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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...
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.
The article does not say that too many people of one color cause crime; you said that. What the article does say, is that Amazon is hiring a primarily white male workforce at salaries far in excess of the average for the area. This correlates with, but it is not proven that it causes, a number of things stated in the article. The gender imbalance, may mean that there are a large number of men without female counterparts or potential mates. The implication in the article is that this is driving prostitution as these men seek sex they are hard-pressed to find in a relationship because there are not enough woman. The income imbalance means that Amazon employees can pay a premium for living space close to Amazon, and because they are the highest paid workers in the area, it is displacing other residents, many of whom happen to be the existing diverse people that current live there. The increased affluence of the area surrounding Amazon, it is implied, is leading to increased crime because wealthy new communities are a target for theft.
The article doesn't prove any of this. The white males that Amazon is hiring may have brought their wives with them, in which case, Amazon's hiring would not create a gender balance within Seattle. Regardless, it doesn't say that less racial diversity = crime. That's a dumb statement you made; not the article.
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.
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?