41–50 of 412 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, Bezos’s interests in Blue Origin and the Washington Post. Oh, and he has a mansion in DC: https://www.washingtonian.com/2018/04/22/inside-jeff-bezos-d...
Or it could be that AWS contract for the Pentagon... literally across the street (highway) from Crystal City (Pentagon City).
> "The company may be having similar discussions with other finalists." The article sounds very speculative. I don't know anything about this place, but if it's expensive like people here say it is, then I don't see the point of Amazon moving there. I think a place like downtown Chicago would make more sense. (if only the winter was not as cold and better public schools...)
Why not Detroit? They could remodernize Detroit in a massively good way.
> "The company may be having similar discussions with other finalists." The article sounds very speculative. I don't know anything about this place, but if it's expensive like people here say it is, then I don't see the point of Amazon moving there. I think a place like downtown Chicago would make more sense. (if only the winter was not as cold and better public schools...)
Chicago has a lot of "natural" advantages, but the governments of Chicago and Illinois are too dysfunctional to put together a competitive bid.
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That’s sounds worse than it is. I think a better phrasing would be “read as much information as you can, and then sleep on it and go with the first option your subconscious tells you to go with”. Or gut, or instinct or ‘feel’. Informed intuition is a wonderful thing.
I think that's exactly backwards. I think you review data to use your intuition to form the hypothesis or question, and then look for empirical data to try to falsify it. Putting intuition at the end of the decision making process is a pretty solid way to screw the entire thing up.
i.e. the process is for selecting out of the final 20, that have been fully vetted and feasibility established.
Or for deciding among three finalist engineers who’ve passed all interviews and tests and you can only hire one.
Or schools or colleges or whatever.
How's the public transit there? I was under the impression that this was a major piece of the puzzle for HQ2.
metro is somewhere between "incompetence that leads to dead passengers"[1], "shit's on fire, yo"[2] and "meh". Lately the biggest scandal is they turn down ads for the ACLU in favor of Northrup Grumman. In any event it's generally minimally acceptable at best. Dumping a ton of people onto it will not help matters. [1] https://www.aboutlawsuits.com/dc-metro-crash-lawsuit-filed-4... [2] https://fivethirtyeight.com/feat…
I ride Metro every week day (bus + train) and look: I'm still alive! And on time almost every day. I much prefer it to driving.
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Crystal City really has so much going for it: 1. As you point out, right next to Pentagon and federal government. 2. Good transportation: right on the Metro and literally across the street from National Airport. 3. If you're going to have 2 headquarters, having them be on opposite coasts makes sense. 4. And I think another one that is pretty unique to Crystal City is that Amazon and their employees definitely want to…
And to its credit, Crystal City is actually pretty rad. It’s full of highly educated people who can’t say where they work or what they do. But they do have good taste in restaurants.
If I were going to work in HQ2, I'd live in Del Ray, though its more single-family focused. But it has some nice local restaurants.
Seems like an admission that they have nothing new to do so they are seeking growth through federal contracts. Northern VA is the poster child of what happens when you have tons of growth over decades, but absolutely no planning, or worse, lots of nimby preventing infrastructure.
Every other city in America that grew post wwII would have just built strip malls and single-family homes.
There are new high rises going up in Crystal city even as rents stagnated. Can't be too much nimby stuff going on.
Compared to say, silicon valley, they did a good job.
Loudon County did a bad job. Fairfax did a mixed job. They definitely grew in some places--like Tysons, but other parts have just grown without planning.
> "The company may be having similar discussions with other finalists." The article sounds very speculative. I don't know anything about this place, but if it's expensive like people here say it is, then I don't see the point of Amazon moving there. I think a place like downtown Chicago would make more sense. (if only the winter was not as cold and better public schools...)
Why not Detroit? They could remodernize Detroit in a massively good way.