Amazon Gobbles Downtown Seattle, Builds Biospheres (bloomberg.com) 91
Amazon has grabbed more than 15% of Seattle's office space inventory, which a local book author is describing as "the Amazocalypse". And now Amazon is building three "gigantic spheres resembling melted-together Milk Duds in the shadow of their new 500-foot-tall office tower," according to Bloomberg:
The 100-foot-tall orbs -- Amazon calls them Biospheres -- will host more than 300 plant species from around the world, creating what the company sees as the workplace of the future. Amazonians will be able to break from their daily labors to walk amid the greenery along suspension bridges and climb into meeting spaces resembling bird nests perched in mature trees... Many of the plants are endangered species, meaning that the spheres double as a conservation project.
Bloomberg talks about the desire of Amazon and other tech companies to stay -- and grow -- in the popular cities "where millennials prefer to live". While the owners of Seattle's Space Needle complain that all the new office towers are blocking views of their tourist attraction, the article also describes how Amazon leased the ground floors of its office buildings to "hand-picked bars, restaurants and coffee shops," transforming it from "a hodgepodge of car dealerships and second-hand stores."
Bloomberg talks about the desire of Amazon and other tech companies to stay -- and grow -- in the popular cities "where millennials prefer to live". While the owners of Seattle's Space Needle complain that all the new office towers are blocking views of their tourist attraction, the article also describes how Amazon leased the ground floors of its office buildings to "hand-picked bars, restaurants and coffee shops," transforming it from "a hodgepodge of car dealerships and second-hand stores."
Balls (Score:5, Funny)
I've always thought high rise structures should have balls.
I applaud Amazon for choosing an unconventional number.
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An Amazon representative was quoted as saying "The giant phallus and balls thrusting into the skyline is not in any way giant 'Fuck you' to neighbors, and the odd number of balls should not be interpreted as representative of Jeff Bezos' fetishes."
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Wait, who is upset by this? They aren't *that* big.
Amazon making Seattle more miserable (Score:3)
Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers [salon.com] (February 23, 2014)
Microsoft: Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book [businessinsider.com] (May 23, 2012)
Traffic: Seattle one of the worst U.S. cities for traffic congestion, tied with NYC [geekwire.com] (March 31, 2015
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Seattle traffic is part of the reason that we have a decent bus system, the other part being Seattle parking. I can drive downtown from home in 10-20 minutes, then spend 15 minutes and $10 to park. Alternatively I can spend $3 and 25 minutes on the bus (well, free actually since my employer pays for my bus pass). Guess which one I generally prefer?
When we first moved out here I was complaining to my mother about traffic and she asked, "Well, why don't they just build more roads?" Since they were plannin
Why allow excessive density? (Score:2)
Portland, Oregon now has constant traffic jams. A short ride from downtown Vancouver, WA across the bridge to Oregon required 6 minutes 44 seconds in 2012. It required 25 minutes 7 seconds in 2015, almost 4 times worse. See I-5-Study [documentcloud.org]. (PDF file, See page 3.)
Re: Balls (Score:2)
Testes, testes. One... two... three?!?
After the beast feeds... (Score:2)
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Because plenty of their employees want to live/work in Seattle.
Same reason Google, Microsoft and plenty of others have offices in Seattle.
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You realize that your salary is pretty much the same if you work on one side of Lake Washington or the other at a given company... right?
More so, I'm sure all have done the math, just as how many Silicon Valley or San Francisco based company has as to if they would be better off relocating to... Detroit (cheap land and homes, and a police force needing some subsidizing, etc).
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Then get new employees. Ones who don't demand you spend more on building space while still paying them a high salary.
When you're trying to hire from a pool of workers in short supply, you might have to concede to some of their strongest demands. High-paid, highly educated, young workers in the US are disproportionately more likely to want to live in urban environments.
I realize that that's not for everyone, but for some people it really is a huge factor in making a job desirable. And if these workers are in a position to pick and choose among employers, why shouldn't they get to push for corporate urbanization? It's not a
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When you're trying to hire from a pool of workers in short supply, you might have to concede to some of their strongest demands. High-paid, highly educated, young workers in the US are disproportionately more likely to want to live in urban environments.
Exactly the problem we've already identified, these workers have demands, extortion.
God forbid the workers have demands! What they're demanding is good for society. What you want to do to save money, I think is bad for us all. God bless the workers who push the companies to go against the undemanding cogs who knuckle under.
If you really believed that, you'd not object to Amazon setting up cloning labs to produce the perfect worker.
Complete absurdity.
The only question is why is Amazon going along with it.
Because they're doing their part to dismantle the suburbs bit by bit, just like the young moneyed classes want them to. They have a vision, and personally I think it's beautiful.
Re: Amazon, you could do it for 1/10 the price (Score:2)
The main campuses yes, however Microsoft and google also have offices in Seattle as well for rather deliberate reasons... Nit to mention oodles if other companies who prefer to be there vs elsewhere.
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Nothing nefarious about that.
http://images.summitpost.org/original/531804.jpg [summitpost.org]
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Re:Amazon, you could do it for 1/10 the price (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon has thousands of employees on hundreds of teams that need to work together. Physical proximity makes that a frack of a lot easier to accomplish.
Besides, they've got piles of money, why not? The South Lake Union area where the main campus is located was a dump, full of warehouses, abandoned buildings, parking lots, hookers and crack dealers. Today that region is unrecognizable to someone who visited only five or six years ago, in a good way.
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The South Lake Union area where the main campus is located was a dump, full of warehouses, abandoned buildings, parking lots, hookers and crack dealers. Today that region is unrecognizable to someone who visited only five or six years ago, in a good way.
Still full of parking lots, hookers, and crack dealers, but now they've got class.
Great idea! (Score:3)
Demonstrators will have more glass to break and I'll bet biospheres burn really good. And when they get thirsty, they'll have a great time looting those "hand-picked" bars........
Space Needle economics (Score:4, Insightful)
Did those owners pay the other property owners to surrender their air rights so that the Space Needle could have unobstructed views, or are they merely trying to seize a right to prevent others from building structures that are equally high? I.e., a real estate version of pulling the ladder up behind you.
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Such requirements can also come from government, take the protected views in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's been something called for in Seattle for years, but isn't official as yet.
Re: Space Needle economics (Score:1)
The space needle has always been ugly. Time to tear it down.
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My guess would be that they assumed that Seattle would remain sprawly and low-rise, and that any outsiders who wanted to invest in the local economy by building taller buildings would cower in shame and abandon their plans when the population of the city passive-aggressively refused en masse to recognize said buildings as being reflective of the real Seattle, the gritty, honest, unpretentious city that we grew up in, not that you would know anything about that.
Re:Space Needle economics (Score:5, Informative)
We got to the Space Needle for dinner for our anniversary every summer, and we're of the opinion that the South Lake Union building boom has dramatically improved the view. That used to be a run-down neighborhood of warehouses, abandoned buildings, and parking lots, now it's actually something interesting and attractive to look at. Yeah, the view of the Space Needle is obstructed from some places in that area, but since the only people there much of the time before the new buildings were hookers and crack dealers I don't see it as much of an issue.
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Somebody has been watching too much Burlesque...
Interestingly... (Score:4, Insightful)
thanks to investment in public transportation, Seattle actually has less traffic than it did a decade ago, despite its growth in employment and housing.
According to the Seattle DOT Traffic Report (2015), Seattle added nearly 100,000 people in the decade from 2004-2014, while average daily car traffic in the city fell by some 60,000 trips over the same period. The travel demand created by population and job growth is being absorbed by the transit system
source [seattlemet.com]
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A typical afternoon in Seattle traffic would invite you to a reality check.
Take a sleeping bag and some snacks.
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That's why I'm making about $20k less than I could, if I went to Seattle or the East side. I live in Tulalip and commute to Everett, about 15 minutes, with a stop for coffee. I worked the dotcom boom and bust in downtown Seattle, it was hard enough back then to commute from Edmonds. I just couldn't do it anymore even with the Sounder train that sometimes runs.
Having those extra 3 hours in my life, each day, make the reduced rate worth it.
Only an afternoon? (Score:2)
Re:Interestingly... (Score:4, Informative)
Seattle actually has less traffic than it did a decade ago, despite its growth in employment and housing.
A funny thing happened between 2004 and 2014... The 2008 crash.
The Seattle area is booming, it's true... But the Great Recession hit this area hard, and in 2014 the area was still recovering. I doubt 2016 statistics would tell the same story.
I mostly take transit to and from work; but anecdotally I'd say Seattle freeway traffic is worse now than it's ever been. I can say for certain that northbound on I-5 used to be clear sailing as soon as you reached the convention center; but now, more often than not, it's stop and go from Mercer to 520 even at 10am.
Downtown traffic may be marginally less bad than ten years ago, but that has more to do with Seattle's aggressive push to eliminate downtown parking than the availability of transit.
But now that I can FINALLY take light rail to UW, it's a moot point in my case. Sounder train and light rail means my commute is no longer dependent on the roads!
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You live in Bellevue and drive downtown? You're a moron. From the Eastgate Park & Ride it's 25 minutes on the bus, and they run every 8 minutes at peak hours.
Re:Seattle vs Flyover country (Score:1)
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The quoted "source" is a guest column advocating a particular position; it is not a traffic report. In fact, it misrepresents what was behind the reduction in trips in the Seattle DOT traffic report. The author attributes the reduction to increases in use of alternate forms of transportation, but completely ignores an even bigger for reason for the reduction in the number of trips, the Great Recession, which hit in the middle of the reporting period.
Since 2010, the number of trips has been increasing.
H
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Not only is it an opinion piece, it shares the common Seattle hubris of claiming leadership in an area where the city has long lagged. How long has Portland or San Francisco or Vancouver had rail transit, versus Seattle? And even getting THAT was a fight. "Finally catching up" would be a much more accurate statement.
Don't get me wrong - I'm loving the light rail I can finally ride to UW. And I think the region (it's not just Seattle) is finally moving in the right direction. But self-righteous Truthiness ab
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I would add in a penchant for denying reality — can anyone in their right mind say that doing the commute across the I-90 bridge is in any way pleasant? And yet people seemed (when I was living there a year ago) to tolerate the way the traffic on it would clog up seemingly at random, or become predictably abysmal before a Seahawks game, and render the buses immobile as well. The bicycle infrastructure is mediocre, too. Is it just low expectations, or a refusal to believe that the Seattle mindset about
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thanks to investment in public transportation, Seattle actually has less traffic than it did a decade ago, despite its growth in employment and housing.
According to the Seattle DOT Traffic Report (2015), Seattle added nearly 100,000 people in the decade from 2004-2014, while average daily car traffic in the city fell by some 60,000 trips over the same period. The travel demand created by population and job growth is being absorbed by the transit system
source [seattlemet.com]
Yea... not so much. Going from Belltown to the interstate which is maybe 1 or 1.5 miles downtown,depending on how you go, can routinely take 30+ minutes. That's just to get out of downtown. The other 10 miles of my north bound commute takes about 20 minutes most days.
Yes. (Score:2)
...host more than 300 plant species from around the world.
Though it smacks of medieval royalty's penchant for importing the rarest of beasts from farthest flung points in the realm.
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Give it time (Score:1)
So Amazon will have massive maintenance costs from such a unique building design plus the cost of tending endangered plants. What happens when Amazon wants to cut costs, downsize, or just 'return to core functions'? Will the municipal council take over the park-lands? Will Amazon demand corporate welfare or just gut/burn the park-lands?
This is like the monorail craze of the '80s; How about some future-proofing?
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+1 Mod Insightful.
I was thinking the same thing about the invasive species of plants that could literally decimate our ecosystem or even potentially bringing hitchhikers in the form of snakes, spiders, fungi and other plant-threatening diseases that our flora and fauna would have no defense against.
While this is an 'enlightened' gesture it's a bad fucking idea.
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No one would even notice. The default vegetation for most of the PNW is blackberry.
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You've heard of capsule hotels? Amazon could build capsule apartments in the basement and rent them to their employees at a merely exorbitant rate.
So there's your home. If you're tired, you can nap in your capsule and go back to work refreshed. You'll never have to leave the building.
They could even rent out space to a mortuary and crematorium. When you die they can cremate you and ship
What is the point (Score:4, Interesting)
Biosphere. God, what a metaphor! In other words, a self-contained inhabitable zone shielded from the harsh environment of--gasp--Seattle.
The whole point of locating in a city is to be part of the city. Let your employees meet for lunch at a local restaurant that hasn't been hand-picked by Amazon's Director of Restaurant Planning. Use the transportation system that the locals use, improving it for everyone in the process. Go to a public park to chill out, rather than a private park reserved for Amazon employees.
This kind of office park is all over Silicon Valley. To someone who's never worked in this environment, it sounds like a huge perk. But having worked in an environment like this, I'd rather just work in Seattle, not in a biosphere surrounded by Seattle.
Megacorps (Score:5, Insightful)
One one hand, revitalizing city centers is not necessarily a bad thing. On the other, this starts to smell a little of Shadowrun-style megacorporations (or of industrial-era company towns).
Live and work your entire life within the protective confines of your employer. Go to the company school, work at the company office, live in company housing paid for with a company-bank supplied mortgage, dine at your choice of company restaurants, vacation at the company resort, get a company funeral...
Re: Megacorps (Score:2)
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At least it's better than a 200 story black pyramid
Debatable.
Reality? (Score:2)
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Nests in trees? (Score:2)
Good While It Lasts (Score:4, Insightful)
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Bezos' idea up to now has been to keep declared profit to a minimum or negative in order to not have to pay taxes, and just plow that money back into the business. Not a bad strategy, as it improves the stock value that most shareholders are more interested in. Amazon Web Services is now bringing in so much money that they've had to declare a profit (and pay a bunch of taxes) the last couple of years in spite of the money they're spending building. I would be very surprised if AWS isn't spun off in in th
Shadowrun Inception? (Score:3)
Waiting for them to change the company name to "Renraku".
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That's what I was thinking as well ;-) The balls don't seem overly big though. You barely notice them next to the neighbouring high-rises...
Space (Score:2)
This fits nicely with Blue Origin. It's one thing to get to space but you're going to need habitats and biospheres and other large scale structures once you get there. Bezos has talked about moving industrial activities off Earth along with mining asteroids.
I suspect they will learn a thing or two about building these structures on Earth that will be applicable to the longer-term goals of the space-faring Bezos.
My first thought was of Paolo Bacigalupi (Score:2)
Amazon have lost their drive ... (Score:2)
Amazon - the thrusting company for Millennials who want to work for 1950s ideas. Their (Amazon, not Belgium's) death must be nigh.