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Amazon will invest $5 billion in a second headquarters in a North American city outside of Seattle.
Amazon.com Inc. already has a sprawling Seattle headquarters that attests to its size and ambition. Now the world's largest online retailer plans to open a second North American campus -- dubbed HQ2 -- that Amazon says could be just as big as the existing one.
The company is asking local and state governments to submit proposals for a development that will likely cost more than $5 billion over the next 15 to 17 years and give the winning city or town an enormous economic boost. Amazon is already one of the biggest employers in Seattle and expects the new headquarters to house as many as 50,000 workers, many of them new hires. Cities have until next month to apply through a special website, and the company said it will make a final decision next year.
The mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, quickly expressed interest. So did officials in Chicago; Philadelphia; Hartford, Connecticut; Tulsa, Oklahoma; St. Louis; and Rhode Island, demonstrating that Amazon will wield a lot of leverage in making its choice.
"We expect HQ2 to be a full equal to our Seattle headquarters," founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "Amazon HQ2 will bring billions of dollars in up-front and ongoing investments, and tens of thousands of high-paying jobs."
Will the new HQ be in the U.S.?
Additional coverage at Reuters, NPR, Business Wire and The Washington Post
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Saturday September 09 2017, @02:38AM (2 children)
How about no fucking proposals and you avaricious pieces of shit that run Amazon can deal with the local community on an equal footing? Why do we need to fall down and thank our lucky stars that we now have the glorious opportunity to grovel before Amazon, spend taxpayer money, and purchase badly needed (but still not living wage) jobs for X multiples of what a regular worker makes per year?
That's how these fucking deals go down. After all is said and done we gave tax breaks and other financial boons to sociopathic fucking twats that end up putting dick into the community.
Of course politicians and officials are jizzing in their pants because this is how backroom corruption is done. There will be some rich and connected people that will get richer. Average Joe Sixpack will still be as fucked as he was before and wondering why he is paying taxes so that Amazon can come to his city.
These deals are always net negative for the citizenry. Always.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2017, @03:24PM (1 child)
You're absolutely right, but your mistake is that a) you think that this is not by design. and b) you think that people care. "People" (and this includes myself) are dumb, incredibly, stupendously dumb.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2017, @05:11PM
I don't think dumb is quite correct. Obviously the masses skew dumb. The normal curve of intelligence means that for every person with an IQ of 130, there is a person with an IQ of 70, but these are getting towards the thin ends of the curve. I assume most people here live in the microscopic end of the curve where Mensa IQs may be found (whether any of us have valued group membership in Mensa enough to obtain it). However, I've seen more willful ignorance and devotion to ideology based on "facts" that have been objectively disproven, if the ideology as a whole has not been proven deleterious, than simple stupidity. I believe it's an active choice of privileging group membership over objective truth.
Either way, I'll concede the that effect taken as a whole is that of dumbness.