Apple threw shade at Amazon 'HQ2' as 'beauty contest,' but then it did the same | Hacker News Reader

Apple threw shade at Amazon 'HQ2' as 'beauty contest,' but then it did the same

businessinsider.com

16 pointsVarcht7 comments

What a terrible headline. In this case "the same" refers not to the "beauty contest" but to locating offices in an already well-established city. Garbage clickbait.

Apple did perform the same beauty contest as Amazon. They just didn't put up as many posters advertising it.

In Northern Virginia they were pitched the same two locations as Amazon. I have no idea when Amazon did their in person tour of the locations but I know when Apple did because they made sure local TV and print journalists were there to capture them touring the Crystal City location that Amazon ultimately selected. Local papers and TV both had stories about it in their next editions.

Neither of the two sites make any sense for what is mostly going to be a giant call center. Still Apple came and made sure there was plenty of coverage of it. Obviously Apple was playing some sort of PR game.

I'd say headline is correct...

> Incentives from Texas include as much as $25 million in taxpayer-funded grants, and a 15-year property tax abatement possibly worth tens of millions of dollars

That's literally what Amazon was forcing cities to do to each-other.

There seems to be a difference in scale here. According to the Washington Post, Amazon is getting 2.4 _billion_ in subsidies from Virginia, New York and Tennessee:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-news/amazon-hq...

That is substantially different than a property tax abatement.

Apple did none of the same shenanigans as Amazon, like pitting dozens of cities against one another to see who could offer the most incentives or creating a lot of hurt feelings as millions of people got excited and let down.

Business Insider is garbage and this headline only reinforces that.

What an abysmal ad experience. Tried to load the page 3 times. Every time had an inescapable pop up ads come up, redirecting me to a spam site, and then redirecting to the same site as many times as is allowed before the browser intervenes, so hitting back does nothing.

This is why the world is collectively joining the add blocker train. Talk about an industry that can’t die soon enough...

I set up a Pi-Hole + Open VPN server on Digital Ocean for about $5/month. I connect all my devices, all the time, and I haven't seen an ad in months. Highly recommended.

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