Stories like this make me think of this quote from C.S. Lewis:
> Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities [committed by one’s enemies] in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.
Bezos is a complicated figure, and there are other causes that could also use money, but this appears to be an inarguably good thing, so let's take the win.
Wow, I'm not entirely clear what the grantees are specifically doing from reading this announcement, but I am sure there will be tons of awesome work accomplished.
I do wonder exactly what the theory of change here is - this is a huge amount of money, and I am surprised it's a great way to spend it, especially when the Inflation Reduction Act just authorized so much money for similar goals. I didn't dig into the individual grants, though the ones I peeked at didn't get too specific on what that work is.
Parks, trees, and community gardens are all great. My general expectation in my experience is that poor urban communities are disproportionately often in park-heavy areas (not for justice reasons, for floodplain reasons). I guess they need work to make them better? I like community gardens, but I am just shocked if folks are helping much to solve anything that matters by dedicating dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars to promoting them.
I am extremely skeptical that the climate mitigations cited are very well-accomplished by the green spaces mentioned. It's obligatory to cite climate change in everything, which gets frustrating, especially because we are engaged in so few of the things that would actually help.
Never attribute to irony what can be attributed to fuckery.
I don’t know Bezos or Amazon’s stance on cops but I do know that corporations loooooove police - it’s where cops came from. I wouldn’t be surprised if this infusion is specifically to detract from the bad press of Cop City.
Oh wait, I do know Amazon’s stance - I was lying, you see. Amazon, via Ring, has really cozied up to law enforcement. The terms of what they can and can’t do with your data have gotten looser and looser when it comes to sharing data with LE, and this includes the Neighborhood app or whatever. Crime on your street? Ring can hand over all recording data from that time from the cameras on your street without the owner’s consent.
So, given this, I’d be very curious to know how much influence this will have on City (sorry about the emoji, I have an auto replace and got tired of “fixing” it). I’d also be curious to know if similar Urban Warfare centers are planned on the other four locations, as the one in Atlanta is certainly being watched closely by other departments looking to get in on the action (and tax dollars!) of simulating high speed chases and no knock raids!
Do you have any pointers to the history of cops coming from corporations? In the UK, they came out of a government response against the inefficiencies of volunteer enforcement groups in the 19th century, and were mostly opposed by civil liberties groups (including the City of London, which was, I believe, was an institution dominated by merchant interests even then).
The podcast miniseries Behind the Police does a better job with the details, but policing in the US came out of two places: in the north, it came out of protecting the assets of businesses. In the south it was the same thing, but those assets were…people. Either way, policing came from the need for those with money to protect their “property”.
FTFA:
>The $90 million[2] construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center began in spring 2023 on a 85-acre plot of land in the South River Forest, DeKalb County, Georgia....
>...Once complete, the center is planned to be used as a training center for police and fire services and is expected to open at the end of 2023....
>265 surrounding acres of the site will be used as green-space.[6]
It's an okish natural area right now, but it's hardly pristine wildlife, and while I'm not a huge fan of the APD - I don't think that removing training opportunities (and potential revenue from surrounding areas that use the facilities) is really the right solution.
For context - I've been in Atlanta 34 years, and live in South Atlanta now.
Frankly, I don't understand the "cop city" drama. It feels entirely manufactured.
No amount of money is going to fix public policy and citizen apathy. The change needs to be grassroots and cultural, not pushed down by someone with $150B to his name.
Just because they could afford to give more doesn't make this money meaningless.
I'm not saying we need to like, bow down and praise Bezos over this, or that it erases any other bad things he may have done...but let's try to acknowledge that hundreds of millions toward this kind of charity is an actual good thing and not just a pointless PR stunt.
I'd prefer if Amazon et al paid their taxes and society as a whole could decide how to spend it to better itself, through the democracy that we are supposed to live in.
Well, sure, there are lots of things that could happen in the world that would be even better than a $400M donation like this, but that doesn't make a $400M donation a bad or pointless thing.
Nor does it make this donation somehow responsible for stopping those other good things from happening.
That doesn't mean that $400MM is a small amount of money, it means the LOTR reboot was an expensive TV show or whatever it was. It is a large amount of money.
what a nonsense comparison. anyway, you're showing a misunderstanding of the complexity of capital allocation.
So he should have donated 1 billion? why not 2? why not 5? why not 10? well hang on, 10 billion for greening some areas? That's not an optimal use of 10 billion. 8 of those should go to doctors without borders. wait hang on, have you seen the ukrainian refugee crisis? and you're putting 8 billion towards doctors without borders? they should get at least 3 of that. wow so you've donated 10 billion dollars but not a single dollar towards educating women in third world countries? etc ad nauseum.
I guess your take is probably that it's his responsibility to donate 100% of his wealth optimally across the world, and spend the rest of his life doing that. but i'm appealing to people with more sense when I say: don't underestimate how difficult it is to "correctly" spend a large amount of wealth.
A classic move by exploitative billionaires to launder their legacy. But what's the alternative? NOT doing it? We should support it, and shame the billionaires that DON'T. do this.
I mean, nobody should have this much money, so it isn’t like I want to defend the guy, but it was the most expensive show ever. If “less expensive than Rings of Power” is the benchmark, almost every other project in the world is a tiny indie affair. IMO the lesson there is “money can’t buy competence.”
I bet they can make some nice parks for $400M. According to Wikipedia, Disneyland cost $130M adjusted to 2021 dollars. 3 Disneylands isn’t nothing.
The US modern politically correct language is about obscuring things.
"Underserved urban U.S. communities"
To upquote Carlin:
They are black.
They are poor.
They are hungry.
They live in bad neighborhoods.
They have arees have a substantial problem with crime.
and often with drugs.
They need money, food, opportunity, education and
jobs that pay a living wage.
Bezos being part of the 0.01% (?) super rich elite,
lounges in his luxury ivory tower and thinks well
"well what the negros need are trees and grass
that will make it all so much better"
No,
What Bezo needs to do is start paying his workers a living wage,
full health insurance, allow them to unionize. give their kids
a better chance at higher education.
Stop treating the workers and slave automatons that go to the bathroom
far too often and get hurt on the job far too often.
As long as Bezo derives his wealth in part because of his exploitation
of "Underserved urban U.S. workers" he is despicable no matter how
many feet of grass or trees he is sponsoring out of the petty cash drawer.
Quite confused by this. Trees and parks are obviously beneficial in numerous real ways.
...but if you ask someone that is really struggling I doubt their answer as to what they need is "more trees outside my door".
From my admittedly ignorant and priviledged position the answer is more likely to be "I can't apply to jobs if i don't have internet".
With people that have their back against the wall you have to address the showstopper issues. That's not to say they don't deserve trees, but given finite resources, prioritize.
I’ve done volunteer work (tangentially) with one of the organizations that got a grant in Chicago. They are very much grassroots, very much from an extremely disadvantaged area, and are routinely praised by their constituents.
Turns out that poor people have diverse needs and desires, some of which is access to clean green spaces.
Part of the problem that things like this fix is "catastrophic paralysis" where you get stuck trying to find the single most advantageous thing you can do, which often ends up being subsumed into converting money into political blathering.
Whereas if you spend $400m to plant trees, you get trees (or, sadly, you get trees that die instantly because you didn't manage the project at all to verify that the trees will do something, and instead burnt it on a tree planting company that doesn't care if they survive).
In urban areas, poor people are the most likely to lack air conditioning. Trees provide shade, preventing absorbent materials below like concrete and asphalt from absorbing heat and baking; and they also evaporate water, cooling the air.
As the climate continues to change, a lot of places will become more susceptible to heat-related death. Trees are a fairly uncontroversial way to mitigate at least some of that; some estimates have the cooling effect as high as 12 C. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2298675-trees-cool-the-...
I think it's good to solve small problems too. The $400M has the chance bring a little happiness to a lot of people. Cooling due to the shade of trees is a big benefit. Trees improve the charm of the neighborhood and could also contribute to feelings of well being.
Ehh you're right, but they don't really have to address showstopper issues. There isn't a lot of upside value in "human issue ranking" as a scrutiny tactic to a donation. Charitable donations aren't public negotiations like they are if you're talking about gov/public funds. Just take the money on offer and build some lovely green spaces.
As someone that lives in an underserved community... the most impactful thing any billionaire could do is to just give the people living in these communities money directly.
Trees are one of those things we know have some impact on quality of life, whether they're mental health benefits from spending time in nature, or temperature impacts in urban areas (poorer neighborhoods have less vegetation, and therefore locally get hotter due to so called "heat islands")... but obviously people here don't care about trees because they're much further down on the hierarchy of needs than the wealthy. When you're worried about making rent you don't have time for trees.
So someone like Bezos sees a high-profile pat-on-the-back environmental project... which conveniently fulfills the "I know what you need better than you do" mentality that the wealthy generally hold over the poor... and tada! poor people get trees.
Yes, I too am pro building more housing. It's generally the people that call restoring parks or adding bike lanes "gentrification" that oppose building more housing.
Shit on the people that all of society has been collectively shitting on for generations, classy. Those peasants better be thankful for their breadcrumbs!
If you were being sincere, you should learn how to communicate in a way that doesn't heavily imply sarcasm.
If you were being sarcastic, which you were, you should troll elsewhere.
Your second comment mentioning racism actually does add a repulsive racial tinge to your commentary, which is worse than the original classist trolling.
"I'm sure the communities will respect these spaces." doesn't really read like "These spaces won't be taken care of not because the community doesn't value them, but because other people are racist towards that community which will hurt their garden in... ways".
It reads like "I don't think these communities can handle running a garden or keeping a green space nice".
> Bezos’s annual reported income during these years of $832 million put him only at number 15. He paid an effective tax rate of 23.2%; as we’ve previously reported, Bezos had so little income in a couple of recent years that he was able to pay $0 in federal income taxes in those periods.
I always like how good old Warren Buffett is calling for high earners to be taxed more, yet he never seems to show up on any of these high earner lists...
He doesn't tend to show up in the lists because he pays himself relatively little (compared to other billionaires). Between 2014-18 he had income of $125m, and paid tax of $23.7m[1]. That's still lower than the average American absolute tax rate, but way higher than most other billionaires. So he's a bit less of a sensational headline than his contemporaries.
His wealth growth of $24.3bn is untaxed through those years, he presumably left those assets in Berkshire Hathaway where he'd personally not generate a tax bill for them. Eventually Buffet, or more likely his inheritors, will sell the Berkshire Hathaway assets, and should pay a monumental tax bill on them.
Because the narrative being developed around him is that he is such a selfless guy, humble midwestern values, wants good for America, yet he structures his affairs in a way that he pays as little tax as possible and would be largely unaffected by increased income tax...
>as we’ve previously reported, Bezos had so little income in a couple of recent years that he was able to pay $0 in federal income taxes in those periods.
This is the part people are bothered by.
Regardless of why, billionaires should never be paying $0 in federal income taxes. Our tax code and the people finding loopholes in it should not do this.
Executives should not be able to be "unpaid" for years because they're getting tax advantaged stock deals.
Nobody should be able to have that much wealth and have a year with no taxes.
If you are the human at the end of the line of ownership that ultimately benefits from assets, you should be charged ordinary income as you extract from those assets.
The only people who should owe $0 in federal taxes are those earning less than a full time minimum wage salary during that tax year, with no exceptions for folks who magically seem to find millions of dollars to spend during a year that they "earned" $0.
Taxes -> Uncle Sam -> Some Politician Pockets -> Dumbass projects, pointless initiatives [sometimes fueled by lobbying] -> Maybe some of it finally towards underprivileged communities with a 25% chance?
Donating directly to the communities removes all this mess and gets money where it needs to go.
I guess your ridiculous caricature of government spending is a product of a failing educational system.
This is also one of the problems, that will never be fixed aslong as taxes are kind of negotiable for ones above the citizenship/law and people get distracted by this kind of altruist-washing (which can also be a way to dodge taxes).
> Taxes -> Uncle Sam -> Some Politician Pockets -> Dumbass projects.
The issue you highlight is not taxes per se but the political sphere, which can be solved seperately. Rejecting taxes and not acknowledging the root problem _makes you part of the problem_ and useful for the ones profiting from it.
OT: Its ridiculous, that ppl _who voted for 1 of 2 corrupt parties complain about their stolen votes_. This kind of idiocy could also be a useful product of a failed educational systems maybe combined with Murrica-first delusions.
I’m a huge fan of long lasting infrastructure like schools, internet, green energy, public transport etc. this stuff always pays off for future generations.
It would be quite interesting to see what got funded, if they let us pick projects to fund while doing our taxes. It might even be a worthwhile experiment to do; let tax payers decide how to allocate, say, 10% of their taxes.
And I strongly disagree with the premise we should let our capitalist and genetic lottery winners solely determine what problems society needs solving.
If they're skirting the rules, that's just called following the rules. Why should we expect billionaires to file their taxes suboptimally? The rules are what need changing.
I personally feel a moral obligation to pay my fair share of taxes, especially if I expect my community to be a place I want to be. I could itemize more stuff and pay less but I'm in a position where I can still live comfortably taking the base deduction. In my opinion ultra rich people should be doing the same whether the rules change or not.
How do you decide what your fair share is though? Do you not take any deductions, even the standard deduction? I'm happy to pay my taxes in full too, but I pay my rate for what they say my income is, including applicable deductions to that income. That's what the billionaires do too. They just have way more tools available to them.
The "ultra rich" likely have a different perspective into how tax dollars are continually squandered and abused, which tempers their desire to give it away to some of the most inefficient and corrupt organizations on the planet.
If you feel so strongly about giving your money away, nothing stops you from writing a check to your favorite causes.
Well, but the complaint is "Bezos should pay his taxes". And we've now established that he has. So... To the comment you replied to's point: we should be upset at the tax code not at people who (as we've established) are probably following the law.
OK, a charitable reading is that two things are being said:
Bezos should pay a fair amount of taxes ie. we ought to close loopholes and raise the rates for billionaires
& 2. Bezos should pay a fair amount of taxes ie. by using legal loopholes and lobbying the govt. for lower taxes, he is acting immoraly and should stop doing so
Both of which I believe is what's meant but are harder to make into a pithy slogan
My point in my earlier comment is that I don't agree with #2. He pays what the government says his "fair share" of taxes are, and why would we expect him to pay any more than that? I bet every one of us here pays exactly what we owe in taxes and not a cent more. That includes taking tax deductions. Even if you take no deductions, you're given a free $13k deduction on your taxable income.
Obviously in some theoretical moral sense billionaires are underpaying. But what's the income level you need to cross before you should willfully avoid tax deductions and ways of avoiding taxes. Now codify that into the law in some way.
And it’s only evasion if you (or someone else) tried it once before and it was ruled abusive. If enough money is at stake, you can go a long way using novel tax schemes to avoid paying taxes long enough to profit, even with civil penalties. Billionaire tax management is a whole ‘nother world.
They aren't skirting anything. If you want to get rid of charitable deductions then advocate for that. People are attacking billionaires because the have unpalatable policy positions.
Albuquerque is a desert, as such greening the city by planting anything is bad. They can still use parks, but parks there need to respect nature and that means very little grass or trees. (not zero of either, but the ground needs to be mostly bare).
Hopefully they don't try to force what would be the correct green for the climate of one place on another. We have too much of that already.
ABQ is also a former flood plain of the Rio Grande, the biggest river in the SW outside of the Colorado (though that's not saying much).
The "bosque" (forest) along the river is a riparian oasis compared to parts of the city 5-8 miles away, and historically was a major agricultural area. This changed somewhat when in the 1940s the bureau of reclamation began damming the river and providing water to other areas.
So while I certainly appreciate your concern, it is easy to overstate the issue (and also easy to ignore it, as has been done in the past).
A quick look on Google Maps shows some forested hills like right next to Albuquerque. Seems like some greening is viable while respecting the climate and environment.
You have to climb quite a bit to get to true forest. Albuquerque is in scrubby desert, although you get cottonwoods down by the river. Go a few thousand feet up the Sandia Mountains and you'll get pines, cedars, aspens.
> Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities [committed by one’s enemies] in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.
Bezos is a complicated figure, and there are other causes that could also use money, but this appears to be an inarguably good thing, so let's take the win.