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from the What-else-could-you-do-with-$3-billion? dept.
"We know the game is rigged": NYC mayor slams Amazon HQ2 reversal
In a New York Times op-ed published Saturday evening, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned Amazon for its decision to pull the plug on its HQ2 expansion in Queens, calling it a byproduct of massive economic power concentrated in the hands of few wealthy corporations.
As the mayor of the nation's largest city, a place that's both a progressive beacon and the very symbol of capitalism, I share the frustration about corporate America. So do many of my fellow mayors across the country. We know the game is rigged. But we still find ourselves fighting one another in the race to secure opportunity for our residents as corporations force us into all-against-all competitions.
Amazon's HQ2 bidding war exemplified that injustice.
Previously: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Headquarters
(Score: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Monday February 18 2019, @03:14AM (5 children)
sounds like my kid when he loses at a board game after he thought he was winning. My kid is 6...
In any case, you gotta wonder how much people were willing to bend over for Amazon indeed. It's a bit like the Olympics where we finally see some cities saying screw this we don't need the Olympics and their debacle. How many good jobs was this going to bring in anyway?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ilsa on Monday February 18 2019, @02:13PM
That's the real question. These megacorps bring "jobs", but how good are those actual jobs? Walmart brings lots of jobs too, and yet the employees are paid so poorly that they still have to resort to food stamps.
Now, whenever I see a company claim that they will bring thousands of jobs to an area, I become instantly skeptical of how much of a boon that would actually be.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @02:15PM (2 children)
The mainstream media is where the blame lies. They have put AOC on a pedestal despite the fact that she - by Bill DeBlasio's own statements - has no basic understanding of how things work. She and her ilk have been lionized by the media and the resistance against all things Trump without actually vetting her knowledge or abilities. Now she crows about the benefits of losing 25,000 good jobs plus all the feeder jobs. And the NYT is still gushing about how they dodged that terrible capitalism bullet. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/opinion/amazon-new-york.html [nytimes.com] You know the left has gone insane when uber-Leftist Bill DeBlasio rants about how unfair it was that Amazon decided they were not welcome and left for more warmer climes. Pull your head out dude, your sycophant lackeys ran them off. Didn't you get the memo? Amazon is the new capitalist Boogeyman of the left.
The media has gone full-on crazy. They place anyone on a pedestal that wants to be part of the Trump resistance regardless of their competence, experience, integrity or understanding. That's why we get nonstop stories on self important thought leader racists and imbeciles like Jussie Smollet, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren and demigods like the six month messiah Michael Avenatti. How did all that Avenatti worship work out for them? Still "bogus"? The media loves crazy so much that you would think that Trump would be their Gender-Neutral-Upright-Homonid-of-the-Year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @04:43PM (1 child)
Avenatti is getting his second wind from a fresh R. Kelly underage sex tape.
https://thegrio.com/2019/02/17/avenatti-third-sex-tape-rkelly/ [thegrio.com]
Maybe he fapped to the sex tape.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @10:06PM
Avenatti only faps to old VHS copies of Brewster's Millions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 19 2019, @01:17AM
Not a good comparison.
Amazon, love them or hate them, really does do a lot of engineering work. Remember, they probably make more money with their web services (EC2 etc.) than they do their online shopping business. As I understand it, this location was an engineering center, and definitely not a warehouse. Engineering jobs bring a lot of money into the local economy, because they're relatively very high-paid. NYS probably would have made their money back pretty quickly, between taxes from employees and even moreso from all the new economic activity created (all those high-paid engineers will cause lots more service people to move into the area to support them).
The Olympics, on the other hand, are just a big money-waster that make some developers rich for building facilities that won't ever be used again. They cost an absolute fortune for the host city/country, they bring in some tourism dollars for a short time but that doesn't make up for the initial expenditure, and then when the games are over the city is left with a giant complex that isn't really useful for anything else. The Olympics should just be shut down if they can't do them cost-effectively, and the only way to really do that is to only have a couple of sites (summer & winter) which are used for ALL the games.