[jknoepfler]

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).

[scythe]

>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.

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.

[philwelch]

Cars are pretty terrible, but horses are even worse, if you can imagine it.

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.

[jogjayr]

No one's seriously suggesting going back to horses.

Many are advocating mass-transit or bike-friendliness.

[bomb199]

I'd like to think if our main form of transport was horses, we'd have solved this problem.

[ravitation]

We'd have invented cars... And that's what we did.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

There's a thing called manure bag which you hang from the saddle and over the horses rump to catch manure on the fly.

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.

[jknoepfler]

I don't recall advocating horses. I advocate using the best means our times make available!

[melq]

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]

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.

[scythe]

Housing prices are rising in Seattle because it's growing. And while Amazon might be the proximal cause of Seattle's growth, the fact remains that some cities in the United States must grow in order for the economy to, you know, fulfill it's debt obligations. Seattle does not have worse homelessness than other cities which are growing at the same rate, although cities with a population decline tend to have a surplus of housing which therefore becomes cheap. So unless Amazon is to be blamed for America's systemic inability to handle homelessness in growing cities, it's a little unfair to point the finger.

[news_to_me]

I think we pretty much agree, and I don't think it's fair to blame Amazon more than any other company, proportional to their effect on the community. I'm just saying, there is an effect there, from Amazon and other business, and the market itself isn't equipped to naturally house the homeless in these circumstances. Without government intervention, the homeless population will grow without any support.

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.