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"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: 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.