Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#101

Post by ars » Wed, May 23, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

m_fayer wrote: post #25

Reason077 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow: "We are a local media company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. We have detected that you are in one of the member countries of the European Union, which is now subject to the General Data Protection Regulation. ... Until we are able to ensure our full compliance with the rigorous GDPR requirements, we are blocking access from EU countries to our websites , which include wral.com, wralsportsfan.com, highsch…

On the one hand I think this is a great sign that the GDPR is being taken seriously. On the other, I see this as corporate speak for "We're not sure if ensuring compliance makes business sense for us and this notice may actually be permanent. You're from a region where anyone interested in our content is probably a long-tail outlier that won't make us much money, so ensuring access for you is not a priority." I reall…

> I really hope that data privacy regulations don't have the unintended side-effect of significantly increasing the geographic balkanization of the web.

It will without a doubt have that effect.

EU citizens are now a liability and simply not worth it. If you are in the EU except yourself to be blocked from large portions of the internet.

On the plus side for the EU, maybe now they'll actually get some internet startups catering to them, since non-EU options are no longer available.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#102

Post by Shivetya » Wed, May 23, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

Karishma1234 wrote: post #84

kodablah wrote: post #26

I'm not sure comparing a second headquarters and a tech support site is apt. I'm not sure how loud the search is matters. WSJ is a joke. Look, I can twist words too: "While Amazon is clearer and open about employee counts and candidate locations for HQ2, Apple remains secret and opaque about any details even for small site". Abatements abound regardless, lets not treat the differences in culture between Amazon and Ap…

Amazon's beauty contest did seem completely counterintuitive to me. People with skin in the game are always in the know of things. Even if Amazon had not massively advertised its move cities and states would have worked hard to bring them to their shores. I did not understand why ordinary public had to be drawn into it. Your average joe is always going to oppose a disruption in his otherwise mundane and lazy life. Ap…

I don't want cities to be able to negotiate "under the table" or without public oversight at all. Encouraging this sort of antics is corruption of the system and many large cities already have that in abundance.

Apple's system is only smarter if you think defrauding the public is good business.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#103

Post by tooltalk » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

Is Apple's spaceship campus considered in this article? I can't read anything behind the paywall, but the headline seems to suggest either Apple is frugal or Amazon is out of control.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#104

Post by briandear » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:10 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #102

Karishma1234 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's beauty contest did seem completely counterintuitive to me. People with skin in the game are always in the know of things. Even if Amazon had not massively advertised its move cities and states would have worked hard to bring them to their shores. I did not understand why ordinary public had to be drawn into it. Your average joe is always going to oppose a disruption in his otherwise mundane and lazy life. Ap…

I don't want cities to be able to negotiate "under the table" or without public oversight at all. Encouraging this sort of antics is corruption of the system and many large cities already have that in abundance. Apple's system is only smarter if you think defrauding the public is good business.

Defrauding? That’s ridiculous.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#105

Post by briandear » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:11 PM UTC

advisedwang wrote: post #96

eldavido wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand why there's this huge presumption of ill will toward Amazon. HQ2 is a project that will involve hundreds of thousands/millions of people when you add up the employees, contractors who will build it, local politicians/electorate, and everyone else. There's just no way to keep something that big secret. It seems easier to just come clean, announce to the world what you're doing, and be open ab…

The complaint isn't that Amazon is expanding into other locations. The complaint is that Amazon is using this to play cities off against each other. It's a race for the bottom designed to maximize gain for Amazon at the cost of the commons.

Cities can choose not to participate. Don’t like it, elect new officials.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#106

Post by kickopotomus » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

soperj wrote: post #62

teej wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t economic espionage a major concern with China, especially if you’re Apple?

Not really when most of the hardware is outsourced.

Yes, Apple gets most of the parts for their devices from 3rd parties but they work hard to obfuscate everything. They get their own part numbers for everything and often times even special firmware images for controllers that cause those parts to behave differently.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#107

Post by Silfen » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #104

Shivetya wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want cities to be able to negotiate "under the table" or without public oversight at all. Encouraging this sort of antics is corruption of the system and many large cities already have that in abundance. Apple's system is only smarter if you think defrauding the public is good business.

Defrauding? That’s ridiculous.

I wouldn't use the word "defrauding," but there is a serious principal-agent problem. The localities that attract an Amazon or an Apple are likely to have winner's curse. That is, the highest bid (in terms of tax breaks and other concessions) for the new headquarters is likely to be from a place that incidentally overvalued the new HQ. The politicians usually know this, but don't care. They get a flashy, public "victory" to campaign on, even if the real value to the local economy is questionable.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#108

Post by mkhalil » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:50 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #66

sigstoat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a simple example, not necessarily realistic, consider the circuit boards of the iphone. yes, they've got to ship the gerber files to china so the boardhouses can fab the boards. but those are just images of the copper and mask layers. apple doesn't have to ship the electrical schematics, with tolerances and notes and explanations of why things are done the way they're done, outside of their office building in cali…

So, their outsource partners can't invent new things, but can clone every existing thing for a small fraction of the price? That's a good deal for them.

It doesn't really work like that either.

You can buy iPhones and take them apart, so you have the logic board. Do you know how to install Ubuntu on it?

Without the logic behind why the board was designed that way, it's going to be non-trivial to reverse engineer what's going on.

Think of it as a .exe file. Cracking software isn't a trivial task. Cracking hardware is harder.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#109

Post by Pyxl101 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:55 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #90

Steltek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how much they have strained the infrastructure in Seattle You could rephrase this as "How much Seattle's entrenched interests have crippled the city's growth". How many towns and cities would love to have the problem of too many jobs?

If Seattle didn't get a single new tech job opening from any of the big-4 tech corps in the next five years (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft), the city would be fine. It would be more then fine. There is no shortage of economic opportunity in it. Expanding their offices puts costs on existing city residents. It's all well and good that tens of thousands of new units to house these workers are being built, but tho…

> Expanding their offices puts costs on existing city residents. It's all well and good that tens of thousands of new units to house these workers are being built, but those units also require extra infrastructure funding.

Property taxes and permits are designed to raise the funds needed to pay for infrastructure. Amazon pays them. According to the Seattle Times (1):

> Amazon entities that own Seattle property are the largest and fifth-largest individual property tax payers in the city, according to government filings. At the regular rate applicable to the company’s home base in South Lake Union, that would yield a tax bill of roughly $27 million. The company also directly pays state and city business and occupation taxes, which tax the portion of Amazon’s sales attributable to in-state customers.

If new construction or other activities generate costs for the city, then they should tax those activities accordingly, not complain about or discourage the activity. Seattle is capturing significant revenue this way, by its own account (2), and its tax base has been rising faster than population:

> Seattle has captured an outsized share of the region’s growth during the recovery. Seattle has been the focal point of the region’s growth during the current recovery. This is reflected in taxable retail sales data (the tax base for the retail sales tax), one of the few relatively current measures of economic activity available at both the county and city levels. Over the five-year period 2010 - 2015, taxable retail sales increased by 52% in Seattle, compared to gains of 34% in the remainder of the King and Snohomish Counties, and 30% in the rest of the state, i.e., outside of the two counties (see Figure 4). Most of Seattle’s relative strength is due to a 123% increase in construction.

> Seattle’s strong rebound from the recession has been supported by the growth of Amazon, other technology businesses, and business and professional service firms. Employment growth at these businesses, along with the current popularity of in-city living, has boosted the demand for office space and housing in the city, spurring a construction boom.

(1) https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-paid-250...

(2) https://www.seattle.gov/financedepartment/17adoptedbudget/do...

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#110

Post by weberc2 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:57 PM UTC

wilsonnb wrote: post #98

weberc2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WSJ is a joke I agree with the rest of your post, but no need to single out the WSJ. Compared to other major publications that regularly have editorialized articles submitted to this forum (e.g., NYT, WashPo, HuffPo, Slate, etc), WSJ is extraordinarily well-behaved. This kind of editorializing is a shame and deserves to be called out, but we should make sure we're calling it out across the board.

I wouldn't throw the New York Times and the Washington Post in the same bucket as the Huffington Post and Slate without some good evidence backing it up. It reinforces the idea that all news sources are roughly the same which is not true. WaPo and NYT are national newspapers founded in the 1800's who compete with the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, the LA Times, Reuters, etc. HuffPo and Slate are news websites…

> I wouldn't throw the New York Times and the Washington Post in the same bucket as the Huffington Post and Slate without some good evidence backing it up.

I totally agree. But like I said, the bucket I'm using is "sites that are frequently featured on HN".

I also disagree with your taxonomy. HuffPo and Slate are much more reputable (rightly or wrongly) than Breitbart and Daily Beast. For example, how often do Breitbart or Daily Beast articles make the front page here compared to HuffPo or Slate or even Salon? BuzzFeed News probably hits the front page more often than these.

In any case, my point doesn't depend on HuffPo or Slate, so I'll happily concede the point.