rogermunibond Posted February 27, 2019 Share Posted February 27, 2019 Seriously, they'd be loved in Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati and Indianapolis. Lots of places to diversify their employment pool. BUT they do need to be sure their millennial employees want to go to the middle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rkbabang Posted February 27, 2019 Share Posted February 27, 2019 Isn’t it strange that AMZN backs out of Long Island City and Seattle at the same time? Maybe they don’t need all that office space and overestimated their near term demands. Yes, very strange. It is either they no longer plan to grow their workforce that quickly or they have made a major re-think about where they wish to grow it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwy000 Posted February 27, 2019 Share Posted February 27, 2019 I wonder if Seattle started to scare them off with the proposed "employee tax" last year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted February 27, 2019 Share Posted February 27, 2019 Isn’t it strange that AMZN backs out of Long Island City and Seattle at the same time? Maybe they don’t need all that office space and overestimated their near term demands. Yes, very strange. It is either they no longer plan to grow their workforce that quickly or they have made a major re-think about where they wish to grow it. I just wonder what new insight or data they have gotten within a short timeframe? What were these new employees in LIC supposed to be working one - AWS? I don’t think they can get the techie employees they need to secondary cities like Louisville etc. Or maybe they feel that the winds of their prospective employee base have changed after they got the last tax return (or lack thereoff). or there is just less demand now all of a sudden? The last would probably make AMZN a short candidate, given the current valuation. I always thought they Austin, TX would be an ideal hub for them - low taxes , business friendly state and beloved by techies. It will be interesting to see what they announce, but I think the absence of news on expansion would be quite telling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rb Posted February 28, 2019 Share Posted February 28, 2019 Seriously, they'd be loved in Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati and Indianapolis. Lots of places to diversify their employment pool. BUT they do need to be sure their millennial employees want to go to the middle. Yep you've got a lot of hot shot execs and whizzy techies that wanna live it up in Louisville, Cincinnati and ugh :o Indianapolis. Nashville actually isn't too bad, but they're not really that much of a low cost jurisdiction these days and becoming less so as time goes on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rb Posted February 28, 2019 Share Posted February 28, 2019 NYS budget director on amazon/nyc fiasco: https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/open-letter-new-york-state-budget-director-robert-mujica-regarding-amazon Worth reading. Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental ignorance of basic math by a group of elected officials. The city and state 'gave' Amazon nothing. Amazon was to build their headquarters with union jobs and pay the city and state $27 billion in revenues. The city, through existing as-of-right tax credits, and the state through Excelsior Tax credits - a program approved by the same legislators railing against it - would provide up to $3 billion in tax relief, IF Amazon created the 25,000-40,000 jobs and thus generated $27 billion in revenue. You don't need to be the State's Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner. ... Make no mistake, at the end of the day we lost $27 billion, 25,000-40,000 jobs and a blow to our reputation of being 'open for business.' The union that opposed the project gained nothing and cost other union members 11,000 good, high-paying jobs. The local politicians that catered to the hyper-political opposition hurt their own government colleagues and the economic interest of every constituent in their district. The true local residents who actually supported the project and its benefits for their community are badly hurt. Nothing was gained and much was lost. This should never happen again." All of that may be technically true. But the fact that it's not a sweetheart tax deals is bullshit. I have income because I generate value. I pay taxes because I generate value. However I do not get to negotiate my tax rate with the government. If you zoom out a bit it's obvious that these tax breaks are a horrible policy. They do not incentivize economic development and growth. At best they shuffle it around and at worst it destroys growth. The best case, of the shuffle, is that at a national level Amazon and others are not gonna do more stuff because they got a tax break and neither is anyone else playing this game. They're just gonna do their stuff in location A or location B. That's all. When you aggregate the players together you basically have the same amount of stuff and a lower overall tax base. That's all. You don't generate more tax. This is painfully evident with the Amazon event. Everyone was bending over backwards to have them come and where did they choose? NYC and DC - two of the highest cost jurisdictions in the US. They were gonna pick those two places no matter what. Tax incentives didn't matter. They played the game just because they could. The worst case is that by letting the big boys negotiate they're tax rates, you give more advantages to large, monopoly power type companies. This puts smaller companies that can't negotiate they're tax rates at a further disadvantage? How's that fair? Isn't their government supposed to look out for them? Or is it just supposed to throw them under the bus? While the big boys can post nice looking headline job numbers, most people work for smaller companies not the big boys. Furthermore, most productivity growth (i.e. real economic growth) is driven by smaller players, not monopoly power giants. Exactly the type of players you try to kneecap with sweetheart deals for giant companies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 28, 2019 Share Posted February 28, 2019 AMZN adding a tool to help fight counterfeiters: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/amazon-announces-project-zero-to-reduce-counterfeit-products.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 1, 2019 Share Posted March 1, 2019 Quite a list of names: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/640-amazon-ad-nyt/23be553f1bef2065302d/optimized/full.pdf#page=1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rb Posted March 1, 2019 Share Posted March 1, 2019 Missing from that list Cuomo and DeBlasio. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwy000 Posted March 1, 2019 Share Posted March 1, 2019 They were directly referenced (including their responsibility) in the letter. They dont need to sign. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rb Posted March 1, 2019 Share Posted March 1, 2019 If you get a letter saying that I'm gonna do something wouldn't you look for my signature at the bottom? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwy000 Posted March 1, 2019 Share Posted March 1, 2019 If you get a letter saying that I'm gonna do something wouldn't you look for my signature at the bottom? Not when you're already on the record supporting it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rkbabang Posted March 1, 2019 Share Posted March 1, 2019 Amazon to Launch New Grocery-Store Business First outlet could open later this year; chain would be distinct from company’s Whole Foods unit https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-launch-new-grocery-store-business-sources-say-11551461887 or outline.com version: https://outline.com/9jXxSj Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 4, 2019 Share Posted March 4, 2019 https://digiday.com/retail/brand-people-trust-new-online-brands-adding-amazon-pay/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 4, 2019 Share Posted March 4, 2019 Short interview with Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/02/28/amazon-cloud-ceo-we-have-a-30-billion-run-rate-in-the-early-stages.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LC Posted March 4, 2019 Share Posted March 4, 2019 I always thought they Austin, TX would be an ideal hub for them - low taxes , business friendly state and beloved by techies. It will be interesting to see what they announce, but I think the absence of news on expansion would be quite telling. I felt the same with the Denver/Boulder area, but rb summed it up nicely: Everyone was bending over backwards to have them come and where did they choose? NYC and DC - two of the highest cost jurisdictions in the US. They were gonna pick those two places no matter what. Tax incentives didn't matter. IMHO Amazon is trying to get closer to building AWS into a service for financial institutions and the federal government and NY and DC are the places to do so. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SHDL Posted March 14, 2019 Share Posted March 14, 2019 https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/13/tech/amazon-economists/index.html This was pretty interesting. So while the rest of the world (including Buffett in this case) keeps repeating old jokes about how useless economists are, Amazon finds a way to profit from their skills… Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 15, 2019 Share Posted March 15, 2019 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/aws-pilots-pro-rata-program-to-connect-investors-with-start-ups.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 18, 2019 Share Posted March 18, 2019 https://zackkanter.com/2019/03/13/what-is-amazon/ h/t Rishi G. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 20, 2019 Share Posted March 20, 2019 Partnership with Nvidia on ML: https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/03/19/aws-upgrades-its-gpu-backed-ai-inference-platform/ the T4 features 2,560 CUDA cores and 320 Tensor cores, providing a peak output of 8.1 teraflops of single-precision performance, 65 teraflops of mixed-precision, 130 teraops of INT8 and 260 teraops of INT4 performance. [...] Each G4 instance… will be comprised of AWS-custom Intel CPUs (4 to 96 vCPUs), up to eight T4 GPUs, up to 384 GiB of memory, up to 1.8 TB of local NVMe storage, and an option for 100 Gbps networking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rkbabang Posted March 20, 2019 Share Posted March 20, 2019 There's a business growing within Amazon that could one day be worth more than retail or cloud https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/19/amazon-business-could-be-worth-more-than-core-retail-e-commerce.html "Amazon Business is just beginning to establish itself, Bank of America projects there is a total addressable market for e-commerce B2B of $1.4 trillion by 2021, which is nearly double the firm's estimated $761 billion market for consumer e-commerce. Essentially, the market potential for Amazon Business is about twice the potential for its core retail business." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 21, 2019 Share Posted March 21, 2019 Ads in the mobile app: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-21/amazon-said-to-launch-mobile-ads-in-threat-to-google-facebook Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 27, 2019 Share Posted March 27, 2019 Want to learn more about AWS? This weekly official AWS podcast is a decent place to start: https://aws.amazon.com/podcasts/aws-podcast/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted March 27, 2019 Share Posted March 27, 2019 Ads in the mobile app: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-21/amazon-said-to-launch-mobile-ads-in-threat-to-google-facebook My wife told me that Prime Video now also has ads. So far, I haven’t seen any ads yet personally. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted March 28, 2019 Share Posted March 28, 2019 Ads in the mobile app: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-21/amazon-said-to-launch-mobile-ads-in-threat-to-google-facebook My wife told me that Prime Video now also has ads. So far, I haven’t seen any ads yet personally. They play an ad for their productions right before the show/movie starts. It's like 75% of the time now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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