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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.
Leftist wacko propaganda. Why is this on Slashdot?
Let's keep slashdot real, folks. Just a silly post altogether.
Seattleites are struggling with [...] declining diversity.
What? What does this even mean? How does one struggle from declining diversity? Don't communities generally struggle with inclining diversity?
or something like that.
Actually, the framing of this is 100% accurate. I was born and raised here and Amazon and its asshole-geek army, who don't have ANY FUCKING MANNERS, have ruined what used to be a great place to live. Fuck Seattle and Fuck Amazon.
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?
"oh look someone is successful... KILL THEM!"
Seriously, progressives... Learn from Detroit. Stop fucking things up. Just let people enjoy something going well.
You've so far succeed in turning a successful industry into your idealized form ZERO times. The best you can claim so far is utterly destroying any community in which you've tried it.
Just stop. And try to enjoy good things. Is it perfect? Life isn't perfect. But for the love of god stop fucking up things that are working.
This country can't stand much more of your shit.
And here a bunch of robots are going to come marching after me saying
"ERROR ERROR ALL LEFTIST ACTIONS ARE GOOD. ALL PAST FAILURES ARE DELETED"
Enough. I'm not even promoting rightist shit. I'm just saying... if something is working... leave it alone. Just stand the fuck away from it and leave it alone.
Why don't you focus on your other little projects that you seem to have lost interest in? How about improving education in the inner city? remember when that mattered to you? You fucked it up horribly and then walked away taking no responsibility for anything.
What about lowering the costs of healthcare? How has that one gone? Total failure again.
What about housing price? Nope.
What jobs? Nope.
Crime? Nope.
After serially fucking up everything they've ever touched, in typical leftist fashion... they want a fucking promotion. And that means they want to take another stab at reengineering a city with a successful industry that is making money. Why? Because they're bored apparently and can't be bothered to fix any of the shit they already broke.
And I know... you're mad at me for saying your little tribe and your little ideology could ever have made a mistake... Except for you're fucking blind if you haven't realized it makes very little besides mistakes.
Look at Washington DC... Look at the schools. THey get more money per student than anywhere and they're a complete mess. How did that happen?
Critics said for ages that hte issue was not money. The issue was how the schools were run. That there are bad teachers that need to lose their jobs. As in fired. And that there are disapline problems in the school that cause students to disrupt class rooms... etc.
But of course that is all some kind of bigoted propaganda. Because the real solution is to just give the teachers more money. Which has a zero percent track record of actually accomplishing anything.
I'm beyond tired of the fucking robot progressives. And I am NOT making an appeal to some other political faction. Most of them are horribly corrupt. But the progressive robots need to have someone pee on their circuit boards because they're out of fucking control. They've got a zero percent track record of making a positive contribution and they always think they have the answers despite the facts of the matter suggesting that they have in fact never had the answers.
Their great claim to fame is what? That they don't believe being racist and sexist is a good idea? Brilliant. Welcome to 90 percent of the rest of the population. That's not distinctive.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
I don't think I have had a former amazon employee, fired or quit, say anything positive about the company....ever. Some have stated that it caused such a career burnout that they switching to the "coffee shop" employment/economy just to get some time off.
The only anti-gay that crosses tech is from conservative male Indians, everyone else in tech embraces LGBTQ and generally IS it. Amazon and Microsoft are and have always been pretty accepting. I'll say Amazon has made poor decisions, I hate the South Lake Union area and refuse to go there (Hey lets build a big company right in the 'central park' of Seattle). The housing in Queen Anne and Capital Hill has been overpriced for over a decade, so nothing really new there. Queen Anne looks like a shitty old Boston neighborhood with no parking and Capital Hill is a dirty overrated Portland neighborhood. Please, everyone move there...
As for development, this is exactly the opposite of SF, the reason why SF is fucked is because of the NIMBYs like who wrote this article. Building denser is the only solution to more populace. Oh noes, no pretty skyline.
Traffic in and out of Seattle sucks more from bad geology/geography than anything. Its population density is incredibly low compared to other metros. I do think Amazon's choice of location is insane, and since they move all of their real logistics elsewhere, I guess they agree. Google has a bunch of offices around the area much like Microsoft smartly does and plans on expanding on east side, so I am not sure why they matter. Facebook is small and Oculus is east side too (until they still birth).
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.
Could be main ingredient for soylent green.
Just expand into Microsoft's buildings: they're still laying off.
Table-ized A.I.
King County has always been super white. The article didn't say that King County was the whitest in the nation, but the whitest of the 20 most populous counties in the nation. I wouldn't be surprised if its always held that title.
I'm in the SF Bay Area. I've been pondering leaving and Seattle has many of the good attributes that I'm accustomed to having in my life. So I was checking just now the differences between the states. Does Washington not have personal income state tax? It seems incredible.
Austin is also an upcoming Silicon Valley.
Seattle isn't diverse enough! Waaaaahhhhhh!!
Send in more Mexicans, Nigerians, Arabs, and transgendered Orientals - pronto!
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
They are being biased against the "right" kind of people. So it's all fine. Remember: Racism, sexism, etc, etc are all fine so long as you are targeting the Right People(tm) and so long as you are doing it For The Greater Good(tm). :P
"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."
Irreverent garbage completely unrelated to the article. Could we get something without painfully obvious bias?
"Oh no, too many white guys! Better fix that!"
But I thought race was a social construct? Or has that narrative changed?
Seattle was wrecked long ago. Amazon is merely defiling the carcass.
And the SJW award for straight, white, male bashing article of the week goes to...
....and you sense lack of diversity is a negative? not all do. Just balkanizes shit. Move on
Waaa our economy is booming and property values are increasing. Be 20 more years till that might happen where I live.
This is absurd. Too many jobs? Too much prosperity? Too much tax revenue and income growth and asset appreciation? These articles kill me.
What is this racist filth???
OP nope that distinction is owned all alone by microsoft
It's ironic that the loudest whiners complainers it are the tech journalists who move into these cities. Look at GeekWire's article: an article by John Cook, a journalist without a technology background making money off the tech boom and living in Seattle, and he's working for a media company covering technology also located in Seattle. Sorry, John, but real techies tend to be quiet, unobtrusive, and frugal. The people who are wrecking neighborhoods and cities are people like you: tech hangers-on out to make a quick buck with technology, or making a career out of complaining about techies, or both.
...reporting like this is.
According to TFS, the head of Amazon HR is also a leader in the KKK.
Boy, nothing like giving all the feels to a few thousand Amazon employees with this crap. And we thought gender bias was bad...
People from Seattle keep tellling me how badly broadband service sucks there. This would seem uncharacteristic of service in a high-tech city. Has the new tech expansion into the area resulted in better broadband?
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53/53033.html
The total population that identifies as white alone is 63%. That's actually pretty low for the northwest. Sometime I fear that people blindly associate opulence with whiteness. I'm half hispanic and as a dev no one would ever believe me that i'm actually 1/2 mexican. Sure I don't speak spanish, and I don't bring much exotic cultural diversity... so I become part of the whiteness. It reminds me of when Obama was starting to campaign. I had learned about him, liked his facebook page.... Then when he became a strong potential and landed on the cover of Time, it mentioned something about how he could be the first black president. That was the first time I realized that he was black - because, really, he doesn't act in a 'culturally diverse' manner. My point is: race is weird.
The rising counts of gay bashing is not being done by the tech hires.
It is very politically incorrect to notice just who it is who is committing these hate crimes.
Amazon, a large tech company, is hiring a bunch of highly-paid confederate-flag waving gay-bashing white men in Seattle, they're turning the whole county white, and they're going around beating up gay people and burning down gay bars?
Does this even pass the smell test? Of course not. Has anyone involved in this story ever worked for a large modern tech company, or talked to anyone who does? Of course not.
Check the actual references and you get a different story. First of all, King County is not the whitest in the nation. It's the whitest of the top 20 counties in the nation by population. But at 62.4% white non-Hispanic, it's just below at the national average for whiteness (63.7%). Second, "the county's fastest population growth is happening among Asian and mixed-race people."
Third, let's take a look at those attacks. The arson? Committed by one Musab Masmari. White tech company employee? Nope. Unemployed drunk raised by Libyan parents mostly in Libya. Race unclear; Arabs are usually counted as white but Libyans are mostly Berbers who are mixed. The other complaints don't mention the employment or race of the perpetrators, though none of them apparently were traced back to tech company employees.
As the Bloomberg article says, "an industry that's otherwise showering Seattle with jobs and money has become a scapegoat".
That's an outlier caught in the net aiming to rein in gangs of idiots looking for someone homeless, gay or otherwise what they see as "the other" to beat the crap out of for a bit of fun. It used to happen a lot and still happens (turns out lesbians in the city I live in wear sensible shoes so they can run like hell away from drunken yobbos), so there is a law to try to deal with it.
There shouldn't be a fucking side. It's a very simple situation of a law to deal with a specific problem. If it's misapplied then that's the fault of whoever applies it badly and nothing at all to do with gangs beating up specific groups. So then you can only have the "sides" for civilisation or against - fucking insane.
It probably just means the hiring practises are fucked. If you only employ people who are very similar to yourself then the chance of being fucked over by something you never saw coming is high, especially if you limit the pool to social contacts. If you want to know why nobody in the south buys your stuff it's handy to have someone from the south you can ask.
For instance, if you have a multinational company with executives all from the same college tennis club the place will end up being run like a college tennis club (Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!) instead of a multinational company or other large org with talent from all over.
So it's not even a race issue, that's just the easiest way to spot whether someone is trying to hire their clone instead of whoever can do the job.
We're gonna liberate this country, again!
not a crime...
Lack of diversity? Rising house costs? Sounds like New Orleans, where 67% are black, and a post-katrina environment has seen housing costs rise from out of town hipsters buying property, which triggers a real estate feeding frenzy, which gentrifies neighborhoods and attracts more hipsters, driving housing costs up. What's so special about Seattle's "Lack of Diversity" where 69% are White? That's right. In America, when its a non white dominated area, it's quaintly referred to as names like "Chinatown" or "Little Gaza" or "Arabian Village", but when it's a White dominated area, it's a social justice bully / diversity police's wet dream.
Call us back when you have a working recombinant cure for Ebola, like we do.
White neighbourhood bad.
Gay neighbourhood good.
But you still haven't given your name and address so I can "come and get [you]".
Many areas are not diverse and yet it should not be considered bad. I think with increased demand for workers, employment benefits as wages go up and yes
the drawbacks are housing prices go up, and most likely poorer people have less ability to live in these areas. But diversity or lack of it, comes from many different effects. Such as jobs requiring certain backgrounds, and education. The argument that every area must be diverse or every employer must have a diverse group of people or its not normal is ridiculous. Amazon should be applauded for creating jobs here, and for making the community and the local economy thrive for people. This is not a bad thing and anyone who finds some reason to fault it is truly someone who does not understand how a free economy works.
How fast some LGQBT woud use predjudices to bias assumptions over the causality of independent events to a macroscopic economic development which they donâ(TM)t like.
Seriously, i would have expected more tolerance and unbiased views of a group who suffered intolerance and biased views much too long.
Any heterosexual who would complain that homosexuals are served or mainly served in some bars in his neighbourhood would be quickly seen as the idiot he is. A bar/restaurant/pub is a service. It is fine with me if they specialize for a specific group, and as long as they donâ(TM)t stop me from entering based on my religion, sexual orientation or skin colour, they can do whatever they want.
The idea that LGBQT need "special" parts of the towns to thrive and survive is utterly stupid and disgusting.
I much more prefer the term 'European-American'. Thank you for caring.
Growth always leads to wreckage. It's sad but true. An area has some big attraction and then the money people start riding the wave and attracting ever more people. A dense population will demonstrate worse behaviour, drug addictions, alcoholism, mental health issues and eventually an exodus with huge debts and poverty left behind. Brooklyn, the Bronx, Detroit, and Flint Michigan as well as Miami Florida are all places once considered desirable but now are places best avoided. Right now no one sees the next big thing. But at some point the next big thing won't be anywhere near San Francisco and the death spiral will begin. The answer is in controlling population density and forcing popular businesses to locate a good distance from each other. Crwoding leads to really ugly living conditions.
Crime probably dropped in other areas with lack of diversity and I'm sure the person who wrote the article doesn't want mention that.
one thing I'm sure of is we don't need more "economic diversity".
Seattle is finally becoming a nice place to live.
It's funny, it is the law of unintended consequences. When people are left alone they revert to their "normal" state in this country or others. So, Governments ever local or federal leave the People be and no more or that so called "politically correct" bullshit!,
WTF why is this racist bullshit on here?!
White neighbourhoods , segregation bad.
Gay neighbourhoods , segregation good.
Hold the phone lol. There are a lots of assumptions being made. These tech companies are not just "whites". If anything tech growth has caused the indian community to shoot up, not to mention the gay population. Seattle could use some upgrades. I'll give you the advice to avoid full time employment at Amazon. That place is a sweat shop.
Packers and Movers Bangalore | Packers and Movers Chennai | Packers and Movers Delhi | Packers and Movers Faridabad | Packers and Movers Ghaziabad | Packers and Movers Greater Noida | Packers and Movers Gurgaon | Packers and Movers Hyderabad | Packers and Movers Mumbai | Packers and Movers Navi Mumbai | Packers and Movers Noida | Packers and Movers Pune | Packers and Movers Thane |
All in all, that makes me nervous. I grew up in Tacoma, then moved up to the Seattle area to find tech work, then once I was able to wfh a bit more, bought a house at the bottom of the market in Tacoma, but I'm worried about what will happen. Thus far Tacoma's kept a lot of it's gritty feel, which isn't for everyone but I've always liked, but more and more I'm seeing the signs of gentrification.
10 years ago I visited Seattle and loved it, and looked forward to returning there. Last month I finally visited Seattle again and it was a nightmare. It's definitely gotten way too big and hasn't handled the expansion well.
no, boom is good. if you cannot pay the rent go elsewhere, nobody forces you.
Seattle's new "feel good legislation" will put the city in a huge turmoil/ quagmire within a few years. when the mandatory new $15 an hour minimum wage goes into effect, there will be massive small business layoffs. the big corporations will cut their employees to 22 hour work weeks so that can afford to stay afloat. I've told several Seattle residents have their food storage ready and keep plenty of fresh water on hand. God help them
Why are the police asking? Are punishments for crimes against homosexuals different than crimes against anyone else? They shouldn't be.
They are if the prosecution can show that the crime was "bias-motivated", such as the defendant's prior threats to commit crime against people of a particular sexual orientation.
How would a criminal even know whether someone is a homosexual or not?
I don't know in this particular case, but in general, a Wikipedia article describes bias-motivated violent crimes against gay or trans people in the USA.
One of them even fell and killed a Microsoft-employed lawyer.
Growth and expansion aren't a bad thing... stagnant wages in light of increased demand and gentrification is the problem.
If you are incompetent to work at one of these companies then there is plenty of jobs that are being created for flipping their burgers and cleaning their laundry. If you don't like any of these jobs then move and let the rest of us get back to work.
Or to be fair it all depends on what you mean by wrecking, so if you think a city in the midst of a depression is ideal then you're correct but if you're like most sane people you'd be hard pressed to find anything about Seattle which is a fault for a modern urban city.