I'm just amazed at the level of negativity in this thread and so many grey comments. To look at something objectively and appreciate for what it is, is very important.
That's my (european) perspective on this:
Philanthropy is like going back to feudalism again: we don't need goodwill; we need social rights.
Those kinds of services shouldn't depend on the generosity of the rich and powerful: those services should be provided because they are social rights. Just like healthcare and education.
Of course I am happy that some homeless in Seattle will have a nice roof over their head thanks to Amazon's generosity,
but I would be even happier if Amazon would start paying its fair share taxes across Europe, instead of eluding taxation thanks to financial tricks.
That's not negativity: that's the elephant in the room. We should be aware between a nice action and a systemic problem, or between good advertisement and reality.
> Those kinds of services shouldn't depend on the generosity of the rich and powerful
Ok, but they do, so this is a good thing. It's like you're saying that the signing of a peace treaty is a bad thing because we shouldn't have wars in the first place.
No, this is a peace treaty for a single block in one city, out of an entire country that is still at war.
It's nice that a handful of people are being helped, but they are utterly dwarved by the amounts of people in the same situation who won't ever receive help, not because it's impossible (other countries do it fine) but because the country refuses to recognize the needs of all of its citizens.
Additionally I believe organizations are better when they serve a prime directive.
I always shake my head in disgust when I see companies like Chick-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby trying to promote religion, or the myriad of Silicon Valley companies trying to promote some progressive social agenda, or even fireman in uniform out on the side of the road collecting money for something.
It's not that I disagree with helping people but I think it's best done if fireman are putting out fires and Amazon is delivering goods and Chick-Fil-A is making sandwiches to the best of their ability and at the best price point rather than posturing about Jesus.
The organizations for helping the helpless should be charities, churches, and since we can't depend on these (and many have ulterior motives), indeed mostly government itself.
We don't need puff PR moves. We need efficiency. And dependable results that scale to society at large.
Just a FYI: If you live in the US the reason you see "Fireman in uniform on the side of the road collecting money for something" is because 70% of America is protected by volunteer firefighters.
They are out there likely collecting money for some essential piece of equipment like a new fire truck or protective gear for their members.
"The organizations for helping the helpless should be charities, churches, and since we can't depend on these (and many have ulterior motives), indeed mostly government itself."
Your cynicism is nearly, but not quite, complete. Government has ulterior motives too. Most simply of the "buying votes" form; anyone dependent on the government isn't going to vote for less of it. But there are more subtle forms of it too.
There is almost nobody who is altruistic, but can pass a "no other motives except pure altruism" test. If you think you can name someone, I'm sure someone else will be sure to pop up and explain their ignoble motives.
A valid point. Agents of government also indeed have motive.
I probably am a cynic (or a realist as I prefer to consider) but it's less the ulterior motive of churches and charities and more the lack of dependability and ability to scale.
I see it to be a function of government to care for the disabled or less fortunate if for no other reason than to avoid the associated social problems. Others might not agree. Government traditionally doesn't do the most efficient job at things, and this one they are doing particularly poorly at, but to be fair it is a hard problem with lots of factors.
I've started to think we might have the causality reversed here: government is inefficient not because it's 'the government', it's inefficient because the problems it concerns itself with don't have efficient market-based solutions (e.g. poverty alleviation, national defence etc.).
If you think about government delivered services as simply a provider operating in a market for that service, you'll find a startling large proportion of them are natural monopoly markets, or markets that produce public goods (non-rivalrous and non-excludable e.g. national defence). Would a private monopolist be more efficient in these situations, simply because they are not 'the government'?
The faith in The Market that some people seem to have has always struck me as odd. It's a way of viewing the world where worth and value are measured primarily by profit. It's also a stochastic model (even if it were perfectly efficient) and will lead to local optima, which may be grossly suboptimal for some or even most people.
Since this view requires looking at profit for deciding whether something should exist or be done, you end up with things like the county north of me: no more hospital. It's not profitable there, they're down to an urgent care clinic and local doctors, mostly GPs. But for anything major, it requires transportation to a facility that's 45+ minutes away on a good day. So for emergency situations you're possibly totally fucked and will have more serious consequences due to the delays (fatalities, amputations due to delays, etc.). For less immediate problems you still have many increases in local economic problems as the infirmed have to travel much further for specialized care. I needed PT, fine, it's 10 minutes from my office. In that county, it's the next county over. You need most of a day off for a 1 hour PT session now. Or you skip the PT session and are less effective and more prone to injury and illness as a result.
"The government", as derided as it may be by some people, largely provides those services which are not profitable generally (defense, police) or not profitable locally (hospitals) or not profitable immediately (education). Those are all financial sinks, but necessary for the overall good of the nation. So the government provides them either directly (public schools) or indirectly (healthcare through subsidies and giving financial incentives to doctors to go to rural areas).
When those services do become profitable, it's generally by abuse of authority or position. The defense industry by milking the taxpayers for all we're worth. Healthcare by hiding the true costs of things and making it hard to discover. Education with for-profit universities (again, by milking the taxpayers, this one by tricking people into getting federal loans for an expensive sub-par degree).
I won't say governments are perfect, but at least buying votes values each individual equally (in theory, there's various issues of how democracy is actually implemented).
My take on this is exactly the opposite. I much prefer companies and individuals voluntarily using their resources to help those in need vs the government forcibly extracting those resources in order to do the same.
That mindset worked well when our towns and businesses were smaller and tight knit. We live in a different world of global corporations with far larger areas of responsibility and externalities. Helping Seattle is great. However, people throughout Washington deserve help... you won't find Amazon, much less Seattle individuals, taking a 5 hour drive to volunteer.
As a shareholder, I don't expect or want Amazon to take ownership of community help. Their work is admirable but ultimately limited in scope and efficiency. Adding in overhead for accounting, tax enforcement, these issues would received more money and higher ROI if we funded them through higher taxes.
You want your money, as shareholder, to return a profit and don't want the company focused elsewhere. However, you want the government to step in to solve this problem using other people's money. That is the problem with America, greed oversee everything else and when it impeded on our greed we automatically fall to the government to the solve the current issue.
Communities are still perfectly capable of taking care of their own. Smaller towns throughout the US do this but you don't see those from the larger cities and/or coasts doing this. I live in Eastern WA/Western ID, and the community is still very much involved in these types of projects without the government stepping.
What a pile of nonsense. Tell us more, in this thread abut a charity for homeless people in Seattle that runs on an enormous level of community and volunteer support, how big city people are evil and soulless.
Because modern governments are the epitome of human decency?
I'm as cynical as about corporations as the next guy , but what makes you so rosy eyed about the government? Is it because governments invade foreign countries and subjugate their people? That they incarcerate millions of their own people for abusing the wrong kind of drug? That they surveil all of our communications?
For sure private philanthropy is not perfect, but neither are government programs.
Government behavior isn't immediately tied to profit (bear with me).
Profit's tied to government (in the US especially), but there's at least a single degree of separation (maybe less so recently). Our democracy still has the theoretical power to change it.
When it's corporate it's entirely inflexible, directly tied to profit (and the economy), and there's little to no requirement for transparency. It's all the downsides of government, with an included layer of obscurity... and also some more downsides.
I think our current administration makes this pretty clear. If left to corporate interests major assets like Planned Parenthood, National Parks, and The National Endowment for the Arts would likely not exist at all (that's just the tip of the iceberg).
Corporate funded initiatives can be completely ejected on a whim when profits are down. With the federal government you can't just remove these things without some level of checks & balances...
Are you being serious? That's the most absurd argument I have ever heard. "The government" is not an entity, it's a collection of separate organizations run by democratically elected officials. Military and law enforcement agencies have no relation to domestic programs.
Furthermore, it could be argued that your examples actually demonstrate the effectiveness of government programs... I oppose surveillance and warfare, but citizens keep voting those politicians into office, and those programs are achieving their results with astoundingly undesirable effectiveness.
I suspect our domestic problems would be resolved overnight if they had similar funding levels.
Modern governments != your government. No government is perfect but there are a lot of examples of governments taking good care of their citizens, just look at Netherlands or Scandinavia for some inspiration.
Individuals and corporations voluntarily using their resources to help others _is_ general human decency. If they're instead being forced to help against their will I find that to be a much less desirable circumstance (though perhaps still preferable to those in need not being helped at all).
I would much rather trust a regularly-changing collection of my fellow citizens, who we've all voted on on some regular basis, to put together laws that reflect our will.
Trusting a wealthy company or individual to keep giving a hand-out? Nope, no interest in begging for scraps. I prefer the self-determination of a government by the people, for the people, etc.
Corporations are made of people and supported by people (customers). Are they not representative of those people?
With all the arcane rules and policies of any government, you could probably make a case that corporations are more representative than a corrupted political process.
They represent some of those people. But only if they're considered stakeholders. See cutting of pensions, layoffs, poor benefits, golden parachutes, planned obsolescence.
If corporations actually represented all the stakeholders, salaries would be higher, retirement plans would be better, products would be designed to last longer, and golden parachutes wouldn't exist or be as big. Right now, CxO's get an outsized representation compared to their actual role within the organization; same for members of corporate boards.
That's the theory, sure, but it's never actually worked that way in practice, so far as my experience has gone. In practice, I find that I am less frequently disappointed or confused, and more frequently able to accomplish my goals and make sense of the world I live in, when I think of levels of government above that of the city as increasingly alien organizations. The US federal government might as well be a foreign occupying imperial power.
> Unfortunately this would mean such services are segregated by race, religion, culture, and location.
These services are already segregated by race, religion, culture, and location - yes, even in Western European countries - both explicitly and implicitly.
In fact, pretending that these problems don't exist and that the government effectively supports and protects all citizens equally is exactly how systemic racism, sexism, and bigotry persist and propagate.
WAT!? Oh noes, in the feudal times, they had PRIMA NOCTA AND EVERYONE SUPPORTED IT!!!
Yeah, there were abuses. Seems more then than there are now. Western Ethics have evolved and are now reflected in ALL of our institutions in some capacity or another. It's not your government protecting you from evil corporations. It's people. Always people who believe things. Change those beliefs and you change everything else.
That's an extreme example. There are many less extreme ones.
If you trust a self-selected random sampling of "people," I suggest that you participate in a jury trial... or just read some YouTube comments.
Government assistance is subject to the rule of law. The rules are public, relatively objective, and codified. The rule of law as implemented by people is by no means perfect, but it's vastly superior to the rule of random emotionally-driven whim.
Governments are subject to the whims of the people as the modern US continues to show. It doesn't matter what fancy rules you have written in a dusty drawer, when people want something to happen, it happens. Though as an aggregate of what everyone involved wanted to happen. Our society follows those rules today largely because we were taught and learned to believe in them. As those rules fail, people will learn and believe in other things.
You can call it 'wealth redistribution' or you can call it 'an acknowledgement that things like the state enforcement of the artifice of private property in urban areas results in humans being unable to build themselves homes'.
I'm trying to make sure I understand your comment: are you suggesting urban areas are better without the concept of private property, because if there is no private property then humans can "build themselves homes"?
he's suggesting that you can turn it from an angry "the poor take from the rich", into an enlightened "the rich know that it's best to appease everyone in the long run".
I never understood the wealth redistribution argument from (USA) Americans. If you make $32,400 a year you are in the top 1% globally. Thus you have the power to fix it, at least on the small scale and yet I haven't heard of a single person who holds these views even attempting to do so. When it comes to most of the western world screaming about income equality won't "help you with medical costs/student loans" in fact it will do very much the opposite unless you chose to implement it in a manner that really doesn't create more equality as much as making a certain class in a certain nation wealthier, but then aren't you just as bad as the capitalists you complain about?
"I never understood the wealth redistribution argument from (USA) Americans. If you make $32,400 a year you are in the top 1% globally."
The math doesn't pencil out. Global population is approximately 7.4 billion.[1] One percent of 7.4 billion is 74 million. In cannot be the case that every member of the global one percent is American. But there are more than 70 million Americans that made money income of more than $47,000 in 2015.[2]
A brief dig didn't get me to any cited data. They refer (without link) to "Global Rich List", which might be http://www.globalrichlist.com/.
Scrolling through all their infographics, I finally get to this: "For the income track, we've used the most recent (2008) statistics from the World Bank, based on household surveys. Here we rank you against the entire world population at the time of the surveys, estimated at 6.69 billion people."
Have you outsourced your brain to the first link in the google results? If there's something wrong with the logic of what I've written or the data sources I'm using, please point it out.
Just the number I found, what do you say it is? 71% of the world lives on less than $10 a day, average globally yearly income is less than $1,500. Even the worst off Americans are extremely well off comparatively to the majority of the world is my point.
The comment you are replying to is using the pigeonhole principle to cast doubt on your data by saying that there are more Americans with income over the 1% threshold you cite than can fit into 1% of the world's population.
I dug into the data behind your claim, briefly, and I think I ended at a self-reported survey. So, that data is probably wrong.
> If you make $32,400 a year you are in the top 1% globally. Thus you have the power to fix it, at least on the small scale
But we also live in a rich nation, and things cost more. If you're a family living in New York, $32k a year isn't going to leave you with a lot of spare cash to send to families in need overseas.
You'll note that many of those expenses are things the majority of the world lacks (homes with electricity, internet and running water/education expenses/entertainment budgets larger than most peoples total yearly income). If this is a valid defense of that policy why isn't "of course I need to make 10 million a year I have 3 mortgages, 5 luxury cars and a fully crewed yacht" a defence for keeping things as is? What is fundamentally different?
>>If you make $32,400 a year you are in the top 1% globally
This meme needs to die. You
may be in the top 1% globally, but cost of living is based on your country and state/city. Making $32,400 a year as a household puts one not much higher than poverty level in America.
> Thus you have the power to fix it, at least on the small scale, and yet I haven't heard of a single person who holds these views even attempting to do so.
That could be because they aren't trying to help -- or it could be because of the difference between "I haven't heard of ..." and "I know they aren't". What reason do you have to think that it's the former?
Specifically, do you know whether the people you're talking to give money to charities that try to help poor people? (Whether in the US or abroad in poorer places where one can do more good per dollar.)
In any case, I think your criticism is logically unsound. That is, you can't get from "X doesn't spend his own money trying to change Y" to "X is insincere when saying Y should be changed", and still less to "Y should not in fact be changed".
Let's take a concrete example. X has an income of $100k/year and says that incomes at that level should be taxed an extra $1k/year in order to help the poorest people in society. X could find a poor person and give them $1k/year, but doesn't. Does this show that X doesn't really mean what he says?
Nope. Let me sketch for you a position X could (somewhat plausibly) hold. X is a kinda-utilitarian. He wants to maximize overall well-being, except that he cares (let's say) 100x more about his own well-being than any other person's. Of course there's more to well-being than money, but let's say that (in X's opinion) income makes a contribution to well-being that's proportional to log(annual_income+$5k) -- I remark that this sort of dependence of utility on money is very widely used, and isn't some sort of unnatural cherry-picked thing chosen to get the results I want. And let's suppose that X is in the US, that the US's labour force is 150M people, of whom 20% are at or above that $100k/year threshold and 10% are at or below let's say $12k/year. X's proposal is to take $1k/year from each of the 30M comfortably-off people and give $2k/year to each of the 15M poor people.
So, how do the utility calculations stack up? For the "global" change: 30M people go from log(105k) to log(104k) and 15M people from log(17k) to log(19k). (Actually, some of the 30M will be on higher incomes and lose less utility, and some of the 15M will be on lower incomes and gain more utility.) So each of the comfortable people loses 0.0096 units of utility and each of the poor people gains 0.111 units. Since 0.111 is much more than twice 0.0096, this is a big win overall. Of course we also need to count X's loss 100x more -- but that's completely swamped by the millions of other people affected.
But for the "personal" change where X alone makes the sacrifice: he goes from log(105k) to log(104k), losing 0.0096 units ... but remember that he counts himself 100x more, so he actually loses 0.96 units. That's much more than the 0.057 units his $1k could provide to a poor person.(Not 0.111 -- remember that the plan was to redistribute two lots of $1k/year to each poor person, but there's only one X.)
A society all of whose comfortably-off people think as X does would choose to make that change, making the poor richer and the rich poorer for an overall benefit; all of them would agree with this despite caring 100x more about themselves than about each other person, because there are so many other people. But a single X would not choose to make the donation on his own. No inconsistency or insincerity required.
(Well, maybe there's a little inconsistency, to the following extent: someone whose values are exactly as I described would in fact support more redistribution than the proposal above. Note that this goes in exactly the wrong direction to help your argument.)
The numbers above are not cherry-picked for anything other than plausibility and simplicity of calculation, and in particular I picked them all before doing any actual utility calculations. Most people are not exactly "weighted utilitarians" like X, but I think X's weighted utilitarianism is a reasonable -- though of course imperfect -- approximation to many people's moral values. Logarithmic dependence of utility on money is a very standard assumption, with a pedigree going back to the 18th century and widespread usage continuing to the present day.
FWIW, local churches of Seattle had a rotation going to host Mary's Place. It was sort of a hassle; you needed people who volunteered for the night to monitor the situation, some food and drink served for dinner & breakfast (if I remember correctly). Only a few people volunteered and burnout was high.
I too am really uncomfortable with a local duke offering some of his property to help, knowing that if it becomes troublesome, he'll just pull out.
US homelessness is extremely difficult to deal with; in large part of the principle of federated states being semi-independant. In order to manage this at an acceptable level, it becomes a purely national coordinated effort. Otherwise one city/state or the other starts to become the place homeless are routed to by the local governments who don't have resources or interest in helping them. Of course, part of the subtext is that the US deinstitutionalized the mentally ill in the late 70s (for several reasons, including the gross violations of human rights and a general distrust in institutions). So on the street you have drug addicts, runaways, the mentally ill, criminals, people who had too little money to pay rent, travellers (rainbow folk and the like), #vanlifers, and people who broke up with their partner. It's an unpleasant combination that the US is unable to solve without significant multiparty negotiation or federal override.
I agree. Also, we should not forget that there is a significant difference between rights and charity. Rights, once won, are hard to revoke. Charity can be taken away at any time.
My interpretation is that, if this is something that will always be needed, it should be the responsibility of the government beholden to the taxpayers and voters, not at the whims of a corporation whose motivation or dedication may change quickly depending on circumstances.
Agreed, but we have a system in place for lobbying the government via our elected representatives. It's not always effective, and it has its problems, but it exists and it works for many cases. If Amazon changes their mind on this, there's no recourse.
Amazon has to lower tax bills wherever possible - it's their fiduciary duty. Nonetheless, the governments can and should be far more aggressive about this. And Seattle, Oregon, and the US at large should be doing this work for homeless families ... not Amazon.
Nonetheless, Amazon lives in the world as it is and it's doing what it can do. The space is an unalloyed good for those people and Amazon deserves a ton of credit.
Sorry but fair share is a crap phrase and completely brushes over the two facts.
1) No business pays any tax, ever. They are collectors of tax only. The embed their taxes and fees in the products and services they sell which means the consumer is the payer. So at most they are guilty of collecting and not turning over taxes. The tricks you bemoan exist because politicians and countries of the EU can still bargain to better support their own people and do so.
2) Considering the level of taxation in Europe, if you think that services are inadequate you need to ask your officials just what have they been spending it on? How are few hundred million or another billion really go to fix it without spending discipline.
As for philanthropy, welcome to the US. It has always been a social quirk of the US for people and companies to step in. Its what they do. Its a social agreement built on history. It should be celebrated, not demonized.
>The embed their taxes and fees in the products and services they sell which means the consumer is the payer.
This is only true in some cases, but what actually determines whether the business pays the taxes out of profits or passes it along to consumers are the elasticity of demand and elasticity of supply. In an extreme example, think of a monopoly with large profit margins facing extremely elastic demand; it will have no choice but to pay the bulk of the tax out of profits. I didn't review these links carefully, but it looks like you can learn more at [0], [1], and [2] if you're interested.
This is hilariously wrong. If "businesses never paid any tax", they would have no problem when tax rates went up. Instead they complain vociferously and buy legislators in order to keep that from happening.
> As for philanthropy, welcome to the US. It has always been a social quirk of the US for people and companies to step in. Its what they do. Its a social agreement built on history. It should be celebrated, not demonized.
That's hardly unique to the US. Many (most?) of the world's religions have a similar call to action, to give to people in need. Though some are more inclusive (anyone in need) and others more exclusive (members of the religious community).
> No business pays any tax, ever. They are collectors of tax only. The embed their taxes and fees in the products and services they sell which means the consumer is the payer.
And similarly no consumers pay any tax ever. They are collectors of tax only. They embed their "fees" in the salaries they demand from their employers.
Or more accurately, both consumers and businesses are responsible for paying taxes as part of the responsibilities of benefiting from a functioning society. One that provides a structure of law, an educated populace, common infrastructure and a safety net.
All sides are responsible for contributing to society - business just have consolidated more power. Sufficient enough to escape the responsibilities of paying taxes.
Yeah, a guy with 80 billion dollars whose company totally denatured a blue collar Boeing engineering city into a city with the top 10% living like kings, brutal real estate situation, bad traffic and transit , no middle class anymore - everything costs too much from housing to tuition. And this guy with 80 billion will put up 200 of the down trodden per night. Yeah, lip service.
I agree with Nick - Nick Hanauer www politico com magazine story 2014 06 the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014 .
The hero worship and the billionaire worship has to stop. And above all Amazon does not create anything of value. They are middle men. And whatever they touch they destroy. Small businesses. POOF, predatory pricing. Walmart, done (Amazon is so bad it makes walmart look like a good guy that hires people in real stores). Sears, gone. And with compute? sure, its cheap, its utility, and margins on hardware, near zero. But if you instantiate an amazon instance for 1 second, oh, you are getting that bill even if the IOPs are trash and it takes 20 minutes to boot.
Make no mistake Bezos is not a "good guy" he is a maniac and a megalomaniac. When he finally manages to get your job (or you manage to finagle a high stress job at Scamazon) youll sing to a different tune.
This is the perfect thread to realize just how biased HN is against Amazon. They are literally providing shelter to homeless people and so many posts are complaining about it...
I like this, but Amazon still has a lot of work to do to address the pillaging of the commons they've been doing the last few years. They've been displacing people and capitalizing on public infrastructure for far too long without giving anything back.
This is such an ignorant response. Do you realize how much of the country is dying because there's no industry, no jobs, no economy to speak of? I'm not saying give Amazon carte blanche but man, appreciate that your city's economy is growing instead of dying.
Some of the negative comments here exemplify why the mainstream is starting to hate on the "tech elitist" types in the same way FinanceBros were viewed negatively in the '90s and '00s.
It isn't just a theory, it's a practice:
'This "district energy" system works by capturing heat generated at a non-Amazon data center in the neighboring Westin Building and recycling that heat through underground water pipes instead of venting it into the atmosphere. This unique approach is nearly four times more efficient than traditional heating methods and will also enable the Westin Building data center to cut back on the energy it uses to cool its building.' - https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/8sbggvr8fsks7kg
I see on Mary's places "About us" page: "Empowering homeless women, children, and families to reclaim their lives by providing shelter, nourishment , resources, healing and hope in a safe community"
While their work appears extremely positive and (of course) every charity is not required to solve every problem, I can't help but wondering about the many many single homeless men or homeless men disconnected from the families. The best data source on homelessness, the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress indicates that the majority of the homeless are single males. Up to about 10% of the homeless are veterans (a group that is vastly male) and many of them have mental illnesses like PTSD. Are these people accepted at Mary's place? Is there a "Ryan's place" shelter? Does / would Amazon sponsor it?
Most shelters in Seattle serve single men. Most explicitly do not allow women or children such that it is difficult for single women or families of any variety. I would love to see Amazon sponsor more assistance for homelessness but I think their first project serves a population that is otherwise underserved.
That's a good point. At least here in Amsterdam I know a few people who avoid shelters if they can because they are/feel unsafe. These were all men, so I can imagine it might be worse for women.
As has already been pointed out, there are in fact plenty of charities serving the needs of men. Is there enough? Maybe not, but I suspect the same is true of women's refuges too.
However, I'd like to highlight that women's refuges and most men's homeless shelters are actually dealing with very different problems. The problems faced by the average homeless shelter that principally serves men includes addiction and mental illnesses like you describe. Women's refuges don't tend to have either of those problems to the same extent, but schooling and former partners require their own set of skills. Equally, because the problems are so different, it makes sense to keep them separate (you don't want to put a six year old next to a meth addict, for instance).
Could we do more for both of these groups? Heck yes. Ironically, some US cities have shown that the cheapest way of dealing with homeless men may be to... give them somewhere to live.
Note: I lived in a women's refuge for a while when I was a kid.
You really need to look at the current homeless crisis in the northwest. It is all heroin and meth, but mostly heroin, and it affects both genders. There are literally tents lining the streets and needles everywhere.
You could've went a little deeper. They accept both men and women who have children.
> Who does Mary’s Place currently serve?
> Homeless women and men with their children from the greater King County area. The women and families we serve range from young adults to seniors and represent diverse backgrounds in race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, education, and life experience. Many struggle with disabilities and mental health issues. Approximately 30-40% of our guests are immigrants or refugees, the majority of those from East Africa.
One thing to consider (and I swear I'm not (a) claiming this is necessarily in reality the case or (b) implying that if it were we shouldn't have a "Ryan's Place") is that there is homelessness due to different causes, some of them more amenable to help than others. If someone's homeless because they were dependent on a partner who was abusive and so they left that environment and are basically a functioning member of society who nonetheless isn't on their feet, it's a whole nother story (though arguably not more tragic) than someone who's a drug addict and therefore isn't on their feet.
For one of these two, a roof over their head and hot meals a couple times a day for a period of months is going to be extremely beneficial including in the long run, since they'll reliably be able to support themself thanks to the homeless shelter's infrastructure. For the other hypothetical case, it's still the right and humane thing to do for them, but the "bang for your buck" is lower to put it in crass terms.
If it just works out that women outnumber men in the former group, and the gender discrimination does a huge amount of work in selecting for the most efficient candidates to keep in the shelter, I'm in favor of the discrimination.
That's a great point. The wikipedia article and my best Google fu seems to say that while drug addiction and lack of education is common to both genders, domestic violence and poverty from supporting children are more common causes of homelessness for women and homeless men are more likely to be mentally ill. I see that providing temporary shelter for DV victims is an easier problem than mental illness. Poverty otoh..
Why do you assume that homeless women are homeless because of abuse and not drug addiction, while homeless men are homeless because of drugs or PTSD? These assumptions seem incredibly sexist, especially in light of the fact that the current opioid crisis is affecting women disproportionately.
That's not really how I interpreted their message. It's more likely that a woman is homeless due to an abusive relationship than it is a man being homeless due to an abusive relationship. That isn't saying women are less likely to be homeless due to drugs. Independent statements.
You can't summarize a 4-paragraph nuanced discussion with "Because it is." by cherry-picking one sentence from one study. Even the Wikipedia link, which is likely to be biased in the direction of older research simply due to the volume, points out that there is significant debate around this.
Recent studies conclude with a much more equal gender distribution among victims, as OP points out.
For anybody wondering if there is a difference between domestic abuse and domestic violence, according to the legal system, in the US, there is no clear delineation.
"Although some states use the term domestic violence while others use domestic abuse, the terms describe similar conduct."
If you're going to disagree with someone, it's your responsibility to substantiate that disagreement. If that's too much of an effort, best not to say anything at all.
That isn't what I said. I stated that it is more likely that a woman would be homeless from domestic abuse, not that men aren't the target of domestic abuse.
Why would domestic abuse cause women to become homeless more often than men? If a woman runs away from her abuser, there are countless shelters she can go to. If a man runs away from his abuser, there is really nowhere he can go.
Share of homelessness due to an abusive relationship + share of homelessness due to drugs + share of homelessness for all other reasons = 1.
If one of those variables goes higher, one or both of the others must go lower. On the assumption that one of those reasons gets more common "all else equal"... both of the others will go lower.
The OP didn't say that women were homeless due to abuse and not drugs and that men were homeless due to drugs/PTSD.
In fact if you read what they wrote, they didn't specify sex at all. A man can be homeless due to an abusive relationship, they never said they couldn't. Hence independent statements. nsnick was the one assuming something.
You are correct in the zero sum outcome for the //ENTIRE// homeless population; however you are not correct in the sense of a hypothetical subject being homeless.
A singular case subject/family could be homeless for MULTIPLE reasons or None (other than other of course) outlined above.
> You are correct in the zero sum outcome for the //ENTIRE// homeless population; however you are not correct in the sense of a hypothetical subject being homeless.
This is wrong. What's correct as a description of the entire female homeless population is equally correct as a probability assignment for one element of it.
Your second sentence is unrelated to your first, and also applies equally well to the entire population as to an individual sample from it. It is arguing that the sum I describe is in fact more than 1. That is defensible, but it won't make the statements independent; they aren't.
I already acknowledged this in a cousin comment. As long as they can also be homeless for a single reason, the statements are not independent. A population of women who are homeless due to domestic abuse, but not for any other reason, simultaneously drives the share of women-homeless-due-to-domestic-abuse up and the share of women-homeless-for-reasons-other-than-domestic-abuse down.
You're working yourself up the wrong tree... take it easy, it's not that anyone that doesn't exactly follow your very same mental model is a monster. Please
Sounds like a lot of of stereotyping with a cop-out "hey, this is the reason! (but I really don't know)" disclaimer. Got any hard data to back this up?
Those claims seem to me very different from -- and compatible with the negation of -- your earlier statement that it's wrong to consider "men" and "white people" dominant groups in society.
Since pretty much any claim about how these things are in the real world is liable to be controversial, here's a toy example to illustrate. Imagine a world in which (1) hundreds of years ago it became, never mind why, very widely believed that men are better and cleverer and harder-working than women, (2) such beliefs are extremely resistant to change regardless of empirical evidence, and (3) as a result of the persistence of that belief, men are consistently given better jobs, paid more, regarded as more trustworthy, etc., etc., etc., than women. But, as in our world, great power and great wealth are rare, and most people whether male or female don't have them.
In that world, the vast majority of men don't have great power or great wealth, and any oppressing that's going on is being done by everyone collectively; but, in that world, men are by any reasonable definition a dominant group: they are greatly overrepresented (relative to their numbers in society as a whole) among the powerful, the rich, the high-status.
So, let's return to geofft's question. Everything in your list could be true without making it false that men and white people are dominant groups in American society. Do you, in addition to holding the positions in your list, further believe that they are not dominant groups?
What would be your estimate for the proportion of men in the following groups in the US: (1) people with an annual income of $250k or more, (2) holders of national-level political office, (3) people with "executive" in their job title, (4) owners of businesses, (5) judges, (6) generals, (7) (full) professors, (8) religious ministers? What about the proportion of white people?
I'll make my prediction: in all those groups, the fraction of both men and white people will be greater than their fraction in the population at large; in several of those groups, much greater. Do you disagree? If so, let's check. If not, why don't you think this makes men and white people "dominant groups"? (Note that "dominant" is not the same as "oppressive".)
> White people, as a group, do not systematically oppress non-white people, preventing them from attaining power and wealth.
If you want to challenge this belief, I strongly recommend reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (which I'm currently partway through). I'll still respect your position if you read it and continue to believe the above, but it's got a lot of good information and good analysis that's worth being aware of.
Why is it that anytime a women's cause comes up, someone always has to chime in with "but what about men"? Organizations are formed by people with a common vision. You can contact them or participate to try to get them to expand this vision or you can start your own. For whatever reason they decided to target their focus on women. Sidetracking from the main issue to grandstand on gender is not constructive and is no different from the #AllLivesMatter rhetoric that always manages to feign concern and completely miss the point of the movement.
> Why is it that anytime a women's cause comes up, someone always has to chime in with "but what about men"?
Because there are many people who think that discrimination against women is bad, but discrimination against men is OK. These people should be fought against.
I'm female, and absolutely disgusted that most shelters for domestic violence victims or ones that accept children often have a "no males" policy.
The first person I met who was abused by their lover was male... she was female. I've met homeless men that risk getting their children taken away because the appropriate shelter wouldn't accept them. These sorts of things cause a negative stereotype for such places. It doesn't matter that most of the victims tend to be female: I'd rather them be gender-neutral on this front. IT isn't just a female problem.
Mary's place sounds like a commendable organization and if so, Amazon's sponsorship is also commendable. I made sure to say so. My questions were honest - I really don't know if Mary's place serves single men (though it sounds like no?) and I really don't know how Amazon's charitable contributions are proportioned.
Where we spend our charitable contributions is indicative of our values (both as individuals and as a society). Some charities are criticized for being too "feel-good" or being inefficient with donor money for emotional heart strings. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/heartwarming-causes-... OTOH, this argument taken to it's logical conclusion says we should only ever donate to the Gates foundation and it's ilk. I find it interesting that Amazon is receiving such positive press for making a donation to an organization that is deliberately aimed at a subset of an issue. I've never seen an article about a corporate charitable donation of this small dollar value on hacker news before - not that the value is so small, but most charity news that breaks the media bubble is so high (e.g. billionaires pledging to donate half their wealth).
The make a wish foundation existence says something about our values. So does this donation sitting on the front page. Some people love the make a wish foundation and say it reflects positively on our empathy and compassion. Others murmur about warm fuzzies vs the greater good. I don't think this ethical question should be invalid or offensive in the context of politically charged issues.
When something makes you furious, especially on a divisive topic, that easily boils over into flamewar comments. Those are destructive of this site, no matter where the vector of fury is pointing. They're destructive in two ways in fact: they lead to incivility and they clog up the threads with repetitiveness. So please don't post in that spirit.
Provisional new guideline: When hot under the collar, please cool down before posting.
I have argued enough in my life to not get angry over some internet news in another country. But, sexist acts like from this organization acutally makes me furious in a way that I have zero understanding for such acts and I now view them as my enemies.
I still stand by everything I wrote, it is a sexist act from a sexist organisation. Until their behavior changes I will forever believe that.
When a certain group has historically been underprivileged or target of discriminatory conduct, a sort of social repairing is in order to balance things, it's called Affirmative Action.
You are basically accusing the mending of sexism of being sexist. That only makes sense when you either don't understand or don't agree that sexism even exists, or maybe in some level is ok with it existing.
> No it means I don't believe in curing sexism with sexism
Is this an ideological position, or a belief about effectiveness? That is, do you believe that it's fundamentally wrong to take sex-biased actions to fix sexism, or just inefficient?
Suppose a city has ten homeless shelters for men and one for women, all built in the early 20th century. Is it legitimate to fund the construction of nine homeless shelters for women without funding more for men? Why/why not?
Studies have shown... that you are probably a white male. For sure I am, yet your attitude, particularly your apparent denial of genuine disadvantages experienced by women, or more generally, by none-white males, is appalling. We are not coming after you, don't be afraid. Here's some homework material that I liked: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality...
It's not because someone wants to help women or minorities, that they're trying to take (equal) opportunity away from you.
> particularly your apparent denial of genuine disadvantages experienced by women
Yes, women do get worse outcomes than men, on average, for some measures. For example men earn more.
It is also true that women get better outcomes than men, on average, for other measures. For example women live longer.
(It is apposite that feminists/SJWs think the first issue is something that needs to be solved, but the second issue isn't).
However, the thing we are talking about is homelessness. Men are more likely to be homeless than women. Men have, in your words, a "genuine disadvantage" in this measure.
> We are not coming after you, don't be afraid.
You personally might not be, but SJWs in general want a world where white men heve less rights than people who do not have these characteristics. This needs to be fought against.
> SJWs in general want a world where white men heve less rights than people who do not have these characteristics.
I do not believe you. (Not unless you define "SJW" to mean this, in which case instead I say: OK, but there are so few of those people and they have so little influence that I don't see why we should care very much.)
So far as I can tell, "SJWs in general" think that in the world as it presently is, white men have it better than other groups, and they are trying to make things better for those other groups, and as long as white men have it better they don't mind if the things they do to help the other groups make things worse for white men.
Now, there are plenty of ways in which that might be wrong. For instance: it might be wrong to think that white men have it better; or it might not be reasonable to try to improve other people's situation at the cost of white men's, even if the latter are better off on average. But this is not at all the same as saying that "SJWs in general" want a world where white men have less rights than non-(white men), and if you want to make that accusation then I think you should be presenting evidence for it.
> [...] men earn more [...] women live longer [...] It is apposite that feminists/SJWs think the first issue is something that needs to be solved, but the second issue isn't.
It's not perfectly clear what your objection is, but if it's the sort of thing I guess then I think you're wrong, for two reasons.
Reason 1
Here are some more things "feminists/SJWs" mostly don't see as problems to be solved: Men are taller. Men are stronger. Men score better in mental-rotation speed tests.
These are all advantages men have over women (you might disagree about the first, but all else equal it generally seems to be an advantage to be taller). So why are "feminists/SJWs" not trying to change them? Because, at least so it seems, they are fairly direct consequences of biology and are not going to be changed by any plausible sort of social action; especially not if you want them changed by making things better for women rather than by making them worse for men.
I suggest that this is also a reason why "feminists/SJWs" are not making noise about men having shorter lifespans than women. It seems like a biological rather than a social thing -- it's not like men have shorter lifespans because women keep shooting them -- and so the sort of activism that defines "feminists/SJWs" isn't likely to make a difference to it.
(I bet there are some people who would describe themselves as, or at least assent when others describe them as, "feminist/SJW", and who are working on improving men's lifespans. Those people would be doctors, biologists, and medical researchers. But they aren't doing that work as "feminists/SJWs"; why should they be?)
Reason 2*
Let's suppose, arguendo, that reason 1 doesn't work out somehow; let's in fact pretend that women's longer lifespans are as plausibly the result of discrimination as men's higher pay. Would that mean that "feminists/SJWs" are being inconsistent or insincere if they focus on making things better for women, even though there are things that could be made better for men as well?
Of course not. People specialize, and there's nothing wrong with that. And part of what it means to call someone a "feminist/SJW" is that they have chosen to give their attention to problems faced by traditionally-marginalized groups in general, or women in particular. What's the problem with that?
> men having shorter lifespans than women. It seems like a biological rather than a social thing
There is plenty of signs from research that point it towards a social thing and not biological.
1# Society values men for their ability to earn money. Women are valued for their social network. Successful aging is correlated to having a strong social network since it reduces stress.
2# Dating success for men is correlated to successful risk taking in maximizing earning potential. For women it is correlated to maximize personal health.
3# Studies on the health care system has shown to tendency to underdiagnose health issues for men while the opposite for women. Suicide is still the primary cause of death for men until around age 60.
Can you explain what feminists or SJWs have to do with this conversation? I don't believe Amazon's effort is a feminist effort.
(If you're defining "feminism" so broadly as "anything that benefits women," you can't turn around and define it so narrowly as "a cause that wants white men to have less rights".)
I'm defining feminist to mean anyone who calls themselves that.
I've read plenty of feminists argue that society needs to solve the problem of women earning less, but never read a feminist argue that society needs to solve the problem of men living shorter.
This is, on the face of it, odd, given that one of these issues is a matter of life and death and the other one is not.
> one of these issues is a matter of life and death and the other one is not
Saying the wage gap isn't a matter of life and death is dishonest. It absolutely is. The worldwide life expectancy gap between the sexes is about 5 years; the life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest Americans is 15 years[1].
I don't understand why americans are so obsessed about race, because I like you assume stuff and I assume you're american.
It doesn't matter what my skin color is since this is simply about gender and equality. I visited america recently and I've never been in a more diverse city in my life. You should know this by now. And it's obvious that I am a male since I disclosed it in my first post.
> It's not because someone wants to help women or minorities, that they're trying to take (equal) opportunity away from you.
Look at my home country Sweden, probably the most "feministic" country on earth, here there are several laws that only applies for women. 3/4 of university opportunities goes to women. Men lose 9/10 of all parental disputes when it goes to court. Recently there was suggestions to the government to pay for womens university education in IT. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Yeah, I do not believe you since the facts in my country is the exact opposite. Don't tell me you're for equality if you acts tell another story. I am very tired of that kind of shit. There is NO REASON for the organization to exclude single men. This is why I would never support the organisation or any other organisation that has the similar sexist and toxic goals.
Please provide sources for your statement that "3/4 of university opportunities goes to women". I did a quick check at SCB which keep these kinds of statistics for Sweden and I can't find any support for it. I also tried to find support for your statement on parental disputes, but the numbers I could find differs from yours there as well.
There have been many discussions on trying to even the gender-gap for certain professions, for example getting more men to be teachers (or getting more women interested in IT). I do not know how successful they are or if they are worthwhile, but I don't see a clear gender bias.
Still with those facts, the swedish government employs an extreme feministic group to suggest stuff that can empower more women in academia:
https://www.svt.se/opinion/article2925614.svt
Sure, all the numbers weren't really correct but the trend is still clear. Feminists only cares about women and really want to diminish men in every way possible.
If you Google around, there's also homeless programs that specifically focus on veterans, homeless programs that specifically focus on women with children, and homeless shelters specifically focusing on dual parent families with children. Along with shelters for substance abuse, shelters for domestic violence victims, and general purpose shelters.
I can see the need for some separation in charities, to help charities focus more on various issues that may be more prevalent with one group vs. another.
Society doesn't look at homeless men the same way. There's far more shelters for women and children, a big reason why most of the visible homeless are male.
Every shelter is for men by default. Women-only shelters are the exception and are far fewer in numbers. Shelters can be ugly, violent places, especially if there's a cold-weather snap and they have to open their doors to those with severe behavioural issues.
The big reason why most of the homeless are male is because as rough an existence as that is, they can survive out there. Women simply do not last as long. They're pressured into sex work, they're dragged into abusive relationships, or they die.
Women are also more likely to be homeless with kids, a nightmare scenario. They have significantly more motivation to get off the street by any means necessary if they're in that situation. By comparison a homeless old male can just stumble along at rock bottom for decades.
Survivorship bias. Be careful how you observe things.
How on Earth is a homeless shelter for males by default? Just because it's a shitty place to be you're saying it's for men and that women should have their own shelters where men are not allowed, that are presumably less shitty.
How does this make any sense? It's the sexist "women are weak" argument without any obsfucation. This is the exact reason why there's more shelters for women than men, broken sexist logic like this.
> This is the exact reason why there's more shelters for women than men...
There's more "women-only" shelters than there are men-only ones, but it's patently false to state there's more women-only shelters than there are non-specific shelters.
> Every shelter is for men by default. Women-only shelters are the exception and are far fewer in numbers
You're presenting that as comparing the situation for men and women, but it's not doing that.
You're comparing shelters that let in men (i.e. including both men-only and mixed shelters) vs shelters that only let in women.
You could just as equivalently switched the genders in the quote and it's be just as much true "Every shelter is for women by default. Men-only shelters are the exception and are far fewer in numbers"
EDIT: to all the people downvoting this, care to say what you think the problem is with what I've said?
> You could just as equivalently switched the genders in the quote and it's be just as much true...
Except that's not true. In most cities there's a handful of women-only shelters, even fewer for women with children, and yet there's a multitude of other options not gender-specific.
Here there's maybe six women-specific shelters, yet there's dozens of Salvation Army locations alone. On top of that there's other organizations that offer shelter services. They do their best to cater to everyone that abides by the rules, but there's an inherent risk in those places.
It's not that women are weak any more than men are drug addicts, but shelters don't represent society as a whole. They're heavily skewed towards certain portions of the population, and that portion tends to have problems with mental illness, substance abuse, and a multitude of other issues. It's not the environment you'd want to be in under any circumstances, especially not as a woman.
Pointing out that "In most cities there's a handful of women-only shelters, even fewer for women with children, and yet there's a multitude of other options not gender-specific" does not make what I said wrong! It's just making the same error I was talking about my original comment. Read it again carefully.
If I said "there are fewer billionaires in the country than millionaires" would you insist that "you could just as equivalently switched the two and it's be just as much true..."?
Go and read the two sentences in question, and what I said about them. It's completely different to that.
#(X or Y) > #(Y-only)
vs
#(Y or X) > #(X-only)
See how these can both be true? (See how meaningless the comparison in either one of those statements actually is? That was the point I was making).
It seems to me that people are so ideologically driven in their thinking that they could only see what I was saying as "taking one side, to the exclusion of the other".
That is, people treating my statement as like
#X > #Y
is equivalent to
#Y > #X
like you did in your millionaires/billionaires attempt at an analogy. Even though if you take the ideological blinkers off it is plainly obvious that I'm not saying anything at all like that.
My original comment would be really greyed out if not for also having received a lot of upvotes along with all the downvotes (the points count on it has swung up and down over time).
This comment and several others you've posted violate the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do that, so please (re)-read the following and post civilly and substantively from now on.
The idea that fickle consumers are to blame for unethical and often unlawful exploitation of employees is propaganda with only the thinnest veneer of economics painted on it.
I suppose I understand why the very rich and business interests make arguments like this, but usually it's just ordinary people. Who benefits? It's about time we held companies like Amazon accountable for the way they harm and exploit their employees instead of helping shift the blame to their customers.
I'm not convinced Amazon would suffer significantly if they raised their prices by 10% on average. No other seller can compete with them on convenience, and people are willing to pay for that.
I didn't say that consumers would choose to pay extra for decent employee treatment. I said that Amazon could just do it and get away with it. Mind you, I'm also not convinced that the cost of treating your employees like human beings is as high as 10%.
Also, for fuck's sake stop making excuses for abusive employers. Why would you do that?
Regardless of how right you are on those details, taking it out on a fellow community member is mean and unduly personal.
We ask people over and over to assume good faith and not insinuate that someone is astroturfing or PR-ing just because you dislike what they say (or who they happen to work for). This sort of argument tactic is poison to community, and the strain of it you came up with here strikes me as virulent.
Large organizations are mixtures of good and bad—not equally, but not uniformly either. To lash out at someone because you're frustrated with what he probably had nothing to do with is uncivil and contradicts your moral posture. You can defend vulnerable people without abusing others personally.
If you want to keep commenting here, please give fellow community members the benefit of the doubt. Who knows?—maybe he feels exactly the way you do and you just kicked him for it.
Are you referring to the line in which I asked to be spared the PR? Note that I didn't mean to insinuate that the author of the comment to which I replied was a paid PR professional or shill of some sort.
That and the fact that you turned your outrage about Amazon onto a specific individual. That is a sort of personal attack and we don't allow those here.
Every one of us is part of and/or tied to institutions that do bad things, so we all need to be charitable about this.
Thanks for responding even-handedly to my rather hot comment.
You must work for one of those other companies with 340,000 employees that always makes the right decisions, always puts people before policy, always maximizes shareholder value, always engages positively with the community, and always makes sure every single employee and customer and client and partner is 100% happy with everything that happens at all times. You should write a book about how easy that must be. It would be a bestseller. You could even sell it on Amazon, I bet.
> You must work for one of those other companies with 340,000 employees that always makes the right decisions, always puts people before policy, always maximizes shareholder value, always engages positively with the community, and always makes sure every single employee and customer and client and partner is 100% happy with everything that happens at all times. You should write a book about how easy that must be. It would be a bestseller. You could even sell it on Amazon, I bet.
Honestly, I've written some pretty controversial things on HN, but your response is frightening.
Bad behavior, behavior that some people would say is more than little evil, isn't excused because other corporations behave just as badly.
The fact is that the behavior we're discussing is quite easy to get right: just stop forcing people out of their jobs when they're sick or pregnant.
Your response is like saying "human rights violations are such a big problem that we shouldn't do anything about it".
It's a good thing that there are people that say we should stand up against hyper-wealthy corporations who are actively trying to exploit and harm their employees, instead of making excuses and looking the other way.
> Your response is like saying "human rights violations are such a big problem that we shouldn't do anything about it".
No, it's not like saying that at all. I'm saying that companies are large, impersonal things nonetheless filled entirely with people with very personal goals and problems all uniquely their own, and all those people have to work together. At the base of it, these are people's decisions affecting other people. Are there bad things that happen to decent people at Amazon? Of course there are, just like at any other company. Acknowledging it doesn't mean condoning it, just as you pointing it out in an inflammatory way shouldn't imply Amazon neither knows nor cares about it. Amazon is not the sum total of the bad people decisions aired out in the online press.
Recognizing there are problems but not doing anything about them? _That_ is an issue worthy of scorn. If anyone's company does nothing when people problems are brought to the fore, _that_ is a problem that needs fixing.
Amazon's problems are under the magnifying glass in forums like this because Amazon is doing things that make the company exceedingly visible: the good and the bad shows up under that same lens. How often do you read on Hacker News about bad people decisions that IBM or HP are making? It's naive to think that because we don't hear about them that they have never had, don't have, and never will have any of the problems for which you are excoriating Amazon.
Laudable. The math on the space is a little odd though.
"47,000 sq. ft. of space within Amazon’s newest headquarters building as a permanent location for a Mary's Place Family Shelter. This first-of-its-kind partnership will include 65 rooms, which will shelter more than 200 homeless women, children, and families"
235 square feet per person? That's a lot of room. Maybe only some of the space is being used to start with? Or a fair portion is for some sort of separate administrative staff?
This is a classic case of Amdahl's Law[0], with square footage as the commodity being optimized rather than computational resources. The more "efficient" you make the scalable quantity (square footage directly allocated to each occupant in this case), The more dependent The final number becomes on the non-scalable terms (square footage of shared spaces like restrooms, stairways, hallways, eating spaces, and etc). Even a simple double loaded corredor with shared restrooms like a high density college dorm layout has a significant fraction of its base determined by the nonscalable spaces.
Nowadays anyone involved in high scalability computer processes is familiar with these concepts but in the 1960s when Amdahl first started focusing on the nonscalable processes the idea seemed as crazy as these square footage numbers seem to non-architects.
Another example of this is that many open office buildings that are (or seem) relatively high density are over 150 sqft/head because of restrooms, meeting rooms, and corridors.
For an application where you would expect shared spaces for kitchen/bath/etc, and a trade-off of comfort vs capacity, it is. It is higher than other family shelters. Which could be unused space, or perhaps colocated adminstration, or whatever. It wasn't a complaint, just an observation.
Do you mean that your room is roughly 10'x13', shared with one roommate? If so, you're not comparing apples to apples. Amazon's number is derived from the entire building (including common hallways, stairs, bathrooms, and other spaces). Also, while a dorm room allocating 65 sqft per person might fit a loft bed, desk, and a student's possessions, that's not convenient for a family shelter.
