AOC was against the subsidies. No one is stopping Amazon from creating jobs and then then getting rid of them when they hit a downturn. The issue was the subsidies provided and if companies can be held accountable.
Virginia paid $750M in subsidies for Amazon HQ2 to bring 2500 high paying jobs in 2023 and Amazon did not reach that goal. They'll probably miss the 2024 mark too. What recourse does Virginia have?
The "subsidies" in this case in NYC were a tax rebate over 10 years tied directly to the number of positions created. The Empire program itself was meant to incentivize new offices to open in boroughs other than Manhattan to help distribute the load on transit and other services. Any company opening new office space was eligible, not just Amazon.
The only real "subsidy" in the NYC deal was a land grant where an old plastics factory used to be that required significant environmental clean up. The land is also next to the notorious Queensbridge projects.
Really considering we mostly work in this industry, the amount of ignorance surrounding the deal, its incentive structure, and how it went up in flames is staggering.
Even the talking point about how Amazon opened up new NYC offices anyways is completely innumerate, so far they've created about 1/5th of the positions that they were projected to create under the HQ2 proposal.
So the original proposal was to create 25K jobs over 15+ years, and the fact that they have created "only" 1/5 the jobs in ~5 years with zero subsidies is supposed to be a negative? Especially considering that they are in the middle of layoffs and not even hitting their committed HQ2 goals.
>> So the original proposal was to create 25K jobs over 15+ years, and the fact that they have created "only" 1/5 the jobs in ~5 years with zero subsidies is supposed to be a negative?
How is this obviously not bad!?
Arent most of us technologists here? How is creating 1 job better than creating 5 high paying jobs? Can anyone currently unemployed chime in on whether you prefer having high paying jobs available vs not having them available?
Overall, Amazon did request $152M in April 2023 for the 6939 jobs it created. They didn’t request any money thru COVID and that $152M will be paid late 2026. Amazon has also paused building due to WFH and maybe realizing they don’t need another HQ. Overall, I would say this thing will stall for the next few years. There is an opportunity cost related to other businesses being offered those same subsidies and are growing. Alas, that can’t be measured.
> Amazon has also paused building due to WFH and maybe realizing they don’t need another HQ
Working at AWS I had teammates hired as remote for a team that was distributed across various regions, and we were given a mandate to either "return" to an office (including potentially having to move if one of the ones assigned to the team) or "voluntarily" leave (with no severance). I'm not saying that they didn't realize they didn't need as much real estate overall, but WFH is not the reason because it largely doesn't exist anymore at Amazon.
I think you are both right? amazon did pause or at least slow building due to WFH, during the pandemic. now WFH is over, but they are still doing layoffs. obviously both are sensitive subjects, but it doesn't make sense to immediately resume large construction projects while headcount is trending downward.
there's one more factor being missed here. obviously they won't say so publicly, but there's a case to be made that the entire HQ2 was as much about calling Seattle's bluff as it was about establishing a second company HQ for its own sake. now that that particular piece of legislation has been repealed, there's not as much reason to follow through on the original plan for HQ2. see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_head_tax
you would have the opportunity to argue whether you were fired for cause (which determines eligibility for unemployment insurance). in general that's hard to win if you just don't show up to your assigned work location, but there may be grounds to argue that mandatory relocation beyond a certain distance constitutes constructive dismissal.
but notice pay and severance are not mandatory for at will employees. the company basically gets to decide whether it's worth paying you not to sue them.
Because the rebate was conditional on sustained hiring and not a grant like the political rhetoric would have most believe.
Essentially the state was rebating the corporate tax they would have received in lieu of the income tax revenue obtained from the new positions along with the increased competition for high paying tech roles in the city.
The program was deliberately structured to be revenue neutral in terms of absolute tax revenue while increasing overall tax revenue by increasing state GDP
I'm not sure what you mean by political rhetoric. Are you saying calling it a subsidy would be misleading (?) because it was given on a condition? That seems a bid odd because subsidies often comes with conditions attached.
Person below commented they already went down from 50K jobs promised to 25K and that $750M is still sitting pretty. The terms are also flexible and over 15+ years so they can keep making false promises kicking the can down the road.
Not hard to imagine Amazon got a favorable deal concerning the subsidy stipulations due to all the competing bids for HQ2.
How does that make any sense? 750M / 2500 is 300k. It's just better to do helicopter money - literally just drop money from the skies and I would bet that more would be generated in return.
Assuming that Gemini is right and Virginia keeps 5-6% of your taxable income, individuals should earn at least 5M just for break even. I don't understand this model - can someone help make sense?
Pretty sure they missed a 0. They were meant to bring 25,000 jobs (which itself was scaled back from the 50,000 they had initially promised). Of course the problem with all such deals is that the timeline is always "flexible" (15+ years in this case), and even if the jobs are filled they will go away overnight if the company deems it better for their bottom line. Amazon has already cut 30,000+ corporate jobs in the last year and a half, and in his latest shareholder letter Jassy committed to continued "cost-cutting" across the company (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/11/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-says-c...).
The actual terms of the deal is $22k subsidy per job. At the time of the deal the average salary for those jobs had to be $150k. That average salary requirement goes up each year. Last year it was $157k and next year $159k. The jobs also have to last 5 years in order for Amazon to get the payout. At those terms the state income tax in the salaries will more than pay for the subsidy over 5 years. That doesn’t include the additional tax revenue from the construction of HQ2. Additional tax revenue from service businesses and their employees which support either HQ2 or the employees working there.
300K is a one-time fee, but that high paying job will probably pay state taxes for years to come. Not to mention the extra taxes collected on that person renting, shopping, driving, etc. Amazon HQ2 might get other companies to make a HQ there too. There are benefits, but Amazon can't be held accountable for deals like these.
Well, it could build a sports facility for Ted Leonsis, and hope that that brings in jobs and dollars. But that didn't make it through the legislature.
the door handle,
physical controls,
having lane indicators on their respective sides,
a glove box handle,
rear view mirrors
As solved things. Removing the door handle on Teslas is not innovative, it’s to stroke Elon’s ego. These changes aren’t innovative, they’re changes for the sake of changes.
Removing the door handle is the most logical decision in all the design.
Try to put your hands on stainless steel. Any trace of skin oil will left a mess of fingerprints all around the place. Door handles in the cyber-truck would be like rubbing your car while covered in meringue each time that you need to use it.
To be clear: removing the door handle or making one that retracts on the outside makes a ton of sense and I'm in complete support of. It significantly improves aerodynamics. Removing them from the inside: idiotic, I hated it in my old corvette which at least had an obvious physical button to push, I hate it more in Tesla's with their capacitive button that literally nobody can figure out opens the door without instructions.
The only objective claim I've seen about this was a Mercedes engineer saying flush door handles on the EQS only saves 0.0005 Cd and that their inclusion wasn't primarily an aerodynamic decision. I'd be interested to see more thorough analysis if anyone has done it.
If you punch in reasonable numbers for the EQS here[1] (2585 kg, 2.51m^2 frontal area, 0.20 cd) you get 420 meters on top of your 522km range at 100km/h assuming perfect efficiency.
Like many Tesla design decisions, it makes sense if you live in California. Elsewhere, you have to look up ways[1] to get the doorhandle unstuck when it's frozen over.
Normal handles can ice over, too, they're just easier to free up from ice. I'm not defending Musk here, but even a broken clock is ~right~ wrong in the same was as others twice a day.
Is it really a significant margin that makes a measurable difference in range, or an insignificant one in the grand scheme of things that can be ofset if the driver has a bigger lunch? Because then it's just a design flex, not a engineering win.
My gut feeling based on a few years working in automotive is that you're talking bull. No offence.
"Significant" was the wrong term, "measurable" was the correct one. Had I realized people were going to jump on it I would've taken more time to pick a better word. The point was: flush handles are at least partially justified, lack of interior handles are not.
As for studies, yes they have been done, I do not have a subscription to pull the numbers:
Ok, so you have no numbers, you just pasted here the first thing that showed up on Google without even being able to read it, just to cover your ass, while a sibling comment provides numbers from Mercedes that show the gains from door handles are negligible.
Boooo! If you wanna post a source, at least post one that you can at least read before using it as crutch for your argument, otherwise you're digging yourself further into your own hole.
Holy cow, take a deep breath. You’re violating multiple rules of this place with the baseless and unnecessary attacks. I have seen multiple reports of a measurable gain in efficiency. Am I willing to spend 2 hours digging up data? No, because again it was literally not the point of the comment and completely missing the point.
if removing door handles can bring about that much efficiency gain (I doubt unless you show data) then imagine removing side mirrors and replacing them by small camera bumps would bring, that i'd support. door handles thing is just Musk BS. same thing with many inside controls, thats just cost optimization. I'd go to the lengths of saying even the falcon wing doors are a poorly thought out design decision.
Removing side mirrors is in full swing - this is why Teslas have the side repeater cameras that display on the screen whenever the turn signals are used. Audi has had the same thing for years.
The holdup here are government regulations, but the minute those are changed, side mirrors are gone.
I get OP's take, but freediver is essentially saying that Orion and their other ventures are a part of the vision. To OP and others, it may seem like a side-mission or a waste of resources, but I trust the guy bootstrapping the company with his own money.
Hell, Orion is the first Webkit browser where FireFox and Chrome plug-ins work on iOS. If may seem like a misstep, but I see it as calculated. If Kagi search hopes to ever take on Google and Chrome, they need their own champion.
It's a stretch to justify paying for search, but I do it. To find out I actually pay for a bunch of stuff I don't care about when search is still a work in progress, naw bro, I'm good. I don't go to a restaurant that has a partial menu to fund a race team. Cool that was your reason for opening the place, you sunk a ton of money into something you think it super cool, but I'm actually here for the food and ignored you don't have fryers yet when I thought that me eating here was supporting them coming, not something else.
You are both right. Freediver laid out the vision, and some users are saying the vision isn't what the paying users are paying for. As someone who ran a business like this, GS is telling Freediver this should probably be something to give extra attention to and consciously decide is it the company the vision or the search product people are paying for?
How is this different from Hershey funding a school for orphans from its profit, or Microsoft funding Internet Explorer with some of the price you paid for Windows (theoretically), or any business that uses income from its stable products to fund new products? The only thing I can think is that you are not actually satisfied with the product (search results for a month) and so in your mind you are funding R&D of the product you would like (better search results for a month). In which case, getting upset is understandable, but assuming my analysis is correct, the mismatch is that you aren't buying for the product they are actually selling.
If you read on, Groq said they would only sell hardware to US companies and outside companies would get cloud services, not the LPUs. I think the US government told them to keep the LPUs in-house since they could be the secret sauce for scale.
I'm not questioning the deployment strategy, I'm wondering why Saudi Aramco wants to access so much compute power that is highly specialized(?) for generative AI workloads. Or is it more general than that?
What's the connection there? The second link says it's not about materials discovery at all but rather their GigaPOWERS model, which is a physics simulation used to optimize CO2 injection into their fields (i.e. optimizing recovery). POWERS is old, it was in development for decades already. Given that they don't plan to use Groq for LLMs but simply for its parallel computation abilities. I wonder to what extent this deal - if it goes through - will seriously drain Groq, actually, as POWERS would not be like the code Groq was designed to run and so much of their performance comes from the way they tightly optimize for very specific calculations.
Groq's system was designed to run arbitrary high performance numerical workloads. In the past it has been used for a variety of scientific computation tasks, including nuclear fusion and drug discovery.
It's an assumption from my side, that they will utilize GenAI in material discovery for Aramco or SABIC[0]. Even if Groq won't fit that use-case a couple of billions with another hardware vendor is nothing if this paid off.
> I'm wondering why Saudi Aramco wants to access so much compute power that is highly specialized(?) for generative AI workloads. Or is it more general than that?
For vanity reasons and because AI is the future (not every company acts that rationally for huge buying decisions).
Maybe Saudi doesn’t want to rely on OpenAI and other APIs and wants to run a fine-tuned Mixtral model on the cloud or their hardware. International companies will probably opt for an open source model since the data is sensitive and OpenAI could pass that to intelligence.
Partly supply-chain security I imagine. If generative AI does indeed become the next big thing much nicer to have a giant pile of hardware physically in your country than buying a drip feed from a foreign company.
The best philosophic ideas I’ve read come from programmers and builders. I don’t know why that connection exists. My hunch is that programming and philosophy both deal in the abstract so are inherently connected somehow.
Samsung and other TVs already show ads on the Home Screen so this is just the other market players catching up.
Dumb TVs are also getting more expensive since Samsung and other TV manufacturers are subsidizing their cost by pitching the ads they can push down the line as they boil the frog.
Samsung Tizen TVs have this bar on the bottom when you go to input or try to choose a streaming app. Right next to my apps, there is a small box promoting Samsung TV Plus shows.
It would be illegal if Anthropic can't sell those AWS credits on the open market which I'm thinking they can't. You're equating this to a stock swap but that is not the case.
Mistral did what many startups are doing now, leveraging open-source to get traction and then doing a rug-pull. Hell, I've seen many startups be open-source, get contributions, get free press, get into YC and before you know it, the repo is gone.
That works, but for more complex questions taking into account different files and the whole architecture of the app, CoPilot fails. I've been trying to RAG my repos to accomplish this, but the parent comment said that's not possible.
Virginia paid $750M in subsidies for Amazon HQ2 to bring 2500 high paying jobs in 2023 and Amazon did not reach that goal. They'll probably miss the 2024 mark too. What recourse does Virginia have?
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