unpredictable. In the days before the finalists were announced, the HQ2 team divided the list of more than two hundred cities that hadn’t made the cut and placed phone calls to local officials, alerting them to the bad news. Most asked why, while expressing disappointment with the amount of time and resources they had put into the failed effort. Amazon employees responded with blasts of data. “Your metro area only has 375,000 people and of those only 10 percent have advanced degrees,” went a typical explanation. “Sorry, that’s not enough of a labor pipeline.” City officials mostly agreed that
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