Homelessness is not Amazon's problem.
Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work?
Agreed.
Agreed.
Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work?
Agreed.
Agreed.
And homelessness can, in fact, be reasonably construed as Amazon's problem (or a problem caused by Amazon if we're a city thinking of letting Amazon in). The exacerbation of homelessness is an externality caused in part by Amazon's concentration of high-wage jobs in a small city and the subsequent skyrocketing of property values combined with mindless gentrification. So it's both a cause for concern when courting Amazon, and it's a form of pollution that they bring to town that it is not a priori unreasonable to hold them accountable for (to the extent that they are responsible for it).
Should they be responsible for this indirect effect? Well, that's the issue at root of a lot of externalities companies produce, like environmental pollution.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that the government should step in and support the homeless, in return for Amazon's tax dollars. But that requires reserving a lot of new housing development for low-income renters, which makes housing more expensive for Amazon's employees, so they have an incentive to discourage doing anything about the homeless.
It's a great example of how market forces can fail a community, actually.
A cynic could argue that the market is operating well in this case because the homeless don't contribute much economically — but I try not to go to the same bars as those people.
Think about all the traffic problems with cars, except the street is covered ankle-deep in manure. And you can't install catalytic converters in their butts to reduce pollution, either.
Many are advocating mass-transit or bike-friendliness.
Image search the internet for horse manure bag for various examples.
Other problems mitigated by horses as a means of transport include, but are not limited to, the relative rarity of high speed collisions. Although, falling off a horse can be quite traumatic.
You responded to a claim about automation, not cars. Trains are automated. Buses are automated. Please contain your virulent hatred for cars long enough to figure out what you're actually responding to.
Not directly, no. But Amazon is based in a city that has a large homeless population. It is in the interest of their employees to see that population fall, therefore it also ought to be in Amazon's interest.
> Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work?
Of course it is. But I see this reaction a lot - that anyone asking questions about our automated future is some sort of regressive idiot who hates technology. Far from it. You can see and be in favour of the obvious benefits automation brings, while also questioning what society looks like when a lot of the jobs people currently have don't exist. That doesn't mean "stop automation", it just means "think about the effects of it while we do it, ideally before".
Is there any doubt that if Amazon or any corporation would not hesitate to eliminate 90% of the jobs in this world if they had the means to do it cheaper with robotics/ai/cloud tech? They couldn't care less if it meant plunging half the population of this planet into crippling poverty.
Its beyond frustrating the amount of attacks you face for inquiring about the livelihoods and future of people whose jobs are replaced by AWS processes.
You want to automate the world? Great. Ease it in over 2 generations and only when humanity overcomes the greediness that allows us to accept wealth inequality and more money than we can ever dream of spending despite half the world living in poverty.
So, never.
That is because jobs aren't a hand-out. Somehow, we still have basically full employment 200 years after society started automating away jobs. You face ridicule for bitching about jobs lost to AWS for the same reason people now ridicule Luddites from 150 years ago.
I'm reminded of the quote by Ronald Wright that is perhaps better suited to today's discussion about Switzerland vs the US, but still feels relevant (and, as an immigrant to the US, very true):
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
There is a vast difference between government policy intended to help its citizens (and thus, the nation as a whole) prosper and grow and adapt as the economy changes, and "hand-outs."
Amazon is not a humanitarian organization. They are only concerned about the interests of their employees to the degree that the law requires, and their only interest, otherwise is in increasing shareholder value. Amazon doesn't care about the homeless... except maybe as a potential source of cheap labor.
And if a company was willing to fuck over everything as long as it increases shareholder value then it should be regulated. You already implicitly agree with that viewpoint unless you believe that Amazon should be allowed to murder or enslave people as long as it increases shareholder value
Their culture is legendary for its relentless focus on cutting costs and driving employees hard for the sake of the bottom line, at all levels. I cannot see them spending a dime on fighting homelessness, even as a PR move, unless they expected to make a dollar back, that's just the way they operate.
Combine that with the NIMBYs refusing rezoning, and you get the current housing mess.
80% of corporate stock is owned by a mere 1% of the population. That 1% are the people who, right now, benefit from automation.
If we reach a world where corporations are replaced by worker cooperatives, or a 90% top marginal tax rate (and similar wealth tax) support a generous basic income -- then automation will be good. Right now it's an acute danger to the survival of most people.
Amazon had 135B revenue and 540k employees in 2016. By comparison (according to the UN) that would have made Amazon the 60th largest economy in 2016, after Hungary (138B / 9.5m people) and before Ukraine (132B / 42m, which has been dropping considerably since).
That is an insane amount of wealth to throw around to influence all manner of people for the sake of a corporate charter. Not only that, but they are only "responsible" for 540k people versus the millions other countries of comparable scale have.
I'm not saying companies should act as governments. I am saying having businesses of that scale is highly distortionary in how governments around them behave, and since the aim of a public corporation is to profit, distortions will be made in the name of profit.
The fact that Amazon is almost certainly more influential on the international stage than Hungary or Ukraine should be horrifying, because nations are at least usually responsible to their people. Amazon is in no way responsible to its employees, nations it operates in, or even its own executives. Its only responsible to the largest stakeholders that own it, and that is terrible for the rest of us.
It could even be for a loss. If you did 1Bn in revenue but paid 2Bn for the goods you're selling it's not really a win.
GDP is more like the value add of a country. Profit is a better comparison. However, profit is tricky as companies often use it to grow rather than pay out profit.
Amazon's profit was 4B. Even saying, reasonably that they used 20Bn than they made in profit and diverted to growth it makes them much, much smaller compared to a country.
You could also use net worth to quantify how much "weight" Amazon has available rather than what it is actively exerting in influence, in which case it would be around the 35th largest nation considering its 656B valuation. Thats roughly as much as Finland is worth. I didn't use that statistic because I think there is a much wider differentiation between a nations wealth and a companies market cap than USD revenue vs USD nominal gdp.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/28/gdp-for-...
GDP to market cap is worse. The net worth of a country is not it's GDP. The total wealth of the US is about ~90 trillion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
The estimates for total wealth, however, are really fraught and fluctuate, as does market cap in other currencies.
It is great that we are improving productivity but automation also furthers concentration of wealth by distributing fewer profits to workers.
It is not simply good. If we don’t understand the negative effects we are more likely to become victims of those effects. If we do understand the negative effects we can make sure to prepare ourselves for the change in the landscape.
I will challenge you on this.
Automation is efficient.
The problem is that maximally efficient is minimally robust.
Cars are wonderful, unless something disastrous happens to your roads. Then horses are better.
Amazon just-in-time delivery is great. Until everybody needs the same thing--at which point local grocery stores with inventory matter.
Efficient doesn't always equate to good.
Efficient doesn't always equate to good.
But it is the problem of the city. They absolutely need to keep this in mind while negotiating with Amazon, who has a reputation for driving housing prices sky high, thus exacerbating the homelessness problem.
"Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work?"
Automation is neutral, as it does cost people jobs, not all of whom can be retrained for something else. It also drives down wages. Hell, productivity has been skyrocketing for the past 30-40 years due to automation, yet workers have seen a pittance in rising wages.
I'd also be curious in a study on Amazon's effect on the homeless.
I don't know why this point seems to escape people in SF, LA, Seattle, etc. If you're homeless, you're gonna want to be where the most benefits and relaxed attitudes toward homelessness are. It's not hard to understand why this problem is at its worst in the most progressive cities.
Our current top tax rate is ~40%, less than half of what it was under Eisenhower, and the owning class continues to push for tax breaks under the guise of trickle-down economics.
Please stop broadcasting propaganda on their behalf.
Washington has no income tax.
> who generate economic activity which can also be taxed and used by municipalities to try to solve homelessness.
Unfortunately a lot of the taxes that can be levied in Seattle are fairly regressive, so it's easy to end up in a situation where property taxes are raised to generate funds to solve homelessness. It's easy to imagine inefficiencies or fund diversion such that low priced housing raises in cost faster than the funds given to help homelessness. Even worse would be the situation where those funds only help in the form of food & shelters for homeless people.
States need to look at the amount of office space being built and mandate that towns allow additional housing so that there are at least 3 beds per desk.
Perhaps you meant to say that automation also has negatives? In which case, I apologize if I sounded harsh here -- I find I have a strong emotional reaction to arguments about complex things that don't support nuance.
Barring the desertification of the Fertile Crescent (arguably natural climate change had a hand too) and the extinction of the American and Australian megafauna, both of which are relatively insignificant in geological time, we simply didn't have the means to harm the environment very much.
Compared to that, industrialization has had side-effects that will endure for millions of years: the upending of the carbon and nitrogen cycles, and the addition of plastics and radiation. Aliens could come to the Earth 20 million years after we go extinct, and still be able to find traces of us.
As things are currently going, I might. Horses are not polluting the environment (in the extent cars do), they don't track me and they can't be turned off remotely if I declined to renew my subscription.
There are plenty of countries without automation. And many allow anybody to immigrate to them. But don't expect air conditioning You'll have to hire a person to wave you with a fan.
And don't expect those job-killing tubes to bring you your water. Hire a water carrier like everybody else.
And in the truly pure countries, be prepared to drag your stuff with you without labor saving wheeled contraptions like the wheelbarrow.
But feel free to point out where I am exaggerating.
No, but it's not an uncommon opinion in these parts that riding to work on anything other than a bike is a flaw in our land use.
Regardless of whether or not you agree, both a bike and a car replaced a horse, but they had drastically different effects on society.