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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.
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?
Including content from such noted leftist wacko publications as Bloomberg Business, no less...
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.
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?
Umm.. your confused. That was Harpo Marx not his retarded cousin Karl. Sorry, I know it's hard to tell the clowns apart but Harpo rarely spoke but had a lot to say.
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.
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.
Just expand into Microsoft's buildings: they're still laying off.
Table-ized A.I.
seriously. traffic is logical to complain about. even the rising cost of housing.
but literally everything else he complains about in here is a non issue. we shouldnt care one way or another who our neighbors are, if that means less diversity so what? all the nordic countries that the leftists love have little to no diversity so why should that matter?
and why the need to bring up "white males" Its as if the submitter wanted a flamefest
This kind of trolling does not belong here, and i dont usually complain about what should and shouldnt be on the front page
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"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?
"Amazon's hired so many white males that King County is now the whitest in the nation"
OK. So what? if King County was 80% black there would be no complaint about a "lack of diversity". if King County was 80% asian there would be no complaint about a "lack of diversity".
Diversity is simply the latest code word for anti-white male.
You're obviously American, so I can make some allowances for your deficient education, but those "non diverse" Nordic countries are more diverse than you.
Ahhhh....more pig ignorant American cannon fodder. Gotta love 'em and their naivety.
That is laughable. Finland and Sweden are fairly diverse by European standards, but the entire European continent is not very diverse. A quick look at France, Germany, and Italy show they have over 90% of their population in their respective ethnicity. The United States largest ethnicity is German, with about 17%.
From Populstat.info:
Norway -> 96.4% Norwegian, 0.5% Laplander, 0.3% Finnish, 2.8% Other
Sweden -> 89.3% Swedish, 3% Finnish & Laplander, 0.8% Yugoslavian, 0.6% Iranian, 6.3% Other
Finland -> 93% Finnish, 6% Swedish, 0.1% Laplander, 1% Other
Iceland -> 98% Icelanders (Norweigian, Celts), 0.5% Swedish, 0.4% Danish
Denmark -> 97% Danish, 3% Other
United States -> 75% White (So much varied ethnicity the site doesn't try to list them all), 12% Black, 10% Hispanic, 3.3% Asian, 0.7% Native American
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
thank you, I was having trouble finding the numbers to post in a nice simple view like the one you provided.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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".
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.
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?
Eh what?
12% of German population doesn't have a German citizenship, they are different ethnicities by definition. Same for France. Third generation immigrants usually have citizenships and count as Germans. 13% of German population have Polish surnames for fuck's sake.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Not that this changes your point but where did you your stats?
I quoted my stats as coming from populstat.info. It was just the first link that came up when looking for the first country on my list of nordic countries: Norway. It does appear their stats may be as old as 2002, but that doesn't change anything about my point. Their numbers would have to be off by a huge margin for any Nordic country to be as diverse as the US.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
United States -> 75% White (So much varied ethnicity the site doesn't try to list them all), 12% Black, 10% Hispanic, 3.3% Asian, 0.7% Native American
Except you seem to be comparing apples to oranges. In Sweden for instance there are no records of ethnicity whatsoever (it is in fact illegal) and this means that everyone who is born in Sweden counts as "Swedish" regardless if both of their parents are from Indonesia or if they consider themselves to be of "Asian" ethnicity.
Well, somehow web sites have statistics of how many Finnish, Laplander, Yugoslavian, Iranian, and other nationalities are in the country. My guess is that sociologists can find a way to determine these numbers based on sample sizes smaller than a full census. Even if the numbers are off, I can't believe anyone would think Sweden is even close to as diverse as the US.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Give me your complete estimation for a single payer society's healthcare costs that takes into consideration all subsidies.
Any country you like. You choose.
If you had even the simplest comprehension of economics you would know that isn't possible in the space here. I can only assume you are one of those immature keyboard warriors types who thinks everything they say is right, and that a discussion group is a place purely for them to try and prove that point to themselves.
As to your admission that your argument was stupid... thank you for admitting your argument was stupid.
QED.
*laughs*
Is writing your emotions inside asterisks still a thing?
Insult, insult, insult... The most obvious sign that you are unable to argue your point coherently.