0.
Imagine Amazon, the creative destructor of the 21st century, the killer of hundreds of businesses large and small, displacer of hundreds of thousands of retail jobs across America, consolidator of wealth in fewer hands and fewer cities, taking all that wealth and the high-paying jobs and the advanced technology out of the country, but within spitting distance of Donald Trump.
How crazy would Jeff Bezos have to be?
If Canadian cities try to outbid each other in a race to the bottom (free land, no property taxes, upgraded infrastructure, grants and subsidies), they would be sending a signal to every other powerful corporation that might consider locating to Canada or another city that this is the new bottom line. Start the bidding wars!
The question is not how crazy Amazon would have to be to locate HQ2 in Canada but how crazy are we.
I would support a bid in the RFP, just do not include subsidies. Amazon replaces retail jobs with other jobs that I would argue are better.
Online shopping is continueing to expand (where it makes sense) regardless of the Amazon HQ location.
Retail property taxes are under attack everywhere and Vancouver need to ake notice FAST ! It ought to shift the tax mix from commercial to residential AND implement road use fees. Online shopping (shippers really) get a free ride as retailers get assaulted. http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-how-city-politicians-are-helping-amazon-destroy-your-favourite-local-retailers
What a great article! It is often the conservative element that strongly resists road pricing in spite of it being totally in line with general free market principles. Very interesting connection to online vs brick and mortar shopping.
remind me who has scrapped our lower mainland road pricing scheme?
There was no Lower Mainland road pricing scheme to scrap. That’s in the works through Metro government working with the new provincial administration.
There was two sets of bridge tolls that were scrapped to buy votes in the suburbs, which will be replaced by some kind of a Metro-wide road pricing scheme. It remains to be seen what that will look like.
Very interesting take on road pricing by a pro-business advocate. I certainly agree in the principle of user pay, but where the author could be misjudging the situation is in the ratio of commercial vs. car commuter traffic. Currently it’s about 3:1 in favour of private cars. If governments enacted fair, per km road pricing with discounts offered to commercial and transit, the roads would suddenly be cleared of congestion and demand for transit would skyrocket. The revenue would probably be enough to offset a good hunk of commercial taxes.
Also note that the bricks and mortar retail stores contained in rapid transit-linked town centres seem to be doing a screaming business compared to the suburban parking lots that preceded them.
The author’s interpretation of ‘highest and best use’ seems to be devoid of the understanding of the principle of zoning, which cannot possibly be so flexible as to charge a rate that mirrors retail business revenue on a block-by-block basis without hiring an army of extra staff. If you run a business in or close to a known high-revenue economic hub you will pay more in your lease, and like fuel taxes, that amount is controlled more by the private owners based on market value than by flat rate, zoning-based city taxes. The article fails to outline the difference.
The issue is that goods delivered by UPS and the like pay zero road use fees for their commercial operation. If the road is part of commerce, then they ought to pay more. Ditto with heavy cement trucks rumbling around neighbourhoods to build concrete highrises. Grossly underpriced wear and tear of the road. For the diesel fumes at least we get CO2 taxes, but noise and road (ab)use is highly undertaxed. As such, a remote warehouse in Surrey can compete easily with a retail store on Robson street as the lease rate is far lower, property taxes far lower and the road is subsidized by all.
The idea here is to re-price public goods like roads, as some benefit FAR more than they contribute, eg online shoppers, online shopping distribution firms and/or cement trucks. Thus, if the T Shirt bought on Robson is $50 but only $20 online then the online shopper will buy online until delivery costs are $20-30.
Of course, as we see in Toronto right now where the conservative Toronto mayor proposed road tolls to drive into Toronto from suburbs, the provincial government nixed this idea. We shall see how this pans out here. Like Singapore perhaps, where subway and bus systems are excellent and cheap, and car use extremely expensive so that a mere 10% of folks use a car ? Or sth like Oregon ie a per km charge ?
It has to include vehicle weight, trip length, time of day, and expensive bridge/tunnel use to spread the pain to all, according to true cost of infrastructure.
I agree. However, in my view commercial and transit should pay a lower rate than the car commuter. The key is that the charge is per km, and yes, possibly per weight.
a 20 ton bus with 100 people should pay the same as a 20 ton cement truck delivering new concrete .. and as such per person that might be peanuts but monetizes road investments and incents different behavior ..
I agree Thomas. It should not matter if a person or thing is in the vehicle. I would expect that with road pricing online deliveries would be more popular because it would be more efficient to car pool a product, with other customers products to your house rather than individually driving two ways to a store. Thus improving the environment and reducing everyone’s taxes by having more efficient use of our transportation network.
More efficient yet would be delivery by cargo bike for parcels and mail. Shopify is doing this in some cities. We have Shift. Why not way more?
Would agree just how crazy a city might be or desperate. The trick is how a brick and mortar local company could include somehow use Amazon.
I believe Shopify has partnered with Amazon (last year?). Not sure of all the details…Shopify offers ecommerce platform software and maybe it’s offering business channel via Amazon for marketing, selling options for a retailer..
https://www.shopify.ca/blog/52368069-shopify-and-amazon-partner-to-bring-amazon-services-to-merchants
Gord, I think your commentary is over the top — perhaps it’s tongue-in-cheek? We have yet to see if Amazon turns out to be another version of a retail giant with a notoriously predatory management, or just another successful business moving with the tsunami of tech change.
If you require someone to blame, then blame the inventors of the Internet.
Likewise, we have yet to see which cities are desperate enough to demean themselves by offering excessive goodies and freebies while prostrating themselves before the Amazon god. Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal are mature cities and I believe they are capable of presenting intelligent proposals to Amazon while defining their limits and conditions without bending a knee, and big enough to merely shrug and carry on if Amazon chooses another city.
I agree. If Amazon (or anything else) does not serve us then we should decline. This is a rich city in a rich province. We aren’t desperate. If they really want to come here then they do it on our terms.
I am ambivalent.
It sure would be nice for Vancouver to actually have a real economy. The history of Silicon Valley shows how much can spin off from a few important players (Stanford University, Fairchild Semiconductor, and buckets of government money). At the same time, I think that Amazon is a terrifying and monopolistic company doing a lot of nasty things. But Vancouver can’t solve the tech sector’s problems; should this in and of itself weigh much against taking advantage of an opportunity like this? Probably not.
I don’t want to see Amazon bribed. If we’re willing to do that, the money could probably be far better spent on local research. The experiences of Silicon Valley, Waterloo, and Ottawa (before Nortel collapsed) show how university research and government spending can create vibrant ecosystems. (But will we do that? I very much doubt it.)
My biggest concern is the power that Amazon would wield once here. They would be a very big fish in a rather small pond. Consider the argument in the Lawrence Solomon article that Thomas linked to. It proposes road pricing and changes to property taxes which would rebalance the market towards bricks an mortar. Would the political will even exist to make such changes if Amazon were here? I doubt the local tech industry would dare cross their Amazon mothership.
I have been working with computers for decades. I remember being excited when the computer industry surpassed the auto industry. I was in a lab next to Bill Buxton when he was developing pinch-to-zoom (actually pinch-to-resize if I recall correctly) before the days of touch screens, with two hands above a projection monitor and a camera behind him. I have watched as innovation has stagnated, twisted and crushed by successive monopolies (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook – though maybe that’s a good thing: so much of that innovation has turned toxic).
So I am ambivalent. The potential rewards are huge, city-making and city-changing. I fear for the day when we collide with our lack of a proper economy. Perhaps the price is not too high to pay. Even so, I suspect it would leave a bitter taste in my mouth when the moment comes that what is good for Amazon is good for Vancouver, just as what was once good for GM was good for America (except it wasn’t).
A house without books is not a home. E-books count. Recently I ordered an $80 solid book online through Amazon from the comfort of my couch. Then we bought $150 of books at Munro’s in Victoria last Saturday. Munro’s business and premises is now employee-owned, and it is one of the best A-rated heritage buildings in Oldtown. Online + bricks and mortar, both have value.
I don’t know a lot about Amazon’s corporate culture, but they offer enough convenience and attractive services. They promised to lower prices and offer home delivery and pick-up services for the elderly. Their HQ2 RFP referred extensively to public transit access and high-quality urbanism. To most, that was a clear signal that they are not primarily interested in cheap suburban highway office / retail space, though they did leave that open.
I have never set foot in a Wal Mart. One of the reasons is their predation on small towns and suburban councils. If there is evidence that Amazon has a directive to prey on cities, then that needs to be presented, otherwise it’s just Mothercorp conjecture about another big tech giant. My assumption is that Amazon became big because of their offerings of products, services and convenience, not because they followed Big Oil and paid politicians to legislate in their favour. This is not to say that their sheer size won’t have an effect on the city it successfully negotiates with, but most interested cities are bigger. Much bigger. Vancouver (or Toronto)-Amazon is not the same as Cupertino-Apple or San Jose-Google. It follows that the negotiations would be to the city’s benefit too. There is every right to strike a long-term mutually-beneficial contract.
I agree with your comments on Canada’s economy. Last Saturday’s G&M featured an excellent piece by Doug Saunders on the direction Canada should go this century to survive and thrive and break the stranglehold that the extractive economic outlook has on our leaders and citizens (link below). Value-added will happen when we develop adequate markets at home instead of always looking at exports, which will require a larger population — he pegs it at 100 million by end of century – with a wealth-generating pool of innovative talent and companies protected by intellectual property patents, and enough income tax revenue to build denser cities and towns that fully support the increasingly expensive social safety net and sustainable urbanism. A larger economy will pay for high-speed rail joining our cities together, a lot more public transit within our cities, for switching to renewables to decarbonize the economy, and for managing a slightly higher sustained immigration level, including assistance for family reunion, refugees and skilled labour.
The article was so awesome that I included Saunders’ book ‘Maximum Canada’ in the stack we bought at the bricks and mortar Munro’s. We may not exactly need Amazon, but we sure as hell need to foster and nourish and mightily grow the Canadian tech, innovation and commercialization skills we currently have.
https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-metro-ontario-edition/20170916/textview
One third of the way into ‘Maximum Canada’ and I have already received a deeper education on our nation’s history.
The comments that follow are not aimed at whether we should welcome Amazon. They are concerned with devotion to a knowledge economy that will supposedly save us. In the big picture, I do not think that it will.
I am highly critical of intellectual property (itself a highly ideological term). I believe it has inflicted tremendous harm; our technology would be serve real human beings far better if there were less of it.
What I see with copyrights and patents of and around software is a commons ravaged and enclosed. Over the course of the 20th century, ordinary people were transformed from doers of culture into consumers of culture. The Internet offered a tremendous opportunity to again make us active participants in the river of community life. I used to say on my web site’s about page that I hoped that the computer would help undo the harms of the car. The technology we have created since is a shadow of what was possible. The Internet should have fostered a grand commons. Instead it is turning into cable TV, and fenced-in by “apps.” Our industrial capacity and working class jobs too were dismantled to worship at the alter of the knowledge economy. In RiP, a the 2008 documentary, Bruce Lehman, IP czar under Clinton, explains IP law and trade policy, effectively drawing a straight line to Trump. For the knowledge is the new clothing for inequality. And of course we have huge monopolistic private spy agencies that monitor and increasingly influence our lives.
James Boyd, another law scholar, in Shamans, Software, and Spleens, argues that copyright and patent case law only makes sense if one believes in an idea of individual artistic genius that is flat out contrary to history, theory, and empirical scholarship: one that ignores the role of the commons. (Creativity and the commons – of ideas and of land – were a large part of my master’s thesis.)
Boldrin and Levine argue against IP altogether, especially patents, presenting evidence that they hinder innovation even in the best-case scenario of pharmaceuticals. They are libertarian economists, but there are numerous similar critiques of IP on the left.
Mark Lemley, director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, in “Faith-Based Intellectual Property”, quotes Robert Merges, another IP scholar: “Try as I might, I simply cannot justify our current IP system on the basis of verifiable data showing that people are better off with IP law than they would be without it.” And yet, Merges says, “through all the doubts over empirical proof, my faith in the necessity and importance of IP law has only grown.” As Lemley argues, this evidence-free faith “is a form of religious belief.”
I think this resembles last century’s ideology of motordom. We have given up so much of what we could have had, and so much of what we had already. Time passes, the struggles are fading, the commons are gone, the alternatives are forgotten or unimaginable.
Undiscussed in this context is excessive government spending incl DB pensions & ever mushrooming debt. That system is unsustainable. As taxes get raised you will see major backlash as we saw with the transit referendum. As such, BC is out for Amazon as wages are too high, income taxes are too high, real estate values too high and CO2 taxes too high soon. Far cheaper SE US states exist where a new HQ is far more efficient. That is why Detroit collapsed as a car production state: excessive unionized wages. Ontario is next here. That is why BC has almost no national HQs. Alberta (i.e. Calgary) might fit the bill. But I think it will be either in Mexico or far more likely SE USA.
Let me read the “Maximum Canada” book. A socialist utopia is espoused, like Sweden and other high-tax Nordic countries ?
Saunders studiously avoids political rhetoric and sticks to economics.
I do not believe that the commons as a whole has been appropriated by intellectual property, though great sections have by operations like Facebook. It’s still an incredibly free environment. The commons though have been subject to extensively monitoring by national security agencies. As with laissez faire planning, it may have been naïve to assume that a great, open market of ideas would not be in part co-opted by those with nefarious or organized self-centred interests. The free Children of the Sixties discovered that two generations ago and through being taken advantage of, have now become one of the most protective generations ever. Helicopter parenting is rampant.
There is still enormous good with the Internet, but it’s obvious society needs to learn to manage it as an instrument of good and to remain optimistic that most IP patents are merely like goods offered on supermarket shelves. CSIS and NSA employees are probably bored to death with the terabyte mountain ranges of useless and mundane information floating out there. Our worry should be about mediocrity and dilution, not only about the corporate appropriation of communication.
IP seems to have become a vital necessity to anything that remotely touches technology. I have used mainly three CAD programs for a long time, but started out hand drawing on a drafting table and typing reports. MS Windows and Apple OS are two extraordinarily successful operating systems used by hundreds of millions. Cable-stayed bridges only became common once AutoCAD and other engineering programs could run the complex structural calculations with great efficiency. 3D graphics and printing is an extraordinary leap that has started to provide great benefits to manufacturing, healthcare and the design professions. Our worldwide communications systems are digitized, as are most other complex systems out there.
Every one of the trillions of digital signals transmitted and received on a daily basis is crawling with, saturated in and deeply-branded by intellectual property patents. The papers critical of IP written by the profs you cited were 99.999% likely to have been themselves deeply exposed to several IP patents, from Google searches to writing the papers using MS Word, Apple Pages or even some kind of university network program. If they were written with pen on paper, they still required IP patents to publish. The vitality and utility of IP patents seem to far outweigh the concern over maintaining the freedom and purity of the Internet commons.
I do not like Facebook and never intend to host a page. It’s different, however, with close friends and relatives who now get their main feed of family news through it. Elizabeth Renzetti’s Sept 16th Globe column expressed great concern over the new tactic FB is taking by using her digital footprints for targeted advertising on her page. This is one example of how FB survives on the information voluntarily placed on it. Without information, they are nothing. To me FB is like the twittersphere: It’s not vital and I much prefer real communication through email, letters, or face-to-face chinwags over coffee.
If we are rejecting companies like Amazon (it does seem strange that an advanced country needs to import established talent), and looking to give IP patents and tech research a wide berth, then what will the Canadian economy look like in future? Surely we cannot assume that an extractive economy will elevate the nation’s standard of living. We’ve had that since before confederation and now all resources combined represent only 1/5th of the national economy.
Our living standards were first elevated beyond the subsistence level when Wilfred Laurier opened the gates to vastly increased immigration (my grandparents were among that wave) and build up our cities and national infrastructure at the same time it became possible to research and develop high-yield wheat and develop a complementary industrial economy.
Doug Saunders outlined how we have now plateaued, mostly by passing off or minimizing efforts to commercialize innovation (preferring to sell off start-ups too early, then ironically import the products others create with Canadian ideas), sticking to the old hewers of wood mentality on exporting raw resources, and failing to recognize that immigrants and their progeny are future taxpayers and will cause government revenues to increase and enable our standard of living to be maintained, the economy to be decarbonized and electrified with renewables, and for the efficacy of our cities to be greatly enhanced. Without IP, the knowledge economy, R&D of technology and immigration, chances are that Canada may have to embrace de-growth and stagnation. That’s not comforting at all.
Well said. Yet Canada is now taking the taxation levels to new extremes and taxing 50% or more of wealth created. As such, not only will doctors leave to NZ, Australia, UK or USA but so will hockey players, movie stars, entrepreneurs and high end IT folks. IPOs will not happen in Canada but elsewhere.
More people will die as doctors leave for NZ, UK, Australia or US.
The risk of running a small biz remains unrewarded and very highly taxed in good years which means less hiring, less reserves, more biz failures and less investment thus unemployment rises and economic growth declines.
The intended higher “fair” tax revenue may evaporate in its entirety.
Does this book talk about this ie this plateau ie more death, less hiring, less investment and overall less taxes that are the very predictable result here ??
We need a 21st Century Laurier.
You seem to be saying that existing technology (e.g. AutoCAD) is covered by IP, therefore without IP that technology would not exist. This looks to me very much like an if-you-drive-a-car-you-can’t-criticize-oil kind of argument. Or to put it in traditional terms, another world is possible.
I get the feeling that you may be mixing up patents and copyright. This is extremely common (journalists get it wrong all the time). The two are quite different. Patents limit ideas, regardless of whether they are made independently; copyrights (supposedly) are on expressions of ideas: though in fact it is far broader, and the legal idea that idea and expression are separable is rejected by relevant non-legal scholarship.
Patents on knowledge were originally created to promote piracy. Countries considered craft skills proprietary. If you were a, say, a metalworker in France, you faced execution if you were caught trying to take yourself and your skills to England. England wanted specialists, so they created patents to tempt them over with a grant of 14 years of exclusivity. The term, 14 years (later taken as the original term for copyright), was chosen as the length of two apprenticeships.
In general, it appears to me that patents are probably bad in all domains. The one area I am certain of is software, whey have been a major barrier to software innovation. Software professionals know this: most developers and computer scientists are overwhelmingly opposed to software patents. Patents have significantly hindered innovation in online video, for example (why we have the chaos of so many formats, why YouTube took so long to arrive on the scene, and so forth). Patents also caused real problems for the GIF graphics format. Every developer routinely and unknowingly infringes software patents on a regular basis, leading to potentially huge liability. Every now and then a patent troll pops up and tries to hold a business hostage (e.g. the current case with the guy who claims he invented email). Never mind the silliness of things like Amazon’s one-click patent. Patents are the land mines of software development.
In contrast to the disaster of patents, software copyright is obviously terrible. However the alternative commons regime of free software (free from restrictions on copying, distribution and modification – it can still cost money) has demonstrated so many benefits and such success that it is clearly preferable. The Internet was (and is) built on free software, from web servers to databases to operating systems. Mac OS X was built on top of free software, as is the Android operating system. Even Microsoft, the inventor of software copyright, is incorporating significant free software components in Windows. This despite the fact that so much more money has been poured into proprietary code. If even a fraction of those resources were spent on free software, if our public policy were to promote free software instead of stronger IP, we would almost certainly be far better off, with more dynamic innovation, less monopoly, stronger oversight, greater resilience, and higher productivity within and without the software industry. Eben Moglen gave a brilliant, inspirational explanation in a speech a decade ago. I have annotated it with explanations for a non-technical audience. Here are the annotated transcript and the original video:
http://www.geof.net/research/2006/moglen-notes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NorfgQlEJv8
Copyright of things other than software also has implications, which I focused on above. I think I have written enough for now, but briefly I will say that stronger intellectual property rights lead to a concentration of IP ownership, which in turn fosters the growth of monopolies and oligopolies, marginalizing independent creators and artist. If copyright is stronger then Disney is more dominant; if Disney is more dominant, then if you are an animator you are more likely to work for Disney. If you work for Disney, then in effect that you are a share-cropper: Disney gets to decide what you produce – and what you do not!, and Disney owns the results.
There are many other implications, but I will stop now. I dealt with much of this in a video series I made years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL65D7BF87E1B0B33B
A very illuminating commentary, Geof. Certainly beyond my experience.
I would like to understand your points in the context of planning a national economy into the future. IP patents have their marketeers publishing op-eds in the MSM all the time, not the least RIM / Blackberry’s founder Jim Balsillie. Their commentary is often couched in terms of 21st Century technology = IP. Meanwhile, the skilled trades are going strong.
Jim Balsillie is actually critical of IP. “Jim Balsillie thinks policies designed to protect intellectual property do more harm than good”:
http://business.financialpost.com/technology/jim-balsillie-canadas-intellectual-property-red-tape-holding-the-country-back-from-innovating
The United States was famously an IP laggard during the 19th century, when Charles Dickens railed about unlicensed U.S. publication of his serials, and for much of the 20th. When all European copies of the film Nosferatu (1922) were ordered destroyed following a copyright loss, it survived in the U.S. The U.S. didn’t even implement the 1886 Berne Convention until 1989 (Canada joined in 1928 at the behest of the U.K.). This benefited them immensely, just as China’s loose IP laws have been good for them.
The U.S. only reversed its stance once their position as a cultural superpower became clear, going hand-in-hand with an ideological shift (e.g. Bayh-Dole, which directed universities to monetize research instead of sharing it). They essentially pulled up the ladder. The irony is that they did this through the TRIPS agreement, which was initiated by third-world countries to try to gain better access to Western technology so that they could industrialize. Through the U.S., an unholy alliance of Hollywood and big pharma imposed stronger IP laws instead of allowances for poor countries, who were threatened with loss of access to Western markets if they didn’t comply: “We won’t buy your food or textiles unless you pay us to allow you to industrialize.” Again, when the World Intellectual Property Organisation shifted towards a “development agenda,” the U.S. abandoned it for bilateral agreements (e.g. with Korea, which has turned out to be a loser for the U.S.) and the TPP. (Though even today the U.S. is not fully compliant with its international obligations on moral rights.)
Canada is in a tricky position. During our last major round of copyright reform, Stephen Harper said that the law would not be done until the U.S. was happy. The U.S. kept us out of the TPP for years for fear we might weaken the IP framework. The USTR routinely (and absurdly) put us on a watch list with China for supposedly weak IP laws. Our policy seems to be to accept stronger IP in exchange for access to markets for our resources and industry. (“Whatever, man, we’ve got lumber.”) If we really believe that creativity and innovation are the keys to the 21st century economy, this may not be the best policy.
We could try to basically be an extension of the U.S. Current politics make the risks of that clear. But I don’t think that has worked out even for them. Lehman explains that their goal was to move manufacturing to China, while retaining IP control from here. (“You be a lowest-cost producer of Mickey Mouse toys, we’ll sit back and collect the licensing fees.”) Innovation in China is booming. It turns out that innovation goes hand-in-hand with manufacturing. Oops.
I think Moglen makes a really powerful economic argument. Proprietary code allows us to make money from selling the software. But since software affects just about everything these days, it is a complementary good. Lowering the cost of software increases the value of everything else. While free software does make money (something I have done myself), the real source of wealth is not software, it is software plus something else. Apple. Except that kind of vertical integration is extremely rare (compare with Sony). The proven path to success is cross-pollination among many smaller firms, as happened in Silicon Valley:
“As they moved from firm to firm, their paths crossed repeatedly, and their relationships transcended sectoral and occupational boundaries – from established firms to start-ups, from semiconductors to PCs to software, and back again. In consequence, unusually, they developed stronger commitments to one another and to the cause of advancing technology than to the individual companies or industries to which they might belong for a few weeks or months.” (Geopgrapher Peter Hall in Cities in Civilization).
The key thing being exchanged here is not only workers (though that is critical): it is also ideas, techniques, and technologies. These days, non-compete agreements and monopolies put a damper on this kind of mixing. Stronger IP only plays against the entrepreneurial dynamic.
If they do go anywhere it will be Montreal. The list of international organizations in Montreal, all assisted and attracted with Canadian, Quebec and Montreal government funds is impressive. The subsidies offered are clearly advertised.
The access to the eastern population base would also appeal to a west coast company.
http://www.montrealinternational.com/en/international-organizations/organizations-in-montreal/
French is a dying / not growing language. Spanish speaking folks is where the American growth is and as such a new HQ will be either in Texas or more likely in Mexico or SE USA where Spanish is spoken by many. Atlanta, Tampa, Miami ..
What a fabulous discussion above! My 2 cents worth: my publisher wanted to have Amazon distribute my first graphic novel, but they wanted such a deep discount he wouldn’t have made a penny on it; however, they took the French edition of it at a much lower discount because they have fewer French titles. Go figure…
FYI: Calgary is crowdsourcing people for Amazon HQ2 elevator pitches:
https://loveyyc.chaordix.com/dashboard
The local economic development group sees it as a great marketing opportunity for the city even if Calgary is off the table.
As for the glut of vacant office space downtown…very real and noticeable with decreased volume of daily work commuters and traffic volume. There are some lovely new office buildings with bike storage, wash facilities..
It’s doubtful corporate culture at Amazon has changed since: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=0
Now, some of us who have worked for large private sector/global firms (I have for 2), Amazon’s culture is way beyond: purposeful Darwinism .. ways to weed out, spiralling too easily in toxicity and fear.
Hard working ethic and innovation in employees can be fostered in other ways.