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Large corporations often make deals with other large corporations, and they prosper. Workers used to do better when a larger percentage of them collectively ba

Large corporations often make deals with other large corporations, and they prosper. Workers used to do better when a larger percentage of them collectively bargained. But somehow, the possibility that citizens, who are represented by various local governments, would use those governments to cooperate with each other across the lines on the map sounds like science-fiction and is disparaged as far-fetched and unworkable in many of the comments here. What is it that Americans don't understand? Do they understand that Seattle, home of HQ1, has home-grown homelessness that is rising? Do they understand that Amazon will automate away any job outside the executive suite that it can? Do they understand the power that Amazon will have over the lucky city that makes the investment? Do they understand that 50 years is now the standard term for the tax breaks that Amazon will be offered?

matchbok 9y ago
Homelessness is not Amazon's problem. Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work? Agreed. Agreed.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  "Homelessness is not Amazon's problem." 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.
  - 40acres 9y ago
    Amazon also provides high wage workers who are taxed on their income, and who generate economic activity which can also be taxed and used by municipalities to try to solve homelessness. On net I wonder what the benefit / determent of Amazon moving to a city would have on homelessness.
    - ImSkeptical 9y ago
      Another confounding factor is that the workforce tends to be left leaning. Left leaning population, plus new money for taxes means more social services for the homeless. More social services means homeless from less accommodating communities will move in. I'd also be curious in a study on Amazon's effect on the homeless.
      - xienze 9y ago
        > More social services means homeless from less accommodating communities will move in. 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.
        kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
        These are all cities without overly harsh Summer and Winter seasons. That makes it easier to be outside year round. The destitute homeless in less favorable regions aren't generally mobile enough to migrate to these places.
        ImSkeptical 9y ago
        I'm sure that plays a part. However, there are small cities around Seattle, with similar climates, that have very few homeless. My interpretation is that these places have less services and the police are more likely to move the homeless. Plus, while living outside in LA doesn't sound so bad, Seattle can't be too high on the list of nice places to live outside.
        xienze 9y ago
        NYC has a massive homeless population as well.
    - ChristianBundy 9y ago
      But this isn't how it works. Political leverage increases with income, and people who don't have to work to survive realized long ago that it's much more efficient to lobby for tax decreases than it is to "generate economic activity". 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.
  - tinymollusk 9y ago
    I think automation has clearly been a net good over the past 200 years. I agree that it does have a cost, and perhaps the compound interest (environmentally) will come due very soon. But it's hard for me to see that it's neutral, given how much better our standard of living is compared to pre-industrial revolution. 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.
    - stretchwithme 9y ago
      We would not even understand environmental pollution without automation. You can't send a human to space with binoculars to do a satellite's job, for example.
      - jogjayr 9y ago
        We also wouldn't have very much environmental pollution without automation. Humanity wouldn't have left much of a permanent mark on the Earth if we had gone extinct before industrialization. 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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- untog 9y ago
  > Homelessness is not Amazon's problem. 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".
  - DSingularity 9y ago
    If they refuse to answer the points we are raising by attacking us trying represent us as regressive idiots then attack them back. Make them feel like greedy pigs willing to let the world starve to make more money. 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.
    - NegativeLatency 9y ago
      Sharpen up your pitchforks.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      when humanity overcomes the greediness that allows us to accept wealth inequality So, never.
    - BookmarkSaver 9y ago
- Brendinooo 9y ago
  >Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work? 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.
- stretchwithme 9y ago
  Technology is why we have the prosperity we have. 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.
  - NegativeK 9y ago
    I've downvoted you because you're using extremely hyperbolic arguments that I don't feel add to the discussion.
    - stretchwithme 9y ago
      I didn't say anything that isn't true. Technologies save us tremendous amount of effort, even ones that we take for granted. It's not hyperbolic to point that out. I'm not exaggerating anything. But feel free to point out where I am exaggerating.
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  Automation is a tool that has both good and bad effects. 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.
  - matchbok 9y ago
    Agreed, but I'd say automation also opens up new opportunities as well.
- jknoepfler 9y ago
  I certainly don't want you riding a car into a crowded downtown. I personally walked to work in downtown Seattle (to Amazon, ironically). I'd vote for any local candidate who pushed for an aggressive pedestrian-only zone in the city with a strategy for expanding mass transit access and park and rides. The technology for affordable mass transit is almost a century old; I think incremental, sustainable progress on that technology is better than anything the Tesla has to offer. Wide-spread single-user cars are one of the worst things to happen to this country. 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).
  - melq 9y ago
    Seems to me that more of the blame for homelessness should be placed on the government than on Amazon. Not working at Amazon is hardly the reason for someone's homelessness.
    - news_to_me 9y ago
      I don't think you understand — homelessness can be seen as an indirect effect of Amazon's presence, based on property values, not whether or not they employ the homeless. 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.
      - 9y ago
- dbingham 9y ago
  Automation is only good if the benefits of said automation are shared broadly among the populace. For the time being, that is not the case. Instead the benefits are held closely by only a tiny percentage of the population, who use said automation to collect enormous power and force an increasingly large number of people to live in increasingly precarious circumstances. 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.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    10%, not 1%, unless you have more recent data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/perspective-on-the-stock-market-rally-80-of-stock-value-held-by-top-10/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/...
    - dbingham 9y ago
      Ahh, thank you. That is the stat I was referring to, I misremembered the number. I would edit it, but it won't seem to let me.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Yeah, there's a short window of time for editions :)
  - Terr_ 9y ago
    Exactly, the root of all this is the power-balance between groups of humans and how it is changing and who likes it that way and who doesn't.
- adamsea 9y ago
  Is Amazon not composed of human beings who are citizens of various cities, states, and nation(s) in which there is homelessness?
- zanny 9y ago
  Homelessness is only not Amazons problem because corporate charters annul the company of any moral responsibility. 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.
  - sien 9y ago
    GDP shouldn't be compared to revenue. Revenue is flow through a company from customers. 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.
    - zanny 9y ago
      GDP is also flow through a country from productivity to revenue realized. Every country is not adding its flat GDP to its wealth every year because a majority of the value created from GDP goes to buying other countries GDP in the same way a companies revenue goes mostly to paying for its operating costs. IE, the US has a 20 trillion GDP but only sees around 4 trillion growth a year in national wealth the same way Amazon can have 135B revenue and 4B profit. Of course, the US having a "profit margin" of 20% to Amazons 3% demonstrates its not a one to one comparison, but the they are definitely the more apt comparisons for measuring how large an economic system is, rather than just how much its profiting. 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.
- bsder 9y ago
  > Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work? 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.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Efficient doesn't always equate to good. Which is why we came up with the word “ruthless”.
- xg15 9y ago
  > Do you want us to ride horses to work? 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.
  - archagon 9y ago
    Also, they are fairly self-driving!
794CD01 9y ago
Other companies might balk at it, but I trust Bezos' Amazon to automate away executive jobs if they can find a way to do so effectively.
- na85 9y ago
  I would never trust a corporation to do anything they're not contractually obligated to do.
  - prepend 9y ago
    Automating executive jobs would increase profit. Trust corporations to maximize shareholder equity, as they are legally obligated to do.
    - na85 9y ago
      It wouldn't increase compensation for those executives whose jobs are being automated, and it's the executives who control the company.
      - prepend 9y ago
        This is a good point. But it would increase compensation for the remaining executive. Perhaps a middle manager could nix the decision for some time, but someone higher up would benefit. I think it’s also faulty to think that automated executives means fired old executives. Most likely would be that executives are freed up from rote activities and would then do higher value activities. Kind of like how Amazon Go didn’t fire a bunch of cashiers, but is a new venture. Automation results in new jobs on the macro level because it removes the boring parts of jobs. I think the end game would be to have all of Amazon automated except for Bezos. This is an extreme example and don’t think it would go to this level, but this seems to be Amazon’s model.
tdb7893 9y ago
I'm not really sure how they could negotiate together. They could cooperate somewhat but if a city looks like they weren't going to get the HQ it would be in their best interest to leave their collective bargaining pact and try to undercut it to get the HQ.
wmil 9y ago
> has home-grown homelessness that is rising I'd be curious to see any stats on this. How many of the current homeless were actually living in the city 10 years ago? I'd expect that many Seattle's homeless are migrants from parts of the US with harsher winters.
- jld 9y ago
  It's not a perfect metric, but 86% of people accessing publicly-financed homelessness services in 2016 reported that their last residence was located in King County. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-countys-homeless-are-overwhelmingly-from-here-service-providers-say/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-coun...
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Seattle has always had homeless people, from the time "skid row" meant the place where you skid freshly cut logs to the waterfront to be cut. Likewise, Portland, Vancouver (BC), and (to a lesser extent) Spokane have and have had very similar homeless problems of roughly the same nature. Basically, these three cities have acted as a catchment for almost anyone in BC, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, that fall through the cracks (and ya, you'll find homeless people from places like Bonners Ferry). Basically, its the red rural areas around these cities exporting their problems to the cities that actually provide services to deal with them. Couple that with kids from these areas with little education going to Seattle to make it, and not making it.
randomdata 9y ago
> Workers used to do better when a larger percentage of them collectively bargained. What I find interesting is that the unionization rate in Canada today is more or less on-par with the peak unionization in the USA, and is one of the strongest unionized countries in the world. Yet, I constantly hear Canadian workers complain about how they are unfairly compensated compared to Americans, where unionization has practically disappeared, doing the same job. Most Canadians I talk to seem to think that labour declined in the late 70s-early 80s, which is actually when Canadian unionization was at its peak. However, those are the years we really started to see union decline in the USA. American workers could understandably make that claim. Canadian workers shouldn't. Those should have been the best years for labour ever, based on union strength. Is this entirely grass is greener syndrome? Canadians do tend to focus on American media more than their own, and the decline of unionization in the USA may have led them to believe that the decline also applied to Canada. Or are their points valid and higher unionization doesn't bring the effects we like to think it does?
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  In Germany, there are very well paid mostly manual labor jobs in unionized industries, especially at the big car manufacturers. In non-unionized industries, wages can be much lower, down to about 30% of what workers in the car industry earn. That is before taxes, though. After taxes, the difference is about 2:1. There is also data showing that unionized workers get about 1% more of a scheduled raise each year.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    I think it is well understood in economic theory that when you can prevent competition in the marketplace, you can charge significantly more for for your product/service. After all, if the people making 1/3 the amount the union workers were making were allowed to take the jobs in the auto industry, they would. Who wouldn't want to triple their income by simply changing employers? However, I'm not sure that is the same as the "rising tide lifting all boats" that we're discussing here. The results seen in your example are limited to the lucky handful who have gained market protectionism from the rest of the people in the industry.

matchbok 9y ago

Homelessness is not Amazon's problem. Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work? Agreed. Agreed.

s73ver_ 9y ago
"Homelessness is not Amazon's problem." 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.
- 40acres 9y ago
  Amazon also provides high wage workers who are taxed on their income, and who generate economic activity which can also be taxed and used by municipalities to try to solve homelessness. On net I wonder what the benefit / determent of Amazon moving to a city would have on homelessness.
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    Another confounding factor is that the workforce tends to be left leaning. Left leaning population, plus new money for taxes means more social services for the homeless. More social services means homeless from less accommodating communities will move in. I'd also be curious in a study on Amazon's effect on the homeless.
    - xienze 9y ago
      > More social services means homeless from less accommodating communities will move in. 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.
      - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
        These are all cities without overly harsh Summer and Winter seasons. That makes it easier to be outside year round. The destitute homeless in less favorable regions aren't generally mobile enough to migrate to these places.
        ImSkeptical 9y ago
        I'm sure that plays a part. However, there are small cities around Seattle, with similar climates, that have very few homeless. My interpretation is that these places have less services and the police are more likely to move the homeless. Plus, while living outside in LA doesn't sound so bad, Seattle can't be too high on the list of nice places to live outside.
        xienze 9y ago
        NYC has a massive homeless population as well.
  - ChristianBundy 9y ago
    But this isn't how it works. Political leverage increases with income, and people who don't have to work to survive realized long ago that it's much more efficient to lobby for tax decreases than it is to "generate economic activity". 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.
- tinymollusk 9y ago
  I think automation has clearly been a net good over the past 200 years. I agree that it does have a cost, and perhaps the compound interest (environmentally) will come due very soon. But it's hard for me to see that it's neutral, given how much better our standard of living is compared to pre-industrial revolution. 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.
  - stretchwithme 9y ago
    We would not even understand environmental pollution without automation. You can't send a human to space with binoculars to do a satellite's job, for example.
    - jogjayr 9y ago
      We also wouldn't have very much environmental pollution without automation. Humanity wouldn't have left much of a permanent mark on the Earth if we had gone extinct before industrialization. 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
untog 9y ago
> Homelessness is not Amazon's problem. 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".
- DSingularity 9y ago
  If they refuse to answer the points we are raising by attacking us trying represent us as regressive idiots then attack them back. Make them feel like greedy pigs willing to let the world starve to make more money. 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.
  - NegativeLatency 9y ago
    Sharpen up your pitchforks.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    when humanity overcomes the greediness that allows us to accept wealth inequality So, never.
  - BookmarkSaver 9y ago
Brendinooo 9y ago
>Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work? 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.
stretchwithme 9y ago
Technology is why we have the prosperity we have. 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.
- NegativeK 9y ago
  I've downvoted you because you're using extremely hyperbolic arguments that I don't feel add to the discussion.
  - stretchwithme 9y ago
    I didn't say anything that isn't true. Technologies save us tremendous amount of effort, even ones that we take for granted. It's not hyperbolic to point that out. I'm not exaggerating anything. But feel free to point out where I am exaggerating.
TaylorAlexander 9y ago
Automation is a tool that has both good and bad effects. 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.
- matchbok 9y ago
  Agreed, but I'd say automation also opens up new opportunities as well.
jknoepfler 9y ago
I certainly don't want you riding a car into a crowded downtown. I personally walked to work in downtown Seattle (to Amazon, ironically). I'd vote for any local candidate who pushed for an aggressive pedestrian-only zone in the city with a strategy for expanding mass transit access and park and rides. The technology for affordable mass transit is almost a century old; I think incremental, sustainable progress on that technology is better than anything the Tesla has to offer. Wide-spread single-user cars are one of the worst things to happen to this country. 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).
- melq 9y ago
  Seems to me that more of the blame for homelessness should be placed on the government than on Amazon. Not working at Amazon is hardly the reason for someone's homelessness.
  - news_to_me 9y ago
    I don't think you understand — homelessness can be seen as an indirect effect of Amazon's presence, based on property values, not whether or not they employ the homeless. 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.
    - 9y ago
dbingham 9y ago
Automation is only good if the benefits of said automation are shared broadly among the populace. For the time being, that is not the case. Instead the benefits are held closely by only a tiny percentage of the population, who use said automation to collect enormous power and force an increasingly large number of people to live in increasingly precarious circumstances. 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.
- icebraining 9y ago
  10%, not 1%, unless you have more recent data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/perspective-on-the-stock-market-rally-80-of-stock-value-held-by-top-10/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/...
  - dbingham 9y ago
    Ahh, thank you. That is the stat I was referring to, I misremembered the number. I would edit it, but it won't seem to let me.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Yeah, there's a short window of time for editions :)
- Terr_ 9y ago
  Exactly, the root of all this is the power-balance between groups of humans and how it is changing and who likes it that way and who doesn't.
adamsea 9y ago
Is Amazon not composed of human beings who are citizens of various cities, states, and nation(s) in which there is homelessness?
zanny 9y ago
Homelessness is only not Amazons problem because corporate charters annul the company of any moral responsibility. 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.
- sien 9y ago
  GDP shouldn't be compared to revenue. Revenue is flow through a company from customers. 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.
  - zanny 9y ago
    GDP is also flow through a country from productivity to revenue realized. Every country is not adding its flat GDP to its wealth every year because a majority of the value created from GDP goes to buying other countries GDP in the same way a companies revenue goes mostly to paying for its operating costs. IE, the US has a 20 trillion GDP but only sees around 4 trillion growth a year in national wealth the same way Amazon can have 135B revenue and 4B profit. Of course, the US having a "profit margin" of 20% to Amazons 3% demonstrates its not a one to one comparison, but the they are definitely the more apt comparisons for measuring how large an economic system is, rather than just how much its profiting. 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.
bsder 9y ago
> Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work? 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.
- hinkley 9y ago
  Efficient doesn't always equate to good. Which is why we came up with the word “ruthless”.
xg15 9y ago
> Do you want us to ride horses to work? 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.
- archagon 9y ago
  Also, they are fairly self-driving!

794CD01 9y ago

Other companies might balk at it, but I trust Bezos' Amazon to automate away executive jobs if they can find a way to do so effectively.

na85 9y ago
I would never trust a corporation to do anything they're not contractually obligated to do.
- prepend 9y ago
  Automating executive jobs would increase profit. Trust corporations to maximize shareholder equity, as they are legally obligated to do.
  - na85 9y ago
    It wouldn't increase compensation for those executives whose jobs are being automated, and it's the executives who control the company.
    - prepend 9y ago
      This is a good point. But it would increase compensation for the remaining executive. Perhaps a middle manager could nix the decision for some time, but someone higher up would benefit. I think it’s also faulty to think that automated executives means fired old executives. Most likely would be that executives are freed up from rote activities and would then do higher value activities. Kind of like how Amazon Go didn’t fire a bunch of cashiers, but is a new venture. Automation results in new jobs on the macro level because it removes the boring parts of jobs. I think the end game would be to have all of Amazon automated except for Bezos. This is an extreme example and don’t think it would go to this level, but this seems to be Amazon’s model.

tdb7893 9y ago

I'm not really sure how they could negotiate together. They could cooperate somewhat but if a city looks like they weren't going to get the HQ it would be in their best interest to leave their collective bargaining pact and try to undercut it to get the HQ.

wmil 9y ago

> has home-grown homelessness that is rising I'd be curious to see any stats on this. How many of the current homeless were actually living in the city 10 years ago? I'd expect that many Seattle's homeless are migrants from parts of the US with harsher winters.

jld 9y ago
It's not a perfect metric, but 86% of people accessing publicly-financed homelessness services in 2016 reported that their last residence was located in King County. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-countys-homeless-are-overwhelmingly-from-here-service-providers-say/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-coun...
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Seattle has always had homeless people, from the time "skid row" meant the place where you skid freshly cut logs to the waterfront to be cut. Likewise, Portland, Vancouver (BC), and (to a lesser extent) Spokane have and have had very similar homeless problems of roughly the same nature. Basically, these three cities have acted as a catchment for almost anyone in BC, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, that fall through the cracks (and ya, you'll find homeless people from places like Bonners Ferry). Basically, its the red rural areas around these cities exporting their problems to the cities that actually provide services to deal with them. Couple that with kids from these areas with little education going to Seattle to make it, and not making it.

randomdata 9y ago

> Workers used to do better when a larger percentage of them collectively bargained. What I find interesting is that the unionization rate in Canada today is more or less on-par with the peak unionization in the USA, and is one of the strongest unionized countries in the world. Yet, I constantly hear Canadian workers complain about how they are unfairly compensated compared to Americans, where unionization has practically disappeared, doing the same job. Most Canadians I talk to seem to think that labour declined in the late 70s-early 80s, which is actually when Canadian unionization was at its peak. However, those are the years we really started to see union decline in the USA. American workers could understandably make that claim. Canadian workers shouldn't. Those should have been the best years for labour ever, based on union strength. Is this entirely grass is greener syndrome? Canadians do tend to focus on American media more than their own, and the decline of unionization in the USA may have led them to believe that the decline also applied to Canada. Or are their points valid and higher unionization doesn't bring the effects we like to think it does?

ahartmetz 9y ago
In Germany, there are very well paid mostly manual labor jobs in unionized industries, especially at the big car manufacturers. In non-unionized industries, wages can be much lower, down to about 30% of what workers in the car industry earn. That is before taxes, though. After taxes, the difference is about 2:1. There is also data showing that unionized workers get about 1% more of a scheduled raise each year.
- randomdata 9y ago
  I think it is well understood in economic theory that when you can prevent competition in the marketplace, you can charge significantly more for for your product/service. After all, if the people making 1/3 the amount the union workers were making were allowed to take the jobs in the auto industry, they would. Who wouldn't want to triple their income by simply changing employers? However, I'm not sure that is the same as the "rising tide lifting all boats" that we're discussing here. The results seen in your example are limited to the lucky handful who have gained market protectionism from the rest of the people in the industry.