Tuesday, October 17, 2017

"Panning for Gold in the Charles River"...

The current fandango about luring "Amazon's Second Headquarters" to Boston, pretty much leaves me cold.  I mean, isn't Amazon at the end of the day a company dedicated to transferring the industrial output of the People's Republic of China to waiting customers in an an ever more rapid fashion?  The jobs such a "get" would create would be the usual cubicle gigs with little positive wage pressure being created on the working-class end of the scale to say nothing of redressing the widening income gap in the USA.
It will bless Boston with a pretty skycraper with a nice big sign, the sort of display politicians love along with a giant ass ribbon to cut that'll all come at an as yet untotalled cost in tax breaks and public giveaways.
But thanks to provincial self hatred and irrational declinism, we fall for this nonsense every time, or almost every time, "for every 2024 Summer Olympics there is a GE" I guess is the best and most delicate way to put it.
There are a lot of things wrong with the Commonwealth but acquiring "Amazon's Second Headquarters" will solve almost none of them, other than giving certain columnists and politicians a false sense of elation there is little else on offer here.

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