The NIMBY Backlash Against Amazon’s HQ2
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Their business model is here to stay, because online retailing turns out to be a natural monopoly due to network effects and economies of scale.
The best solution is to nationalize it. Instead of squeezing the public to boost private profits, all profits would be returned to the public.
i can't imagine anything other than brain-machine interfaces disrupting the web.
these are probably coming sooner than we'd expect (neuralink supposedly has an 'exciting' update coming within the next few months), so, i wouldn't personally expect the way we interact with or even define the web to remain constant even, say, 10 years from now.
No, break them up. Governments are terrible at running businesses. Fragment the market legally so competition can't be eliminated by a monopoly. A competitive market is better than a government run monopoly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a very different kind of forum. There are legit uses for throwaways, just not routinely.
Lots more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Pure ideology, and trivially factually wrong.
- Nationalization means the government owns the business, not that it runs it. Only difference is who collects the profits, Bezos or everyday people.
- Norway and the other Scandy countries have high levels of public ownership and huge public sectors. Their economies run great.
"Some of these SOEs are businesses often run by states: a postal service, a public broadcasting channel, an Alcohol retail monopoly. But others are just normal businesses typically associated with the private sector.
In Finland, where I know the situation the best, there are 64 state-owned enterprises, including one called Solidium that operates as a holding company for the government’s minority stake in 13 of the companies.
The Finnish state-owned enterprises include an airliner called Finnair; a wine and spirits maker called Altia; a marketing communications company called Nordic Morning; a large construction and engineering company called VR; and an $8.8 billion oil company called Neste.
In Norway, the state manages direct ownership of 70 companies. The businesses include the real estate company Entra; the country’s largest financial services group DNB; the 30,000-employee mobile telecommunications company Telenor; and the famous state-owned oil company Statoil."
Read more here: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/03/14/the-state-ow...
Including the airport train which even Trygve Hegnar, editor of Kapital and as capitalist as they come, says is one of the best run companies in the country. The Conservatives (Høyre) keep on promising it to sell it even though it is profitable, and Hegnar says it is unlikely that anyone else could run it better.
A distinction without a difference, owners appoint who runs it, they effectively run it.
> Norway and the other Scandy countries have high levels of public ownership and huge public sectors. Their economies run great.
Tiny economies with largely mono culture populations who align on this political ideology; that won't work here, our diversity also includes ideological diversity that would never allow this kind of program to be implemented so it's a non-starter proposal.
When a government is as ideologically split as our is, they are ineffective and bad at doing things due to the constant infighting and battling of ideologies. So no, it's not factually wrong at all, it's reality.
It's like saying, "Hey Ethiopia, you should just be more like Canada and that would solve all your problems!"
The US isn't Ethiopia. It has ample resources to solve all its problems given the political will. It just needs to overcome its irrational fear of the welfare state.
https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/amazon-is-losing-money-fro...
$4.2B revenue with 40% market share has $0 market share tax and keeps $4.2B; $5B revenue with 50% market share has $800M market share tax and keeps $4.2B; $7B revenue with 80% market share has $2.8B market share tax and keeps $4.2B;
This would reduce the incentive to grow market share above the threshold. A 40% threshold allows for two companies to max out market share and a 30% threshold allows for three companies to max out market share.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System [2] https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/smbs-small-and-midsize-b...
Have a theory on corporate organization for cases of industries where there is heavy capital investment to enter, but low marginal cost. A cooperative style organization where regional sellers can freely enter or join, but cannot do business with each other. The cooperative would own in the case of telecommunications the backbone, and the research labs (if research is needed that the regional companies cannot afford themselves). So that it won’t be a franchised monopoly, the cooperative doesn’t have patent or trade secret rights, it can’t sue competitors out of existence.
Influenced by mutualism.
Market share tax just results in companies redefining their industry.
Do you have a specific example?
It's especially sad to see because my father just spent 2 months (working >80hr weeks) and thousands of dollars to move his carpentry shop from Bushwick to LIC after getting priced out due to gentrification. Now it looks like he'll have to do it again soon because the city decided to give the richest company in the world a 325 million cash grant. (https://mobile.twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/10623746032328...)
Because they’re bring more than they cost to the city? High-paying taxpayers, an educated workforce, technical talent and a reason to build out the East River infrastructure?
New York’s permitting process is broken. (Not as badly as California’s, but that’s a terrible baseline.) To get these sorts of anchor tenants, we unfortunately have to pay. Fortunately, we’ll make it back in payroll, income, capital gains, property and sales taxes.
I’m a New York City taxpayer, and while I’d prefer we get every penny of taxes owed, some gain is better than nothing. Perfect can’t be the enemy of the good.
Yup. New Yorkers are pragmatic. A win is a win.
There is a problem in that this biases large companies over small ones. But unless our zoning processes lighten up, the best way to fight that might be throwing the taxes Amazon brings New York at the problem.
That's what amuses me about this whole saga. Out of the successful tech companies, Amazon has by far the worst reputation as an employer (mediocre pay compared to other top tech companies, and poor work-life balance for engineers - never mind work conditions for warehouse workers), yet all these cities were bending over backwards to entice Amazon to move to their cities.
If one's real happy working for Amazon though, I wish them luck and continued prosperity, and a bit of willful ignorance to carry on. For sure it looks real good on the resume for the next gig.
The concerns about rent and displacement are really the only NIMBY complaint (particularly the idea that building luxury condos for new workers would shuffle out existing residents from existing apts / condos).
https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/9wploz/ocasiocortez_bl...
Overall, a much better argument against these subsidies is that they shouldn't be needed at all. Everyone should be able to have the same streamlined permitting processes.
They used the excuse that small banks and credit unions got screwed a bit with Dodd-Frank so we need to pass a bill to fix that, and oh by the way we’ll roll back big player regulations along the way cause that’s all we actually cared about.
My point is, small business get screwed all the time and it sucks and should be fixed, but for the love of god don’t use that as a justification for why Amazon should be able to shop around to dozens of cities to get a better deal than anyone else could (or why we should pass banking deregulation).
Your framing of the argument, and that comment, seems like an intentional misdirection.
With regards to uneven enforcement, you would have to be delusional to think that these same tax incentives aren't being extended to every other large development, be it Google NYC, Goldman's 200 West, or Jared Kushner's DUMBO mall.
You can even download a list of NYC property tax refunds here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/property-refunds-201...
The only reason you're hearing about this one is because of Amazon's unconventional bidding stunt and its publicity.
The process is outrageous and benefits large developers the most. But it's naive to think these companies won't always lobby for lower taxes, and cynical to think that the same benefits can't be extended to smaller firms.
His argument was "I found it hard to start a business in New York, therefore it's nearly impossible to start a business in New York without help, therefore Amazon needs the $2 billion in subsidies".
As an ex-small business owner I would much prefer if little companies got more incentives.
Corruption has become so ingrained in the state that it has become part of the official duties of the state.
Politicians see the chance for tens of thousands of high paying jobs to be a net positive for their city -> politicians compete to bring said jobs to their city. I don’t understand why this is so controversial. Even absent Amazon’s explicit RFP process, which was a bit tacky, you were always going to have cities falling all over themselves trying to gain Amazon’s favor. It’s no different than if you were buying a car and trying to play multiple dealers off each other, just on a larger scale. To think that NYC and DC don’t have to compete to attract business is naive.
On the non business side our tax dollars are going to support billionaires. At the national level this is pretty close to zero sum. Every dollar Amazon doesn’t pay is a dollar someone else has to. Discrepancies between regions would be solved more efficiently with transfer/equalization payments.
So why should they get so much as 1 cent to help with that?
It's an awful broken system and the politicians who enable it should be tossed out of office.
Part of what's so ridiculous about all this is if you picked 2 places for Amazon to go then NYC and DC would be right near the top. They want government money, they want access to talent. Obvious choices. If neither city gave them a cent they would still end up there.
I'm curious why we don't see those analyses in news stories about HQ2. It's possible that governments don't publish them, but why? Some sort of NDA agreement with Amazon? It feels like those numbers would make people more favorable to HQ2 coming to their city.
EDIT - Found this NYT article, but it's light on the numbers: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/nyregion/amazon-long-isla...
He should debate David Sirota, or Nathan Robinson.
Just look at Wisconsin and [foxconn](https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/28/technology/foxconn-wisconsi...) a taiwanese company getting 4 billion in incentives
Amazon will create 10k's of jobs paying on average above 100k/year and by proxy of these wages the workers will then inject millions into the local economies of these places right? ... it's win-win.
It was a pretty bad deal for Wisconsin.
The NLRB is as much a corporate tool as anything else. Collective bargaining happens through unions and actual collective action. Not by hoping regulators do enough to keep the company at bay.
I wonder if Bloomberg owns a stake in Amazon.
(FWIW I think it will benefit both regions, although I don't like the race-to-the-bottom competition and special treatment that led to it.)
Got nothing to do with billion dollar giveaways to trillion dollar corporations. Amazon is just such a benevolent force that they deserve, and Jeff is a philanthropist now.
Got nothing to do with the corporate rule and oligarchy that controls America. That this is perhaps the most blatant example of the casual corruption that we accept, and to be fair it is just capitalism in action.
Got nothing to do with the absolute farce of a process. I'm sure that the biggest tech hub on the east coach and Washington DC put in the best bids. I'm extremely convinced of that.
It's all just a bunch of uptight people who don't want Amazon so close.
It isn't a "NIMBY backlash" to acknowledge that this was a sweetheart deal for Amazon, and that it doesn't make a lot of economic sense. Moreover, at least in Queens, there's very little chance that it actually benefits the people who live in the neighborhood today.
If we make the assumption that everyone who lives in the neighbourhood rents instead of owns, then yeah, probably.
But why are we attaching any value to the needs of renters? Economically, if your only concern is the benefit of renters then it never makes sense to enrich property values in an area because rent will rise.
I understand it's not compassionate as renters are typically much poorer, but this line of thinking that we should coddle renters leads to a lot of completely regressive policy decisions like rent control that leads landlords to poorly maintain property and public housing projects that tend to cluster crime altogether.
Right. Screw those losers. If you don't own property, you don't matter.
In both cases, the arguments are either disingenuous or misguided.
The cost to buy is not much more than the cost to rent in NYC for most property. NYC's regulations around coop and condo ownership are also fairly progressive.
The only real barrier is the traditional down payment size, which is typically 20% here.
We should be encouraging more young people to buy and build their wealth.
Since you think I'm flippant, let me elaborate. The real barrier is financial security and knowing you'll keep making those payments. Renting is not the same (you can always, maybe, go live somewhere much cheaper than the current, even it's way across the country.) The way you think shows a lack of familiarity with actual hardship, or just, you know, normal life for most people nowadays.
Further, young working people frequently move from city to city to even a new country every couple of years, and quite casually (the kind who could, in theory, afford to purchase a property in New York, who are a very small percentage indeed).
So OK, I purchase a property in New York. But my job now calls me to San Francisco. I have to manage that condo (Maybe I'll Airbnb?) in addition to paying a new equally pricey payment of rent in SF. And because of my demanding work schedule at a tech company, I won't be able to physically check on my property very often. I might have to hire someone to do it for me. Oh no - I now also have to have both home owner's AND renter's insurance. And next year I have to work for 6 months in Berlin, so I'm going to have to find someone to sublet from my 1-year lease in San Francisco... I'm now spending all my free time just trying to manage 3 properties instead of trying to build my own company/find a mate/obtain a higher degree.
Whether you're a capitalist who believes in the value of entrepneurship or a communist who focuses on honest labor, the one thing you should agree on is that socioeconomic policy should do everything it can to limit the growth in property values. The last thing we want to do is to enrich the landed gentry.
(Note that rent control is not really pro-renter; it merely helps early renters at the expense of new renters. This is similar to how propping up growth in property values by restricting housing development enriches early property owners at the expense of prospective new property owners)