Why Is Amazon's Generosity to a Seattle Homeless Shelter Such a Pain?
slate.com
slate.com
When you read about companies that just chuck out food instead of donating it, you can kind of see why.
> In addition to the downtown location, Mary’s Place operates six other shelters in Seattle, serving individuals and families with 680 beds each night. But Amazon didn’t deliver the food to the other Mary’s Place locations, nor did the shelter consistently set aside additional resources to distribute the donations each night, according to four sources.
Amazon is the bad guy because they only donated to 1 of the 6 shelters.
> But Amazon is the fifth-most-valuable company in the world, with one of the richest men on the planet at its helm, leaving little doubt that the company could be doing much more to ensure that its local philanthropy isn’t making life tougher for people on the front lines.
Bizarre hit piece.
> Bizarre hit piece.
Do you really disagree with that paragraph though? It is not an opinion paragraph, it is just a series of statements of facts. Doesn't seem like a "hit piece" at all to me.
It is a selection of facts intended to present an act of philanthropy as a PR liability. Systemically, it is why most restaurant groups throw food out instead of donating it. The latter should be the default move. But if donating invites more criticism than disposing, guess which one is incentivized.
I don't understand at all how this is anything remotely like a hit piece. Have some compassion for the homeless who everyone here, Amazon and the newspaper, are trying to help.
Could Amazon do more, as the quoted paragraph suggests? Yes.
Non sequitur. Nobody is discussing legal risks. Just PR ones. If I own a restaurant, and donating produces negative press, problems I would not have had to deal with had I defaulted to not donating, I'm going to be incentivized against donating. This piece isn't designed to help, and it doesn't help.
What? This is a legal concern! You brought it up and it is a major legal concern across nearly all of America!
> This piece isn't designed to help, and it doesn't help.
You are wrong. More people are aware of problems they weren't aware of before. That is usefuuand that is helpful.
What is the legal concern I brought up?
In any case, this point is irrelevant. Businesses donating food isn't illegal in Seattle. Here we have a business donating food in Seattle. There is no legal concern. But they'll wake up to a PR itch on Tuesday. That problem would not have happened if they hadn't tried to help. The disincentivisation remains.
The agenda in the article is the head tax currently being debated and fought in Seattle city council. This is absolutely a hit piece that sounds very much the same as what has been in the local papers.
The glaring issue not mentioned in the article is that Seattle already spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year for homeless services and the reason no one wants to give the city more money is because the homeless situation is so insanely bad given the money they have spent. Money is not going to fix the problem.
I’m also biased because I got punched in the head by a homeless person on the way to/from work and that fact alone is not enough to de-anonymize me. Right now there is a man screaming “fuck” at the top of his lungs at 8am, the same person who last week I saw punching a car trying to pull out of a parking spot.
If the city could promise a genuine solution other than just shrugging these crimes off, I promise you everyone living in Seattle city limits would support that tax. Unfortunately, the problem continues to get worse not better.
Somewhat misleading, but so is saying that the city only spends what is directly allocated for the homeless services line item to maintain the status quo that isn’t working.
Curiously, I saw no specific allegations of food getting spoiled.
Food specifically is highly problematic since even canned food go wrong (leave food cans in direct sunlight for a day or two and open them, it won’t be pleasant) these items need to be individually checked and if you need to transport them the cost of transportation alone can often be higher than the value of the goods at your destination.
On a personal note at least in the UK chartities that do pickup goods for donation are highly picky and anything that will not turn a profit will not be picked up or accepted by them as they simply cannot cover the cost of transport and disposale of goods that won’t sell or won’t be of value.
The sad truth is that often the only real thing you can and should donate is cash.
If you manage to wade through the article to the end, they even point this out, illustrating it with a different charity who appears to either do a better job or have a better mindset and experience about food collection. Sounds to me like Mary’s Place should spend some time learning from their peers rather than lashing out like this.
Suck it up. That is exactly the relationship most non profits have with government and NGO grants. You adapt and keep the mission in mind. Is it frustrating? Hell yes, but at the end of the day you have people to help. I admit to visiting a bar after every government site visit and some of directives failed the logic test so badly I screamed at the sky, but you persevere or get out.
"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. ... I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular."
Neither of those groups are helped by you taking on only an infiticimal part of he problem and giving the poor person a dollar. So if you want to actually help them you either give money to shelters, help support initiatives like the homeless paper, or volounteer.
Of course, short of the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency, that seems rather unlikely to happen (and even then it's far from guaranteed). Certainly the GOP doesn't seem very concerned about this issue.
Now, what could help is relaxing zoning enough to build more housing, thus making housing itself cheaper. With cheaper housing, something like Salt Lake City's Housing First program would become more feasible.
But that would probably require ending Seattle's USA-standard segregationist zoning to allow more density in more of the city, and doing that is fraught with peril, politically. People are used to the government enforcing a certain lifestyle in their neighborhoods, and don't like the idea of the market letting in more people, especially people considered 'undesirables'.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1710756
[2] https://www.addictions.com/opiate/the-role-of-pharmaceutical...
My New York City neighborhood's commercial association felt incentivized to solve the problem. It finances outreach, education and relocation (to shelters) efforts to keep the neighborhood pleasant. In any case, a large part of the problem is created through voters enacting silly housing restrictions.
The free market certainly does some good, but it's never gonna solve the problem in full. If it could, it already would have.
If charity could solve the problem, it already would've.
If you're willing to pay more above the taxes and do so, you're already part of the solution and you're already performing charity without the need of government.
If you convince enough other people to do the same, then you're good to go and you'll have enough funding to solve the problem. Unfortunately, as with everything government, you actually want/need to use it as a big stick for more taxes or for tighter regulations when people don't behave the way they're "supposed to".
No. I'm willing to pay a large amount to go towards public housing as taxes, but not as charity. The distinction here is that it coming in the form of taxes ensures that everyone (or at least everyone able) is also paying their fair share, and that we'll have enough for a substantive impact.
I don't have much interest in putting in extra while homo economicus types get the same benefits of living in a society with fewer people homeless while not contributing.
If you have a solution that's been more effective than government social welfare, public housing and saner zoning in, say, Western Europe, I'd love to read about it.
I mean a lot of their complaints really come off as them being horrible at logistics and communication and whining that Amazon isn’t fixing this for them, but they honestly can’t do that. Just like they can’t fire the bad employees or volunteers or purchase more refrigerators that they can’t even know they need.
I wonder how many donations/etc they get from other places and how it's handled.
Logistics with donations and NGOs has long been a headache, though. This isn't a new thing.
Since profiling is not required for their service to work, they have to give access to the content even if I opt out.
> Consent is presumed not to be freely given if ..., or if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance.
It is not necessary to consent to data collection for a person to read Slate's article, therefore walling their article behind a consent button means the consent is not freely given.
In other words - you can't lock a site behind a consent button. Either you provide the site regardless of data collection consent, or you don't provide it at all - period.
You can't lock a site under European jurisdiction behind a consent button.
I don't see how any of this can apply to Slate, unless the EU wants to start reciprocally start enforcing, say, Saudi law on European websites.
This is the option they should take.
The Right to Withdraw Consent. If you would like to opt-out at any time, please delete the “gdpr_consent_1” cookie from your browser window. You will have to opt-in again in order to view Slate content.
There are ways for US companies to be exempt from it, and what slate does is not one of them.
Edit: Digging a bit deeper, Graham Holdings, owner of Slate, have European presence. So they might care to be compliant.
What is the single best thing I can do to help this problem? Volunteering my time to help a shelter? Paying money to the support it? Influencing my company to change? What are some ways that I can help solve these problems at scale?