The following is a lesson for government agencies of all types and levels across the globe. I remember when Jeff Bezos moved from New York to Seattle to rent a house and start selling books from his garage. He did this at 30 and he wrote the business plan as his wife was driving, then raised a million dollars from 20 people.
- He went to Seattle because Washington State had no income tax. Fast forward to today and there are 60,000 employees in Seattle alone. Yes, I was ordering from Amazon when they only sold books. Along with Microsoft, whose ex-employees helped build the site, the entire city changed into a global tech capital.
- This is when the Seattle City Hall decided they were now going to tax him because of "fairness", he called it something else that you can look up for yourself. It started with a tax on employers of US$265 per employee per year, a so-called "head tax", to go to housing and homeless services. Amazon stopped building their new office tower, literally. It's worth your time to look up the origin and earlier life of Jeff Bezos. The tax was repealed 30 days later.
- Then they tried Jumpstart, a payroll and expense tax of 2.5%. By 2024, Amazon had shifted more than 14,000 employees to Bellevue, a council on the other side of the lake, still in Washington State but with no similar taxes. By 2026, Amazon was no longer Seattle's largest employer and it had vacated over 100,000m² of office space in the city. Downtown Seattle's office vacancy rate hit 35.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025, Jumpstart fell $47 million (1.6 billion baht) short of its revenue forecast in 2024 alone and there is a $175 million deficit projected for Seattle by 2027.
- The lesson is simple. If a large company moves to your area providing revenue, employment, world renown and changes your skyline, then don't get greedy, because they can move. The US for example is seeing this occur in California, Oregan, Chicago and other places as companies move to states with no income or low business taxes.
- Oracle is but one organisation that has fallen for the AI marketing promises. They have reduced their global workforce by 21,000 over the last year. According to Oracle, "deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce". Oracle is financing its AI data centre build and they may "initiate new restructuring plans in the future".
- I predict this mad rush to artificial intelligence replacement of the human workforce will end badly. The current Large Language Models are close to collapse and the replacements are still in the pipeline. Even targeted AI systems need human oversight or failures seem to crop up regularly. While computer coding has improved, it's not perfect and needs a human to check and test any outputs. Watch this space.
- As covered earlier the new Steam Machine is getting closer to release. For early adopters, you will need to enter a lottery to see if you are one of the lucky ones to get the first run of units. Thanks to the AI driven memory shortage, the prices will be somewhat higher than many had hoped. The units come with an AMD Zen 4 hexacore CPU, with either a 512GB or 2TB SSD. You can order just the base unit, or get it bundled with Valve's new Steam Controller. The current prices are $1,049 for the 512GB model and $1,349 with 2TB. Adding the controller will increase the prices by $79. Both models come with 16GB of DDR5 RAM (plus 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM), and you can upgrade the main memory yourself. There's a microSD slot for more storage. I want to see the reviews before I consider one for myself.
- In the laugh of the week, or at least it was for yours truly, President Trump has ordered the development of a quantum computer to ensure that the US maintains a strategic technical advantage, along with a nationwide migration to post-quantum cryptography to protect sensitive data against just such a computer. So far so good, a noble aim.
- The Executive Order has tasked the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Michael Kratsios, to coordinate the effort across the Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce and the Intelligence Community, as well as with the broader industry and research communities. Still all good so far. Kratsios told reporters that the administration believes that this goal can be achieved by 2028.
- Yes, here is where my laughter erupted. There is little or no chance that we will see commercial grade quantum computers this decade. If you want to know why, I suggest you check out presentations like those on YouTube by Sabine Hossenfelder covering this subject. If you are into science, her channel is a good one for all manner of topics around physics and maths.
James Hein is an IT professional with over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
