vast numbers of competing constraints, and sometimes have to take gambles (a central feature of which is the possibility of loss). It seems like this type of thing happens all the time. Almost every time something bad happens, there was some naysayer who predicted it. But you never hear about the cases where the critics were wrong. The classic Slashdot comment r.e. the iPod is the counterexample that proves the rule. It's such a notable comment because naysayers are almost never so blatantly and visibly cited for their incorrect calls. Anyway, it's not even clear that the team was wrong to discard this feedback. They got their tax break, didn't they? Along with a bunch of bad PR at the time. But I had totally forgotten that this thing even happened until this article brought it up. I'll probably forget again by next week, and so will most everyone else.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Naysayers can CYA by saying “X will be difficult because of A, B, and C” rather than “X is impossible.” Seriously, it isn’t just CYA, but the former provides useful and perhaps actionable context while the latter doesn’t. The main issue with discarded feedback is when someone said X would be a problem, it was ignored, and X turned out to be a surprise problem (rather than an unsurprising one). And then there is the opposite CmdrTaco comment, where he thought the lack of X (WiFi, larger storage) would be a problem and it wasn’t.
leto_ii 7y ago
Billionaires trying to out-compete each other in the size of the public handouts they're receiving :)) I never understood why in the US (and in more and more other places as well) it's considered legitimate to give billions to private profit-seeking corporations so they can do the kind of stuff that private profit-seeking corporations do anyway: hire people, build stuff etc.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  To misquote Ronald Wright's apocryphal quote of John Steinbeck, capitalism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. More seriously, the problem is one of moral hazard: The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money. The people whose money it is aren't buying seats at their $500-a-plate fundraising breakfasts, either.
  - caseysoftware 7y ago
    > The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money. Exactly. This applies no matter who else is involved.. whether it's billionaires looking for incentives, city unions looking for better deals, or candidates offering to pay for college, healthcare, and cell phones. When you're spending someone else's money, cost isn't a problem and accountability is punted to someone else. I think the difference here is that it's easy to name & shame one entity than millions.
  - leto_ii 7y ago
    > The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money. True that! Btw, the (apocryphal) Steinbeck quote I think is about socialism/communism. I don't think we need to go as far as that to figure out that giving billions in subsidies to mega corporations is maybe not a good thing.
    - jfengel 7y ago
      It helps explain why we do it. Everybody imagines that it's going to make them rich, because rich is their natural state of being, and they're only poor now because of some external influence. Corporate subsidies (among other things) seem reasonable when you think it's going to create "good jobs" and that you (of course) are destined for one of those. For people to say, "Turns out that I'm not ever going to be rich, and maybe we ought to work on a system that allows even poor people to live tolerable lives instead" would require a major rewrite of the American character.
karl11 7y ago
Bloomberg still has not retracted their spy chip story (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...). Until then, I would take anything you read in Bloomberg w/ a grain of salt.
- krzyk 7y ago
  Was it confirmed that it was made up?
  - Tagbert 7y ago
    It was denied. No one else was able to confirm the existence. Bloomberg never mentioned it again. Does not sound like a solid story.
    - wyldfire 7y ago
      > Bloomberg never mentioned it again. If they're unable to determine the veracity of the story, they should retract it. If they're convinced of some elements of the story but not others, they should say so. The failure to follow up with either affirmation or retraction seems dishonest.
      - Traster 7y ago
        The thing is, if they were unable to determine the veracity they would have retracted it.
        SahAssar 7y ago
        If they had been able to determine the veracity of it they would be able to tell us the ways that they did. Not just silence.
        ChefboyOG 7y ago
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
I think it's interesting how other states have to fight so hard to get companies to move there and yet, CA one of the least business friendly places, can take it's growth completely for granted.

149 points by pdog 7y ago

> When Elon Musk secured $1.3 billion from Nevada in 2014 to open a gigantic battery plant, Jeff Bezos noticed. In meetings, the Amazon.com Inc. chief expressed envy for how Musk had pitted five Western states against one another in a bidding war for thousands of manufacturing jobs; he wondered why Amazon was okay with accepting comparatively trifling incentives. It was a theme Bezos returned to often, according to four people privy to his thinking. Then in 2017, an Amazon executive sent around a congratulatory email lauding his team for landing $40 million in government incentives to build a $1.5 billion air hub near Cincinnati. The paltry sum irked Bezos, the people say, and made him even more determined to try something new.

luckydata 7y ago
This is so 100% pure CEO thinking it hurts.
- blibble 7y ago
  it could easily be a line out of Silicon Valley
- me_me_me 7y ago
  It really feels to me comically childish behaviour. You are at the top of the world and yet you still need more marbles then anyone around you. But why would you care?
  - konschubert 7y ago
    Matt Levine in “Money Stuff” yesterday: One thing to say here is that the people who are Econ-101-rational tend to be the ones who make the most money. Every time you read about a workaholic billionaire and think “boy, not me, if I had a billion dollars I’d be on the beach,” the answer is always “well that’s why you don’t have a billion dollars.” If you have the characteristics that enable you to make a billion dollars, you don’t usually turn them off once you get there.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    How is it childish behavior? If I'm paying top dollar for something (in this case, lobbying governments for tax breaks), then if I don't get top results, I'm wasting money, which is disappointing.
  - ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
    You do not get that rich without the motivation to maximize profit. He could have sold Amazon in 1999 and not worked an hour since and still have millions. But that's generally not how these people operate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 7y ago
    It does make me wonder why people are worried about paperclip maximiser AIs when paperclip maximiser CEOs are out there and just as dangerous. The world is full of people who'd cut down every tree in the rainforest so long as they kept getting paid for it.
- ksec 7y ago
  What would you do if others are gaining a competitive advantage from Government while you get nothing?
  - luckydata 7y ago
    CEO?

aguyfromnb 7y ago

So this is what we've devolved to: ultra-rich tech overlords competing with each other for government handouts. Things are fixing to get interesting if Bernie gets the nomination...

Nicksil 7y ago
>ultra-rich tech overlords competing with each other for government handouts. Mate, I reckon we met that goal long ago.
chrisco255 7y ago
Tax incentives are different than handouts. At any rate, it's certainly nothing new and you could attribute this sort of thing as playing a part in the United States's economic success.
- TheOperator 7y ago
  Tax incentives are where entrenched power get to take from the collective social good while not pitching in. How are they not handouts? It's like taking food from the lunch lady and paying half the price because your dad is rich. States fighting amongst themselves to give the most generous handouts doesn't ensure national success. Perhaps that makes sense in regards to national tax incentives but not state ones. Spinning getting divided and conquered and screwed into offering an unfair tax deal just to get Amazon in your state as the key to economic success is some trickle down shit. Why not have solidarity amongst states and tax Amazon fairly? Instead of having to shoot yourself in the foot economically years down the line when you have to adopt costly self-destructive measures to reverse the economic inequality you entrenched for no good actual reason?
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    I grew up in Florida. Disney transformed central Florida from a rural agricultural economy to a thriving tourist destination in the 60s thanks to economic incentives which included exemptions for state building codes. Yes, Walt Disney World has its own building codes. Almost 60 years later and Orlando is thriving. I think the fact that tax and regulatory incentives work so well should underscore the importance of keeping taxation and regulation to the minimum necessary. When taxes are high and regulations are too stringent, it can choke an economy.

neonate 7y ago

https://archive.md/pGGNV https://archive.md/pGGNV

satya71 7y ago

How was this a fiasco? They got $762 million to do what they were going to do anyway.

dx87 7y ago
It may have been a fiasco for the local governments bidding on it.
- jburwell 7y ago
  I live 1.5 miles from the Crystal City HQ2 site in Alexandria, VA. Are there affordable housing, transportation, and public safety issues we have to address? Of course. Will we benefit from addressing these problems to add 25,000-35,000 jobs? Far more than the cost/difficulty of solving these problems. We are thrilled to have them. We would much rather contend with growth problems than a loss of tax revenues, reduced property values, list employment, or low quality jobs. We have subsidize part of their expansion, but the growth will pay back that investment in 5-7 years. We can live that ROI. EDIT: cleanup/clarification
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    I'm sympathetic to this view ... but on the other hand, every major metro area basically just set a floor for how much they're will to give out in tax breaks and perks to rich tech companies to bring in fancy real estate deals. There's something deeper going on here, where tech is investing money they seemingly don't know what to do with in land.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      > There's something deeper going on here, where tech is investing money they seemingly don't know what to do with in land. ... And before tech, video media. ... And before video media, radio. ... And before radio, railroads. ... And before railroads, newspapers. ... And before newspapers, ship captains. ... And before ship captains, cathedrals. ... And before cathedrals, banks. ... And before banks, kings. If you're the currently atop the economic pyramid, you inevitably splurge on real estate.

jorblumesea 7y ago

Amazon is so heavy handed in how they interact with the public. They don't seem to understand or care that much for PR and give off this hyper capitalistic vibe that turns off many people. Even for American society, they feel extreme. As the article states, "Fuck you, we're Amazon".

Infinitesimus 7y ago
> They don't seem to understand or care that much for PR and give off this hyper capitalistic vibe that turns off many people Markets keep rewarding a behavior/product so nothing is going to change. Amazon.com is convenient and fast for most people. Kindles are great for most people. AWS is default for most people. 2-day shipping is great for most people. As long as most people find their products and services preferable, I'm afraid bad PR won't change a thing (see: stock performance )
- throaway1990 7y ago
  is that a bad thing? Shouldn't the local governments be smarter in giving fair incentives to tech companies? If $760 M is fair for HQ2, I don't see a problem if it isn't fair then the onus is on elected officials to explain their decisions. I see value in Amazon's product and services, why should I care how they operate and whose arms they twist? If I don't see value in Amazon I am free to buy products and services from other companies.
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  I don't see a super strong connection between Amazon's business power and how they present themselves. You can make boatloads of money and also still come off as somewhat presentable and not some uncaring monster. There are plenty of companies that operate like that. Amazon just chooses not to. As the article pointed out, it's how Bezos rolls, for better or for worse.
  - true_religion 7y ago
    That’s true, but do you want PR or truth? For better or worse, Bezos has always been true to himself and his vision for the company. Without any market pressures to dissuade him, he has never lied and pretended to care about anything more than money, status, and further company success. There is nothing wrong with this. The purpose of government is to set up rules to harness the market so even uncaring monster companies still must do “good” in order to succeed and walk away with money.

danhak 7y ago

What a beautiful illustration of how ego-driven decision making can be at the highest levels—both Bezos’ decision to solicit incentives to compete with rivals, and local NYC officials’ plan to torpedo the deal out of spite for being left out of the process.

throwawa66 7y ago

Bezos repulses me. He was smart to have built his empire, but as a human he did not demonstrate much. Quite the opposite, he built initially a useful tool, the early amazon was a great shopping experience. Now it’s a profit squeezer, theres tons of counterfeit products, I personally would give my business to others even if i pay a bit more. Bezos’s intentions are egotistical. Musk, imho really has better intentions than Bezos, he really wants to make the world a better place, he has some geeky dreams that may be an outreach but his intentions are genuine. Bezos.. he’s the greedy d—-head in my books.

stoops 7y ago
Just curious, have you ever used AWS?
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Ah, the UI trainwreck that powers half the world
  - scarface74 7y ago
    The CLI and SDKs are fine. If you’re spending a lot of time in the UI, you’re doing it wrong.
    - tomc1985 7y ago
      For light usage I would beg to differ I'll never forget getting told off by the S3 PM at Reinvent because I had the nerve to ask for global sort in the S3 file browser. "Do it yourself!" he said... like, I need to find one file, sorted by date, about once every other month. You want me to learn the CLI and write a custom script for THAT?! Un-effing-believable They have a bajillion highly-paid programmers (and enough infra to power God himself) and yet one basic feature present pretty much elsewhere in both the online and offline worlds is too much to ask
      - shats 7y ago

JackFr 7y ago

It's easy to look at Jeff Bezos and say ego-driven billionaire jealous of Elon Musk. That's a fun narrative. On the other hand, why should Amazon leave money on the table to be happily scooped up by other companies. Forget Tesla, Washington state was giving billions of dollars in subsidies to Boeing, while Boeing was cutting jobs in Washington. The city council of Seattle was feuding with Amazon for "for making the city too expensive". The city is complaining that Amazon is making some of their citizens too rich. I think his frustration would be understandable as businessman, and not as envy. Of course the whole system is perverse and corrupt, but hate the game, not the player.

danhak 7y ago
Amazon's mistake was not that they sought government incentives--it was that they did so in an ostentatious, tone-deaf way and turned it into some sort of strange game show. They did not play the game by the (unspoken) rules.
- paulcole 7y ago
  > They did not play the game by the (unspoken) rules. That's how they got to where they are. Not surprised they felt untouchable.
Angostura 7y ago
> The city is complaining that Amazon is making some of their citizens too rich. The city would prefer that Amazon's presence has benefits for citizens as a whole - or at least didn't make their live worse - rather than enriching a few. Seems reasonable to me.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  And it does: "anchor" industries are what brings in wealth in general to a city or metro area. Wages for unrelated jobs in Seattle are still higher than average. That said, the problem is that average wages don't rise as fast as the cost of living does. But that housing is so expensive is a failure of local government policies, and by extension, the voters who support those policies. Housing doesn't have to be super expensive; voters actively choose policies that make it so. People are getting what they voted for, and they're mad as hell about it.

natmaka 7y ago

"Employees with experience negotiating deals around the country anticipated problems, but their red flags were ignored by those eager to please Bezos" ... this is eerily similar to one of the major drawbacks of an authoritarian regime, where everyone tries to please the Great Leader while no-one dares to express any unpleasant truth.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
One person's "ignored" is another person's "accounted for." It could easily be that the folks who made the decision recognized this risk, but decided it was worth it. That looks about the same as ignoring the risk to someone who is not privy to the machinery that makes the decision. I see this happen all the time in the organization I work for. Some folks say that X won't work, product team tries X, and if it ends up not working, they say, "You ignored our feedback on X!" But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons. IMO, the "ignored" narrative is pretty uncharitable, even if it is the natural and easy one to assume. It feels good to be vindicated. It feels less good to think about how teams are dealing with vast numbers of competing constraints, and sometimes have to take gambles (a central feature of which is the possibility of loss). It seems like this type of thing happens all the time. Almost every time something bad happens, there was some naysayer who predicted it. But you never hear about the cases where the critics were wrong. The classic Slashdot comment r.e. the iPod is the counterexample that proves the rule. It's such a notable comment because naysayers are almost never so blatantly and visibly cited for their incorrect calls. Anyway, it's not even clear that the team was wrong to discard this feedback. They got their tax break, didn't they? Along with a bunch of bad PR at the time. But I had totally forgotten that this thing even happened until this article brought it up. I'll probably forget again by next week, and so will most everyone else.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Naysayers can CYA by saying “X will be difficult because of A, B, and C” rather than “X is impossible.” Seriously, it isn’t just CYA, but the former provides useful and perhaps actionable context while the latter doesn’t. The main issue with discarded feedback is when someone said X would be a problem, it was ignored, and X turned out to be a surprise problem (rather than an unsurprising one). And then there is the opposite CmdrTaco comment, where he thought the lack of X (WiFi, larger storage) would be a problem and it wasn’t.

leto_ii 7y ago

Billionaires trying to out-compete each other in the size of the public handouts they're receiving :)) I never understood why in the US (and in more and more other places as well) it's considered legitimate to give billions to private profit-seeking corporations so they can do the kind of stuff that private profit-seeking corporations do anyway: hire people, build stuff etc.

mumblemumble 7y ago
To misquote Ronald Wright's apocryphal quote of John Steinbeck, capitalism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. More seriously, the problem is one of moral hazard: The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money. The people whose money it is aren't buying seats at their $500-a-plate fundraising breakfasts, either.
- caseysoftware 7y ago
  > The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money. Exactly. This applies no matter who else is involved.. whether it's billionaires looking for incentives, city unions looking for better deals, or candidates offering to pay for college, healthcare, and cell phones. When you're spending someone else's money, cost isn't a problem and accountability is punted to someone else. I think the difference here is that it's easy to name & shame one entity than millions.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money. True that! Btw, the (apocryphal) Steinbeck quote I think is about socialism/communism. I don't think we need to go as far as that to figure out that giving billions in subsidies to mega corporations is maybe not a good thing.
  - jfengel 7y ago
    It helps explain why we do it. Everybody imagines that it's going to make them rich, because rich is their natural state of being, and they're only poor now because of some external influence. Corporate subsidies (among other things) seem reasonable when you think it's going to create "good jobs" and that you (of course) are destined for one of those. For people to say, "Turns out that I'm not ever going to be rich, and maybe we ought to work on a system that allows even poor people to live tolerable lives instead" would require a major rewrite of the American character.

karl11 7y ago

Bloomberg still has not retracted their spy chip story (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...). Until then, I would take anything you read in Bloomberg w/ a grain of salt.

krzyk 7y ago
Was it confirmed that it was made up?
- Tagbert 7y ago
  It was denied. No one else was able to confirm the existence. Bloomberg never mentioned it again. Does not sound like a solid story.
  - wyldfire 7y ago
    > Bloomberg never mentioned it again. If they're unable to determine the veracity of the story, they should retract it. If they're convinced of some elements of the story but not others, they should say so. The failure to follow up with either affirmation or retraction seems dishonest.
    - Traster 7y ago
      The thing is, if they were unable to determine the veracity they would have retracted it.
      - SahAssar 7y ago
        If they had been able to determine the veracity of it they would be able to tell us the ways that they did. Not just silence.
        ChefboyOG 7y ago

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

I think it's interesting how other states have to fight so hard to get companies to move there and yet, CA one of the least business friendly places, can take it's growth completely for granted.