I <3 NY

[guinness77]

https://twitter.com/hudrichh/status/1079484300762992641

Lolol, that’s fantastic.

[SixFeetDeep]

https://twitter.com/davidpurdum/status/1085259502008578049?s=12

Let’s goooo

[SixFeetDeep]

CT what the freak is y’all doin

[MBGreen]

CT what the freak is y’all doin

Feel the powahhh of Dortch

[SixFeetDeep]

https://mobile.twitter.com/johncardillo/status/1092465715272212485

[Johnny English]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html?

[AlioTheFool]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html?

Sickening and infuriating.

I know there's a lot of people who adore Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but that lady garden can go freak herself. NYC just lost 25,000 jobs thanks to her and people like her. Good freaking job.

[Johnny English]

Sickening and infuriating.

I know there's a lot of people who adore Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but that lady garden can go freak herself. NYC just lost 25,000 jobs thanks to her and people like her. Good freaking job.

As someone who lives in a city that was supposedly a serious contender for HQ2, I don't think it's as simple as just a whole load of extra jobs. I don't know the ins and outs of the NYC bid but for us the amount of excrement we were offering them was insane, and the negative impacts on the city and its economy are potentially as significant as the positive ones. I'm still not sure if I'm happy we lost out or not, HQ2 is a real double edged sword as far as I can see.

[AlioTheFool]

As someone who lives in a city that was supposedly a serious contender for HQ2, I don't think it's as simple as just a whole load of extra jobs. I don't know the ins and outs of the NYC bid but for us the amount of excrement we were offering them was insane, and the negative impacts on the city and its economy are potentially as significant as the positive ones. I'm still not sure if I'm happy we lost out or not, HQ2 is a real double edged sword as far as I can see.

NY was going to give Amazon $3B in tax incentives. It was also going to allow a massive campus in an increasingly gentrifying neighborhood. Amazon was going to create lots of non-union jobs.

So?

25,000 jobs is 25,000 jobs. And I'm sick of hearing people whine about their neighborhoods changing, especially when the argument is "We can't afford the rent anymore" while simultaneously preventing a huge influx of jobs.

[Johnny English]

NY was going to give Amazon $3B in tax incentives. It was also going to allow a massive campus in an increasingly gentrifying neighborhood. Amazon was going to create lots of non-union jobs.

So?

25,000 jobs is 25,000 jobs. And I'm sick of hearing people whine about their neighborhoods changing, especially when the argument is "We can't afford the rent anymore" while simultaneously preventing a huge influx of jobs.

Again, I can't speak for NYC but at least in Toronto the discussion has a lot of nuance. For example, and this is just one of several concerns, what is HQ2? Is it commercial, administrative, technical? Let's assume that it is at least partly technical. Toronto is a burgeoning tech hub thanks to a favourably corporate tax regime and a couple of outstanding universities for leading edge technology research. We have lots of startups and lots of interesting small and midsize tech companies doing their thing pretty successfully here.

What does a sudden demand for 5000 or more developers and coders in the market do? It drives up the price of the ones who are already here which stifles the ability of smaller firms to be agile and competitive, which negatively impacts the startup landscape because those companies are dependent upon young, smart people willing to work now for big rewards later. As a result, the business plan for a startup looks a bit more daunting because the prices are that much higher. In addition, if you take young developers out of school and attract them straight into a huge monolithic company with the promise of fat pay checks, you stifle their ability to learn commercial and technical environments which then makes them less likely to become the next guy with a big idea.

All of this in turn means that incubators and angels start looking elsewhere for more favourable landscapes in which to find their next big things, and before you know it 25,000 jobs at Amazon is having to offset a drain of both brains and investment money, so no, 25,000 jobs is not necessarily 25,000 jobs. We've not even begun to consider the impacts upon housing, transit, essential public services and so on yet.

I'd put it to you that there's much bigger picture to consider than tax in = jobs out with a project as immense as HQ2.

[Pope]

I used to work with the company that was protesting in the pics. Small world

[Badger]

Sickening and infuriating.

I know there's a lot of people who adore Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but that lady garden can go freak herself. NYC just lost 25,000 jobs thanks to her and people like her. Good freaking job.

Actually it's fine

[AlioTheFool]

Actually it's fine

Cool story

[Badger]

Cool story

Which one of the 25000 jobs are you going to miss the most?

For me it has to be pee bottle collector.

[AlioTheFool]

Which one of the 25000 jobs are you going to miss the most?

For me it has to be pee bottle collector.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe one of the AWS jobs they would've created? Maybe an executive job?

Let's do a little math. Part of the agreement was that Amazon would bring an average salary of $150k to HQ2. While that's not the $4B often mentioned, it is $3,750,000,000.

Let's be completely ridiculous and assume all but 100 employees at HQ2 would make minimum wage. So, 24,900 people would make $15/hour, or $31,200 per year. That's a total $776,880,000 per year, leaving $2,973,120,000 for those 100 execs, so each would gross $29,731,200 per year.

According to Glassdoor, the average Amazon executive makes $128,759 per year. If we spitball a number, say, 1000 people would be executives in HQ2, that's a total of $128,759,000 per year in executive salaries. To then achieve a mean average of $150k, the other 24,000 employees would have to average $150,885.04 each.

Even if 1000 executives averaged $1M per year, that would leave $2.75B to be split among the 24,000 other staff, for an average salary of $114,583.33. Not bad for collecting pee bottles.

This wasn't going to be an Amazon warehouse. I understand the argument against Amazon in terms of abusing manual labor. This was office jobs, including accountants, management, and programmers, the latter two of which I'd be qualified for. So yeah, I'm going to miss some of those jobs.