141–150 of 490 posts
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Pittsburgh yet. uber did some early self driving pilots there. CMU is there. Google has a large office there. Amazon has also started hiring software engineers for an office in Pittsburgh too. Cost of living is very cheap. Many upsides to Pittsburgh. I don't know what the city could afford in terms of subsidies though.
Minnesota. Budget surplus, tons of F500 companies / large companies to recruit from and a strong university system, with lots of other states to draw from, being the largest city in the area, save Chicago.
On the other hand, Bezos might want to just move the margins and try to make a purple state blue. For a big state, that might make have a bigger impact and make more sense, especially since you're not going to find 50,000 software engineers in Montana.
I think Cincinnati could be a good choice. I don't know much about Cincinnati, except that it's in Ohio and borders Indiana and Kentucky, and that it's not a tech hub. But, I don't think it would be that hard to convince a lot of people to move there. If the move is really successful, it could create somewhat of a tech hub there, which would have spillover effects in those other states (giving them 3 for the price of 1?).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. "Amazon seeks a city to provide cushy tax credits in exchange for vague, unenforceable promises of job creation" would've been a more accurate headline.
I understand (and largely share) the annoyance about these sorts of tax breaks, but as a software developer, it seems obvious that having an Amazon headquarters in my city would result in lots of job opportunities for me - not just at Amazon, but at other software companies that locate nearby over time due to the increased concentration of workers. So I don't understand your skepticism at the "job creation" part.
It always amuses me how stunningly bad Amazon really is at making standalone pages on their web site. This one is totally unresponsive, has images for headings, and a slightly blurry image for the table. Here's Amazon Locker, which is even more dismal: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Click-and-Collect-with-Amazon-Locke... I guess they must have to produce all this stuff within the constraints of their CMS, but it really doe…
A skilled front-end designer/developer could convert that to an HTML table in a few minutes. Instead they throw up a 672KB 6250 × 1563 JPG image which manages to appear blurry when downscaled.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. "Amazon seeks a city to provide cushy tax credits in exchange for vague, unenforceable promises of job creation" would've been a more accurate headline.
I understand (and largely share) the annoyance about these sorts of tax breaks, but as a software developer, it seems obvious that having an Amazon headquarters in my city would result in lots of job opportunities for me - not just at Amazon, but at other software companies that locate nearby over time due to the increased concentration of workers. So I don't understand your skepticism at the "job creation" part.
Skepticism over the job creation part is because there are usually no guarantees with how many jobs the company ends up creating. In the Foxconn case, they could make the factory fully robotic and end up employing very few people. There will still be increased economic activity, but there seems to be better ways to generate it than singling out one company.
Silicon Slopes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Slopes - Population > 1,000,000 - Serviced by 2 great universities (UoU, BYU) - Utah is a top 5 state for # of Unicorn Companies From the wiki I shared: "The Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development allows a variety of grants and tax incentives to companies willing to either relocate or expand their enterprise" Note: I live in Seattle, not Utah.
Portland, Philadelphia, Atlanta based on what Amazon wants / needs.
I'd also say the research triangle, Salt lake city, Austin, Chicago, the twin cities, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati
[1] https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q3/purdue,-ama...
[2] http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/2017/05/20/why-salesfo...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-01/iac-to-ac...
[4] http://www.indystar.com/story/money/2017/05/02/550m-gm-stamp...
[5] https://www.ibj.com/articles/58486-salesforce-to-invest-40m-...