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Comment So let me get this straight (Score 2) 410

Amazon, a large tech company, is hiring a bunch of highly-paid confederate-flag waving gay-bashing white men in Seattle, they're turning the whole county white, and they're going around beating up gay people and burning down gay bars?

Does this even pass the smell test? Of course not. Has anyone involved in this story ever worked for a large modern tech company, or talked to anyone who does? Of course not.

Check the actual references and you get a different story. First of all, King County is not the whitest in the nation. It's the whitest of the top 20 counties in the nation by population. But at 62.4% white non-Hispanic, it's just below at the national average for whiteness (63.7%). Second, "the county's fastest population growth is happening among Asian and mixed-race people."

Third, let's take a look at those attacks. The arson? Committed by one Musab Masmari. White tech company employee? Nope. Unemployed drunk raised by Libyan parents mostly in Libya. Race unclear; Arabs are usually counted as white but Libyans are mostly Berbers who are mixed. The other complaints don't mention the employment or race of the perpetrators, though none of them apparently were traced back to tech company employees.

As the Bloomberg article says, "an industry that's otherwise showering Seattle with jobs and money has become a scapegoat".

The Almighty Buck

Is the Amazon-Led Economic Boom Wrecking Seattle? 410

reifman writes: Seattleites are struggling with massive traffic, rising housing costs and declining diversity. Amazon's building and acquiring enough office space to triple its local headcount by 2020. Facebook, Google and many other tech companies are now expanding here as well — it's the San Franciscoization of Seattle. Downtown is filled with 75 cranes — some blocks look like mining towns. Amazon's hired so many white males that King County is now the whitest in the nation and hate crimes against gays have shot up in a formerly LGBTQ neighborhood. Politicians can't agree on reforming impact fees and taxes to address these issues." An interesting piece of recent advice from a long time Amazonian to the company's interns: avoid full-time employment there.

Comment Re:I hope they realize... (Score 2) 264

US median rent is $762 ($9144 annually). US median household income is $51,900. Which works out to $117/day after rent, not $20. Federal taxes for that group would be somewhere around 14%, state income tax varies but 6% should be slightly high, so call it 20% for taxes, now we're down to $88/day after rent and taxes. Still more than $20.

Comment Re:I hope they realize... (Score 1) 264

If you get a 100K job, it means you are good at it, not because someone handed you that job on a silver platter.

I think some of them -- the ones who went directly from the approved pre-schools to the high-ranking suburban public schools (or less likely, private schools) and college prep courses to the top colleges, did get it handed to them on a silver platter, or at least they certainly didn't notice any difficulties. This makes them easy prey for the philosophy of "privilege" (which they got fed in their electives at that top college).

Then they go and assume it's because they were the right color and gender (because that's what they've been told by those professors, and because they've read and believed all the atrocity stories about how people of the wrong color and gender are treated in tech), and start trying to shove all that guilt off on the rest of us who are of similar color and gender. They make some recruits, but those of us whose life wasn't a cakewalk aren't buying it... and Eastern European immigrants (who typically didn't have it easy) _especially_ don't buy it for some reason.

Comment Re:the real admission is peak driving. (Score 1) 285

What's a bigger cost? 100 residents in an apartment building? Or 50 residents spread out among 40 houses?

For schools, the apartment building (assuming same demographics of residents, which is unlikely; there's a reason municipalities love 55+ developments). For police, the apartment building again. For fire, probably the apartment building but I'm less sure of that.

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