Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is the scale at play with the Supermicro story.
If the story is that a small handful of motherboards that were destined to be shipped to cloud providers from Supermicro had some remote monitoring / control capabilities (of varying types opportunistically applied) added to them at the behest of the Chinese government that sounds completely plausible and incredibly hard to verify and/or defend against.
I say plausible as we know that US intelligence agencies have conducted similar actions:
It’s often impossible to prove something didn’t happen. (Overused example: you beat your wife, prove you didn’t.) But when all parties involved universally denied the event (unusually strongly in this case), and the journalists couldn’t produce a single piece of solid evidence, especially considering the attack surface was pretty big (14 companies they say?), I’d say at least the story failed pretty epically as far as journalism goes.
Also take into account the fact that when the story first broke, people were quick to point to past reports by the same journalists that are provably false but never retracted.
Btw, last I heard about this story, it was said (IIRC) that Bloomberg assigned different journalists to re-investigate it. Did anything ever come of it?
If they're unable to determine the veracity of the story, they should retract it. If they're convinced of some elements of the story but not others, they should say so.
The failure to follow up with either affirmation or retraction seems dishonest.
Discussing sources is tricky business for journalists, but given the pushback, it seems like at the very least Bloomberg should have conducted some follow-up investigations.
I don't know, but I see that some assume it is false because companies mentioned denied it, well, everyone would deny it. If they didn't they would go out of business (at least the cloud part of those companies).
I ask, because it is quite plausible to have something like this planted, considering that majority of electronics is produced in one country.
It's easy to look at Jeff Bezos and say ego-driven billionaire jealous of Elon Musk. That's a fun narrative.
On the other hand, why should Amazon leave money on the table to be happily scooped up by other companies. Forget Tesla, Washington state was giving billions of dollars in subsidies to Boeing, while Boeing was cutting jobs in Washington. The city council of Seattle was feuding with Amazon for "for making the city too expensive". The city is complaining that Amazon is making some of their citizens too rich.
I think his frustration would be understandable as businessman, and not as envy.
Of course the whole system is perverse and corrupt, but hate the game, not the player.
> The city is complaining that Amazon is making some of their citizens too rich.
The city would prefer that Amazon's presence has benefits for citizens as a whole - or at least didn't make their live worse - rather than enriching a few. Seems reasonable to me.
And it does: "anchor" industries are what brings in wealth in general to a city or metro area. Wages for unrelated jobs in Seattle are still higher than average.
That said, the problem is that average wages don't rise as fast as the cost of living does. But that housing is so expensive is a failure of local government policies, and by extension, the voters who support those policies. Housing doesn't have to be super expensive; voters actively choose policies that make it so.
People are getting what they voted for, and they're mad as hell about it.
> That said, the problem is that average wages don't rise as fast as the cost of living does.
And that's presumably part of the problem
> But that housing is so expensive is a failure of local government policies, and by extension, the voters who support those policies. Housing doesn't have to be super expensive.
I'd be interested to know precisely which local government policies are failing here. To a naive outsider, it sounds as if its likely that well-off incomers are displacing existing populations from desirable areas/properties.
What are the failures of local government housing policy? Failure to relax standards so that existing residence can move into nice high-density prefab blocks built on existing green-space?
Failure to allow supply to meet demand. Zoning regulations constrain how much housing can be built to a very low amount on most residential land. No surprise that prices would rise in that environment, this is barely econ 101, it's like high school level economics.
Like, when demand goes straight up and supply can't go nearly as fast, what else would anyone expect? I don't understand why everyone always acts so shocked that the completely predictable happens over and over.
Seattle has actually been much better about allowing more housing than some peer cities, like SF. But compared to cities in most other developed countries, the situation is still awful. For example, the kind of very low density zoning that is commonplace in Seattle literally doesn't exist anywhere in Japan or Germany.
I don't think you'll find many urbanists or YIMBYs pushing to demolish greenspace like parks or trails. I'm certainly not; if anything, I'd prefer to push to acquire more greenspace, perhaps by redeveloping surface parking lots. As for housing needs, there's plenty of space where things are already developed.
> Like, when demand goes straight up and supply can't go nearly as fast, what else would anyone expect? I don't understand why everyone always acts so shocked that the completely predictable happens over and over.
Thay aren't shocked, as you say its a predictable side effect. That's why cities have to be careful when saying yes please to the economic growth promised by big companies - it can have a detrimental effects on the people living there. Zoning regulations aren't usually arbitrary (I can't speak for any particular city's ordinances) they are there to ensure that minimum housing standards are met, that people don't find themselves living too close to heavy industrial areas, that the infrastructure and green space can cope.
I'm afraid you're wrong: there are many, MANY supply and demand denialists around, who think it doesn't apply to housing. Believe me, I've argued with them. They see that brand new housing is more expensive than the decades-old housing it replaced, and go, "See?? It didn't help the prices at all!"
> Zoning regulations aren't usually arbitrary
True, in many cases they were designed to keep out undesirables, like people who are poor, or non-white. That's not arbitrary, it's intentionally bigoted.
Nobody's suggesting dumping factories into residential areas, or relaxing basic safety standards. That type of zoning is absolutely fine.
The biggest reason is political, that people have NIMBY tendencies: yes there needs to be more housing somewhere, but put it somewhere else please. I don't want to have to worry about parking or see unsightly apartments on my block.
I don't dispute that infrastructure is a concern, but it's not a blocker. Cities growing quickly isn't some unfathomable phenomenon of the 21st century, the logistics can be handled if people want it politically.
and, i've never understood why people ALWAYS assume that a new apartment building will be unsightly. There's just this general attitude of "any kind of building, any kind of development" is bad development. It's really crazying coming from a country that wants economic development so badly.
There's so much economic development that could happen if we simply allowed builders to build the housing that people so desperately need. its win win.
It is a petty objection compared to the stakes but ugliness and beauty aren't in isolation. Take a beautiful Mediterranean Villa and plop it down in the middle of a colonial historic district and it will clash despite both being considered beautiful on their own.
By definition new apartments in a less dense area will have to stand out and the transitioning will result in either clashing. The alternative is they do it in a big wave and say buy out a small neighborhood cul de sac and turn them into apartments. It wouldn't clash any more even if they went with something downright garish but the big changes like that also upset people as they find it jarring.
To be fair, in the US at least, most apartment blocks are kind of ugly compared to most single family homes. Living in Munich now, they're much more attractive on average.
>I'm afraid you're wrong: there are many, MANY supply and demand denialists around, who think it doesn't apply to housing.
Are they really in denial though, I mean many want the housing prices to go up because it means their housing ( asset ) increases as well. So there is clearly a conflict of interest.
I think that's a different category of people, those who understand quite well that supply and demand applies here, and for that reason don't want more supply, to enrich themselves.
There's definitely a grouping of people who just think adding more housing doesn't help lower prices.
Housing doesn’t fit the traditional supply/demand model b/c of the time constraint. It takes time to build housing but companies can grow and hire faster than housing can be built. You don’t want to overbuild and create ghost towns where developers go bankrupt trying to sell (a couple of these places exist in Europe, Canada, and America - I think China too but I haven’t seen it in person), but you don’t want to underbuild a la SF. So I agree with you that the zoning laws have a lot to do with it - but housing isn’t an instant commodity either - it can take many years, esp for high density projects.
Housing doesn’t fit the traditional supply/demand model b/c incumbent owners are able to increase there wealth by using the power of the state to constrain supply through zoning and other regulatory means.
The time constraint you mention is often artificial, six months for permitting here and two months for an impact study there. Actual construction is surprisingly fast.
Nobody overbuilds into ghost towns where there are real housing problems. The only ghost towns I've seen were really small areas that didn't really need all of the houses.
Also, manufacturing delays don't have any impact on supply and demand. They are part of the "supply".
What allows companies to hire faster than cities can grow? The companies still need office space that means more and bigger buildings, it's the same damn problem as housing.
...with one significant difference: communities are generally much more amenable to increased jobs than increased residents. And companies growing fast usually are cool with huge buildings in the city center, which is the one place where cities are generally fine with high density. Getting cities to be okay with, say, low-rise housing developments across the city is a much harder ask. So it really does just come down to zoning and zoning-adjacent concerns (e.g. community input meetings where developments get shot down).
Then the reasonable solution is for the city to tax the enriched citizens and distribute the taxes to the rest of the citizens so that they benefit as a whole.
But, what really happens, is the "city" or "city council" wants is to score political points, because a tax would also impact themselves and their friends and family. Everyone wants someone else to pay to benefit citizens as a whole, when obviously the fairest way is to pass a tax applicable to all "enriched" citizens.
Seattle council has voted for an income tax on highly paid residents (2.25% on everything above $250k), but income taxes are nominally unconstitutional in Washington State. It's been working its way through the state courts for years. So far the lower courts have ruled that an income tax may be constitutional (this would be a first, in Washington) ... but only if the rate is equal for all earners (So the Seattle tax still fails).
It brings to mind the stupid perfect enemy of the good of judging those who try to do better worse than those who don't even try in complete lack of proportion.
It is like reacting to a give away of free shoes to orphans with "Those orphan shoes aren't organic, the bastards!" while ignoring the others make luxury shoes /out of/ orphans because "Blood of the Innocent" brand Cobblers always does that sort of thing.
Amazon's mistake was not that they sought government incentives--it was that they did so in an ostentatious, tone-deaf way and turned it into some sort of strange game show.
They did not play the game by the (unspoken) rules.
"Employees with experience negotiating deals around the country anticipated problems, but their red flags were ignored by those eager to please Bezos"
... this is eerily similar to one of the major drawbacks of an authoritarian regime, where everyone tries to please the Great Leader while no-one dares to express any unpleasant truth.
One person's "ignored" is another person's "accounted for." It could easily be that the folks who made the decision recognized this risk, but decided it was worth it. That looks about the same as ignoring the risk to someone who is not privy to the machinery that makes the decision.
I see this happen all the time in the organization I work for. Some folks say that X won't work, product team tries X, and if it ends up not working, they say, "You ignored our feedback on X!" But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons. IMO, the "ignored" narrative is pretty uncharitable, even if it is the natural and easy one to assume. It feels good to be vindicated. It feels less good to think about how teams are dealing with vast numbers of competing constraints, and sometimes have to take gambles (a central feature of which is the possibility of loss).
It seems like this type of thing happens all the time. Almost every time something bad happens, there was some naysayer who predicted it. But you never hear about the cases where the critics were wrong. The classic Slashdot comment r.e. the iPod is the counterexample that proves the rule. It's such a notable comment because naysayers are almost never so blatantly and visibly cited for their incorrect calls.
Anyway, it's not even clear that the team was wrong to discard this feedback. They got their tax break, didn't they? Along with a bunch of bad PR at the time. But I had totally forgotten that this thing even happened until this article brought it up. I'll probably forget again by next week, and so will most everyone else.
Naysayers can CYA by saying “X will be difficult because of A, B, and C” rather than “X is impossible.” Seriously, it isn’t just CYA, but the former provides useful and perhaps actionable context while the latter doesn’t. The main issue with discarded feedback is when someone said X would be a problem, it was ignored, and X turned out to be a surprise problem (rather than an unsurprising one).
And then there is the opposite CmdrTaco comment, where he thought the lack of X (WiFi, larger storage) would be a problem and it wasn’t.
That's also true. In a transparent decision-making machine, hopefully the response is, "We think A will be a small problem, and B and C won't be a problem at all." Of course, we can still be wrong, no matter what form our decision-making process takes. Perhaps the group that set up this contest expected some PR risk, but didn't expect it to be as severe as it was. If they were not aware of the possibility of PR risk, that would indicate a pretty severe error in their thinking. But we just don't really know whether that's the case or not. It's not observable from outside the system.
The article states that "red flags" raised by "Employees with experience" "were ignored" by court jesters.
If objective, it states that knowledgeable folks critics were not neglected as "OK but let's go ahead anyway in order to check the limits".
I only see 2 contexts where it may be adequate:
A/ periodically poking the limits may be useful in order to be sure they didn't disappear,
B/ to search for a way to overcome them.
If active experts immediately "raise red flags" one may think that A/ isn't pertinent, because by definition they (right now) cope with the limits and therefore know that they aren't changing/crumbling down (for any reason).
B/ is only really pertinent if there is at least a vague new idea about the approach, about a way to tackle the challenge. "Let's try because if we succeed our Great Leader will be happy" isn't a plan, not even wishful thinking.
There's where the whole chain of observations breaks down. People whose desired course of action was rejected can rarely be objective about the folks who rejected their advice.
In such a case either the journalists didn't do their job (because they should have interviewed those folks, to obtain an explanation about the red-flag rejection), or those folks didn't provide any explanation (it seems probable to me, as the article seems solid and also as I'm unable to find such an explanation in the comments here or even online).
"I, a close adviser to one of the richest men in the world, will given an interview about the failure of my advice to him." Hrm. I wouldn't expect someone in such a position to be eager to be interviewed. It doesn't provide evidence either way in my accounting.
Even if they did give an interview, what do you think they would say? "Yeah, we totally ignored the feedback about political risks. Didn't even read it. And it blew up in our faces. Aren't we dumb?" There's no way that it would be admitted. It would be framed as a calculated gambit either way.
When the the red flag were raised if they had a solid new theory against them, they now can explain it to the journalist.
If this new theory isn't dumb, even if it proved wrong, it may save their faces (as there often is some useful lesson to draw from such "this new idea is apparently good, let's put it at test" failure).
They didn't.
Therefore either the journalist didn't interview them (or neglected their answer), xor they didn't reply because they had no new theory, and their only motive was "let's try to Please the Master, by sheer luck we may succeed and will benefit from it, and in case of failure the Master will not punish because he liked the objective and the approach".
There’s a standard solution for this problem, namely numeric probabilities and prediction markets. If an internal prediction market had given an 80% chance of this happening, that’s meaningful in a way that individual ambiguous naysayings are not.
I'm aware of the existence of prediction markets, but I'm not aware of much evidence that they are actually good oracles, especially for events that will happen in the medium to long term. Do you happen to have any evidence you'd like to share about this?
Practically speaking, I don't think this can really work, because I don't think employees will necessarily feel good about betting on things like this. You also have some pretty severe moral hazards when you have employees who stand to gain financially if things go badly for the company. If I take a significant short position on NYC accepting an Amazon headquarters, I now have an incentive to leak negative things about the employer or otherwise sabotage the deal in order to get my contracts to close in my favor.
Are there any examples of corporations running internal prediction markets? That sounds fascinating and I'd love to read about exactly how they made it work, because I can see about 100 problems with this being the "standard" solution.
Google ran one internally for some time maybe 10 years ago. (Maybe still does, for all I know.) IIRC it was for points, maybe transferable for massage credits or something, so no huge economic incentive. I have no idea if it was in any way effective, actionable, or even seen by executives with decision making power. Based on the quantity of discussion on the mailing list I suspect it was mostly used by a pretty small set of people, so I'd have some doubts about its predictive power.
A prediction market is just that, a market of folks with diverse interests on all sides of a given deal. That is not helpful to the leader of a company, whose interest is one-sided.
"But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons."
Considering feedback and not truly taking the time to understand the risk and to discuss the decision with the origin of the feedback is ignoring the feedback. People with the power to make decisions in an organization often follow this pattern. It's the mindset of a fool to think that they know better than the people closest to and most impacted by a decision. Good leadership enables those who are closest to the problem to make the decision or minimally discuss the pros and cons of the decision providing any missing information before making it.
I can't begin to count the number of times that those in leadership roles have made decisions only to walk back on them after they failed citing the exact same reason of feedback they received prior to making the decision. Often the language is spun to obfuscate this but when pressed the reality is made clear.
Worse case, I have witnessed vindictive measures taken by leadership against those who, correctly after the outcome of the decision was realized, criticized the decisions being made.
It's not always about a single naysayer. It's also the bizarre perception that one needs to "have all the answers" when they make it to leadership. We should not ignore the reality that incompetent leadership is real and happens more often than people think.
Amazon's internal principles explicitly demand expressing disagreement until a decision is made. While I'm seven levels below Jeff, in five years at Amazon, I have never seen any hint of people being reluctant to express disagreement with leadership. I have seen people at my level contradict VPs in company forums, and be thanked for it. Unwarranted generalized cynicism does not advance our understanding.
Billionaires trying to out-compete each other in the size of the public handouts they're receiving :))
I never understood why in the US (and in more and more other places as well) it's considered legitimate to give billions to private profit-seeking corporations so they can do the kind of stuff that private profit-seeking corporations do anyway: hire people, build stuff etc.
Because there are positive externalities to a company choosing to do that in your city. If a big corporation chooses to place a HQ in your city, you get an influx of people into the housing market, of consumers into your service industry, of tax payers into your district, etc. While I agree, a lot of these payoffs end up being small compared to the giant sums offered, the theory behind incentivizing companies to come to your district absolutely makes sense, and is exactly what politicians and government workers should be doing. Their job is to plan for the next 30+ years, not the next 6 months where the price point for the incentives is all negative.
If you're going to make $5B in the next 10 years because of a corporation, and giving them $1B now to incentivize them to come to New York instead of Chicago makes a ton of sense. I'm making those numbers up, but that's the thinking.
Except politicians don't stick around for 30+ years, nor do voters or their memories, and it's impossible to make any accurate calculation about how much one is going to make over the next however many years.
So now you have a few people in control of a big pot of future taxpayer money who have the ability to make up numbers however they see fit. There's only one way that story ends.
Not to mention the race to the bottom it causes as time goes on since there are fewer and fewer big organizations being courted by more and more desperate governments.
Where does the 5B come from? They dont pay federal tax, they are getting state and local tax breaks, and providing jobs that have suffered wage stagnation since the bailouts. Politicians do this because they get their pockets stuffed, and then in turn Amazon and Bezos make bucket fulls of cash too. It is crazy to allow tax breaks for company's that largely don't pay taxes to start with, especially extremely profitable companies.
These were thousands of SWE jobs. Amazon would have paid significant payroll taxes (which are federal but that doesn't fit the narrative so people ignore it) and their employees would have paid millions a year in city and state income taxes, property taxes, etc. Getting a high-paying company like Amazon in your city is a huge economic boon and is totally worth up front tax breaks. Remember, it's a tax break, you're just agreeing not to take money you already don't have.
>It is crazy to allow tax breaks for company's that largely don't pay taxes to start with, especially extremely profitable companies.
Again, Amazon pays tens (maybe hundreds) of millions in taxes every year. You're just repeating a political talking point based solely on what they pay at federal income taxes (due to loss carry-overs).
> there are positive externalities to a company choosing to do that in your city.
I get that that's the theory, but does it ever actually work in practice? Do you know instances when massive subsidies attracted big corporations that actually created enough jobs, externalities etc. to compensate for the handouts they received?
It is because of a provincialism and incentives resulting in the culture of "bringing home the bacon" selfishly seeking local benefits without regards to their impact on others. It lets politicians claim benefits where just private corporations doing stuff that helps they can't even if being hands off lead to it.
The bringing home the bacon culture is a larger toxic phenomenon given the "bandit towns" doing things like lowering highway speed traps and the town being vastly composed of traffic cops.
To misquote Ronald Wright's apocryphal quote of John Steinbeck, capitalism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
More seriously, the problem is one of moral hazard: The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money. The people whose money it is aren't buying seats at their $500-a-plate fundraising breakfasts, either.
> The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money.
Exactly. This applies no matter who else is involved.. whether it's billionaires looking for incentives, city unions looking for better deals, or candidates offering to pay for college, healthcare, and cell phones.
When you're spending someone else's money, cost isn't a problem and accountability is punted to someone else.
I think the difference here is that it's easy to name & shame one entity than millions.
That's still better than the injustices people will allow to take root and endure when they view themselves as a temporarily embarrassed bolshevik central planner.
> The politicians making these decisions aren't playing with their own money.
True that!
Btw, the (apocryphal) Steinbeck quote I think is about socialism/communism. I don't think we need to go as far as that to figure out that giving billions in subsidies to mega corporations is maybe not a good thing.
It helps explain why we do it. Everybody imagines that it's going to make them rich, because rich is their natural state of being, and they're only poor now because of some external influence. Corporate subsidies (among other things) seem reasonable when you think it's going to create "good jobs" and that you (of course) are destined for one of those.
For people to say, "Turns out that I'm not ever going to be rich, and maybe we ought to work on a system that allows even poor people to live tolerable lives instead" would require a major rewrite of the American character.
> ...would require a major rewrite of the American character
I wouldn't be that pessimistic. As far as I understand it, when polled Americans are significantly to the left of what mainstream politics has become. At least when it comes to economic issues.
They literally had to cancel 50% of their plans and they likely would have gotten the incentives through the traditional route anyway. The stupid way they handled the negotiations not only ruined their plans for NY it also turned a huge number of people against them.
I live 1.5 miles from the Crystal City HQ2 site in Alexandria, VA. Are there affordable housing, transportation, and public safety issues we have to address? Of course. Will we benefit from addressing these problems to add 25,000-35,000 jobs? Far more than the cost/difficulty of solving these problems.
We are thrilled to have them. We would much rather contend with growth problems than a loss of tax revenues, reduced property values, list employment, or low quality jobs. We have subsidize part of their expansion, but the growth will pay back that investment in 5-7 years. We can live that ROI.
> Are there affordable housing, transportation, and public safety issues we have to address? Of course. Will we benefit from addressing these problems to add 25,000-35,000 jobs?
As an Arlingtoninian, I remain skeptical that a response of the appropriate magnitude will occur in the region. Those who aren't fortunate enough to have a well-paying job will be forced further outside of the beltway, further worsening their commutes. Affordable apartment buildings will continue to be overhauled and become "luxury", demanding an extra $300+ in rent a month. Well-maintained medium small businesses that were barely breaking even will be forced to shutter as banks and upscale gyms take their spots. This has happened in the region, and will only accelerate with HQ2.
> loss of tax revenues, reduced property values, list employment, or low quality jobs
AFAIK, Arlington was turning around their office vacancy rate before HQ2. Admittedly, it was more focused on the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, but still...
Increased property values are not really a benefit. That is more concisely restated as increased cost of living and higher costs of doing business. Retail costs rise in turn. Traffic gets worse. You feel like you’re making progress on paper, but it all just becomes a lot less livable.
HQ2 is a great case study on why we ought to have the Land Value Tax. Under this regime, wherever Amazon chooses to put their HQ would have all the same market mechanics occur (prices would still rise with the market) but the increase in prices would be seized as tax revenues and not as a windfall for landlords who had nothing to do with why Amazon chose to put HQ2 there. The region could then use this to e.g. build public housing, improve infrastructure, create functional transit hubs to allow people to disperse a bit while still remaining part of the community, etc.
They're not necessarily evil, they're just profiting from something they had no role in creating. The LVT taxes specifically the value of the land as if nothing were on it - therefore it's value that is extrinsically generated by things like educational institutions, public infrastructure, geographic desirability, or... access to high value employers like Amazon(!).
It's worth noting that under this regime, any actions the landlord does take to increase the value of their particular use of the land is theirs to keep. Build a better apartment building that can demand higher rent? All upside is yours. Build a better storefront that entices higher end tenants? All the upside is yours once again. Seems like capitalist justice to me: you're entitled to what you've produced (value of things on the land) and the community is entitled to what it has produced (value of the land itself).
I don’t understand how this is supposed to work. Land value goes from 1 dollar to 2 dollars because Amazon moves in. Cool, tax revenue goes up 100%, too. This seems no different than a general real estate tax, though. Additionally it seems like this says nothing about whether the rent will go up 100% or 500%.
This feels extremely hand-wavy and borderline wishful thinking. Land value isn’t fully separable from improvements. (My land and improvements are both more valuable when my neighbors improve their properties. My neighbors benefit the same from me. I fail to see why we should be double taxed for the value we create.) Even is separable, it’s not at all clear that landlord profit could be separated this way, because landlords don’t rent out land.
Tax on land value only, excluding improvements. This encourages landowners to build to the limit of marginal construction costs, which benefits both the local economy and tenants.
More housing is not going to happens if everyone is making shit wages. If it were profitable to build housing there, someone would have already done that.
Your comment would read better if you didn't claim to speak for some group - presumably anyone living within a few miles of the HQ2 site. I'm sure that many people could be found there that strongly disagree with your confident predictions:
> We have subsidize part of their expansion, but the growth will pay back that investment in 5-7 years.
Most of the incentives are tied to specific goals; the bulk of the money is tied to specific numbers of jobs being added above a certain pay level (I think it was 25k jobs with an average salary over $100k/year, but haven’t gone back to find the article). Other incentives are contingent on revenues from a specific tax (hotel rooms I think) going up. The other big incentive isn’t Amazon exclusive: building a new campus for Virginia Tech nearby and increased funding for STEM education within the state.
A similar story played out here in Seattle. Amazon transformed SLU into a business hub, bringing tens of thousands of high paying jobs to a previously underdeveloped neighborhood.
This only benefits the people who already own property in the region. As a renter, things are much worse for me post-HQ2 announcement. My wife and I have to accept that, though we love Arlington, we will almost certainly never be able to afford a home here and that we'll be priced out eventually. And we're well-paid professionals; anyone of more modest means is screwed.
I'm sympathetic to this view ... but on the other hand, every major metro area basically just set a floor for how much they're will to give out in tax breaks and perks to rich tech companies to bring in fancy real estate deals. There's something deeper going on here, where tech is investing money they seemingly don't know what to do with in land.
My understanding is that the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, which includes Alexandria/Arlington is one area in the country that is all but recession proof due to the high number of federal government and associated jobs. Thus loss of tax revenues and reduced property values just aren't a thing in this region.
Perhaps if you look at the whole region but this specific area, Crystal City, was devastated by the BRAC[0] program which moved a bunch of government agencies, offices, and their associated contractors out of this area.
IMO if there’s any place on the east coast that can handle this (other than maybe NY but then again maybe not) it’s you guys. Every time I’m up there the metro lines and VRE get longer and there are one or two more high-rise apartment buildings. The price for a starter apartment is about the same as it is in most small American cities because of that.
Could it be better? Yes but I don’t think it’s better anywhere else.
A fellow I know lives in Washington, DC, a block and a half from the Columbia Heights metro. He expects to be charged more rent as the first result of the Crystal City HQ2. I imagine that Washington will gain some income tax revenue.
What a beautiful illustration of how ego-driven decision making can be at the highest levels—both Bezos’ decision to solicit incentives to compete with rivals, and local NYC officials’ plan to torpedo the deal out of spite for being left out of the process.
I think it's interesting how other states have to fight so hard to get companies to move there and yet, CA one of the least business friendly places, can take it's growth completely for granted.
Amazon is so heavy handed in how they interact with the public. They don't seem to understand or care that much for PR and give off this hyper capitalistic vibe that turns off many people. Even for American society, they feel extreme. As the article states, "Fuck you, we're Amazon".
Amazon has always had neutral PR and amazing customer service. They realized early on that they don't have to please the entire world, and acting "woke" won't actually get and retain customers. I'd say the approach has worked out for them pretty well.
> They don't seem to understand or care that much for PR and give off this hyper capitalistic vibe that turns off many people
Markets keep rewarding a behavior/product so nothing is going to change.
Amazon.com is convenient and fast for most people. Kindles are great for most people. AWS is default for most people. 2-day shipping is great for most people.
As long as most people find their products and services preferable, I'm afraid bad PR won't change a thing (see: stock performance )
I don't see a super strong connection between Amazon's business power and how they present themselves. You can make boatloads of money and also still come off as somewhat presentable and not some uncaring monster.
There are plenty of companies that operate like that. Amazon just chooses not to. As the article pointed out, it's how Bezos rolls, for better or for worse.
For better or worse, Bezos has always been true to himself and his vision for the company. Without any market pressures to dissuade him, he has never lied and pretended to care about anything more than money, status, and further company success.
There is nothing wrong with this. The purpose of government is to set up rules to harness the market so even uncaring monster companies still must do “good” in order to succeed and walk away with money.
> When Elon Musk secured $1.3 billion from Nevada in 2014 to open a gigantic battery plant, Jeff Bezos noticed. In meetings, the Amazon.com Inc. chief expressed envy for how Musk had pitted five Western states against one another in a bidding war for thousands of manufacturing jobs; he wondered why Amazon was okay with accepting comparatively trifling incentives. It was a theme Bezos returned to often, according to four people privy to his thinking. Then in 2017, an Amazon executive sent around a congratulatory email lauding his team for landing $40 million in government incentives to build a $1.5 billion air hub near Cincinnati. The paltry sum irked Bezos, the people say, and made him even more determined to try something new.
Matt Levine in “Money Stuff” yesterday: One thing to say here is that the people who are Econ-101-rational tend to be the ones who make the most money. Every time you read about a workaholic billionaire and think “boy, not me, if I had a billion dollars I’d be on the beach,” the answer is always “well that’s why you don’t have a billion dollars.” If you have the characteristics that enable you to make a billion dollars, you don’t usually turn them off once you get there.
It does make me wonder why people are worried about paperclip maximiser AIs when paperclip maximiser CEOs are out there and just as dangerous. The world is full of people who'd cut down every tree in the rainforest so long as they kept getting paid for it.
How is it childish behavior? If I'm paying top dollar for something (in this case, lobbying governments for tax breaks), then if I don't get top results, I'm wasting money, which is disappointing.
I think you've got it backwards. Amazon (as Walmart before them) has done more to help poor people than any other firm or program around. Squeezing suppliers and returning the benefit to consumers in lower prices, providing a wide offering of goods previously unavailable are real benefits which improve peoples lives.
SpaceX is a government contractor -- an amazing one no doubt, but without the custom of the government they wouldn't exist. Tesla grew up on government subsidies for years and when faced with real competition, Elon suggested it was time to stop the subsidies. He may be doing good for the planet, but he is an ego driven hype machine.
Amazon = net negative for people who do business with them. "Squeezes" relationships, as you put it.
Elon Musk ventures = solves real world problems while maximizing fun.
It's interesting how you paint Amazon and Walmart. Let me bring up just one example:
The short term price squeezing means manufactures are responding by providing lower quality items to Amazon, just like what they do at Walmart. (Try buying a box of name brand Pampers diapers on Amazon right now and compare them with the same SKU at, say, Target) And all the more power to them if that's their goal. But long-term it isn't a sustainable strategy, business or environmental.
Low-quality products equals more landfill and less money in consumer's pockets overall. It also means a very small market for product re-use, such as buying second hand. I grew up with 20 year old appliances from a local thrift shop. Every appliance I buy now seems to have a 24 month shelf-life, with the liability of having to dispose of unrecyclable materials. I'm telling you, net negative.
>Low-quality products equals more landfill and less money in consumer's pockets overall. It also means a very small market for product re-use, such as buying second hand. I grew up with 20 year old appliances from a local thrift shop. Every appliance I buy now seems to have a 24 month shelf-life, with the liability of having to dispose of unrecyclable materials. I'm telling you, net negative.
Nice anecdote, maybe you're just abusive? I buy simple appliances from Walmart and they last fine. I have a $15 drip coffee maker that has probably made about 2000 pots of coffee now from them and it still works. I'm telling you, net positive.
This seems a like a false equivalence to me. There is far more than just Amazon that has facilitated the benefits you described. The Internet, portable computing, etc. all played a role in the general standard of living increase. If Amazon had not become dominant entity its very possible that another or many other competing players could have done things differently.
It's a lot harder to argue that another player in the market could have filed the niche that Elon identified and continues to expand.
And Elon selling the pipe-dream of production ready FSD maybe 10+ years early to Tesla lapdogs that drink up all the koolaid because they believe in him? He is equally cunning towards the unsuspecting consumer
I'll never forget getting told off by the S3 PM at Reinvent because I had the nerve to ask for global sort in the S3 file browser. "Do it yourself!" he said... like, I need to find one file, sorted by date, about once every other month. You want me to learn the CLI and write a custom script for THAT?! Un-effing-believable
They have a bajillion highly-paid programmers (and enough infra to power God himself) and yet one basic feature present pretty much elsewhere in both the online and offline worlds is too much to ask
S3 is one of the last things I would manage from any GUI. I don’t use GUIs when I’m searching or listing local files either.
Besides the S3 cli commands are some of the most intuitive.
S3 is not a file system though and is a big blob of objects with tags. I think the worse thing AWS ever did was present S3 as a file system in the web console.
How would that even work on the API level efficiency given how S3 is architected? It’s clear given their optimization techniques they tell you to use that S3 is optimized for prefix style searching. That’s all they offer from the web console, the cli or the SDKs.
It would amount to retrieving everything from the S3 conceptual “index database” and doing a non optimized sort when everything is architected to search based on the key and a key prefix.
It’s far more efficient to let the client get a subset by prefix (ie “folder”) and sort/filter by other meta data client side.
As in, search results reflect only the current visible page and not all pages. If you use a bucket as a dump for, say, daily backups, finding a specific file from 3 years ago is really time-consuming and needlessly difficult. Can't sort, can't search.... just pure frustration
I haven't checked this feature in years -- maybe they fixed it
It comes from a fundamental lack of understanding of what S3 is and how it is organized. Objects are indexed as a key value store optimized for sorting on a key and a key prefix. The fact that keys can have backslashes as a character doesn’t mean that objects are stored in “folders”. Knowing how S3 indexes data - by key only and all other metadata is tagged on the object and not in the index, should inform how to name your keys and your access patterns.
For instance sorting by date, would involve AWS querying each objects meta data and then sorting it.
If having to find objects by date is an important use case, why not create keys in the format of YYYYMMDD?
And honestly (not directed at you) that’s a problem endemic with “AWS consultants”. Too many of them are old school netops people who took one certification learned how to click around in the console and now call themselves “AWS Architects”.
They end up duplicating their on prem architecture and processes - costing companies more and not knowing how to automate and increase efficiency.
As far as “powerful GUIs”, one of the earliest game changers for the Mac that helped Apple survive during the dark ages were all of the custom workflows that publishers had created using AppleScript. It wasn’t the better GUI back in the day.
The AWS web UI is a trainwreck by design. Amazon doesn't want to spend a penny more on it than the bare minimum, and the APIs and CLI tools (which are the intended entry points for all serious customers) do the job exceedingly well.
"However, this mode won’t erase everything you do. If you log on to a site like Facebook or Amazon in incognito mode, those pages will recognize you and record your browsing activity. In other words, your browser won’t remember what you’ve been up to, but any sites you log into will. This means you might see evidence of your private browsing in ads that appear later. And if you download files, private mode won’t wipe them either, though it will clear out your download history."
> Things are fixing to get interesting if Bernie gets the nomination...
As always, Bernie’s plan appears to be “You bet I’ll do it!” and Warren’s plan is “Here is a carefully considered plan for it”. Having watched the Corbyn fiasco unfold, I really hope the Democrats manage to pick someone other than Sanders.
Tax incentives are different than handouts. At any rate, it's certainly nothing new and you could attribute this sort of thing as playing a part in the United States's economic success.
Tax incentives are where entrenched power get to take from the collective social good while not pitching in. How are they not handouts? It's like taking food from the lunch lady and paying half the price because your dad is rich.
States fighting amongst themselves to give the most generous handouts doesn't ensure national success. Perhaps that makes sense in regards to national tax incentives but not state ones.
Spinning getting divided and conquered and screwed into offering an unfair tax deal just to get Amazon in your state as the key to economic success is some trickle down shit. Why not have solidarity amongst states and tax Amazon fairly? Instead of having to shoot yourself in the foot economically years down the line when you have to adopt costly self-destructive measures to reverse the economic inequality you entrenched for no good actual reason?
I grew up in Florida. Disney transformed central Florida from a rural agricultural economy to a thriving tourist destination in the 60s thanks to economic incentives which included exemptions for state building codes. Yes, Walt Disney World has its own building codes. Almost 60 years later and Orlando is thriving.
I think the fact that tax and regulatory incentives work so well should underscore the importance of keeping taxation and regulation to the minimum necessary. When taxes are high and regulations are too stringent, it can choke an economy.
What seems more likely. Bezos scheming in his loft or someone being hired just to take full advantage of anything that could benefit the company? This is just the result of someone doing their job. Of you don't like the handout your issue is with the government. Not someone doing their job.
Until then, I would take anything you read in Bloomberg w/ a grain of salt.