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Amazon Second HQ

So why waste 7b$ on corporate welfare for one of the most highly-valued companies of all time when your front yard still looks like a developing country? Idiots.
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
Then again, it's the state that birthed the abomination that is Atlantic City.

AoD
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Have never been there, but I've been to Vegas and if it's even a tenth as shit as Vegas I want nothing to do with it.
I'm guessing it's worse than Vegas and wondering how the hell they managed that.
 
At this point Washington DC has to be seen as the key favorite. Three of the shortlisted cities are in the DC metro region with close proximity to Congress and K Street.
 

Salon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers
https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/wo...t_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/

Other examples include providing UK employees with cheap, ill-fitting boots that gave them blisters; relying on employment agencies to hire temporary workers whom Amazon can pay less, avoid paying them benefits, and fire them virtually at will; and, in a notorious case, relying on a security firm with alleged neo-Nazi connections that, hired by an employment agency working for Amazon, intimidated temporary workers lodged in a company dormitory near Amazon’s depot at Bad Hersfeld, Germany, with guards entering their rooms without permission at all times of the day and night. These practices were exposed in a television documentary shown on the German channel ARD in February 2013.

Perhaps the biggest scandal in Amazon’s recent history took place at its Allentown, Pennsylvania, center during the summer of 2011. The scandal was the subject of a prizewinning series in the Allentown newspaper, the Morning Call, by its reporter Spencer Soper. The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.

On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.”
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The more I look at Amazon's list, the more it appears to me that they already made their choice.

Many of the finalists hover around the New York City and Washington DC areas. Newark, Philly, Montgomery County, Washington DC and New York itself are all clustered very closely together with others like Pittsburgh, Boston and Raleigh pretty close to that cluster. Even if Bezos already knows where he wants to build HQ2, Amazon benefits from keeping the conversation going on as long as possible.

Toronto's major advantage is being outside of the US at a time when the country is lead by a nationalist. That's dangerous for a company that relies on foreign skilled IT workers — a skill that's been declining in the US while rising significantly in developing nations. But Trump will probably be gone in 3 years or less, even before Amazon opens their new HQ.

As much as I want Toronto to get this, my bet is on Montgomery County, Maryland. Why did such a low profile city make it to the top 20 with all the other recognizable giants? It's point blank in the centre of that cluster. It's a city that Amazon can shape to its needs while being within a train's ride to New York, Washington DC, Baltimore and Philly where Amazon can bring in skilled workers like Apple's Cupertino campus is to San Francisco.

Bonus Points: Both of Amazon's campuses would be close to both Washington's on each coast.
 
With the exponential impact of climate change and the increase of hurricanes along the east coast of the United States, I wonder if this will play a role in where HQ2 ends up. I know for a fact that a large american bank is no longer opening offices along the Hurricane belt due to disruptions. This same bank is increasing its headcount in Toronto (Technology offices)
 
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