Using NIMBY for people that don't want the equivalent of a privately owned airport dropped into their neighbourhood seems an abuse of the word.
Or an airport, yes?
Are you implying an Amazon Warehouse suddenly using drones and filling the air with noise for their corporate enrichment is the same as a public airport built by elected officials after due consultation?
That's optimistic.
Your other examples are power plants, halfway houses, low income housing are (often) private as well.
There is of course a value judgement. But this is a matter of degree not kind.
NIMBYs are anti-progress because of impacts to their lives and their neighborhood. The power plant needs to exist, but arguably does it? What's wrong with the old one? Why do they need to build a new one? Halfway houses and low income housing doesn't need to exist any more than a warehouse does. This one happens to be owned by Amazon, but where you want the distribution center for goods to exist, and who do you want to have own it? That this Amazon warehouse makes more noise than other warehouses and they don't want it there is definition NIMBYism.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50000-0
> Regulators, environmental advocates, and community groups in the United States (U.S.) are concerned about air pollution associated with the proliferating e-commerce and warehousing industries. Nationwide datasets of warehouse locations, traffic, and satellite observations of the traffic-related pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) provide a unique capability to evaluate the air quality and environmental equity impacts of these geographically-dispersed emission sources. Here, we show that the nearly 150,000 warehouses in the U.S. worsen local traffic-related air pollution with an average near-warehouse NO2 enhancement of nearly 20% and are disproportionately located in marginalized and minoritized communities. Near-warehouse truck traffic and NO2 significantly increase as warehouse density and the number of warehouse loading docks and parking spaces increase. Increased satellite-observed NO2 near warehouses underscores the need for indirect source rules, incentives for replacing old trucks, and corporate commitments towards electrification. Future ground-based monitoring campaigns may help track impacts of individual or small clusters of facilities.
https://scitechdaily.com/toxic-toll-where-warehouses-rise-so...
> Toxic Toll: Where Warehouses Rise, So Does Air Pollution
(recently assisted in scuttling an industrial park project in Northern IL [someone else's backyard, not mine], it can be done)
> Halfway houses and low income housing doesn't need to exist any more than an Amazon warehouse does.
This must be a joke, right?
EDIT: I guess this is what the opinions of Amazon execs must be. We all question how people can be so blind that they make decisions which lead to huge amounts of suffering and mass destruction of the earths resources, well here it is in black and white.
Sorry but I completely disagree, People lived for thousands of years before warehouses. People dont need 'stuff' - that is a fabrication by capitalism to make you buy more stuff.
Housing, and specifically affordable housing for lower income people, is infinitely more required than more commercial warehouses built to ship people more Chinese rubbish.
Yes the world does need to do something about lower income people. However because of the above low income people today have a higher standard of living than the richest of 200 year ago. (though the rich then did have some luxuries that even the richest today consider only a dream).
> Many women died in childbirth. Many people starved to death in a drought year. Specific to this article, many of those who survived lost their teeth because they didn't have toothpaste.
Personally I would say that advances in science and healthcare has helped these things, not capitalist corporations with big warehouses unnecesarily shipping consumer products around the world.
Umm no?
In 1600BC when the Egyptians were first performing autopsies and writing about the human anatomy, they were not ordering scalpels off Amazon.
When Aristotle first identified the difference between arteries and veins in 4th Century BC, I doubt he got his magnifying lenses shipped next day from a warehouse.
When Leonardo da Vinci made his incredible drawings of the human skeleton and mapped out the human anatomy for the first time in 1510, I dont think he needed to sign a drivers delivery note for his pencils and paper.
I think you need to step back a little bit and take a good look at what you are arguing. I am no longer going to reply to this nonsense. Thanks for the fun!
Yes we did have science before, but capitalism was what provided it in more than tiny amounts.
Where I live people have jobs like forester, woodcutter, blacksmith, teacher, doctor, farmer, builders, painters etc. People often do work for somebody else, in return for their services back. Lots of service is provided on a trade basis instead on via money.
People working in commercial warehouses for big companies is a relatively new thing, and it causes most people who do it great unhappiness.
Do you genuinely believe that only the possibility of a world exists where people have to slave all day for big corporations in factories and warehouses?
> You seem to have the opinion that every person on the planet should be working in corporate warehouses and be very happy for that fact, otherwise they would effectively be dead.
I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote.
Corporate companies with warehouses have been around for about 200 years.
So yes, warehouses are a relatively recent thing. The majority of human societal development happened before then.
Neither are all the other manufacturing plants within a few miles of my home.
Neither are all the commercial office buildings with lots of office jobs.
Seems there's a lot of places for people to work that aren't involved in massive noise pollution over my home every minute.
I could see the community having the same reaction if the halfway house decided to have loud parties in the evening or the power plant was constantly emitting exhaust noise into the neighborhood. But it also strikes me that they're entirely reasonable people who just want some peace and quiet.
If you want your packages delivered sooner why not set up your own small communities next to Amazon distribution centers and work out a deal with Amazon to pick up your own packages? Maybe they can even give you a Prime discount for self-pickup??
Technology is just a tool - it's neither progressive nor regressive except in the results of its application usage. I'm not sure where we got this idea that more efficient deliveries == "progress". Progress toward what? Even more efficient deliveries?
* Nothing in particular against Amazon versus Wal-Mart or other generic retailers, Amazon is just the topic of the OP.
In fact, we could build a large warehouse, with adequate parking and even transit, and the warehouse could be brightly lit, and it could not only allow you to pickup what you ordered, but you could see what was available for sale, and even have self-checkout machines that would take card or cash.
We could call it something like "Wall of Markets" or "Walmark" perhaps.
What if you could, but it was 10x more expensive? Obviously you wouldn't want it. Now take a step back and realise that for many people, having drones flying over the city all day long is enough of a reason to not want it.
I don't order from Amazon, and whenever I get things delivered, I'm usually fine walking 5 minutes to the store where I have it delivered.
And honestly, for the kind of items quoted in the article (toothpaste and batteries), I simply plan ahead to have stock.
Or as it happens in most urban areas of the developed world: I can just walk 5-10 min to buy it from a nearby store.
With an individual delivery you get several times the volume of wasted space, plus at least one wasted layer of corrugated cardboard — which must then be taken away using a different truck.
However, the shop does use better climate control and lighting than the warehouse.
It seems like a gimmick. At best to reduce labour costs of delivery drivers.
>NIMBYs are anti-progress because of impacts to their lives and their neighborhood
Improved lives and neighborhoods is the greatest progress possible. Like...isn't this the goal? Suddenly having endless droning of drones is not "progress" in any way at all. It's a regression. People move away from that sort of nuisance, not towards it.
I live in the suburbs of an exurb. Many deliveries are same day. The rest are next day.
"Suburbs" aren't what this is about, and I doubt it has much to do with speed either. Amazon is trying to automate more of the "last mile" to reduce delivery costs.
I'm not sure what what you see my issue as.
Me, at least enough that I cancelled Prime, and took advantage of that "Amazon day" thing they had whenever I could.
I'd love for someone like Amazon or Walmart to offer weekly delivery to my neighborhood, and I could just order things as I remembered them, all delivered every Wednesday or whatever. Save time, save gas, save having to think about it.
Scanning through my recent orders, 90+% of them could take a week to arrive and I wouldn't have noticed, much less minded.