Why Amazon built a second headquarters and how the pandemic reshaped HQ2

Six years ago, Amazon kicked off a sweepstakes-style contest in search of where to build a second headquarters. The competition drew bids from 238 states, provinces and cities vying to be the next anchor for the nation’s dominant online retailer and second-largest private employer.

This week, Amazon formally opened the doors of the first part of its new East Coast headquarters, dubbed HQ2, in northern Virginia. The first phase, called Metropolitan Park, includes two 22-story office towers, which can accommodate 14,000 of the 25,000 employees Amazon plans to bring on in Arlington. About 2,900 employees have already moved in, and Met Park will be occupied by 8,000 employees in the fall.

Amazon built its headquarters in Seattle in 1994 partly because of the area’s deep pool of tech talent and the presence of Microsoft in nearby Redmond, Washington. The company’s Seattle campus now spans tens of millions of square feet across more than 40 office buildings, and the greater Puget Sound area has 65,000 corporate and technical Amazon employees.

It raises the question why Amazon, with its sprawling campus in Seattle and a growing real estate footprint globally, needed to build a second headquarters.

Around 2005, as Amazon’s business grew and its campus ballooned in Seattle, founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos began to consider where the company should expand next.

At all-hands meetings, employees would ask Bezos “if we would ever be in one location at one time,” said John Schoettler, Amazon’s real estate chief, in an interview.

“I think that there was a romantic notion that we as a company would only be so big that we’d all fit inside one building,” Schoettler said. “[Bezos] had said, well, we have long-term leases and when those leases come up, I’ll work with John and the real estate team and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

John Schoettler, Amazon’s vice president of global real estate and facilities, walks Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin through HQ2.

Tasha Dooley

Originally, Bezos suggested Amazon stay around the Puget Sound area, but the conversation then shifted to recreating the “neighborhood” feel of its Seattle campus elsewhere, Schoettler said.

“We could have gone out to the suburbs and we could have taken some farmland and knocked some trees down, and we would’ve built a campus that would have been very inward-looking,” he said. “They generally have a north or south entrance and exit east or west. When you put yourself in the middle of the urban fabric and create a walkable neighborhood, an 18-hour district, you become very outward, and you become very part of the community, and that’s what we wanted.”

Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of economic development, said it would have been harder for Amazon to create that kind of environment had it “sprinkled these employees around 15 other tech hubs or 17 other tech hubs around North America.”

“So what HQ2 has provided is the opportunity for that more in-depth collaboration and being part of a neighborhood,” Sullivan said.

‘I don’t see us getting bigger in Seattle whatsoever’

Amazon’s highly publicized search for a second headquarters has faced some challenges. In 2018, Amazon announced it would split HQ2 between New York’s Long Island City neighborhood, and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia. But after public and political outcry, Amazon canceled its plans to build a corporate campus in Long Island City.

The company’s arrival in Arlington has generated concerns of rising housing costs and displacement. The company said it has committed more than $1 billion to build and preserve affordable homes in the region.

Schoettler said Amazon intends to focus much of its future growth in Arlington and in Nashville, Tennessee, where the company’s logistics hub is based. It also plans to hire as many as 12,000 people in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, he added.

“I don’t see us getting bigger in Seattle whatsoever,” Schoettler said. “I think that we’re pretty much tapped out there.”

HQ2 has some of the same quirks as Amazon’s Seattle campus. There’s a community banana stand staffed by “banistas” and white boards on the walls of building elevators. Amazon has a dog-friendly vibe at its Seattle office, which carried over to Metropolitan Park, where there’s a public dog park, and a gallery wall of the dogs of Amazon employees. The towers feature plant-filled terraces and a rooftop urban farm that echoes the feel of the “Spheres,” botanical gardenlike workspaces that anchor Amazon’s Seattle office.

Metropolitan Park is the first phase of Amazon’s new Arlington headquarters, called HQ2.

Tasha Dooley

Amazon is opening HQ2 at an uncertain time for the company and the broader tech sector. Many of the biggest companies in the industry, including Amazon, have eliminated thousands of jobs and reined in spending following periods of slowing revenue growth and fears of a recession ahead.

Companies have also been confronting questions about what work looks like in a post-pandemic environment. Many employees have grown accustomed to working from home and have been reluctant to return to the office. Amazon last month began requiring corporate employees to work from the office at least three days a week, which generated pushback from some workers who prefer greater flexibility.

Amazon tweaked the design of HQ2 around the expectation that employees wouldn’t be coming into the office every day.

Communal work spaces are more common, and there’s less assigned seating, Schoettler said. Employees may only be at a desk 30% of the day, with the rest of their time spent in conference rooms, or having casual coffee meetings with coworkers, he said.

“If we don’t come in that day, no one else will utilize the space,” Schoettler said. “And so that way, you can come in, the desk is open and it’s not been personalized with family photos and that type of thing. You can sit down and absolutely utilize the space, and then go off about your day.”

Amazon’s HQ2 features some of the same quirks as its Seattle headquarters, like a community banana stand.

Tasha Dooley

The shift to a hybrid working environment has also influenced the further development of HQ2. Amazon in March said it had pushed out the groundbreaking of PenPlace, the second phase of its Arlington campus. PenPlace is expected to include three 22-story office buildings, more than 100,000 square feet of retail space and a 350-foot-tall tower, called “The Helix,” that features outdoor walkways and inside meeting areas for employees surrounded by vegetation.

Amazon will observe how employees work in the two new Metropolitan Park buildings to inform how it designs the offices at PenPlace, Schoettler said.

Amazon didn’t say when it expects to begin development of PenPlace, but it is continuing to move forward with the permitting and preconstruction process, Schoettler said.

“We just want to be really mindful, since we’re just opening these buildings, to make sure we’re doing it right,” Sullivan said. “These are large investments for us. We own these buildings, and we want to give them a long shelf life.”

Source link

#Amazon #built #headquarters #pandemic #reshaped #HQ2

Was George Santos The Dashing ATM Robber Gentleman Bandit?

George Santos, who as far as we know may actually be Andy Kaufman [Dok, you say everyone is Andy Kaufman! — Rebecca], allegedly ran a credit-card-skimming operation in Seattle in 2017, according to the man convicted of the crime and deported to Brazil for it. Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha, who roomed with Santos at the time, sent a sworn declaration to US law enforcement agencies detailing the accusation, according to Politico, which obtained a copy of the declaration and also interviewed Trelha by phone.

At this point, we’re ready to believe just about anything about Santos, including the possibility that he’s actually an alien time traveler fucking around with us while he’s on spring break from Tralfamadore Polytechnic.


In the declaration (translated from his native Portuguese), Trelha writes, “I am coming forward today to declare that the person in charge of the crime of credit card fraud when I was arrested was George Santos / Anthony Devolder.” He said that he recognized Santos on TV after he was elected to Congress.

Politico reports that postal receipts show the declaration was sent to the FBI, the US Secret Service, and the US Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, by Trelha’s New York attorney, Mark Demetropoulos.

And by golly, there are some definite connections: Politico reports it’s seen a copy of a lease showing that Trelha rented a room in Santos’s apartment in Winter Park, Florida, starting in November 2016. As Politico notes, Santos

was previously questioned about the Seattle scheme by investigators for the U.S. Secret Service, CBS News has reported. He was never charged, but the investigation remains open. Santos also told an attorney friend he was “an informant” in the fraud case. Trelha insists he was its mastermind.

And golly, what a tale! The two met through a Facebook group for expatriate Brazilians living in Orlando in the fall of 2016. Trelha writes that while he rented from Santos, that was “where and when I learned from him how to clone ATM and credit cards.”

Santos taught me how to skim card information and how to clone cards. He gave me all the materials and taught me how to put skimming devices and cameras on ATM machines.

He alleges Santos had a warehouse in Orlando where he

had a lot of material — parts, printers, blank ATM and credit cards to be painted and engraved with stolen account and personal information.

Santos gave me at his warehouse, some of the parts to illegally skim credit card information. Right after he gave me the card skimming and cloning machines, he taught me how to use them.

We do have to say that while this sounds plausible, the idea that George Santos actually mastered any real skills, even criminal ones, seems out of character. We can see him lying about being a criminal genius, though, and lying well enough to fool someone else into actually doing crimes.

After training under Santos in the ways of the scammer — we can certainly envision a montage here, with hilarious failures and no actual success — Trelha says, he flew to Seattle and got arrested right quick, on April 27, 2017, when a security camera captured him removing a skimming device from a Chase ATM.

At the time of his arrest, Trelha had a fake Brazilian ID card and 10 suspected fraudulent cards in his hotel room, according to police documents. An empty FedEx package police found in his rental car was sent from the Winter Park unit he shared with Santos.

But did they scan it for alien DNA? Big oversight, guys.

It gets, as you’d expect, stupider. Trelha wrote in his declaration that Santos had promised him to split the money from their frauding 50-50, and that it was all very high-tech:

We used a computer to be able to download the information on the pieces. We also used an external hard drive to save the filming, because the skimmer took the information from the card, and the camera took the password.

It didn’t work out so well, because I was arrested.

Has Netflix or HBO snapped up the movie rights yet?

Trelha said Santos visited him in jail in Seattle, and told him “not to say anything about him.” What’s more, he says Santos “threatened my friends in Florida that I must not say that he was my boss.” The friends, he wrote, were “all afraid of something happening to them,” which is why he’s since lost track of them.

Then there’s this, which has the ring of absolute authenticity: Trelha concludes the narrative by saying, “Santos did not help me to get out of jail. He also stole the money that I had collected for my bail.”

That’s our George all right!

Politico adds that in an interview, Trelha said that

before flying to Seattle, Santos had traveled to Orlando to pick up $20,000 in cash he instructed Leide Oliveira Santos, another roommate, to give him from a safe. Santos had promised to hire El Chapo’s lawyer for Trelha, he said.

Again, that’s very Santosian or Santosesque: not just any lawyer, but El Chapo’s lawyer. What’s more, we get a little more documented fibbing by Santos:

In an audio recording of Trelha’s May 15, 2017 arraignment in King County Superior Court, Santos tells the judge he’s a “family friend” who was there to secure a local Airbnb if the defendant was released on bail.

Santos also claimed to the judge he worked for Goldman Sachs in New York, a key part of his campaign biography he later admitted wasn’t true.

They should have asked his wife, Morgan Fairchild, whom he has seen naked more than once.

But nah, it all evaporated. No El Chapo lawyer, not even an el cheapo lawyer. Santos didn’t even call Saul — or Lionel Hutz — and Trelha never heard another word from him. Oliveira Santos couldn’t contact him, either. By then, Santos had run off to Venice, where he took to calling himself Tom Ripley.

Trelha couldn’t make bail, and pleaded guilty to “felony access device fraud,” for which he spent seven months in prison. After that, he was deported to Brazil in 2018, where we hope he’s kept his nose clean.

Trelha says he has witnesses who can back him up on all this, and Politico closes the story thusly:

A federal prosecutor who handled Trelha’s case described the scheme as “sophisticated,” adding that the Seattle portion was only “the tip of the iceberg,” according to court records reported by CBS News. But a person close to the investigation who is not authorized to speak publicly said they saw no evidence that prosecutors did forensic reports on Trelha’s phone or seemed motivated to pursue international co-conspirators.

Hmm!

We tried to contact Rep. Santos about all this, but all we could learn was that the congressman was last seen talking to a detective in Los Angeles who tried to follow him when he realized Santos was Keyzer Söze, but by then he’d vanished.

[Politico / ATM image by Mike Mozart, Creative Commons License 2.0, cropped and digitally altered]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 monthly so we can try to keep you up to date on all this. Monthly donation link below, or you can leave cash under a flower pot on the balcony of Bob Woodward’s apartment in DC. We’ll know.

Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons.



Source link

#George #Santos #Dashing #ATM #Robber #Gentleman #Bandit

Being a digital nomad isn’t just for singles. Here’s how families make it work

To many, the lifestyle of a “digital nomad” is an aspirational one — you can live anywhere in the world, visa permitting, with your laptop as your office.

Forget the daily grind of the rush hour commute. As long as there’s decent Wi-Fi, simply pick a coffee shop, park or pool and get to work.

The lifestyle has become more popular in the wake of the Covid pandemic, which accelerated the trend of remote working. The number of American digital nomads increased 9% in just 12 months from 2021 to 2022, to a total of almost 17 million, according to the jobs platform MBO Partners.

But one factor deters many from the lifestyle: kids.

Whether it’s schooling, health and safety concerns, or the question of a child’s ability to develop lasting friendships, parents face multiple barriers.

But some have taken the plunge anyway. Two families tell CNBC Travel how they’ve made it work.

Keller family: French Polynesia

Sam Keller is the founder and CEO of Working Without Borders, which calls itself “the world’s first company providing coworking retreats for families with culturally immersive programming for kids and teens.” 

He’s also a dad of two kids under the age of 12.

Sam Keller, founder of Working Without Borders, which organizes coworking retreats for families.

Working Without Borders

“My wife and I each had living abroad experiences, but we couldn’t figure out how to make it happen” again, he said. “Then we had kids.”

The couple scoped out a school while on vacation in French Polynesia, thinking it could be “the place where we can go live,” he said.

Another factor worked in their favor: Keller’s wife Pascaline Cure works for Airbnb, which allows her to work anywhere she wants.

So together they made a big move from California to French Polynesia. And not just at any time — they moved during the pandemic.

“The stars aligned, we made it onto the plane and decided we’re going to make lemonade out of lemons of this pandemic.”

Sam Keller with his family in Bora Bora.

Working Without Borders

Education is regularly cited as the biggest challenge for digital nomads with children. Navigating an unfamiliar school system, often in an entirely new language, can be a struggle.

“We found that [in French Polynesia] there are a fair number of private schools that will accept kids for as short a time as a couple of weeks or a month. Then there are plenty of schools set up to provide online support, or online-only schools with really good teaching and instruction and curricula,” Keller said.

Homeschooling is another option for some, but Keller prefers to call it “world schooling,” which he says “embraces this notion of viewing the world as your classroom.”

“From the playground you could see stingrays swimming by,” he said. “Kids are out as part of the curriculum, so we’re paddling outrigger canoes in the lagoon, seeing sea turtles and dolphins. It was just magical in so many respects.”

He added that now more resources exist to help people learn about the digital nomad lifestyle, thanks to its growing popularity. Companies, like this own, let families “dip their toes in the water,” and some Facebook groups for world schooling have more than 50,000 members — so there’s always someone to answer a question, he said.

Elledge-Penner family: 20 countries

The beautiful Indonesian island of Bali, famed for its laidback lifestyle, is a popular destination for digital nomads.

Martin Penner and Taryn Elledge-Penner from the boutique travel agency Quartier Collective call it home, along with their three children, aged between seven and 12.

Since leaving Seattle in 2018, the family has visited nearly 20 different countries, including Japan, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey and Sri Lanka. Sometimes they stay a few weeks, but typically they’re in one place for one to three months.

Taryn Elledge-Penner and her son Viggo in Ahangama, Sri Lanka.

Quartier Collective

Penner said his children were part of the reason they decided to leave the United States.

“We traveled a lot as individuals and just felt that the world was this big, wild place — and that our world in Seattle had shrunk in a way,” he said. “We had to show them the world and didn’t want to miss this connection to something bigger.”

Elledge-Penner said they wanted more time with their kids, to make their journey sustainable and, critically, to connect with other families.

“When we left it was lonely for families like ours on the road,” she said. “Now that has really changed and a lot of families have realized this is an option, going longer and deeper.”

The family of five have enjoyed a range of experiences: living on a farm in Japan where they slurped soba noodles from a 30-foot hollowed-out bamboo pole; making pottery in Mexico; and taking in a shadow puppet show in the Cyclades in Greece — though they didn’t understand a word.

Penner said the key to making the lifestyle work for them is “connecting with people” and not approaching places “as a travel highlight hit list.”

Martin Penner walking with two of his children in Japan.

Quartier Collective

But it’s not all fun and games. There are also practicalities to be reckoned with, Elledge-Penner said.

“One of the challenges has been finding a balance with time and space on our own — and away from each other and the kids,” she said. “We’ve gone such long periods being together, every waking moment of a day.”

“We all need a break and space, normally by going to work or school. Even though this is what we’re choosing, it still requires some balance and that can be difficult to find and that can lead to tension.”

The pre-teen marker is a natural point when pressures mount.

She also touches on what she calls “decision fatigue.”

“The time to plan out the logistics, getting from A to B, where to stay, it can literally be a full-time job and really exhausting,” she said.

Once again, education is one of the biggest questions for global nomads with kids, but — like Keller — Elledge-Penner said there are plenty of options.

“Things have changed a lot from when we first set out. It’s tenfold the number of options you can find and plug into as a world schooling family,” she said.

“We’ve dropped into schools in different countries around the world. There are accredited distance learning programs too and home-schooling pods. For literally anybody who wants to untether from their current school system, it’s totally possible to find whatever you’re looking for.”

The couple noted that the family dynamic has changed since they started traveling in 2018. Their daughter, for example, now wants more long-lasting friendships, while the idea of having a dog — and a bedroom she doesn’t have to share with her brothers — is a big draw.

“The pre-teen marker is a natural point when pressures mount. Lots of families we see stop traveling when [kids] are that age. Now they want to spend more time around friends [which is] a big shift from when we started out.”

 



Source link

#digital #nomad #isnt #singles #Heres #families #work