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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Canceling the program bothers me a little, but replacing it with "donating" to four in house charities, only two of which are properly labeled as such, that clearly help Amazon makes it so much worse.

The first is about building houses in areas near Amazon offices. The second is training future Amazon employees. The third is delivering food that I'm sure won't use existing Amazon delivery solutions at all. And the fourth is disaster relief, which I'm less cynical about though I am reminded of their recent tornado issue.

What a charitable company.

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The 20,000 families benefitting from housing in the Seattle metro area as a result of Amazon's investments in the community might define charitable vs. non-charitable differently than you. I've personally met the women and children benefitting from the $100M Amazon and its employees have donated to Mary's Place -- their lens is not yours. Your comments about AFE are a bit underdeveloped. File under no good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.

Building houses is a good thing, but you could make the project a for profit division of Amazon and I don't think what they're doing would drastically change.

Similar with their education program, some of it would change but I bet the base project could be seen as a worthwhile investment in the companies future. Saying these acts justify ending smile is silly.

20,000 houses hardly makes up for the 12m square feet that Amazon inhabits in the Seattle Metro area, very little of which is built in such a way to contribute to a livable or affordable city. Their impact on the real estate situation is nowhere near positive even with this whitewashing.

Does it not? 12m / 20,000 = 600. So Amazon's real estate is displacing 20,000 households of a size of 600 square feet. And they've created 20,000 houses to offset that, which are probably larger than 600 square feet. Seems like a fair offset.

Its good but probably not the most effective or most wanted by customers which is what that point was with these donations.

Wow they are investing in real estate! How generous!

I’d point out that most companies - including their closest analogue, Walmart - don’t do this. Amazon is reverting to the corporate norm.

I'm not sure what your problem here is. It's good that amazon has some incentive to do these things well and to do them longterm, to make sure that housing actually gets build, to make sure that kids actually learn computer science. This is much better then a one-time donation to some trendy charity for good PR.

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