2019.02.25
Gruber recommends this overview of what happened in NYC w/ Amazon HQ2. And while the deal might have been a net good for the city, the author is in suport of a bigger scale picture, with this as a blow against a kind of crony capitalism that emerges when businesses pit city against city. (Like they do for sports franchises.) It feels akin to unionization; that local politics need to be bolder in not being such suck ups, and that cities presenting a more unified front of "look, we'll be accomodating, but we're not going to suck up to you to an enormous degree" would be a huge improvement. (Ritholtz points to Apple and Google as companies that have done well for themselves moving into NYC w/o big ol' sweetheart deals.)
facebook is doing to boomers what working in a mercury-vapored hat factory did to 19th-century laborers