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Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

nytimes.com

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Re: Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

#11

Post by randomamazondev »

CryoLogic wrote: post #4
rayiner wrote: post #2

DC should just let Amazon run the city government as Amazon sees fit. I wouldn’t mind living in an Amazon company town, I bet they’d shape things up around here.

Yeah, high-ish salaries. Everyone works until 10pm. Get off work and get drunk. Complain about how Amazon took away your life and cost you your marriage, but hey they offer free marriage counseling now as a result (true story). Rinse and repeat. That's what I see around SLU. Amazon is incredibly efficient, and that's good. But please don't let them take over a city with their work life culture.

> That's what I see around SLU.

To be fair that is Amazon US. Amazon where I work is so far divorced from all the famous crazy US practices that it seems like a different company.

Re: Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

#13

Post by throw2016 »

Usually tax deals or tax holidays are offered to entice prospective companies but given Amazon's US tax burden is already nearly zero what else can these cities offer, free land, protection from unions?

Amazon seems unlikely to choose a city randomly, its likely to already have decided which city suits it best in terms of logistics, efficiency, cost and available labour pool so this seems to be an elaborate game to squeeze its preferred city.

Re: Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

#14

Post by dang »

stuckinarut wrote: post #10

[flagged]

This comment violates the HN guidelines. We don't want ideological battle here (not to mention low-rent rants). That's not because we're capitalist pigs or socialist moochers; it's because it's all repetitive and therefore boring, and it leads directly to flamewar. All scorched earth is the same.

You've been posting a lot of this for a long time. We ban accounts that do that, so I've banned this one. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended. In the meantime, would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

#15

Post by sincerely »

I respect Toronto's proposal a lot, in light of this: absolutely no specific incentives offered, just an overview of the benefits of working in Toronto/Ontario/Canada from an employee/employer's perspective. I think it was a strong action both in terms of attracting Amazon (there's no other non-US cities being considered, so they are already hugely differentiated) and in terms of reassuring the constituents that the government will not bend over backwards for corporations (especially considering the Google smart city in development).

Re: Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

#16

Post by davidw »

> Corporations have choices. They could go about their business, and simply choose the best location, the one that makes the greatest business sense, and invest accordingly. Or they can as Amazon, GE, and dozens of others, go through the ritual of pretending to entertain a wide range of proposals, and use the leverage of competing bids to sweat the best possible deal out of their preferred location

http://cityobservatory.org/cash-prizes-for-bad-corporate-cit...

Whoever 'wins', may not come out ahead.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/9/10/what-can-i-do-...

Re: Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

#17

Post by fipple »

dang wrote: post #14
stuckinarut wrote: post #10

[flagged]

This comment violates the HN guidelines. We don't want ideological battle here (not to mention low-rent rants). That's not because we're capitalist pigs or socialist moochers; it's because it's all repetitive and therefore boring, and it leads directly to flamewar. All scorched earth is the same. You've been posting a lot of this for a long time. We ban accounts that do that, so I've banned this one. If you don't wan…

Except for the first line it is a fairly interesting comment.

Re: Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

#18

Post by fipple »

gervase wrote: post #8
refurb wrote: post #3

Why is Amazon negotiating/receiving offers from outside the gov't? Seems odd. They could pick a specific city and the city council could say "hell no" or just be unable to pass legislation to deliver on it.

My cynical side says that this is a feature, not a bug - a litmus test to see whether or not the selected city will be politically pliable under Amazon's significant financial leverage. Any city that can't pass (or force through) favorable legislation isn't one that Amazon would want to choose long-term anyway, especially viewed in the context of their relationships with local governments in Seattle [0]. The key poin…

Yeah, my guess is that the principal function of HQ2 is to increase negotiating leverage with Seattle.

Re: Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders

#20

Post by pasbesoin »

Democracy: When you can't tell your citizens what you're up to, you already have a problem.

It is also a very hypocritical example of, speaking generally of these things, business decrying "the nanny state" while actually engaging and encouraging it, full force.

It's just that they want all the nanny's attention and preferential treatment.

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