the unstoppable local-biz-swallowing pseudo-monopoly that is AMAZON

feel sick now thanks

I know that for all intents and purposes holding stock in Amazon is "wealth" but some part of me sees the number that counts all of his stock as personal net worth and thinks "fake money"

now if he had all those billions in hundos under a really big mattress, now we're talking

By that definition probably almost any billionaire has a lot of his wealth in "fake money." Maybe more diversified fake money.

all money is fake money

I guess the "fake" aspect is that Bezos couldn't just like liquidate his Amazon stake and suddenly have $113 billion in cash. But that's an almost meaninglessly large amount of cash anyway -- I don't even know what you could do with it other than buy another huge corporation.

the NYT probably has a section for that now

sad lol

Imagine the luxury you could live in while trying to work out what to do with 113 billion

hey, it's not that much; a couple billion for food safaris, a couple billion for illuminati school, all of a sudden you're stretching just to pay for next week's jet service to the ponce de leon institute for a long overdue blood transfusion...

a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money

I would buy the Steelers and the Patriots and then make all the players kiss each other

i can’t help feeling it’s plans like that which will prevent you from becoming a billionaire in the first place

Save the billions and the trillions will look after themselves

eh I'll just change my name to "Tony Blockchain" or something and wait for the checks to show up at my door

Jeff Bezos should give out $100 bonuses to every single American.

this is all heading for one of those futures where people cower and whisper in the corner of the space station about whether the corporation is going to jettison them from an airlock for not having enough to cover their oxygen credits for the month

"can you FLY bobby"

HamNo:

This is all fucked. Companies like Amazon build new headquarters and other facilities because they have a business need to do so. If a business has a business need to build a business facility, you do not need to pay the business money to do so. The fact that it has a business need means that ultimately it will make money by doing so. There is no charity involved here. The only thing that every damn city in America is bidding on here is the right to have a business facility located in a certain place. You do not have to be a genius to see that, in aggregate, from a national perspective, this is a losing game for the public. If we did not give private corporations any free public money, they would still build their business facilities, because doing so is a necessary part of doing business, which is what businesses do. Furthermore, taxes are what we charge for public services. By giving Amazon tax breaks, you excuse them from paying (a lot) for public services. As a result, either public services will suffer, or the rest of us will pay more to make up the difference. This is charity money being spent to enrich the richest man in the world. It is the worst possible use of public funds.

https://splinternews.com/make-this-amazon-charade-illegal-1822511600

good lord hamilton is such a basic bitch and also his name is hamilton. by his same stupid 100% tautological argument about 'business sense' if a city determines there is a municipal need to incentivize a giant company to headquarter there then ultimately it will benefit the municipality to do so. is he even saying anything at all, here or in any of his writings? yes, i know bezos/amazon is already rich.. because they fucking generate lots of money. spending some money to make lots more money is not the "worst possible use of public funds"

I thought his arguments made perfect sense.

Amazon depresses local wages and erodes labor norms generally, they do not help workers or citizens generally over time

xp thought experiment: why do both of y'all live in NYC instead of, say, sioux falls south dakota? completely gorgeous cities with no money are much less appealing to 90% of the population than filthy cities with tons of money.

municipalities might well "determine" that it will benefit the city but that don't make it so and it has not turned out to be the case basically anywhere AFAIK beyond the initial influx of jobs xp

I live in a big city because there are jobs in my field and for basically no other reason.

right, jobs are good for cities. companies offer jobs. my point. thank you. thanks.

sleepingbag sounds like the kind of citizen sports owners like to pay for their stadia.

As to why I live here, I plead guilty to being a voluntary inmate (as described in My Dinner with Andre) who should've left in 2002. (Also, in line with Simon, I am probably unemployable above a subsistence level nearly everywhere else. And soon, here.)

one more time for sleepingbag:

Amazon depresses local wages and erodes labor norms generally, they do not help workers or citizens generally over time

more on this from those pesky lefties at The Economist

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21735020-worlds-largest-online-retailer-underpaying-its-employees-what-amazon-does-wages

to say nothing of the strikes in Italy and Germany

Well, GOOD jobs are good for cities. Idk if just saying "all jobs" is an accurate statement. Low-paying jobs, exploitative jobs, jobs that lead employees into a high rate of use of civic and social services, in a situation in which the employer under-contributes to their fairly assessed share of the expenses of those services, don't seem like a good deal for cities.

The company said the ideal city would have at least 1 million people, an international airport, and a "stable and business-friendly environment."

Ie an anti-union regional culture.

I'm terrified it'll come to toronto

there's an entire term and area of study about rent-seeking behavior, which is exactly what's going on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Amazon has at least two specific cases where they're doing this: warehouse/manual labor and their HQ, which is largely white-collar jobs with the exception of maintenance staff and building overhead, which is work done by contract.

The first is an ongoing streamlining of labor and wage suppression in the Wal-Mart model. Like Simon mentioned, it depresses wages. The latter, which is what the HQ is all about, is an inversion of affordability. From what I gather, the cost of living anywhere near Amazon's existing HQ has skyrocketed not just due to demand, but the relatively high-wage environment they've created. So at this point, hiring more than a certain threshold of new employees in that area makes no sense because the cost of living portion of salary is so off-kilter compared to other areas.

Ideally urban planning would catch up and force mixed-income neighborhood plans, but city planners, 99% of the time, see "shoring up the budget and attracting business" as a priority far above "make sure everyone (not just amazon white collar employees) can afford to live here." But all of the needs of the white collar people don't go away, you just end up with people working retail, providing labor services, living on less with longer commutes and fewer resources.

sb's mention that it will "benefit the municipality" is doing a lot of work in that phrase because, outside of funding the occasional study on economic impact, most city governments are stacked with people who came from business backgrounds who might know real estate but economic planning eludes them. There are some notable outstanding exceptions, but they're too few. The main "benefit to the municipality" is that poor people have to move to a neighboring community and commute

It's hard to argue with "jobs are good for cities." The problem is that what makes sense in the individual case creates terrible effects in aggregate -- a "race to the bottom" effect. Amazon is going to build its headquarters somewhere regardless, thus the fact that cities are made to "compete" for that headquarters is actually a net loss. "Economics 101" guys always seem to miss that what we're talking about *is* economics 101.

we are talking about actual decent paying jobs, hq being much different than a warehouse. amazon has warehouses everywhere, i don't think cities were falling all over themselves to compete for those. & sure, bad jobs could maybe pay better, but the alternative to bad jobs in some of these places is....??? maybe if some of these lower tier cities put more resources into luring in good jobs then bad jobs wouldn't be the only option? maybe some cities SHOULD be spending MUCH more to incentivize good jobs into relocating there?

i mean, don't get me wrong, i don't think there are easy answers to some of these questions, and i live in an hq2 candidate and don't really want them to come here myself. but just pointing out that many jobs at big companies don't pay well doesn't really point toward a solution in and of itself. and the jobs that do pay well seem to be able to buoy entire metro regions for decades. i get that the leftist ideal is that there are no huge unruly corporations to begin with, but get rid of amazon and then NOBODY has the ability to offer 50,000 jobs at $100,000....

i live in an hq2 candidate and don't really want them to come here myself

lmao

I can't even imagine how much more fucked the TO housing market would be if it opened here

you could argue it's 100% a city problem and that regulation, housing reform, and legislation could fix a lot of it but people see the same thing as sleepingbag with JOBS and with the HQ it's WELL PAYING JOBS which yeah, more jobs is overall a decent thing, but companies like Amazon are completely operating in their self-interest and systems that should force the human factors (affordable homes, decent commutes regardless of salary, public transportation, etc) are messed up

the warehouse worker stuff is completely fucked on the other end of the spectrum

xp i don't want them here bc my city doesn't need it. other cities do. and again, you're acting as if the alternative to corporations is some utopia and not detroit

Is anyone trying to "get rid of" Amazon? I just want them not to be above regulation, and for cities not to crawl to Amazon to propose deals that are good for developers and business tycoons but not urban planners and the majority of the current residents who'll be displaced when rent triples.

also, $100k near an Amazon HQ doesn't go nearly as far as you'd think, even if it's pretty damn good

the last time I did a comparison to see what my (midwestern mid-sized city, tech job) salary would have to be for me to have the same spending capability in say, Seattle or SF, it came out to a lot more than $100k, when I definitely don't make that

they just can't justify relocating to a place that size because they're leeching off of the rep/resources of a larger metropolis and would have to build up their own infrastructure if they located somewhere smaller

at some point we should probably have a thread on the unstoppable mid-sized datacenter swallowing monster that is Amazon Web Services

the current tech company grift is, imo, even worse in that realm because they pull the rent-seeking behavior off, and the number of people actually employed full time on-site is in the double digits once everything's built. it's like a warehouse with zero workers, just machine and building maintenance

Is anyone trying to "get rid of" Amazon?

Nationalize, ideally.

oh hell no

I think the ideal thing would be Amazon choosing several cities, giving an influx of workers/construction/capital to multiple areas that could use that, and not setting up the problem where their workforce is dictating housing costs but idk that would be a good thing for someone to study

also, pay warehouse workers more and let them unionize

like the problem isn't necessarily Amazon eating everything, it's that they're doing so by wrecking the low end of the pay scale in warehouses AND the upper middle class end of the pay scale by concentrating those jobs

"let them unionize" - sure, let's ask them nicely to support workers' right to organize, they'll love that

the tech giants cannot/will not be reformed

Is anyone trying to "get rid of" Amazon?

― Conic section rebellion 44 (in orbit)

seattle

I think the ideal thing would be Amazon choosing several cities, giving an influx of workers/construction/capital to multiple areas that could use that, and not setting up the problem where their workforce is dictating housing costs but idk that would be a good thing for someone to study

also, pay warehouse workers more and let them unionize

― mh

yes, this will work wonderfully when amazon replaces them all with robots in ten years

well then you make them pay to retain the workforce in robot repair

JUST IN: Amazon is partnering with Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank, to explore getting into the health insurance business https://t.co/pCM00ICALo pic.twitter.com/ZA04vC1kui

— CNN (@CNN) January 30, 2018

okay time to break up amazon pls