Search results for: “amazon”
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Prosperity Bomb
What if Amazon dropped, to borrow a phrase gaining currency these days, a “prosperity bomb” on Washington, D.C., by selecting the District as the location of its HQ2 project? Martha Ross with the Brookings Institution worries about the implications of creating 50,000 jobs and pumping $5 billion in investment into a city already marked by huge racial disparities…
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Virginia’s Political Class Isn’t Doing Much to Reduce CO2 Emissions — And It’s Working Out Just Fine
As faithful readers know well, I remain unpersuaded that the world is facing global-warming Armageddon or that we need to force a restructuring of the global energy economy to avert it. But as long as there’s even a remote chance that the emission of greenhouse gases (primarily CO2) might be driving cataclysmic climate change, I…
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Things Legislators Didn’t Hear (Or Want To)
“It might have happened without this bill.” “I think it was going to develop anyway.” Both comments were made today about the prospect that Virginia will actually see 5,500 megawatts (MW) of new solar and wind generation installed within its borders in the next few years, the amount of new solar designated as “in the…
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Fairfax Snags Bechtel Headquarters
It aint’ Amazon HQ2, but it’s still a pretty big deal. Bechtel Corp., the global engineering and construction firm, announced its intention yesterday to move its headquarters from San Francisco to Reston. The Reston office, which had relocated from Frederick, Md., in 2011, has functioned as the de facto “operational headquarters, with CEO Brendan Bechtel…
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Only A Brief Romance After All
The key to Dominion Energy’s successful efforts in the 2018 General Assembly was an alliance with the major environmental advocacy groups who saw several of their key goals achieved by the massive bill: promises of more wind and solar generation and massive spending of ratepayer funds on energy efficiency programs, coupled with weaker cost-benefit requirements…
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Golden Goose to Emerald City: Drop Dead
By Stephen D. Haner The brief snippet on the telly that caught my attention showed a massive Seattle office building being developed by Amazon, and the report was that construction is slowing because the company might start reducing its footprint and headcount in the Emerald City of Oz due to yet another Occupy Wall Street-inspired…
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Regarding Prince William’s Computer Tax…
by Stephen D. Haner The Prince William County Board of Supervisors yesterday voted to maintain a special tangible personal property tax rate on “programmable computer equipment” used in a business, providing a live and real-world example to continue our discussion on tax preferences and other incentives used to lure and keep businesses. The general personal…
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Taxes, Data Centers, and Republican Party Politics
Data centers account for 92% of all new capital investment in Prince William County between 2012 and 2017. Now Corey Stewart, chairman of the Board of Supervisors and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, wants to raise taxes on them. Stewart, who is running as a Donald Trump-style populist, proposes to use the $21 million…
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21st Century Wealth Creation: block.one
Nine years ago Dan Larimer was broke, living with his parents, driving a 2001 Nissan Altima, and recovering from a messy divorce. Today Forbes magazine estimates his net worth at $600 million. The source of the 35-year-old Virginia Tech graduate’s fortune? Crypto-currency. As the Roanoke Times‘ Jacob Dimmit tells the story, when Larimer was down…
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Localities, Get in Front of the Transportation Revolution
After the General Assembly hashed out a deal this weekend providing the Washington Metro system with an additional $154 million per year in state funding, local Prince William County leaders expressed discontent that more funding for Metro means less money for roads and highways. Lawmakers had to divert roughly $80 million from regional transportation projects…
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Where in the World Is Jim Bacon?
The Bacon family is heading off for its semi-annual vacation today. I will consider the trip a success if we spot howling monkeys like these in the wild. Any guesses at to which country we’re visiting? I’m taking my laptop and I hope to blog sporadically. But the wife and I hope to pack in…
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Hey, You, Get Onto My Cloud!
Early this month an obscure Virginia-based company, REAN Cloud, announced a nearly $1 billion deal to provide cloud computing services for the Defense Department, reports the NextGov website. REAN doesn’t build the data centers — it helps customers migrate to commercial cloud environments. Which cloud environments? Amazon Web Services’s cloud environments. There’s likely to be more business…
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Enjoy It While It Lasts
Woo hoo! Tax cuts and spending increases — it doesn’t get any better than this. The United States is about to enjoy its biggest fiscal stimulus since Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. All this spending and tax cutting is going to feel great for the next couple of years — especially…
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Follow the Dark Money
Yes, it’s a legitimate story when Dominion spend big bucks supporting grassroots groups that favor the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Why isn’t it also a story when out-of-state billionaires underwrite pipeline foes? We learn from the Washington Post today how Dominion Energy, its partners in the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and the American Gas Association poured resources…
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More Lazy Thinking about the Higher-Ed Affordability Crisis
So, I was reading this op-ed piece in Inside NoVa by David S. Kerr, an instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, in which he took the Republican supermajority in the General Assembly to task for slashing state support for higher education, increasing tuition levels, and rising student indebtedness. Then I got to the following paragraph: States…