A commenter on the article made a snarky reply about Apple choosing China as that's where a lot of the manufacturing is - I wonder why Apple/Amazon don't look internationally for HQ2?
Are their international offices 'big enough' for what they need?
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.
You'd have to be insane to keep any of your sensitive IP in China, honestly. But mostly I assume they stick to the U.S. because that's where the talent is (and that's the government they need to have the closest relationship with, too)
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 california.
same with their ASICs; the masks and such have got to go to the fabs, but not the HDL describing the logic.
so, certainly some of their IP ends up over there, but not necessarily the juiciest bits.
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.
In order to do business in China you need to partner with a Chinese company, that Chinese company has another partner, it's the Chinese Government. Everything you share with your partner is automatically shared with the Government and the Government shares all of that data with all of their other companies.
So if you want to manufacture a CPU, your partner needs to know all the IP, if you want to make LCD panel, your partner needs to know all your IP, etc.
This is the reason it seems China is supercharged, they are forcing companies to share IP in order to get access to their market, and that IP is shared with every other relevant company in China.
All of them have large Canadian campuses, presumably because the US visa process is such a dumpster fire and the need for specialized advanced academic backgrounds.
You can't just open an office in China; you need to be a Chinese company for that, founded by a Chinese native.
Second, any Chinese company above 1000 employees needs to have a communist party shadow management - that is, for every manager above a certain level, a party representative is active at the exact same rank with the same (probably slightly higher) management power.
That's for China though, for other countries the reasoning is probably legislative and tax related.
Likewise, an European company can't just operate in the US without being incorporated in the US.
Come on. If you’re not making enough money they would probably not even bother with a 1000. If you do however, and the main reason to have a business is to make money as I remember - then they will most certainly come for you anyway.
You’re trying to lawyer your way out of an oppressive government. It doesn’t end well generally.
"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, highschoolot.com and wraltechwire.com. We take the GDPR seriously."
They don't know and don't feel like being in compliance with it. Laws like GDPR and specific sales tax laws net these kinds of results all the time in local businesses who don't gain anything by complying.
If you're a small or medium sized non-tech publisher who outsourced the building of your digital publishing system 5 years ago and have been cruising along ever since, you might not be very motivated to spend real cash on a big new IT project to ensure your various server logs don't have IP addresses or other "personally identifying information" in them, just to name an example.
And, in this case, a local newspaper in a relatively small market. Their exposure is probably pretty limited but it's not hard to imagine a legal or compliance person asked IT is they were compliant with GPDR and the answer came back "dunno." At which point, the decision is between spend an hour to cut off EU access, decide to deliberately sweep any potential problem under the rug, or spend a fair bit of effort to do at least a compliance audit. #1 doesn't seem like a bad choice in this situation.
That's probably the issue. The news site itself doesn't have to do much.
But the ad code and trackers and beacons and all the other stuff that they have installed on each and every page - the news site has no idea what it's doing and how to even begin ensuring compliance.
You can't be all that surprised, right? EU users are now a liability, so it makes sense to block them until you can be absolutely sure you can comply with their laws.
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 really hope that data privacy regulations don't have the unintended side-effect of significantly increasing the geographic balkanization of the web.
> We're not sure if ensuring compliance makes business sense
If that is the the case then it is working as intended. Instead of just ignoring regulation and writing off a small risk of some fixed and difficult to enforce fine as cost of business the "4% of global revenue" clause puts the fear of god into companies.
Yep, just had that call yesterday: <0.1% of customers? Drop EU users off our email list and blacklist the EU until we want to actually target the market. Ended up not worth it to even check if we're compliant than to just lose the business, at least for the short term.
I don't blame them. I'm thinking about doing the same thing for a few of my web sites that have very local content.
The company that sells the advertising on those sites says non-US traffic dilutes the value of the ads, and I'd get 3-5% higher CPM if I filtered non-US traffic.
I've kept them open until now because I like to check on the sites when I travel, but GDPR might be the incentive I need to pull the plug.
> I'd get 3-5% higher CPM if I filtered non-US traffic.
3-5% higher CPM on how many fewer pageviews? In general, filtering out traffic should always make you less money, even as filtering to the most profitable traffic increases how much you make per page view.
If non-US traffic really were losing you money your advertising company could always drop ad requests from non-US traffic.
Non-US traffic is essentially non-revenue for many American web sites (unless you're running AdSense). Serving pages still costs money, though. So it makes more sense to block non-US traffic than to serve it ad-free.
> 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.
It's pretty clear it hasn't done Amazon's reputation any favours. And there's no reason to think government officials won't go above and beyond in offering incentives behind closed doors.
Why do you think that? I think Amazon will get what they want - mainly a city to capitulate to their demands. I’ve talked to people in Pittsburgh and Atlanta and the majority wanted Amazon. I don’t think most people realize outside of tech circles that Amazon will mostly bring people in rather than hiring locally and how much they have strained the infrastructure in Seattle.
Seattle mostly. If they built HQ2 here, I'd expect that recruiting would switch to be for jobs at HQ2 (and get a lot more successful, since no relocation required).
I can only speak from my experience, but as an Amazonian working in a non-Seattle office, we hired essentially completely locally. We have a few transfers, but it's much more of a pain in the ass to get people moved than it is to find talent in the area. Hiring in LA, by the way.
Seconded, as another Amazonian working in a remote office. The Seattle HQ absolutely hires folks from all over, but many of the remote sites tend to hire more locally. In fact, many of the remote sites exist precisely because of the local labor market (e.g. NYC hiring people out of finance, advertising, etc).
Although given the planned scale for HQ2, I would imagine hiring practices for HQ2 to be closer to the "bring in people from everywhere" model rather than the "hire [almost] exclusively locally" model.
> 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?
So cut other spending. There is a 100% chance that there is money being mispent somewhere else. When a family has a budget, they can’t go over that budget: they cut expenses and prioritize. Governments are unwilling to do that because they somehow feel that every single expenditure is “vital.”
It's not so much that voters are voting down income tax as progressive income taxes are illegal in the state of washington[1]. Though Seattle has tried[2]. You are right though that in some cases the voters have voted down income tax initiatives [3].
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 those units also require extra infrastructure funding.
Amazon wants this cost to be 100% borne by Seattle city residents. Unsurprisingly, Seattle city residents aren't interesting in bearing it (On top of the %8 YoY rent increases many of them are seeing.)
Amazon earns what, half a million dollars a year for every new engineer that they hire? Whereas the city gets stuck with a $XY,000 infrastructure bill for supporting that engineer's apartment - money that ends up being squeezed out of existing residents.
I do work for one of the big-four in Seattle, and I absolutely believe that they, or their employees should pay for these infrastructure improvements - not my hairdresser. I have no right to move into a neighborhood with the expectation that existing residents pay to make room for me.
> 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.
> Property taxes and permits are designed to raise the funds needed to pay for infrastructure. Amazon pays them. According to the Seattle Times (1):
The share of property taxes that Amazon, and its employees pay do not cover the costs of building out new infrastructure to support them. It's basic mathematics.
Let's say that you and four of your friends live in a 5-bedroom house. Let's say that you all pay an equal share of rent, maintenance, etc. Let's say that I decide to move into your house...
And demand that we knock down an exterior wall, and build a sixth bedroom, and a second bathroom, to accommodate me (Because everyone needs a bedroom! And one bathroom doesn't cut it for 6 people - it barely supported 5!) And insist that all six of us split the cost of this construction equally.
You should be happy about this - the rent-payer base has increased! Now a sixth person is chipping into paying the groundskeeper to mow the lawn. Never mind the $83,333 construction bill that the five of you had to front.
It's bollocks, and it's the situation Seattle is currently in. Existing residents are expected to pick up the tab for new people moving into their neighbourhoods. Yes, taxable activity is rising faster then the cost of population, but so is the infrastructure bill. It's a lot cheaper to maintain a five-bedroom house in a steady-state, then to build an extra bedroom in it. It's a lot cheaper to maintain the city's existing infrastructure, then to expand it to meet this population growth.
The only solution is making it extremely expensive to upzone commercial spaces (Which will result in shenanigans - like packing more employees into less space), or by taxing tech firms directly.
It's more expensive to build the same infrastructure today then it was in 1960 for a huge number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with Seattle policy.
As density increased, the infrastructure we need today is more expensive, even if the cost of construction stayed the same.
Before all land within city limits was developed, the city could charge large fees for subdivisions. Generally, American city infrastructure is financed by such fees. There aren't very many subdivisions happening anymore.
Lastly, the rate of population growth was slower, and did not create a housing crisis. All of the above can be stomached through when you don't have exploding rents and homeless populations -despite the unprecedented levels of residential construction the city's seeing.
I'm not sure it hurts Amazon so much as the reputation of the cities and mayors who were bending over backwards and trying to land a deal at all costs. And if nothing else wasted the city's time and money with various desperate stunts.
I suspect Apple will get the same results when they finally talk to the locals about a HQ had they made a big public deal about it vs. somewhat quieter search (relative to Amazon).
If you're on a desktop/laptop computer and have a FB account, use the "fullwsj" hack: Edit the URL to say "fullwsj.com" instead of "wsj.com", and click on the link from Facebook.
If on a mobile device, you can do it, but have to copy the URL and then paste into a private browsing window (at least on Safari/iOS.)
There is something interesting though. I tested it after logging out of Facebook (wanted to see what would happen). Basically I wanted to see if you needed to be logged into Facebook or not to use this redirect (would it work from the logged-out Facebook page?), but got something surprising.
I performed these steps (Chrome on Desktop, from Windows):
1. I was logged into Facebook in an incognito window. I decided to log out of it. I then removed my fast login button by clicking the X.
(Note: I didn't close that incognito window. This does mean any cookies could have been retained, I wasn't being so thorough)
2. After logging out I returned to the main Facebook.com page (to sign in) in the same window.
4. After I pressed Enter Facebook actually put up a page "Confirm leaving Facebook" with the URL. This was under the Facebook.com URL. And then I clicked the URL on that page. I got the full article.
This is what that window looked like (I reloaded it by clicking the back button in that window, while writing this comment):
It doesn't do this when I put in just any other URL into the URL field.
So how did this happen technically? How did Facebook.com get the new URL I put in, and halt my navigating away manually, and instead ask if I really want to go there (but remove the "full" from where 'there' is)? I don't think Chrome gives Facebook access to URL's put into the URL bar by the user...so...?
There's no chance I'm misreporting what happened because there's nowhere else I could have pasted the URL other than the URL bar, since I was logged out of Facebook at the time. I'm puzzled how this happens on a technical level.
I think any JS can listen for the navigate-away event or changes to the URL without doing anything special - then just grab ‘window.href/window.location’ or something like that
Wow, that would be super surprising. I wouldn't think I'm giving Facebook my next destination when I type it manually into the URL bar! Can someone confirm?
(Method: I just installed a redirect checker Chrome extension, the top one, called Redirect Check, lets me check a plain URL also which is what I had it check.)
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 Apple, which translate to their way of searching for places to do business, as if one is clearly superior. (I personally don't mind what Amazon is doing in the least)
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 launched in the 90's or 2000's that are competing with sites like Breitbart, Salon, the Daily Beast, etc.
I agree that we should call out this kind of article, but I don't like spreading the conception that click-bait based news websites are equally as reliable as more trustworthy sources.
> 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.
I concur. I subscribe. I think these writers must be young and wanted to accentuate the concealment of gov't deals. I would say this article could have used a few more revisions.
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.
Apple's strategy is much smarter let the cities secretly do a peacock dance, cut some real under the table secret tax deals and move somewhere else.
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 about it.
Plus something of this magnitude is going to require political support so the proposal is as much an appeal to the local electorate as anything else.
I, for one, think it would be great if tech jobs spread out across the US.
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.
Sorry if I came across as Anti-Amazon. In fact I am very pro-Amazon and I love the fact that Amazon is making cities battle it out. A future where city mayors and state governors have to actively fight for investment and when they fail they are seen as incompetent bozos would be good for democracy and people. Amazon has my full support for their move to pit city against city.
My point was that not dragging ordinary people into this might have helped Amazon get a better deal. Why should general public know what deals these mayors and governors are cutting ? (In Amazon's perspective, it is good for democracy if the fight is in open)
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.
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.
I don't think any of these cities are actively handing Amazon money, just not taxing them. None of the cities on the list absolutely NEED amazon to survive, so they're not going to completely overextend themselves.
The part of me that likes giving big companies the benefit of the doubt wonders if amazon is intentionally trying to show how corrupt the process is by having such a big public competition for their hq2 site.
Even if they hadn't massively publicized it, the word would have gotten around to candidate cities and the same sort of bidding war would have occurred. So what benefit did amazon really accrue by creating a media frenzy around their hq2 bid process?
If the public balks at giving out a massive tax break to one of the worlds biggest companies, run by the (publicly) richest man, then Amazon can just point at the city next door and say "Well they promised us X, but we really like you guys so we wanted to go with you".
I think the reason Amazon had to announce their search publicly is because their HQ2 project is so much bigger than Apple's or any other company's.
60,000 jobs is not something you take up lightly, especially as it relates to transit and housing. It's the equivalent of a small city, and you're going to need to be prepared for it.
Plus it's a way for cities to start a bidding war, offering the lowest tax rates and property prices. Effectively Amazon will get their new HQ for free, if not have the cities actively pay for it. Because jobs. Free market, competition, etc, yay.
Just because Apple has a reputation for being secretive doesn't mean they are in this case. Most companies don't go around advertising plans to open a new office or their CEO's meeting schedule.
Can we all agree is bad form to share paywall links here? No, I don't want to resort to any hacks since it is stealing but this is literally advertising for the WSJ at this point.
> "It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds."
> "In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."
After hearing about Cupertino's possible plan to shakedown companies like Apple for tax money, should we be surprised at their approach to a new campus? Of course even a public search, there would be cities promising tax breaks to Apple, but their approach seems consistent with their usual levels of operational secrecy.
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.
123 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadAre their international offices 'big enough' for what they need?
http://fortune.com/2017/03/17/apple-rd-centers-china/
What does it mean to create HQ2? Tim Cook and Jony Ive will work there part of the year? Probably not.
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 california.
same with their ASICs; the masks and such have got to go to the fabs, but not the HDL describing the logic.
so, certainly some of their IP ends up over there, but not necessarily the juiciest bits.
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.
So if you want to manufacture a CPU, your partner needs to know all the IP, if you want to make LCD panel, your partner needs to know all your IP, etc.
This is the reason it seems China is supercharged, they are forcing companies to share IP in order to get access to their market, and that IP is shared with every other relevant company in China.
Second, any Chinese company above 1000 employees needs to have a communist party shadow management - that is, for every manager above a certain level, a party representative is active at the exact same rank with the same (probably slightly higher) management power.
That's for China though, for other countries the reasoning is probably legislative and tax related.
Likewise, an European company can't just operate in the US without being incorporated in the US.
You’re trying to lawyer your way out of an oppressive government. It doesn’t end well generally.
I think the concept of a second HQ is by definition a bit weird, size is probably not the main concern here.
"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, highschoolot.com and wraltechwire.com. We take the GDPR seriously."
Seriously though, is GDPR compliance that difficult? What does a news site have to do to comply?
But the ad code and trackers and beacons and all the other stuff that they have installed on each and every page - the news site has no idea what it's doing and how to even begin ensuring compliance.
I really hope that data privacy regulations don't have the unintended side-effect of significantly increasing the geographic balkanization of the web.
If that is the the case then it is working as intended. Instead of just ignoring regulation and writing off a small risk of some fixed and difficult to enforce fine as cost of business the "4% of global revenue" clause puts the fear of god into companies.
BBC stuff is likewise blocked.
I find region-based blocks all the time :( , mostly related to IP and copyright.
The company that sells the advertising on those sites says non-US traffic dilutes the value of the ads, and I'd get 3-5% higher CPM if I filtered non-US traffic.
I've kept them open until now because I like to check on the sites when I travel, but GDPR might be the incentive I need to pull the plug.
3-5% higher CPM on how many fewer pageviews? In general, filtering out traffic should always make you less money, even as filtering to the most profitable traffic increases how much you make per page view.
If non-US traffic really were losing you money your advertising company could always drop ad requests from non-US traffic.
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.
Why do you say that? Amazon seems to recruit pretty heavily around me, which is far, far from Seattle and SV.
Although given the planned scale for HQ2, I would imagine hiring practices for HQ2 to be closer to the "bring in people from everywhere" model rather than the "hire [almost] exclusively locally" model.
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?
[1] https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/local-i...
[2] https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/11/22/25581262/superio...
[3] http://www.theolympian.com/news/politics-government/election...
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.
Amazon wants this cost to be 100% borne by Seattle city residents. Unsurprisingly, Seattle city residents aren't interesting in bearing it (On top of the %8 YoY rent increases many of them are seeing.)
Amazon earns what, half a million dollars a year for every new engineer that they hire? Whereas the city gets stuck with a $XY,000 infrastructure bill for supporting that engineer's apartment - money that ends up being squeezed out of existing residents.
I do work for one of the big-four in Seattle, and I absolutely believe that they, or their employees should pay for these infrastructure improvements - not my hairdresser. I have no right to move into a neighborhood with the expectation that existing residents pay to make room for me.
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...
The share of property taxes that Amazon, and its employees pay do not cover the costs of building out new infrastructure to support them. It's basic mathematics.
Let's say that you and four of your friends live in a 5-bedroom house. Let's say that you all pay an equal share of rent, maintenance, etc. Let's say that I decide to move into your house...
And demand that we knock down an exterior wall, and build a sixth bedroom, and a second bathroom, to accommodate me (Because everyone needs a bedroom! And one bathroom doesn't cut it for 6 people - it barely supported 5!) And insist that all six of us split the cost of this construction equally.
You should be happy about this - the rent-payer base has increased! Now a sixth person is chipping into paying the groundskeeper to mow the lawn. Never mind the $83,333 construction bill that the five of you had to front.
It's bollocks, and it's the situation Seattle is currently in. Existing residents are expected to pick up the tab for new people moving into their neighbourhoods. Yes, taxable activity is rising faster then the cost of population, but so is the infrastructure bill. It's a lot cheaper to maintain a five-bedroom house in a steady-state, then to build an extra bedroom in it. It's a lot cheaper to maintain the city's existing infrastructure, then to expand it to meet this population growth.
The only solution is making it extremely expensive to upzone commercial spaces (Which will result in shenanigans - like packing more employees into less space), or by taxing tech firms directly.
As density increased, the infrastructure we need today is more expensive, even if the cost of construction stayed the same.
Before all land within city limits was developed, the city could charge large fees for subdivisions. Generally, American city infrastructure is financed by such fees. There aren't very many subdivisions happening anymore.
Lastly, the rate of population growth was slower, and did not create a housing crisis. All of the above can be stomached through when you don't have exploding rents and homeless populations -despite the unprecedented levels of residential construction the city's seeing.
If on a mobile device, you can do it, but have to copy the URL and then paste into a private browsing window (at least on Safari/iOS.)
There is something interesting though. I tested it after logging out of Facebook (wanted to see what would happen). Basically I wanted to see if you needed to be logged into Facebook or not to use this redirect (would it work from the logged-out Facebook page?), but got something surprising.
I performed these steps (Chrome on Desktop, from Windows):
1. I was logged into Facebook in an incognito window. I decided to log out of it. I then removed my fast login button by clicking the X.
(Note: I didn't close that incognito window. This does mean any cookies could have been retained, I wasn't being so thorough)
2. After logging out I returned to the main Facebook.com page (to sign in) in the same window.
3. On the blank Facebook login screen , I then manually pasted https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/apple-avoids-amazons-beauty... into the URL bar in Chrome.
4. After I pressed Enter Facebook actually put up a page "Confirm leaving Facebook" with the URL. This was under the Facebook.com URL. And then I clicked the URL on that page. I got the full article.
This is what that window looked like (I reloaded it by clicking the back button in that window, while writing this comment):
https://imgur.com/a/X8bIGyX
It doesn't do this when I put in just any other URL into the URL field.
So how did this happen technically? How did Facebook.com get the new URL I put in, and halt my navigating away manually, and instead ask if I really want to go there (but remove the "full" from where 'there' is)? I don't think Chrome gives Facebook access to URL's put into the URL bar by the user...so...?
There's no chance I'm misreporting what happened because there's nowhere else I could have pasted the URL other than the URL bar, since I was logged out of Facebook at the time. I'm puzzled how this happens on a technical level.
I wanted to reply "can someone check this" but I was like, come on how lazy can I be so I checked.
-> Yes, it redirects in the way you suggest.
Proof:
https://imgur.com/a/puTv5Ar
(Method: I just installed a redirect checker Chrome extension, the top one, called Redirect Check, lets me check a plain URL also which is what I had it check.)
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 Apple, which translate to their way of searching for places to do business, as if one is clearly superior. (I personally don't mind what Amazon is doing in the least)
Secrecy and tax deals are two different issues.
One's opinion on one should not be conflated with the other.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/19/technology/business/amazon-h...
and
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/pennsylvania-asks-...
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.
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 launched in the 90's or 2000's that are competing with sites like Breitbart, Salon, the Daily Beast, etc.
I agree that we should call out this kind of article, but I don't like spreading the conception that click-bait based news websites are equally as reliable as more trustworthy sources.
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.
Your average joe is always going to oppose a disruption in his otherwise mundane and lazy life.
Apple's strategy is much smarter let the cities secretly do a peacock dance, cut some real under the table secret tax deals and move somewhere else.
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 about it.
Plus something of this magnitude is going to require political support so the proposal is as much an appeal to the local electorate as anything else.
I, for one, think it would be great if tech jobs spread out across the US.
My point was that not dragging ordinary people into this might have helped Amazon get a better deal. Why should general public know what deals these mayors and governors are cutting ? (In Amazon's perspective, it is good for democracy if the fight is in open)
Apple's system is only smarter if you think defrauding the public is good business.
It's disgusting.
Even if they hadn't massively publicized it, the word would have gotten around to candidate cities and the same sort of bidding war would have occurred. So what benefit did amazon really accrue by creating a media frenzy around their hq2 bid process?
60,000 jobs is not something you take up lightly, especially as it relates to transit and housing. It's the equivalent of a small city, and you're going to need to be prepared for it.
> "Are paywalls ok?"
> "It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds."
> "In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html