931–940 of 1001 posts
If Amazon had just quietly announced plans to expand to LIC without the "HQ2 Search" dog and pony show they almost certainly would still be here. Google buys entire city blocks and nobody bats an eye. Turns out that publicly shaking down cities across the US tends to draw out the opposition. More publicity = more scrutiny = more angry opponents of your business decision
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I don't see it as a "what can you do for me". A lot of Amazon's interest were aligned with that of many New Yorkers. Both Amazon and most New Yorkers want to have a strong transportation system and a diverse economy that doesn't just rely on taxing bloated financial bonuses to pay for services. They also want New York to be an in-demand tech hub with a deep labor pool and be a place where people actually want to live…
What? If Amazon wanted a strong transportation system they could have demanded some of their tax break went towards that. They did not. NYC is already the second largest tech hub in the nation, as well as a global leader in a wide variety of industries. If anything, Amazon moving in, and this I doubt, would have made it less affordable than it already was to live here.
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I'm under the impression that Amazon has never been a big taxpayer.
Their employees still pay tax though. With tech wages as high as they are it is probably non-trivial amounts. I am not advocating for big businesses evading tax mind you. Just suggesting it would probably still be a boon for the state tax income if a bunch of tech wages migrated to the NY tax base.
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Animal cruelty is a great analogy because the people who oppose it, which are the minority, are more vocal than those who are proponents of it, which make up the majority.
Do you really think only a minority oppose animal cruelty? How many people are proponents of animal cruelty? Neither of us have data to back it up but if you polled people I think the majority would be against animal cruelty, they just wouldn't spend their time opposing it, that's the difference.
If Amazon had just quietly announced plans to expand to LIC without the "HQ2 Search" dog and pony show they almost certainly would still be here. Google buys entire city blocks and nobody bats an eye. Turns out that publicly shaking down cities across the US tends to draw out the opposition. More publicity = more scrutiny = more angry opponents of your business decision
The big dog and pony show was about asking for major tax benefits. They're still welcome to open a giant LIC office, they just won't get showered with a tax windfall for it. That's Amazon's decision that it wasn't worth it.
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I'm pretty unconvinced. I don't see any reason to believe your line of reasoning; that the original poster is a hyperbolic vegan. Do you have anything beyond your assertion?
Who else would derail comments on an article about Amazon cancelling their NYC expansion with tangential and disingenuous discussions about factory farms? Also, the way different accounts seem to seamlessly continue a deep and tangential discussion thread is also kind of suspicious. Almost like it’s one person who keeps switching alt accounts.
Regardless of peoples eating lifestyles it's undeniable that factory farms which produce most of the economically accessible meat are little concerned about animal welfare or the environment. The public on this matter also are least concerned about these matters related to the meat they buy off supermarket shelves, only when it's a video of a 'cute' animal being abused. It is only the minority of people in this instance that take a principled stance, if the silent majority did care we wouldn't be producing so much factory farmed meat after years of publicizing the abuse in the media.
I'm not a vegan but the way you characterize anyone who has a 'minority view' as some radical that only wants to cause problems is the attitude that allows corporations to operate it's abuse of worker standards and public funding to no one else's gain but themselves.
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It is always vocal minoirities who do things, even with very popular topics. Animal cruelty? There is only a vocal minority who takes a public stance, despite this beeing a very clear cut issue in terms of public opinion. Migration is the other way round: most people don't give a fuck, but have a loud vocal base that will even hurt themselves to make a point and you will be heard.
What's the debate about animal cruelty?
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agreed. the drive to squash this deal was mainly driven from local politicians who were whining that they were cut out of the process.
> Is this 4chan now? It's good when local politicians weigh in on local issues. Your comment is completely off the mark.
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Not all, but very many will be highly paid. My comment is about tech workers working in that area. I think this is better for that area to have highly paid workers in remote queens who can live or commute in. There’s already a ton of tech companies in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The new change would be to have a tech hub in LIC.
Better for who? Better how? Queens is already richly diverse in both income and in every other category worth listing. There is nothing that the borough lacks that mythical tech workers will bring in their wake. On the contrary, much of what makes Queens quite unique is threatened by the one thing we know would follow on the heels of something like an Amazon HQ landing here: even more heated real estate speculation f…
Certainly it will increase property values but I don’t think it will be absentee capital as the demand will be driven by something that requires occupancy, working at hq2.
Maybe Queens doesn’t require intervention, maybe it does. Since there’s no hq2 we’ll close to seeing the contra factual of not having this intervention. Maybe the area grows substantially without it.
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> Google already has some dev offices in cheaper areas, like Pittsburgh, where office space is cheaper and the salaries they pay slightly lower. And yet, they still choose to double their headcount in NYC. Location, Location, Location. Yes it's cheaper to live and run a business in Kansas but then you're in Kansas.
I don't want to tell you what the right trade offs are between, say, living in Phoenix or Dallas or Charleston and living in NY or SF. But at some point people want to start families and buy a house and that starts to take precedence over being in a cool area. The only issue is jobs -- can they work remote, can they find a local employer, can they work for themselves? So there is a huge demand for higher paying jobs…
Some people do, yes.
> and buy a house
Some people do, yes.
Others want to just stay in an exciting, vibrant area. You're projecting your values here.
> will pull the trigger as soon as they can find a job that pays even 2/3 of what they are earning in SF or NY.
The very fact that such jobs are somewhat uncommon, even though programming ought to be the kind of thing that's easy to distribute/make remote, should tell you something.