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Amazon To Build Homeless Shelter In Its New Seattle Headquarters (cnn.com)
Amazon is trying to do its part to help the homelessness problem in its hometown of Seattle. The company announced on Wednesday that it would donate more than 47,000 square feet of space within its newest Seattle headquarters building as a permanent location to house homeless people. CNNMoney reports: "Mary's Place does incredible, life-saving work every day for women, children, and families experiencing homelessness in the Seattle community," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "We are lucky to count them as neighbors and thrilled to offer them a permanent home within our downtown Seattle headquarters." Amazon is partnering with local nonprofit Mary's Place to create 65 rooms, which will house more than 200 homeless people every night. The new Mary's Place shelter will open in early 2020. It will also have a resource center like those the nonprofit offers in North Seattle and White Center, where 40-plus local nonprofits and volunteers work with staff to help families obtain employment and permanent housing.
5 hobos for the price of 3 (for opening day only). Or is Bezos using them as guinea pigs for manned missions?
"...life-saving work every day for women, children, and families experiencing homelessness..."
Well, at least men got included as long as they support a family. Wouldn't want all of those useless, disposable freeloading homeless men taking up a shelter slot.
Is that what they're calling employee housing nowadays?
I wonder how many of its own employees will take advantage of this.
Amazon could pay a living wage!
As a homeless man you're only worth something if there's a family attached to you.
Isn't male privilege great!
Amazon is partnering with local nonprofit Mary's Place to create 65 rooms, which will house more than 200 homeless people every night. The new Mary's Place shelter will open in early 2020.
But this will have no effect on the homeless population until 2020, how does this help the homeless community today?
Ken
Didn't trump just make America great again? How can we still have homeless people?
As noted, this won't be available until 2020, just as President Trump is up for re-election, two years after Democrats "take back the congress" in the 2018 mid-term.
Ken
Of course men. Women have a valuable commodity they can trade for food/shelter/sugar daddy. I see them doing this as a tax write-off. Why not give them jobs? Even if it's a yard worker or garbage picker upper.
Hey Amazon: They need a huge one in Portland Oregon too. I visited once and haven't seen so many homeless people in my life.
What you saw in Portland were the political activists.
when you got no job, any job is better
Hiring managers are reluctant to hire higher-skilled people for minimum wage jobs because they know that people will leave when a better opportunity comes along. When I was out of work for two years, hiring managers told me I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs and recruiters told me I was unemployable for everything else. I ended up working for a moving company on the weekends for six months until I found another full-time job.
[...] so give trump at least 2-3 years to fix the problems of trump.
FTFY — Who knew that governing was so complicated for a businessman?
Didn't trump just make America great again? How can we still have homeless people?
If they live at Amazon, they aren't homeless. You see? American is great again, thanks to be big business.
Why not give them jobs?
You have a deep misunderstanding of what causes homelessness and why it is such an intractable problem. They are not "just like you and me" except without homes. Most homeless people have mental health issues, substance abuse issues, and are in general very dysfunctional people. If they were employable, then they wouldn't be homeless in the first place.
Oh, he's close. Just missing things by a few blocks. Down the street from Amazon is the Allen Brain Institute.
Brain. Institute.
Once they take your brain (for science, of course), your only options are either the homeless shelter or politics. The vast majority of people, even after being pithed, would apparently prefer homelessness rather than politics.
There is some hope for mankind.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I find it amusing that this comes to 235sqft per person, and I've taken flack for designing apartment microunits at 224sqft per single individual as part of a universal social security plan. People stopped arguing that it wasn't affordable and started arguing that I'm trying to shove people into prison cells or something (never mind that they're allowed to go anywhere outside)--to which I'd typically respond with something about cardboard boxes, bad weather, and food from dumpsters.
People don't seem to care about making the lives of others better; they just want to win a moral victory so they feel good.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Most chronic homelessness is caused by mental illness and addictions. Instead of putting up shelters, why not spend a little extra and reopen public mental hospitals? Before the deinstitutionalization movement in the 70s, states had huge mental health treatment systems in place. Admittedly, part of that was because there was nothing that could be done to treat mental illness before the 50s and the only thing to do was to lock them away. But, we've seen that treatment isn't 100% effective, people relapse, they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, etc. Why not operate facilities where people who need treatment can be placed until they're stable enough to actually live in the community?
This is great for the homeless population, but for those that aren't employed by high-tech. They just can't afford to live in Seattle anymore. Teachers, fire-fighters, police, food service workers, etc can't afford to pay $2000 for a 1bedroom apartment. What we all saw in SanFrancisco/Silicon Valley area, is happening in Seattle.
Hope these high tech workers don't plan on having kids, there will be nobody to teach them. Maybe Amazon can buy Khan Academy and launch Amazon-School. "Alexa, teach my child to read."
The problem is that a lot of the homeless are mentally ill and can't hold any job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Discriminating is not "equal opportunity" at all. When nationally 80% of the homeless population is men, having a program which discriminates against men is flat out evil. That you attempt to claim discrimination is fine because "bogey man" makes you evil.
Real numbers show that gender discrimination is not a problem in the workplace. 61% of all college graduates are Women who are _CHOOSING_ not to go into STEM jobs. The graduation numbers have favored women for well over a decade, and were pretty close for the prior 20 years. The wage gap has been debunked so frequently that you must be mentally handicapped to still believe it. That is not a joke. You should seek immediate psychological help and ask the doctor to consider some strong medication (Thorazine) because you simply ignore reality to support a delusion. Worse, using that delusion to discriminate against people.
Your sig makes it perfectly clear that you are a SJW troll.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
What would you choose if your only options were performing labor in exchange for food & shelter or sleeping on the street and begging? And was it government that fixed the abuses with company towns and company stores or was that the genesis of the union movement?
Government also passed laws which mandate "minimum standard of habitation" for rental property. A living space must have all of the modern conveniences or it's illegal to rent on a long-term basis. Such amenities come with a cost. People are homeless because they are priced out of the market. Politicians talk about "affordable housing" but they make it illegal to build and rent cheap, rudimentary shelters. Why not rent out cabins or tents in a campground type setting with communal toilets & showers? Government even evicts people from basic shelters that they built for themselves! "Sorry, you can't live in that plywood cabin you built because it doesn't meet our standards, so we're going to bulldoze it and make you sleep on the street." I think that's absolutely barbaric.
The free market & private charity won't produce a utopia, but the results would certainly be no worse than government "solutions".
I have played too much Shadowrun to think this can be anything good.
He may have put it poorly but there is some truth there.
There's a lot of homelessness in NYC and the overwhelming majority falls into two camps: those with mental issues and those with substance abuse issues. The percentage of able bodied and able minded people (is that a word?) who are homeless is a small.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond