Earlier quoted context omitted.
My god, you're bitter for a startup founder! As a veteran founder myself, I'd be excited: this brings talent to fuel my startup, this brings interactive infrastructure, etc. Amazon and Google are not regular employers: your startup pays outlets in taxes and mooches off infrastructure. The big companies find that with real profits. Finally, $48k/employee is peanuts to a big city startup, and typically that kind of mon…
We're literally giving New York tax money to the richest man in the world, who lives somewhere else, instead of spending it on the subway, or parks, or schools, or literally anything. If you're not outraged you're not paying attention. As it happens I don't have a Silicon Valley venture backed profitless startup, I have a company that gets paid money to do work and makes a healthy profit. I've paid very considerable…
This is a shocking display. What they are calling a government-private partnership is nothing of the sort. It's a public subsidy to Amazon. The New York Times reported $5 billion in this project will be invested by Amazon. $5.5 billion dollars will be invested by New York and Virginia. That is a subsidy of over 50% of the cost of this project. We the taxpayers will be either paying higher taxes to fund this private company, among the richest in the world, or, if we don't get our taxes raised, the government will deliver fewer services to us because it has given this enormous subsidy to a company. $5 billion from Virginia and New York where Mr. Bezos, the owner of Amazon, is himself the owner of $160 billion. He didn't need it, the company doesn't need it. We are being asked to subsidize. All of the profits will go to the private companies and their shareholders. We, the public, will be funding more than half of this project. Shame is what Mr. DeBlasio ought to feel rather than posing in the PR as if he has delivered something. [...]
The projected number of jobs in the New York area from this is 2,500. That's a very small number and will have no effect on the unemployment problem of this city [New York City] it's just too small and that's not a surprise [...] because the kind of work Amazon does is highly automated; it uses machines for 90% of what it does. And half of the people it's likely to have working in New York will be brought in from other parts of the Amazon empire.