How Virginia Won Amazon's HQ2
washingtonian.com
washingtonian.com
Wiedefeld, incidentally, is a total bad-ass. He was hired at the end of 2015. In 2017, the first year they started measuring end-to-end travel time, on-time performance was a dismal 66%. In Q2 of 2019, it was 87%. In 2016, he shut down the entire system for days, and entire lines for weeks at a time, for emergency repairs. He's steam-rolled over NIMBYs, dramatically shutting down entire stations all summer so crumbling platforms can be completely rebuilt: https://ggwash.org/view/72561/metro-reasons-loud-yellow-and-.... (Accomplishing in three months what took years of delays and disruptions during prior, partial shut-downs.) He's brought the hammer down on the WMATA union, controlling costs and resisting calls to overtax the system by extending service: https://wamu.org/story/17/04/27/transit-union-turns-back-met...; https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2018/09/18/metro...; https://wamu.org/story/16/11/03/wmata_board_struggles_to_rea.... Not all heroes wear capes.
All hypothetical of course, I am not from the area.
here's the paragraph describing the loophole:
""" “The parking areas, all the travel areas…the pedestrian walkways…that’s all considered inside the station,” Kirst added, explaining what the noise waiver granted to Metro covers. Crews working in those areas aren’t allowed to perform “excavation, demolition, saw cutting, and jack hammering” between 10 pm-6 am on Sunday through Thursdays, and 10 pm-8 am on Friday and Saturday. Those restrictions don’t apply to the tracks outside the stations, however. """
it seems that what you imagine is a 'temporary inconvenience of a few families'. what I imagine is a world where every day there is a new 'temporary inconvenience' which you are supposed to endure 'for the good of the many', over and over again -- because that is what will happen when 'heroes' like the one in the article are allowed to run amok.
A benevolent dictator would do a nationwide cost-benefit analysis, and decide if 30 families having no sleep for a week outweighs 100,000 people getting to work 10 minutes faster for the next decade.
While sometimes our existing legal system makes the same choice as our fictional benevolent dictator, sometimes it doesn't because rather than looking at the big picture, it gets tied up with nuances of wording of ordinances and precident written decades earlier without knowledge of the current situation.
Whenever that happens, on average, people's lives get worse and the economy weaker, compared to an identical country which made the benevolent dictator choice.
And it makes sense. When you have a kid, that kid is your priority. There's less incentice to be willing to sacrifice for others who aren't your genetic progeny.
Full disclosure, I personally think having a kid is the single most selfish act a human can do. I don't mind it obviously, but do observe that it's amazing when other people expect me to prefer their offsprings' benefit over anything else.
No, you're already looking out for them. I think it makes sense to treat them like any other human, since that's all they are to me.
How can something that is standard in the ordinances of multiple districts (and is pretty common nationwide) be considered a loophole? It is pretty intentional that this work is exempt.
The subway needs disassembly to check it isn't worn out yet, which involves big sledgehammers to dislodge bits of track. Due to strict safety rules, they have to do that once per 10,000 wheels passing over the track, which is every day.
Does it reduce my quality of life? Yes. But not having the subway working efficiently and safely would have a much bigger impact, so is a cost I pay for a bigger benefit elsewhere.
The reality is that Metro still has a lot of work in front of it and still has to crawl back form decades of neglect and poor planning. Metro could operate at 100% reliability, but it still wouldn't offer sufficient travel options for a large majority of the area because it doesn't fit the commuting patterns of the area. Short of extending lines and adding new ones, there's only so much the metro in it's current incarnation can do.
That's not true at all. He's fighting through tremendous resistance from various factions. From unions seeking to insulate themselves from private-sector competition, http://www.fairfaxtimes.com/articles/metro-to-use-contractor..., to urbanists demanding that Metro offer massively money-losing late-night rides to support "active nightlife": https://ggwash.org/view/70172/metro-needs-late-night-service.... He's taking a bold course that elevates long-term sustainability over temporary inconvenience, and quality of the core offering over trying to cater to every want or need. Lots of people disagree whether that is what needs to be done.
> He's brought the hammer down on the WMATA union
Ahh, that hero crushing the working class.
I disagree that VA was pre-decided, the way I see it is, they kind of knew what the front horses are but wanted what others can surprise them and/or improve their negotiation position.
* Austin had something given Whole Foods * Dallas is said to finish #3 for HQ2 (probable rumour) until a tell all from some one in search committee.
I think people are missing the forest for the trees - Amazon could have saved billions of dollars a year founding it anywhere else. But we cannot seem to break out this viscous cycle where the good jobs of the future go to tiny, expensive areas. And the primary benefit of these areas is they are already full of successful, well paid people.
Instead of paying 3 people in Tallahassee a decent $80,000, we are choosing to pay 1 person in San Fransisco $240,000.
Companies that are based in San Francisco and the Bay Area aren't just recruiting randomly from the people who happened to live there. The most skilled people in the world move there because there's so many companies that can fruitfully utilize their efforts. Or at least that's how it looks to me from across the Atlantic ocean.
I'm certain I would be more valuable delivering software for a customer base of 40 million rather than the 400,000 I do in my local market, but I wouldn't accept my current salary for that level of responsibility. Hopefully most others think the same; it's in our interest as developers and professionals/working-class (not capitalist class) to make sure we negotiate the highest salaries we are able to. After all, we are programming magical robots that do the work of millions of menial labor employees. That's an incredibly valuable service we shouldn't trade away cheaply.
We've all heard the fable of the 10x engineer. My take is that this is what it looks like in practice.
I assume they quickly ripped them down and plastered them with images of Apple Park since they pitched the same space to Apple shortly after.
The comment above seems to be speculation that backroom deals played a part in a major tech news story. Speculation based on expert opinion often seems welcome, but speculation colored by negative experiences with the political jockeying that tech firms often do to accomplish their goals is not welcome.
Suppose the user above is a tech CEO with expert experience negotiating land deals with city government. Suppose they're a clerk in city government who often are privy to these deals. I feel like you may be making some broad assumptions of your own about what rises to the level of expert opinion and that's got a noxious effect on conversation here as well.
I'm assuming that by "the locations were pre-selected" the comment means that the outcome of the process was predetermined. That's a huge claim. Obviously a comment making a wild accusation without providing any basis for it is unsubstantive. It lowers discussion quality noticeably when people sling such charges around. I realize it's a fun thing to do on the internet, but there are other places for it.
I've noticed lots of instances where a high profile technology company may be responsible for some wrongdoing gets the notice of moderators.
It leads me to believe this particular kind of speculation presents a specific problem for hacker news and the moderators.
I don't much care, either way, about Amazon or any other high-profile technology company. I care about doing a good job for HN. Assuming I didn't misread the GP comment, it seems like an obvious case of somebody making something inflammatory up on the internet, so I posted a moderation reply. This is routine. Yes, there are plenty of other cases just as bad where we don't reply. That doesn't mean we secretly agree with those comments. Most often it means we didn't see them.
This did not seem to be a throwaway comment to me. It seems entirely plausible that a backroom deal was reached between local politicians and Amazon. Such deals were solicited and a major part of the reporting around this story.
Worst moderator I've ever seen. Seriously, you are just atrocious.
> All told, Virginia offered Amazon only $550 million in tax breaks and $195 million in transportation improvements. But it pledged to plow $1.1 billion into tech schooling. According to Moret, it was the only place in the nation that made education the centerpiece of its pitch.
More than 2/3's of Virginia's investment into Amazon was in education and transit, which benefits everyone.
Philly, by contrast, offered $4.6 billion in subsidies, just $100 million for transit, and nothing for education: https://slate.com/technology/2018/11/amazon-hq2-incredible-i.... Chicago offered $1.3 billion in tax breaks and $450 million for transit.
"We're moving to Virginia. Let's see if we can get other cities to bid and see if that improves Virginia's offered incentives."
(Plus free business intelligence hand delivered to them, and leverage if they want to put a distribution hub in one of the cities that didn't win. "You were willing to part with billions, you can't spare a couple dozen million in incentives for this warehouse?")
Worst case you're at the cost you expected anyways.
Or perhaps you'd like to explain how Amazon wants tech schooling for, I dunno, religious reasons?
Ostensibly, yes, but caution is warranted here; let's hope that (as with Oracle sponsorship), that education funding doesn't translate into indoctrination into the sponsor's stack.
More telling is that these tax incentives all seem off-the-shelf. Like these cities are crazy inflating the sticker price of their taxes just so they can turn around and boast to businesses about how much they are taking off. Like a cheap salesman.
They are. Tax incentives are a common practice. Amazon just made it national news.
Well, at least the gridlock around 395 should keep them at bay for a little while until Bezos figures out how to bore a private tunnel under the Potomac.
Similarly, the DC Flight Restriction Zone (FRZ) is not a no-fly zone, but an area where flight operations are much more tightly managed. I (and many other pilots) have authorization to fly into the FRZ and land at the DC-3 airports for non-scheduled operations (in addition to the many air carriers who fly scheduled operations in/out of the area).
Amazon paid no federal taxes last year (https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/16/amazon-p...), and probably would have figured out how to pay little corporate state tax. At the promised level of 25,000 jobs with an average $150,000 salary, the city (but not the state) would have only seen an extra ~$150mil in income taxes.
There's lots of ways to run the projections and factor various costs/benefits, but few of them would have resulted in a 10x improvement in the offhand estimates.
It was a bad investment for the city the same way most sports stadiums are.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/08/politics/amazon-backlash-alex...
Aren't the workers primarily knowledge workers? In a place like New York where developer jobs grow out of the concrete I don't think there could be legitimate fear of unionization.
Interesting that you characterize the entire state as "locals" given that some parts of New York can take several hours to get to by car from the city.
Do people really think Amazon really left it up to chance? Then that chance just somehow worked out to right next to DC and the biggest talent hub on the East Coast.
Sure, I'll buy that to go with my new bridge.
Big Gov is just starting in the cloud, and Amazon wants the biggest piece of that gadzillion dollars. I can see a private wing of AWS running most of the military, for example.
[1]: From 2010-2015, the Washington DC MSA was basically the only large tech hub that lost tech workers, because of the Sequester and the constant government budget showdowns. Virginia viewed HQ2 as an insurance against that.
"Virginia tried very hard to make sure that HQ2 is not just more government contracting jobs"
Virginia can think whatever they want, but Amazon will do what it wants to do.
The objective is not 'contracting jobs' - that's not Amazon's business. The objective is to deeply entrench AWS services and products into government.
The amount of money - and especially the incumbency - provided to the winner of 'gov cloud' will be gigantic.
Defence and civie agencies spent $6.5B on cloud services in 2018, up 35% (!) from the year before, that's an incredible growth rate. [1]
This is going to grow like wild for some time, and that's Amazon's objective.
The lobbying/relationship efforts will be important as well.
Virginia is just the local government, they are actually not hugely part of the equation other than the specific incentives as you point out. Even the 'investment in education' is not hugely sweet for businesses, as the majority of workers won't come from Virginia anyhow.
The best thing Virginia can do is 'be a good government' - make sure the infrastructure, healthcare, schools etc. are well managed.
[1] https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/09/federal-clo...
In any case, I never considered locations other than Northern VA as viable for the HQ2 business, it was 90% going there from the start IMO due to 1) Existing Amazon Offices 2) Existing Amazon Datacenters and major internet exchanges 3) Proximity to DC.
So, to present this as to 'How Virginia Won' is a little wishful IMO. Virginia did nothing other than happen to be the place where other companies are doing business.
The government is 25% of the economy, and it's just starting in the cloud.
The amount of money the US Gov. is going to spend on AWS will be jaw dropping.
It will trickle down into states, cities, and other governments like Canada.
And of course the deeply entrenched lobbying power.