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Amazon Begins Housing Homeless In Seattle (jeffreifman.com)
reifman writes: Amazon announced that it will commit one of its buildings to housing 200 Seattle homeless people for the next year, allowing a nonprofit organization to oversee the facilities... With more than 4,505 living on the streets, Seattle's mayor recently declared a homelessness emergency... More than 45 people died on the streets in 2015, heroin related deaths in King County are at a 20-year high, and neighborhoods are up in arms about homeless drug use, crime and people living in cars.
The Seattle Times notes that Amazon's construction on the lot isn't scheduled until 2017, so they reached out to the homelessness nonprofit to temporarily offer its use, hoping to later offer the group a second site. (The nonprofit will pay the site's utility bills).
The Seattle Times notes that Amazon's construction on the lot isn't scheduled until 2017, so they reached out to the homelessness nonprofit to temporarily offer its use, hoping to later offer the group a second site. (The nonprofit will pay the site's utility bills).
When Amazon goes to reclaim the property to begin building, they'll be reviled for taking the shelter away...
>> The Seattle Times notes that Amazon's construction on the lot isn't scheduled until 2017, so they reached out to the homelessness nonprofit to temporarily offer its use, hoping to later offer the group a second site.
The gap between poor and rich is ever increasing.
People are not homeless because they are poor. They are homeless because they are mentally ill, usually combined with alcohol and drug abuse.
We need to address both poverty and homelessness, but they are two very different issues.
File this under "no good deed goes unpunished"
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That isn't always true. There was a time when I was poor, sleeping in my car and taking showers at a friend's flat. The job I had then was best I could find at the time but it didn't pay enough to be able to afford a place to live. This was in the San Francisco bay area, where rents are extremely high. After living that way for some time, I eventually saved enough to move to a distant location that wasn't so expensive.
As far as I know, Seattle is even more expensive, so it's entirely possible that people are homeless because they are poor.
"Tough love?" How is that going to help someone who is homeless because they had a catastrophic illness and lost their job and home? How is that going to help the disabled find a job in this economy, so that they can actually get a place to live? How do you practice "tough love" on the mentally ill, on those who can't keep a job because of side effects of the drugs that help their illness - it's not like taking away their meds is going to suddenly make them employable? How do you practice tough love on a rape victim who has been afraid to get on a bus for a decade so she can look for a job or see the doctor? Or those who are long-term unemployed because they and all their co-workers have been RIF'd and now they are all competing for a much smaller pool of jobs?
It's not like everyone can suddenly become uber drivers to make a few bucks. If they have a car, they're sleeping in it.
I mean, sure, it sucks for them now and it's a terrible shame and stuff, but at what point do you say, "Damn, this person needs to make some better decisions!"
Better decisions? Hey, let's extend that idea. I should have decided to have better parents because they gave me juvenile diabetes. And if I had decided not to be friends with a high school classmate that I didn't know had a long history of schizophrenia, I wouldn't have gotten PTSD when he killed his old man in front of me. And if I hadn't read Dr. John Money's fake research that claimed gender identity was mutable (a whole generation of doctors bought into this before he was exposed as a fraud) I could have decided to transition earlier instead of conforming for as long as I did.
Yep, all bad decisions ... I really need to make better decisions, and that will magically fix everything! It's all my fault. Random chance had nothing to do with it.
Fortunately an amazing therapist who has experience dealing with transsexuals with PTSD who are also victims of sexual assault helped me realize that it's not all my fault, some things are truly random events that you cannot protect yourself from or find a reason for when you look back on them. Not everything happens for a reason, not everything is predictable or preventable. That makes the universe a bit scary, but it's reality. Victim-blaming is seen as ugly for a reason.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yes, but I wonder how many homeless people and people currently struggling to make ends meet could be helped more efficiently through state and national public services if Amazon and other corporations paid their fair share of taxes? The US poverty and homelessness rates are almost as shocking as the amount of money that is being taken out of public circulation (i.e. to serve everyone's interests) so that a small number of oligarchs and bankers can play on the Wall Street casinos.
Aristotle didn't know jack shit. Even what we call poor today is 1000 times richer than he can even imagine.
So effing what? The rich today are 1 billion times richer than he could ever imagine. It changes nothing. The poor are poor by our standards, not Aristotle's.
This argument that the poor aren't reaaaallly poor is some conservative nonsense to justify being tightfisted a-holes incapable of empathy. It's the modern equivalent of the welfare queen myth.