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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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

And when the secret contract is signed? Can voters reneg on the deal considering they weren't consulted nor notified.

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)

Marketing, that is how it works.

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

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

Defrauding? That’s ridiculous.

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

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.

Chicago promised to give the taxes paid by employees back to Amazon.

It's disgusting.

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".

Not to mention, didn't Apple just build a billion dollar new headquarters building that was the subject of countless fawning articles?

They are looking to build one more.

5 billion. I wish I understood how projects involving that much money are actually managed. https://www.fastcodesign.com/3029477/norman-foster-on-design...

Why build only one when you can build two for twice the price?

"Only, this one can be kept secret."... Gotta love Contact references.

> WSJ is a joke

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

The real story here is that WSJ posted a news article with an implicit bias against Amazon. This is interesting because Bezos owns WSJ.

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, not the Wall Street Journal. Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal.

Goodness gracious. What a miserable error to start the day with. More coffee I guess.

Bezos is a smart dude. Small jabs at Amazon doesn't have a significant effect on the business. It adds credibility to the paper.

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.

Good point.

Secrecy and tax deals are two different issues.

One's opinion on one should not be conflated with the other.

Except that secrecy is increasing being being used to hide the details of those tax deals. See:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/19/technology/business/amazon-h...

and

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/pennsylvania-asks-...

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