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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

How can we price in the wasted time/effort of the dozens of other cities who put in bids?

Be reasonable. That's an absolutely ridiculous counterpoint, and a perfectly reasonable answer is "assign it zero" since no city was compelled to apply. Should we dispense with competitive processes completely? Why have the Olympics, for instance, because it's such a waste of time for everyone that doesn't medal?

Further, the Scott Walker/Foxxcon debacle is a completely different category than the HQ2 situation. However, it is not going to be productive discussing the reasons that an ostensibly large manufacturing site was situated in an electoral battleground state with substantial involvement at a federal/executive level.

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> no city was compelled to apply

I think this could be argued. The thing about democratically elected politicians is that while you can't "force" them to do something, there can be enough political pressure to effectively compel them to do something. In this case, any city that passed on this opportunity would have to describe to their constituents why they didn't want to bring 50,000 high-paying jobs to their city. It's much easier to just play ball, hence over 238 submissions.

> Should we dispense with competitive processes completely? Why have the Olympics, for instance, because it's such a waste of time for everyone that doesn't medal?

Do the Olympics change the rules in the middle of a competition like Amazon did?

> the Scott Walker/Foxxcon debacle is a completely different category than the HQ2 situation.

It is different in many ways, but also similar in a number of ways. Specifically, both used the promise of X number of jobs to extract a set of concessions, then proceeded to chop that jobs number in half.

>while you can't "force" them to do something, there can be enough political pressure to effectively compel them to do something.

>any city that passed on this opportunity would have to describe to their constituents

So, democracy in action? Constituency wants something, and politicans have to obey? Or do you prefer politicans to decide by themselves and not having to explain their decisions back to their constinuents?

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

-- H.L. Mencken

So the point is that, being a democracy and subject to societal pressures, you can't assign that value to zero as that is unreasonable.

Nope, no city was compelled. That was intended to be a rhetorical point, because it's so obviously not the case. Did anyone feel pressure to because of constituencies? Maybe. But compelled? Absolutely not.

You have a point that the Olympics analogy isn't great. One other flaw is that cities aren't contractually bound to deliver the promised incentives, either. Olympic athletes can't change their performance after the fact.

I find myself in an uncomfortable situation, where I'm defending Amazon (who I have no relationship with aside from being a customer) and not even liking the HQ2 selection process, even a little. But it's just hardball negotiation that was conducted a bit more publicly than countless other site selection processes for countless other companies.

fwiw, i think all of the amazon concessions are tied to the number of jobs specifically. at least that was true for the Nashville office which I've followed more closely. i.e. to get all the breaks they have to create all the jobs.

Should we dispense with competitive processes completely?

When we're talking about pitting strapped local governments against each other in corporate welfare bidding wars, the answer is, absolutely, unequivocally, yes.

What we're talking about is the time spent putting together a report and emailing it to Amazon in this case. I'm not talking about jurisdiction shopping (which is gross whether it's corporate domiciles in DE, lawsuits in east TX, or if you want to make the case that's what HQ 2's process amounted to).

What was asked, and what I answered, was how to account for the time of municipalities that answered the RFP. Since they do not have to actually offer any of the proposed subsidies since they lost, then I think it's fair to assign no value to the cost. If you disagree, please feel free to tell me what price they paid instead of downvoting.

Cities actually spent quite a bit of money on hiring consultants, site planners, doing impact studies, etc. I don't think it's unreasonable to say mid to high 7 figures.

-https://www.consulting.us/news/290/consulting-firms-recruite...

-https://technical.ly/philly/2017/09/13/site-selection-consul...

This is not to mention that cities likely had to hand over demographic data that would've otherwise been very expensive to collect: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hq2-search-data-2018-....

Look at some of the cities that made the finalist list:

-Columbus (population ~880k)

-Denver (population ~700k)

-Indianapolis (population ~870k)

-Nashville (population ~667k)

-Newark (population ~285k)

For these cities, an additional 25k jobs would have been huge. Scott Galloway has advanced the theory that a large goal of the HQ2 search was to secure competing bids, which Amazon then took back to NYC and DC in an attempt to secure better terms. If these "finalist" cities were simply used as stalking horses with ~0% chances of actually winning, I can't help but feel it was a little wrong to induce them to spend the necessary fees on consultants and planners to put together a decent bid.

If it was actually their plan which it very well seems like from the way everyone is talking about, wouldn't this actually be fraud rather than just unfair?

There was no commitment, and there was no false information. How can there be fraud?

I do the same thing Amazon does all the time, to get the best price. I don’t need to be honest and tell the seller I’m using them to get someone else’s price down. Maybe I do go with the new seller if their price is good, maybe it’s not good enough to sway me from the other seller. It’s just business.

I am of course not a lawyer. But there's a whole lot of difference between casually asking a seller a price or haggle vs. asking for a formal bid for something. I think in a formal bid the expectation is that you have a reasonable chance to win given the expense needed to answer a bid.

It sounds like the sort of casual fraud that megacorps routinely get away with.

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