It happened last week in the mess of news and I missed it somehow: Amazon made a shock, but not particularly surprising, announcement that it wouldn't open a New York HQ2 any longer after continued pressure made it unwelcome in the city. Now, there's only one HQ2.

But, this was always inevitable. It was an interesting, if a little brazen, idea, to open a second HQ2 in a big place like New York after it got all of those free benefits from local governments, but it was never part of the original plan. Amazon never needed or wanted to open HQ2 and HQ3 at the same time, which made it all the more easy to cut as resistance crystallized. 

The deal is over, and 25,000 jobs won't come to New York, after it changed position on Valentines' day:

“A number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward,” Amazon said in a statement. The company made its decision late Wednesday, after growing increasingly concerned that the backlash in New York showed no sign of abating and was tarnishing its image beyond the city.

This was always going to happen, but the company was clearly hoping for one thing: to get away with it, and reap the rewards. As soon as legal challenges arrived, the company became less interested, as evidenced by reports that even New York's mayor couldn't get Jeff Bezos on the phone before it was cancelled entirely.

The local pushback was immense, largely because the company would benefit from more than $3 billion in tax benefits, and totally transform local neighborhoods. Even though the jobs might have been a net positive, granting such concessions to a massively profitable conglomerate were controversial at best.

Now what? Well, it's all Virginia, and there's been little to no resistance there. The state needs an Amazon, and will do anything it takes (or whatever the company asks, it seems) to succeed. Will Amazon try to exploit cities again when HQ2.5 rolls around? I'd almost bet on it. But for now, the locals won.

Qualcomm unveils, er, next year's smartphone processors
5G is going so well that Qualcomm literally unveils its next-gen product while still hocking its "new" 5G modem for 2019. 7Gbps download speeds sound tantalizing, but let's be honest, we'll never see those in the next few years.

After years of controversy, YouTube finally overhauls its policies
A new 'one time' get-out-of-jail-free strike system, a hard line on multiple strikes (you lose your channel) and classifying every violation, regardless of size, in the same bucket. Will it help? Who knows! This is the world's biggest cat-and-mouse game, but it is the first major update to the policies in almost a decade, so, there's that.

Google's full, nerdy whitepaper on how it fights disinformation in search just hit the web

Huawei Founder goes on TV: "The US cannot crush us"

AR is still the next big platform, and we'll create a 'mirrorworld' inside
Stay tuned to find out if 2019 is, yet again, the year of AR.

Good read: A deep-dive on the recent DNS hijacking attacks against governments

Good listen: A huge, in-depth podcast about the realities of 5G in the real world from a 5G engineer. That it even works is astounding, apparently.