Having run around the country as a modern Prince Charming in search of Cinderella, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, has decided that two hopefuls fit the slipper: Crystal City, Va., and Queens, N.Y.

But these Cinderellas aren’t to be carried off to live happily ever after in Amazon Castle. No, there are dowries to be paid — about $2 billion each in tax abatement and other goodies. These beauties are no bargain.

In fact, New York City and Washington, D.C. — Queens is a borough of New York and Crystal City (a part of suburban Arlington, Virginia) is just across the river from Washington — may be prostrating themselves to gain possibly 25,000 jobs in an unhappy, taxpayer-funded alliance.

The theories as to why Bezos chose these locations abound. The dominant one is that high-tech companies must follow high-tech workers. That explains why Boston and San Francisco are overheated along with, yes, New York and Washington.

This overheating might be described as more people trying to get into a city than its housing base and infrastructure can absorb. Result: skyscraper-high living costs, hideous commutes and wretched lives for those on the economic bottom rung.

High rents and homelessness go together.

I’m more persuaded that the decision has been made more to suit Bezos and his executives than to snare talent. Washington is the site of one of the Bezos mansions and he owns The Washington Post. New York has always had special appeal to the ultra-rich: Wall Street and the gilded social set.

Palo Alto, in California’s Silicon Valley, is white-hot in terms of desirability for high-tech jobs. But it was underdeveloped 45 years ago when a visionary scientist, Chauncey Starr, established the Electric Power Research Institute there. Starr told me he chose the location not because of the talent pool, but because he wanted the independence he feared he wouldn’t get in a big city, close to the electric companies that funded EPRI. The high-tech talent was yet to move in.

The point here is that it’s not necessary to go to the labor, the labor will come to you. Had Amazon chosen, say Upstate New York or somewhere in Kansas, and hung out a shingle for help, it would’ve poured in: build and they’ll come.

The great Washington hostess and diplomat Perle Mesta said, “All you have to do to draw a crowd to a Washington party is to hang a lamb chop in the window.” The same goes for labor.

The downside to Washington these days is that its roads and bridges, to say nothing of its troubled subway, are inadequate for the stunning growth it has seen since the late 1960s. It has some of the worst traffic jams anywhere and is said to have overtaken Los Angeles for traffic congestion. As the greater Washington area is split between the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, regional problems are hard to solve and often go unsolved as a result.

New York needs infrastructure spending in the worst way, from the tunnels into Penn Station to the estimated $48 billion the subway needs to modernize. But an increasing amount of the city’s capital budget is going to have to be devoted to building barriers against sea rise, particularly in lower Manhattan and to a lesser extent in Brooklyn and Staten Island. Is it a good investment to sink money into any location which is going to have to throw its treasure at Neptune, not improving the rest of the infrastructure?

As someone who lived most of his adult life in Washington, I don’t celebrate its helter-skelter growth, gridlocked roads, potential water shortages or the just-upgraded sewage treatment plant, Blue Plains, which has been known to flood, sending the raw stuff into the Potomac River in big rainstorms.

Virginia and New York, have you bought into a cyber-dream from Amazon that denies reality? You’re paying for a tenant who should pay you for the stress of his buildout.

Prince Bezos, there were so many other pretty feet.

 

 

 

---

Photo: CHIANGMAI, THAILAND – March 31, 2015: Photo of Forbes article page about Jeff Bezos on a ipad monitor screen through a magnifying glass.

The votes that will be cast on Election Day might be the most important votes cast in a long while, but they’re unlikely to change our lives as dramatically as two great tsunamis that are hurtling toward us.

Change Agent Tsunami One is being driven by science. If you thought that the Digital Revolution had reached its apex with the smartphone, or perhaps Instagram, get back to thinking room.

The Internet of Things is on the march and nothing appears to be able or wants to stop it.

Soon you’ll have “smart cities.” In the beginning, these will be the result of evolutionary change. Things like 5G, the next generation of mobile technology, and Wi-Fi using “short towers” — in fact, a lot of small towers — will make Wi-Fi available to everyone in a city.

Then things speed up.

Already, the Digital Revolution is responsible for these lifestyle changers: barcodes, Uber and Lyft, urban bicycle systems and, yes, those scooters that are whizzing around many cities. Oh, throw in Airbnb.

In store is automated transportation with autonomous electric cars and trucks, automated package delivery by drone. Electric small aircraft and automated pilotless air taxis will take you from your home to the airport. Keeping all these moving objects from knocking into each other or into us will take further electronic wizardry.

All of this will come under the rubric of smart cities. The only impediment to this stunning new world of efficiency and convenience is a cyberattack that takes down the electric grid for days, weeks or longer. Every horror that can be conceived would be unleashed: no communications, no food, no gas, no money, no sewage and no water. We’d all be reduced to the state of primitive man without the skills of the Stone Age.

In its way, cyberattack is a greater threat than anything posed by the arsenals of China and Russia. We might perish without a bang, just a whimper. An ignoble but terrible exit.

Change Agent Tsunami Two is climate change. This has all the makings of a global catastrophe. Low-lying countries might not be able to mount the defenses needed just to deal with ocean rise. They’d have move to higher ground in other countries.

Especially vulnerable is the East Coast of the United States. While the Trump administration may be in formal denial, the agencies of government are preparing within their ability to go against the politicians. National labs have maps and charts of the devastation that would result from a sea rise of several feet. I saw the first of these maps myself at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California decades ago. I thought they were fanciful. Now I think they were prescient.

The Navy is particularly alarmed because, as Axios has reported, the sea rise along the East Coast is likely to be worse than in other parts of the world, due to tidal and other geographical factors. Particularly, the Navy is worried about bases in low-lying coastal cities such as Norfolk, Va., and is looking at scenarios as to where these could be relocated efficiently and in time.

Other climate change horrors include tropical bugs in northern climes, mutating viruses, more storms, droughts and tens of millions of people driven from their homes, i.e. refugees.

I have no doubt that we’ll lick the cyberwarfare threat. Technology can take on technology. Many good minds in government, industry and the universities are hard at work. Climate change is a many-orders-of-magnitude more implacable problem.

A very different future is ahead, one that isn’t on the ballot — not this Nov. 6, but it will be in future years. Great new political issues are in the making; issues that are outside of the party-speak of this election, but which will emerge soon. In 2020? Possibly.

There are no solutions to complex problems — except when the problem becomes so complex it must have a simple solution.

That is the paradox thrown up by global warming and the shattering report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report cries out for dramatic, simple remediation of the amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere every day by industrial society.

The complex solution is a case-by-case, country-by-country, industry-by-industry, polluter-by-polluter remediation: power plants, automobiles, trucks, trains, ships, aircraft and manufacturers.

The simple solution to this complex problem is to tax carbon emissions: a carbon tax. Make no mistake, it would be tough. Some industries would bear the brunt and their customers would carry the burden — initially a light burden growing to a heavier one.

The obvious place to start is with electric utilities. Those burning coal would get the heaviest penalty. Those burning natural gas — the fuel favored by its low price and abundance in the nation — some penalty, but not as heavy.

Nuclear, which is having a hard time in the marketplace at present, would be the big winner of the central station technologies, and solar and wind would continue to be favored.

When it comes to transportation and farming, the pain of carbon taxation rises. The automobile user has choices like a smaller car, an electric car or simply less driving. But heavy transportation, using diesel or kerosene, is where the pain will be felt: buses, trucks, tractors, trains, aircraft and ships. The burden here is direct and would push up prices to consumers quickly.

Jets are a particularly vexing problem. Although they represent about 3.5 percent of pollution, it is the altitude at which they operate (above 30,000 feet) that makes them particularly lethal greenhouse gas emitters.

A carbon tax must be introduced gradually but firmly so that technology and alternatives have a chance of coming to the rescue. Some things, like airline tickets, will just cost more before manufacturers improve engines and work on new propulsion. Farming will he hard hit, and farmers may have to get rebates.

When a carbon tax was proposed in the 1970s, it was defeated in Congress by a phalanx of industry groups led by the American Petroleum Institute and the National Coal Association, now part of the National Mining Congress. Its purpose then was to cut demand for fuel during the energy crisis, which was in full swing. Today these groups are less vocal on the subject as their members begin to entertain the idea of a tax.

Although Congress is still opposed to it — an anti-carbon tax resolution was overwhelmingly passed in the House in July — industry is coming around.

ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total have signed on, and several Republican lobbying groups outside of Congress are working with members of the House and Senate, including the new Americans for Tax Dividends. Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, an influential group of Republican graybeards and financiers, says they get a good hearing in private conversations with lawmakers.

The U.N. climate study with its awesome conclusions may have come too late to play a big role in the midterm elections. But, especially after hurricanes Florence and Michael, it will blow through the 116th Congress at gale force, the public demanding action.

The quick fix — rough-and-ready and punitive — may be the only quick fix: Tax carbon where it enters the atmosphere. History tells us the economy will adjust creatively.

Old friends from The Washington Post in the 1970s write to me, agonizing over where journalism is headed.

There is no shortage of news or need for news, but there is a desperate need to find new platforms to carry it forward.

There are three existential crises facing the news trade:

—How to finance newspapers.

—How to deal with the power of the technological behemoths, like Google.

—How to keep a flow of talent into the business while it sorts itself out.

Journalism has always been financed through a kind of subsidy provided by advertising. It has worked well enough, and sometimes enormously well. No one saw a day when the advertising would flee to a cheaper delivery system: the internet. But it did.

There were intimations of the vulnerability of the setup. Originally, afternoon newspapers were dominant: Go off work, go home and read the paper before bed. H.L. Mencken warned that morning newspapers, like his Baltimore Sun, would perish.

Instead of Mencken’s prophecy, the playing field tipped the other way; morning newspapers survived and, one by one, the afternoons failed across the country and the world. Television was the culprit.

In magazines, the television slaughter was more terrible and more complete. Great institutions, keepers of the culture, were swept away: Life, Look, Colliers and, saddest of all, The Saturday Evening Post. What had been citadels of power and wealth were toppled, not just in America but worldwide: Picture Post in Britain and Outspan in South Africa. All gone.

Newspapers and magazines are embracing the electronic future by becoming electronic platforms, old dogs doing new tricks. Also, the consumer is carrying much more of the cost of production. Newspapers selling for over two dollars? Unheard of a short while ago.

I was part of discussions in The Washington Post, where we turned down a cover price increase of a nickel, to 15 cents. “The public’s right to know,” it was reasoned, outplayed our financial gain. We were, so to speak, rich enough and could not see that changing.

Still there is no clear way ahead as to how to finance the new reality for newspapers. Some — the big ones — will prosper behind paywalls, but most are still looking for a solution. There is talk of subsidies, and there are pure web platforms that seek contributions: journalism as charity case.

There are hints as to the future here with paywalls and reader contributions, but these alone do not suggest a robust new business model.

The second existential threat is the new delivery systems. If Facebook and Google are to censure content — say, hate speech — they have moved the whole journalist enterprise to a new and dangerous place: The global behemoths deciding what should and should not be read.

Do you want a faceless algorithm deciding what you can read?

To me this is the greatest threat to journalism and the democracies it protects. Other ways exist, and new ones could be developed, such as libel laws and penalties for criminal mischief.

The great internet companies should remain what they are in reality: common carriers. If they become censors, freedom of the media is at stake. Virtuous censorship is still censorship and that is, by definition, without virtue.

Finally wages in journalism, except for a few employed by the television networks (themselves seeing the beginning of the end of the monopolies), are at a low point. Freelancing is worse off.

If improvement do not occur, the best minds coming out of the colleges will not go into journalism, they will go elsewhere, often law. Going forward journalism will not solve its problems without a decent flow of talent, and public will not be served either.

I can speak to this. In the last six years I was a publisher of commercial newsletters in Washington. My paid interns, gifted people, began to tell me that they loved reporting, and though they had studied it, they would go into law. They did not fancy a life of poverty. Their gain, our serious loss.

 

 

---

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

 

---

Ireland was a country that thought it could not compete before the 1990s. Its rail system was primitive, its ports were outdated and small, and its roads were problematic — mostly you had to share them with sheep or tractors hauling peat wagons.

It looked as though Ireland was doomed to be one of the least competitive countries in Europe and would continue to have “structural” unemployment of 20 percent and higher.

Then a miracle: Ireland combined its greatest assets — literacy and superior education system — with the computer revolution, and it became a boom country. Ireland, rather than depending on exporting bacon, butter and linens, started exporting services by internet.

It became a computing center for Europe, and American and Asian companies flooded in. Galway, a university town, was ground zero for top computer companies.

Ireland went from nowhere to wearing the crown of “Celtic Tiger.” Businesses around computing, and those serving the foreign executives, boomed. Ireland shook off the dead weight of centuries.

There are lessons in the Irish experience for cities as they struggle to become “smart cities” and to compete as the smartest cities in livability and business friendliness. Can some ailing Midwest or Upstate New York city burst the bonds of their Rust Belt past and find a new future as smart cities, attracting investment and technology-based business?

Largely unseen, cities from Rochester, N.Y., to San Antonio are seeking the title, even though the full dimensions of what makes a city smart are still being thrashed out.

A global study, undertaken by the Singapore-based Eden Strategy Institute, puts London at No. 1 and Singapore at No. 2 in the world. New York leads in the United States, closely followed by Boston; Rochester, N.Y., is on the list. Out of 50 world cities, just 12 U.S. cities make the list.

But many smaller U.S. cities are in the race to be the super-smart, from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to San Antonio. Smart cities are a place where the old world of bricks and mortar meets the new world of artificial intelligence.

The players, besides the cities themselves, are the telephone giants (especially AT&T and Verizon), the electric utilities, a wide variety of software vendors and consultants. They are vying with each other for business at the city and county level.

The telephone companies are hoping to use their emerging 5G technology as the way in which machines and systems will talk to each other. IBM is interested in all aspects of the city of the future, including the use of blockchain as the primary recordkeeper. Amazon wants to begin smart deliveries, maybe by drone.

Even law firms — and Dentons, the world’s largest, is out front — will be needed to write the contracts and guide their clients. Clinton Vince, who heads the U.S. energy practice at Dentons, says the firm has taken the unusual step of establishing a “think tank” within the firm to work on smart cities.

Smart cities implementation needs local political approval and encouragement; the action is in the city councils and mayors’ offices, and county boards, not in Washington.

As with so many things, it is technology that may change our lives as much or more than policy. Already, the effect of computing in the way we live in cities can be seen everywhere — from those pesky scooters that are on the streets of many cities, and which rely on computer networks and GPS, to Uber and Lyft ridesharing and Airbnb.

Down the road, smart technologies will have to decide how electric cars are to be charged and where; how autonomous vehicles will operate in cities and where they will park themselves between assignments.

The building blocks are electricity and telephony. They will also be the managers of the old infrastructure, surveilling pipelines, water systems, roads and even traffic lights. The idea is to slave the old infrastructure to the new infrastructure for efficiency and instant response to problems.

Some cities will lead, but none will be unaffected. Smart is coming fast and will be here to stay. Will those who do not catch the wave become “stupid cities”?