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Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

nytimes.com

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Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#131

Post by exikyut »

toast0 wrote: post #82
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #25

Why doesn't Amazon choose a city that almost meets their criteria and invest the wealth they generate there back into the city? Then we get more good cities instead of overinvesting into any single city.

Most of their criteria aren't that flexible. Nobody is going to reroute interstates or move airports for Amazon. They might be able to get a transit line extended or a new station added to an existing line. Population/education might be negotiable if there is a site with awesome transportation. Cell coverage would certainly be fixable, though, if the local officials commit to reasonable planning approvals, and can co…

> Cell coverage would certainly be fixable, though, if the local officials commit to reasonable planning approvals, and can convince carriers to play ball.

Well, there's the Kindle Whispernet thing. I'm in Australia and was impressed when the first Kindles came out and "they just have 3G, no configuration/questions asked - and Wikipedia is free." The high-level involvement and agreements required for worldwide "just works" connectivity (which is not technically amazing, but politically impressive) means that fixing local cellular would likely be a shoo-in and require no drawn-out anything. Chances are the HQ building(s) will have cell towers factored in at the blueprint level.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#133

Post by ActsJuvenile »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #65
virtuallynathan wrote: post #17

I'm surprised to see Philadelphia eliminated so quickly, it ticks almost all of the boxes, and has a very large number of engineering schools (UPenn, Penn State, Drexel, Temple, Princeton, Rutgers, etc). It's transit is better than many of the other cities, and it has 2 major development plots in the city with existing full tax abatements. Not to mention its proximity to NYC and Washington, DC via Amtrak (~1h20m to N…

Philly was dropped by the "job growth is strong" rule, which is also drops many other cities which would otherwise be fully qualified. So the question really is why would Amazon have that rule and how willing are they to bend in it. Why would Amazon want that rule? Wouldn't it just mean there's more competition for employees? It strikes me as the type of rule put in to ensure their secret favorite gets chosen.

NYT team seems to have misinterpreted Amazon's "Stable business climate for growth" requirement.

I interpret that more as a political requirement, where city and state governments are strongly pro-business (anti-union?).

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#134

Post by danjayh »

wehere1 wrote: post #122
danjayh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really couldn't care less about the wall. I do think that choosing not to enforce immigration laws through an exective order was wrong - that is the domain of congress. In the case of an institution as important as the government of the United States, the ends do not justify the means if the means weakening the foundations of the entire system. I think that this applies equally to executive orders from both Trump a…

lol you're mad about downvotes when you admit you 'couldn't care less' about a wall that was borne out of pretty awful racism

The reason I don't care about the wall is simple: Yes, our immigration laws are complicated and need reform, but people shouldn't be crossing the border illegally, full-stop. That's why we have laws. A country that selectively enforces its laws is a country where the government can imprison you on a whim (because you've broken a rarely enforced law that they can use against you at will), and historically such countries haven't been nice places to live. So as a basis, you want and need a government that consistently enforces laws, and if the laws are bad, you change them -- which is less likely to happen if lax enforcement eases the pain of the bad laws. So how do I move from "we need to enforce our laws, and change them if they're bad" to "I don't care about the wall"? Simple: whether or not we have the wall, immigration laws need to be enforced as they are written (love 'em or hate 'em), which means that until the law is changed anyone caught crossing will be deported anyway. At the point that the law is changed, people who want to cross will be allowed through as specified in the law. With this philosophy as a background, the wall is relatively meaningless in a practical sense, although I do admit that it does have some symbolic weight. I have always had far more concern for pragmatic thought than symbolism and idealism (which probably led me to engineering), and I'm assuming that building a wall would reduced long-term border patrolling costs to compensate for the cost to build it, and so this leaves me in a place where it's a wash and I don't really care whether or not they build it. And yes, I have been called an emotionless robot before ... I took it as a complement :).

One more note: I'm not saying that I expect the government to achieve perfect monitoring -- just like it would be impossible to catch all speeders, it would be impossible to catch all illegal border crossings -- but I am saying that when the government does know that a law has been broken, it should apply a consistent response that is compliant with the laws that have been passed by a congress and signed by a president.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#135

Post by KGIII »

School-Cotton wrote: post #127
KGIII wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason my company used to, I'm retired, sponsor the local little league sports teams - even though the audiences were absolutely never going to be clients? Sometimes, you do the right thing, just because it's the right thing to do. It wasn't an investment. It was just giving back to the community that housed us. I guess you could argue that it improved employee morale? I don't think any of our employees…

I'm not denying that companies do charitable things, but I think where to build your headquarters is much more fundamental than whether to give money to a kids' sports team. Would your former company have made decisions about the parameters of their core business based on the interests of Little League?

I'm not convinced that their office location is a core business decision. Wherever they go, people will also go. They could HQ in Mozambique and still attract top talent.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#136

Post by _n_b_ »

tomschlick wrote: post #81
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46

I know they eliminated Pittsburgh right out of the gate, but I think it has a bunch of things going for it. It's one of the few places where housing is cheap (but a pretty beautiful downtown) but young tech workers would love to live: tons of stuff to do but lots of knowledge workers with CMU. Biggest obvious issue is no direct flights to Seattle, but if Amazon built a headquarters there it seems like it would be eas…

Also, they eliminated PGH based on the 1 million population without accounting for the city borders being much smaller than normal cities due to how Allegheny county is structured. The metro area is ~2.5 million and is about the same size as most city borders.

It was actually eliminated on "job growth is strong" not on metro area size. The first map is all >1M metro areas, which lists Pgh.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#137

Post by technofiend »

saryant wrote: post #91
technofiend wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where Amazon ends up. We definitely are weak on public transportation but have a couple of international airports. With 600 square miles of area, it's tough to have a single metro system serve that entire area and frankly with our weather few people choose to stay outside and wait on transportation unless they just have to. Which is why you see things like Exxon's move to the Woodlands. There's enough loca…

So many of the oil companies have left downtown I have to think Amazon could snap up a good chunk of it. I moved away years ago but did anyone even fill up Shell Plaza after they moved out? That said, I doubt it'll be Houston.

I too doubt it'll be Houston. Downtown has slowly been shifting to residential high rises because of the tax incentives our previous mayor put in place for them.

But yes there's still plenty of real-estate downtown, although I don't know the status of Shell One and Two specifically.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#138

Post by querulous »

I think Amazon has already selected Toronto (or possibly somewhere else in Ontario like Kitchener-Waterloo or Windsor) and is just running this 'contest' to extract the best deal they can get. I don't see any reason for dual HQs unless they are hedging against the risk they may have to abandon their current HQ and the biggest threat they face is anti-monopoly actions by a hostile government. Any secondary HQ is going to be outside of the USA and they've already eliminated Europe and Asia.

No city in the USA can compete with Toronto on the basis of legal risk, cheap labour (senior software devs top out around $90k usd in Toronto) and population/infrastructure

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#139

Post by hiram112 »

rdtsc wrote: post #8

Not sure if Washington, DC includes Northern Virginia (Ashburn, Herndon, Reston). AWS is already here. And a ridiculous amount of fiber seems to out through this area. I see new data centers popping up quite often. And prices are crazy expensive but probably still cheaper than the city itself. So I would pick this area if I was them. Though not sure how I'd personally feel about prices and traffic going up even highe…

I think the area around Reston / Dulles would make a great pick. The Silver Line will be finished soon, and there is plenty of room to build it up in the style of Arlington's Orange Line or Old Town's Blue. Dulles being 10 minutes away would be a huge advantage, especially compared to Denver where the airport is a long ways from both the tech corridor and the Boulder area.

Traffic is still a nightmare and housing costs are pretty bad compared to most cities, but there is a lot of tech talent here and wages seem lower than NY, Seattle, and the Bay Area.

NOVA is liberal, but Virginia is business friendly, unlike DC and MD. There is already the big NE Virginia AWS here, and I'm pretty sure most of the governments and intel communities AWS infrastructure is also housed close by.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#140

Post by stale2002 »

wehere1 wrote: post #122
danjayh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really couldn't care less about the wall. I do think that choosing not to enforce immigration laws through an exective order was wrong - that is the domain of congress. In the case of an institution as important as the government of the United States, the ends do not justify the means if the means weakening the foundations of the entire system. I think that this applies equally to executive orders from both Trump a…

lol you're mad about downvotes when you admit you 'couldn't care less' about a wall that was borne out of pretty awful racism

Huh? We already have a wall. It covers about 1/4th of the US-Mexico border.

Trump would just be expanding it. Likely to around a half of the total border (Much of the border is close to impassable, due to mountains, desert, ect).

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