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Is the Amazon-Led Economic Boom Wrecking Seattle?
reifman writes: Seattleites are struggling with massive traffic, rising housing costs and declining diversity. Amazon's building and acquiring enough office space to triple its local headcount by 2020. Facebook, Google and many other tech companies are now expanding here as well — it's the San Franciscoization of Seattle. Downtown is filled with 75 cranes — some blocks look like mining towns. Amazon's hired so many white males that King County is now the whitest in the nation and hate crimes against gays have shot up in a formerly LGBTQ neighborhood. Politicians can't agree on reforming impact fees and taxes to address these issues."
An interesting piece of recent advice from a long time Amazonian to the company's interns: avoid full-time employment there.
Including content from such noted leftist wacko publications as Bloomberg Business, no less...
They think that is the truth and will blame large companies and GOP for whatever was wrong, or whatever they believe was wrong.
According to this article, having too many people of a specific skin color in an area causes crime. Does Slashdot really want to endorse that kind of retrograde prejudice?
Amazon is great for Seattle. Property values are going up, and formerly seedy neighborhoods are getting developed and gentrified.
The media narrative about hate crimes and lack of diversity is just pandering to people who are upset by rising rents and evolving neighborhoods. Seattle's "whiteness" is not a issue unless lower crime rates and less nuisance behavior is somehow problematic. I'm not being racist, just calling a spade a spade here.
If it's a bar fight and one of the participants happens to be gay or trans-gender, then it becomes a hate crime. Boo hoo. This is just a convenient way to breed an "us versus them" mentality between groups that will always feel marginalized or oppressed somehow vs people climbing the economic ladder.
The only REAL problem is the traffic, and it is caused by too many cars on the road, and Seattle voters consistently voting against their own best interests.
Seattle Police Department records show that "bias crimes" against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the first half of 2014 had already outnumbered those for the whole of 2013.
This statement is meaningless as it gives no contect.
In the first half of 2014, the Seattle Police Department reported 21 crimes such as assault or vandalism against LGBT people, compared with 19 for all of 2013.
This statement is more helpful as it points out that there were and extremely low number of incidents in 2013. Doubling a very low number is not difficult. Another thing I just noticed is that these crimes may have nothing to do with hate against LGBT. Just because the victim is LGBT does not mean it is a hate crime.
When I saw (in the article summary) the implication that there are too many white males, I was done with the article. I'm all for diversity --- I live in Hawaii, as diverse as it comes, and married an Asian --- but I'm SO tired of the "white males are the soul of evil" rhetoric.
The first person to mention evil is you. The post was lamenting declining diversity—a social quality the author values—in favor of increasing majority homogeny. You may not specifically value diversity, but those of us who do are not maligning the majority group.
I'd go even further and say that "whiteness" is entirely fabricated and only exists as a social construct. The biological and cultural reality is that race breaks down under many kinds of scrutiny.
Be that as it may, it's also a powerful social construct. "Whiteness" doesn't just convey a number of social privileges, it also provides a set of assumptions of belonging for a huge proportion of the people who can reasonable be described as "white". It provides none of those qualities for people who don't have the "whiteness" attributes.
It's easy to dissect social differences into absurdity, but it's a mistake to pretend that race isn't a strong force in many social issues. As such, while people of any given race have a wide range of experiences, beliefs, attachments and orthogonal social variations, their race also tends to have a huge impact on a certain range of experiences. For "white" people, one of the prevailing experiences is being dominant in many respects. This effect is amplified for people who were born with a penis, who are comfortable with a male gender role, and who are attracted to people who were born white, with a vagina, and comfortable with a female gender role.
The effect is not total, but it is generally observable. The effect also isn't universal, nor is it universally applied. It's not applied as strongly in less "white" places, though it tends to have a surprising residual presence in most of them.
The biggest exception to all of these power dynamics is access to wealth. Moderate access to wealth has the effect of making these other dominant attributes somewhat less potent. Access to extreme wealth eliminates many of the competing advantages. But not all of them.
Glad we had this overly specific discussion. I hope to press buttons that send electric signals into a series of electronic circuits that connect to wires and other such machines and eventually communicates data in the form of text to you, again in the future.
i understand now, i dont have any specific links to go by, however I would argue that the woman who was sued for not baking a cake would be an example of someone being unjustly charged with a hate crime in one instance
I see your point and im sorry if thats how the way you see things is making you feel. however numbers dont lie, and only 20 examples in a city is a rounding error as I said, and not a "thing" it would be like if everyone in NYC lived their lives in fear of another airplane attack because it happened back in 2001, yeah it could happen but the odds are very slim
I sincerely hope the best for you and your area as 1 attack on another , regardless of the reasoning is a bad thing
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
What I do doubt is the generalization that some people make from this, that all or even a majority of white males today in Western society are the "enemy" or are "evil" or "bad" in some way.
Already addressed this in another comment. The only people calling white people evil are the people getting upset that anyone else values diversity. It's a straw man argument.
I don't and won't apologize for being a white male.
Good. Neither will I. No one asked you to.
I don't and won't apologize for being a white male. As I said above, I live in Hawaii (where white male dominance, by the way, is long a thing of the past) and I married an Asian. I love and would never give up either the diversity of this part of the world or the multicultural richness that my marriage has brought me. I also try to do everything I can to treat people fairly. Is it too much to ask to be treated fairly in return, and not be categorized and stigmatized because I happen to be a white male?
Do you feel you're being treated unfairly because here in Seattle we're talking about a problem that doesn't appear to be about you in any way? Has anyone said to you, as a white male in Hawaii, that you're responsible for hate crimes in Seattle? As a white male, who works in the tech industry, in Seattle, I am engaging this conversation as if it is about facts and the desire of people in my community. I don't feel like your defensive interjections are in the same spirit. Consider the possibility that this isn't about you.
i understand now, i dont have any specific links to go by
Not surprised.
however I would argue that the woman who was sued for not baking a cake would be an example of someone being unjustly charged with a hate crime in one instance
Since you're naming a specific incident, can you please link to it? I'm not aware of a baker being charged with a hate crime.
I see your point and im sorry if thats how the way you see things is making you feel. however numbers dont lie, and only 20 examples in a city is a rounding error as I said, and not a "thing" it would be like if everyone in NYC lived their lives in fear of another airplane attack because it happened back in 2001, yeah it could happen but the odds are very slim
This is a bullshit analogy. It'd be like if over 250 attacks (again I don't know if the number 20 is accurate, but taking it for granted, that's 8,406,000 population in NYC over 652,000 in Seattle, times 20) happened in NYC in the course of a year. This year.
I sincerely hope the best for you and your area as 1 attack on another , regardless of the reasoning is a bad thing
No idea what this means. Have another toke duder.
Nope... that's just the same bullshit you spew all the time. You tell us that the economy has recovered. You tell us that unemployment is down. You tell that healthcare costs are down.
After the ACA, my healthcare premiums DOUBLED. Fucking... Doubled.
And on top of that, you have companies left right and center canceling health insurance for employees or reducing the number of full time employees because you don't need to provide healthcare to part time employees.
So your bullshit isn't actually making it any better.
And I note you're not talking about the education system anywhere... no comment about that anywhere.
As to crime, tell me what program you put in place that had a positive impact on the crime rate? And I note... our prisons are fucking full of people. We have one of the most incarcerated populations in the world. So tell me again how proud you are of that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
see, this is the problem. I am sitting here not insulting you, trying to understand your side while offering my side of things.
No you're not. If you can't understand that, this is not going to be productive.
yet your side seems unable to do so without resorting to smugness.
I asked you to defend any of your outlandish claims with evidence, and you continued posting more outlandish claims and refused to provide any evidence. I'm not being smug, I'm being efficient with my use of Internet Debate Time.
What I said was in simple terms, "dont hurt people for...reasons" I dont care black white gay straight, you shouldnt be attacking someone for no reason.
I'm not attacking anyone at all. I came in here to defend.
As for the baker, you didnt hear about the baker being forced to pay over 100 grand to a lesbian couple because they refused to bake them a custom cake???? google is your friend, and for someone who is caught up on LGBTQDFHSDTHUA++ you should be well aware of that case
1. I'm aware of a number of contrived cases about "cakes". Please specify one, with a link to something anything. Your claim was not that someone was sued, but that someone was charged with a hate crime. This might be news to you, but some things are not the same as other things.
2. LGBTQDFHSDTHUA++ - Oh yeah, you don't want people to attack each other. You just literally mashed your keyboard because you couldn't be bothered to understand what the acronym is that represents several sub-sections of society whose concerns you can't stop taking time out of your day to dismiss. The amount of defensive disdain is palpable.
Look, do you want to have an honest, compassionate discussion about things you are actually self-aware enough to admit you don't understand? Stop acting like you're an equal in that discussion. I am not an authority on queer issues in Seattle, but I'm a queer in Seattle. I have more experience than you do as a not-queer in not-Seattle. If you want to understand my "side" of a discussion, stop putting straw men in front of me that queers are getting innocent bigots charged with hate crimes over cakes. It's not real, it's not true, it's a caricature, it's insulting, and it's not in the spirit of honest discussion.
You tell that healthcare costs are down. After the ACA, my healthcare premiums DOUBLED. Fucking... Doubled.
Hello over there, Americans! While you bicker about whether the ACA increased premiums or brought healthcare costs down (or both or neither), the rest of the developed world enjoys per capita overall spending that is a fraction of yours, and with much better overall health outcomes. Maybe you could simply agree that a truly "socialized" system of medicine would be a great improvement on either the pre- or post-ACA American healthcare system and drop the partisan crap?
Hey mate, spare a sig?