> It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III)
This is what assimilation looks like. Someone with an Irish name calling themselves Anglo-Saxon. It’s like a Hispanic person calling themselves Latinx, proof that they have lost all organic connection to the culture of their ancestors.
An Irishman of the hundred years centered on 1900 would have responded with amusement or indignation at being called "Anglo-Saxon", a term referring originally to the peoples of
Great Britain east of Wales and south of Scotland. The Irish regarded themselves rather as Celts, and ones that I had received bad treatment at Anglo-Saxon hands.
And as we all know, ethnic identity is fully static and never changes over time, you are morally obligated to identity in a way that would be accepted by your ancestors. lmao.
Assuming they are relatively pure-blooded Irish, they'd more accurately describe themselves as Celtic. In theory, Anglo-Saxon has a somewhat specific meaning (descended from the Angle and Saxon tribes). In practice, the term is often generically used for descended from northern European white people (as in WASP).
Generally speaking, Irish people would be of Celtic or Norman (Which I'll still probably get some pushback for saying.) ancestry. Anglo-Saxons settled the rest of the area and ever since there's been some type of issue between the groups. An Irish person describing themselves as Anglo-Saxon is entirely divorced from the roots of where many Irish people are descended, there has always been a lot of trying to erase and assimilate that history and culture.
This is a somewhat tenuous topic too because there's a whole lot of history and bad blood after the times I'm speaking of and there's a different but similar issue currently brewing over there as well.
Note that no one callled them Normans before the 1800s. They called themselves English when they conquered Ireland. The Irish (Gaels) called them Saxons (Sassenach) or foreigners (Gall). After the conversion of the English to Protestantism there was a yawning chasm between the Old English (Catholic) and the New, but no one ever used Norman contemporaneously.
That can't be right. The Normans as a people played a major part in European history from at least the year 911 through the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). I've never seen the faintest indication that they weren't still called Normans after leaving Normandy, by themselves and others, e.g when invading England and Italy.
I guess you meant more that the term fell out of use in England at some point, and Norman-descended people in England called themselves English. But even so, Norman is still a recognisable ethnicity - norse people who settled in France, spread by conquest into England, Malta etc. It could be a useful contemporary or historical label even if those people at a given time called themselves something else.
The people who invaded England and Italy were called Normans. The people who invaded Ireland called themselves English, and were called English by the Irish.
The article you link to is talking about the Vikings, not the Normans. If you can find a primary or secondary source saying they called themselves anything other than English of be delighted to see it.
I neglected to add “in an Irish context”. No Normans ever invaded Ireland. A great many English did, the military leadership of whom were mostly descended from those who conquered England a bit over a century prior.
> The Anglo-Saxons inhabited England, not the rest of the British isles. The term more-or-less corresponds to racially English, or culturally English.
This isn’t true. The Lowland Scots are no less culturally Anglo-Saxon than the English. They were slightly less successful than the English at extirpating all traces of Celtic culture from their homeland but it wasn’t for want of trying.
On the hispanic comment, Spanish is a naturally gendered language, you cannot form a sentence without giving gender to at least the subject, for example "la doctora toma el café por la mañana" would translate to "the (female) doctor drinks (male) coffee by the (female) morning" because English is a mostly gender neutral language you would loose all gender information by literally translating that sentence.
Now if we take the gender out of every word in that sentence it would look something like "lx doctorx toma (we loose el, here) café por lx mañana", el wasn't necessary in the sentence to beging with, so that's fine, but the rest of the sentence becomes pretty hard to read to anyone that speaks Spanish, there's no practical way of pronouncing that unless you use the English pronunciation of the letter x.
To add more depth to this, in spanish to give a gender neutral statement, you default to the male version of the noun, for example, for a group that has boys and girls, you would just refer to them as "los niños", people feel this could be dismissive of girls, if there is at least one boy in a group of girls you'd say "los niños" and depending of the context it is implied that the group has both girls and boys, so in some latin american governments they are required by etiquette to form sentences like "las niñas y los niños" instead of just "los niños" this is called around here "inclusive language" but even then most Spanish speaking people think that is impractical and unnecessary.
That said, the latinx movement is kind of relevant in Argentina IIRC, but in most other latin american countries the idea will be met with a lot of resistance and rejection.
This is all true but I don’t think it was the main point GP was making.
Most “Latino” people are of at least part Native American or African ancestry; whereas “Latin” refers originally to speakers of Romance languages. Thus most (of course not all) “Latinos” who call themselves that are identifying with the subset of their ancestors who enslaved and conquered the others.
Yes there were many Native American enslavers and conquerers. Doing evil isn't exclusive to white people and it would be absurd to suggest that it is. But I don't see how that's related to my comment.
As a Mexican-American I have had to explain the term ‘Latinx’ to native Mexicans as well as other Hispanics and they all just kind of shake their heads.
> That said, the latinx movement is kind of relevant in Argentina IIRC, but in most other latin american countries the idea will be met with a lot of resistance and rejection.
I would go even further than that. The US-centric idea of Latino as a unified identity (let alone with the x), often based on North-American stereotypes of Mexican and Caribbean cultures, can be off-putting in Latin American countries. As an example, here's the comedy-rock song «No Somos Latinos» («We are not Latinos») from Uruguayan band El Cuarteto de Nos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onQU3sp8_Jk
I would argue about that, I'm salvadoran, never been to the states and I would gladly say I'm latino, we even have an expression when we go abroad, "I miss the latino heat" which means that we miss the warm weather and friendly disposition of people in latin american countries, it's a weird phenomenon that you can't experience if you're not from a Spanish speaking country and have not gone abroad.
Generally speaking when you're in your country you'll sometimes have strong opinions about your neighbouring countries, Hondurans are this, Guatemalans are that, but when you're outside your country and you run into other latin american people, in my experience it was something really special we would greet each other as if we were long time friends, I think there's something more to it than language, I think most latin american people can relate to a certain kind of burden that comes with living in a latin american country, those burdens and the problems our societies have are pretty similar all around and I think when we meet in foreign countries we immediately relate in the way we perceive our societies and the things we've lived through.
Just as an anecdote, I went to Paris for a vacation and I went into a Five guys restaurant, usually you have to pay for a soda refill, but there was a dominican guy who was a waiter and he heard me and my SO speaking Spanish and he immediately smiled and came over and we had a nice conversation about our countries, and he let me refill our sodas for free, it's really nice and I don't know if other regions have something like this
Yes, other countries have something like that. In national football (soccer) there is fierce competition between clubs, but if its international countries such rivalry counts instead. If I am in Germany, I feel Dutch, but if I am in USA I feel European.
Because Spanish speaking people did not come up with the concept and people that came up with the concept were maybe not that familiar with spanish pronunciation or weren't concerned about it at all, I've heard that this originated strangely enough in Portugal but was made popular by some people in the US, I might be wrong on that one though.
It's just 'x' as in the mathematical variable 'x' for something unknown, e.g. suppose a train is traveling at 'x' km/h... They use "latinx" to abstract over "latino/latina". Of course this makes zero actual sense in Spanish.
It likely came about in written form then was moved to speech.
I’m in agreement with you that é is the natural neutral replacement letter. But I don’t think this is a serious attempt to change the language so much as a serious attempt to signal group membership.
The term Latinx is a political construct and for the most part irrelevant to most people from Latin America or of Latin American ancestry.
It’s mostly used for political purposes in the US by non Latin American people as well as a few Latin Americans in the political sphere because it’s a useful political tool for the time being.
“Latinx” is basically an “embrace, extend, extinguish” attempt of Latin American ethnicity in my view. It offers what appears to be acceptance, but only within a progressive Anglo-American framework with a bunch of extra signifiers on top. At the end you have English language thinkpieces about taco authenticity, and assimilation into establishment politics and culture.
Even in English, he/his was considered gender-neutral in context. It's only in the last few years that a plural "they" has confusingly taken its place. I still get tripped up when I see singular "they." I have to stop and re-read the sentence because I think I missed something.
Murphy is the Anglicized form of an Irish name, Ó Murchú. One of the author’s paternal line ancestors came from Ireland, a land conquered and colonized by the English, i.e. the Anglo-Saxons. It would be one thing to say he had a honky ass white name, a cracker name, that would be in the American says American thing, who cares category. But to identify as Anglo-Saxon, an ethnic category!?! Not terribly surprising given the use of that most American of making customs, the numeral[1], but still. In much the same way as someone with Irish ancestry calling themselves Anglo fucking Saxon tells you something about their attachment to any Irish ancestry you learn something about anyone with ancestors who spoke Spanish if they self-identify as Latinx. You learn that they don’t care about the Spanish language, at all. And you learn that they use an ephitet invented by Anglos, for use by people who speak English
> only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.
I feel you shouldn't punish people for the name they were given by their parents. Changing your name is a big existential act, which I don't think it's reasonable to expect. If you've had it drummed into you from birth that you are III then it's hard to escape. That person's views about what their name represents are their own though and can be challenged.
Americans do their American thing. That’s cool. I do my Irish thing and point out that a Murphy calling himself an Anglo-Saxon is utterly assimilated. Also cool. Americans pointing out that Irish and British people drink way more than Americans, and imbibe other narcotics at rates not normally seen outside Cuban-American locales. That’s cool. We can all notice that other people are different and get along, or not.
> "Changing your name is a big existential act..."
that's mostly cultural. in some cultures (e.g., asian ones), it's normal to have multiple names for different levels of familiarity, and to adopt new names as circumstances dictate.
with that said, criticizing (someone else's) naming choices is a wholly aesthetic opinion and should be disregarded (perhaps politely).
Are not all white people Anglo Saxon? I don’t bother to call myself anything other than white, Anglo Saxon, European, Caucasian. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. I have Irish, English, Italian, and post world war 2 immigrated Polish direct ancestors. I don’t know what else to call myself nor do I particularly care. I don’t have a strong personal sense of identity tied up with any of those things. They are just words I assume apply to me when people use them.
Anglo-Saxon is a somewhat outdated term that refers to the Germanic people that inhabit England and Wales. Easy way to remember is if you take "Anglo" + "Land" you get "Anglo-land", which morphs into the term "England".
Modern historians don't use the term Anglo-Saxon much these days, so it's not especially important.
> Modern historians don't use the term Anglo-Saxon much these days, so it's not especially important.
To you. And to a bunch of people who have to live in fear of being canceled - a.k.a., fired for - in the case of historians - reminding the world of uncomfortable truths.
Historians don't use the term because it's a bit imprecise and outdated. If you were talking about the "Anglo-Saxon language", you would probably say "Old English" instead. If you were talking about the people, you would probably want to make it clear whether you were talking about the Germanic tribes who migrated to England starting in the 5th century, or whether you were talking about the English people in the 5th-11th century, which also included the indigenous British population.
Just as an illustration of why the term "Anglo-Saxon" muddles things, we have the person in the article who seems to think that Murphy is an Anglo-Saxon surname, when it is clearly Celtic in origin. I'm not doubting that the author is Anglo-Saxon... just pointing out that his suname, itself, is not.
I'm not a historian, so I'm just relating the parts of the issue that I understand. There are articles online by historians that go into greater depth explaining why historians tend to avoid the term "Anglo-Saxon" these days, and why the term became so popular in the 18th and 19th century.
Not sure what "uncomfortable truth" you are referring to. If you have something to say, spit it out. I also don't understand why someone would "fear being canceled" just because they used a somewhat obsolete term.
Those are fighting words in Europe. We are very serious about our ethnicism.
Akin to saying that someone from Philly might as well be from LA, it’s all just a city. Or that the Warriors might as well be the New York Yankees, it’s just sports.
PS; this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA – not anglo-saxon
That is nationalism. Northern French genes look like anglo-saxon or viking while southern France genes looks Ibarian or Italian. The generic pool in europe doesn't map to one country one set of genes usually. Some do better than others. At what point does someone become French considering it has been a melting pot for a long time?
In my experience the typical perception is that you’re X when your parents and grandparents are all X, hopefully also great grandparents.
There is a lot more melting recently. Europe historically has been pretty big on cultural identity because everyone had/has a grudge with their neighbors for trying to assimilate them at the edges.
Slavs for example (I’m from Slovenia) can trace or Slavic lineage all the way back to the 600’s and the fact we haven’t been assimilated into German or Italian despite being part of their countries for centuries is a point of pride.
There is still a recognized small German minority in Slovenia from back in the 1300’s when they tried to deal with the slavic problem by encouraging people to go settle in our area, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire but we of course wanted to keep it Slavic.
To be fair, as late as the 1940’s the germans were trying to germanize the slavs.
Some of these grudges are very fresh and ongoing. Look at how the Catalonians are fighting against being called Spanish
No, there really isn’t. It may look like there is because of the post WW2 ethnic cleansing leading to more or less monoethnic monolinguistic nation states but the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were always indifferent to what the peasants “were“, like the peasants themselves, mostly. People cared a lot more about religion than ethnicity almost everywhere in Europe until after the French Revolution. The tiny urban, bourgeois or well traveled population were the exception. Everybody else mostly just rolled with it. Most French people didn’t speak a Romance dialect modeled after the Parisian one until well after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
I meant more like since schengen and easy travel within the EU. If we keep this up, in a few centuries we might get to a point similar as USA where your identity doesn’t depend on which country your grandma comes from.
> If we keep this up, in a few centuries we might get to a point similar as USA where your identity doesn’t depend on which country your grandma comes from.
As a fellow European I don't think it's going to happen. Not in a hundred years. We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening. We might get to the point where people will define themselves with dual nationalities, like Polish-German, but this we see even today.
>We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening.//
I recall some people from Netherlands getting upset that English was becoming quite prolific to the point that University courses are sometimes held in English.
I think this happens to some extent in other countries in EU too?
Germany, Spain, and France seem highly unlikely to adopt English without a fight - not sure about other countries. But I wouldn't rule out some movement towards greater dominance of major languages.
Yes University courses are held in Englilsh, mainly because of Bologna Process. Some companies in non English speaking countries do conduct their business in English, but to the jump from that to some sort of dissolution of national borders and melting of national identities is no where to be seen. EU will never be a United States of Europe of any kind, no matter how much French and German politicians are wishing that.
I worked in company with culture which could be considered international and working language was English. But still when locals were alone they switched to local language... Ofc, when non-natives were present it was English. I don't see European nation states going anywhere.
> this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA
This is not true. They were the worst sort of white, the worst sort of people, Catholics, but the US legal system went to great lengths to categorize people by racial category and all of the ethnic groups you named were always considered white.
Depends on the place and time? they were going to lynch a black man for marrying a white woman but they got off since she was from Sicily and thus considered "not white", somewhere in the 1800s [citation needed]
Just realize those generic tests are designed more for entertainment than scientific rigor. They are looking at associations between genetic traits and groups, but it’s not like those groups where clones of each other or even genetically isolated.
Slavs were not a tribe in Germany. Slavs speak an entirely different language family from the Germanic one, as different as the Romance one. The Slavic language family stretches from Russian through Ukrainian and Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serb and Slovene, among others.
Slavic languages are as broad or more broad as Germanic ones. Ethnicity and the mother tongue does not always go together, see for example Wallonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallonia
Angles and saxons were 2 tribes from modern day Germany who migrated to England for better farming and conditions. They're a very small part of "white". A very small part even of "British" descent. Even in England, not everyone is Anglo Saxon, the ruling classes are Norman, there are Celts still, Cornish people count themselves out, Londoners date back to pre-Roman times, vikings settled some areas...
Actually, the term Anglo-Saxon refers to the traditionally three tribes (and probably at least four tribes) who emigrated from the Frisian coast region (North Sea coasts of Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands): the Jutes (traditionally originating from Jutland, the main Danish peninsula), the Angles (traditionally from the neck that is part Danish and part German), and the Saxons (which would have been from what is now northern Germany). The fourth group of the Frisian coast is of course the Frisians, (originating from what is now northern Netherlands), and while they are not traditionally held to have been part of the emigration, it's thought that they also made the journey. Frisian today is one of the closest languages to English.
It also doesn't help that our literary sources for this period are very few, non-contemporary (i.e., talking about what happened a few centuries ago), and reliant on state societies talking about non-state societies. Naturally, they use inconsistent terminology for talking about the ethnicity of who is where, and the term "Saxon" appears to be pretty interchangeable for much of northern Germany. The modern term "Anglo-Saxon" thus effectively means "English German," arising largely to distinguish the Saxons who lived in England from those who lived in Germany.
Functionally speaking, you can divide the ethnicities of Britain into 5: the original Celtic speakers, the Romanized Celtics who were part of the province of Britannia, the first wave of Germanic immigrants (Anglo-Saxons), the second wave of Germanic immigrants (the Norse), and the third wave of Germanic immigrants (the Normans), this one largely limited to a very small ruling class.
One question, do the Normans count as Germanic? I thought they were from Scandinavia originally and then spent enough time in France to pick up the language?
Old Norse culture is very clearly linked to Germanic cultures. Linguistically, the descendants of Germanic languages are broken up into North Germanic (modern Scandinavian languages), West Germanic (English, Dutch, and modern German, along with siblings), and East Germanic (now all extinct). We can also see clear parallels between Norse and Germanic religion. I'm less certain of similarities in other areas of culture, but I would be shocked if they were much greater than the linguistic or religious evidence would imply. It is not at all wrong to call Norse Germanic.
It is much less clear if Normans should also count as Germanic. I wrote it as such mostly for the pun of having England be invaded by three waves of Germanic peoples from three different places. The actual reality is murkier, as the Normans themselves are an amalgamation of existing Breton, Gallo-Romanic, and Frankish (another Germanic people!) peoples with a hefty Norse influx both before and after the ceding of territory to Rollo. It's probably more accurate to say that the Normans represent a new cultural identity which is a fusion of several that came before it, just as the English did with their several invasions, or the French did during their centralization push in the Early Modern.
I'm majority Anglo (like, actually from England), but I have a Spanish last name from one of my grandparents, who in turn is a patrilineal native American whose family adopted Spanish naming some time in the distant unremembered past. The author's terminology could easily be correct in reference to himself, irrespective of his name.
That said, I question the relevancy of this comment to the story.
Even the tech stuff posted on HN has a political or some sort of a ranty slant to it that it's gotten so damn tiresome. I wish we had a proper HN without any of the political, fiscal, housing, nutrition/dietary, etc bullshit. Just post solid articles on tech and startups. Preferably actionable ones so it's not just a comment minefield of circlejerking from people who have an opinion but have zero idea what they are talking about. Take that shit elsewhere.
> native American whose family adopted Spanish naming some time in the distant unremembered past
I'm curious: what kind of Native Americans were they that would willingly adopt Spanish names as indigenous, and not mestizo, peoples, especially given that Spanish contact was pretty violent across most of North America?
I'm not familiar with the details, sorry. Just repeating what I've been told by my dad. Granddad never really volunteered much demographic info about his family and, for better or worse, it is not something I interrogated too deeply. It doesn't impact me directly all that much as I am for all intents and purposes white -- that's what I answer on e.g. college applications or government forms, and it's what anyone would think looking at me. The only exception is my name.
The damning thing about Latinx though is how forcefully it was hoisted onto Hispanics by whites who knew little to nothing about their cultures. They simply saw an opportunity to make latinos conform to their world views and now identifying yourself as latinx signals that you are one of those fully assimilated hispanics that has bought into white culture, and who can be expected to be agreeable on certain topics without embarrassing yourself or other whites. So pervasive this has become, that merely identifying yourself as Latino or Latina instead of Latinx can be seen as a sort of statement that can send out the “wrong vibes”.
I don't blame them. If you are offered an executive role at a successful company because you can help with PR, it may be good for your career. I don't see how that is any different than someone with an climate science degree joining a company to help them "go green". Obviously the role exists partially for PR, but there may still be positive things you can do.
Seems convoluted and unfair to condemn all people using a term for what you think are their reasons. Simpler explanation is that "Latinx" doesn't carry a gender so it's more inclusive than "Latinos" and shorter than "Latinas and Latinos". I'm not saying it was a good idea but I don't get all the negativity towards it; at worst seems a misguided attempt by well-intentioned people, big deal, just let people call themselves whatever they want and let words and people evolve (see "African-Americans" and "Blacks").
The negativity is because Latinos did not call themselves Latinx, white people called them that because they didn’t understand and were intimidated by gendered languages, seeing them as a threat to “inclusivity” rather than just a different way of speaking. So then any “progressive thinking” Latino was forced to adopt the term for themselves as a result of peer pressure to fit in.
I know I’m being hit with downvotes to my name the more I try to explain this but I’d rather speak the truth and be punished than stay quiet and take it to the grave.
I am transgender and I feel similarly about the language that has been adopted by our community in recent years. The difference is that the terminology seems to have originated from the trans community itself. But there are many modern correct terms that I don't feel comfortable using for myself but if I don't use them I am instantly seen as regressive. It's even so bad that one of the terms I used to enjoy casually calling myself among friends is now regarded as an outright slur and saying it is akin to cursing in a problematic manner. And yet it's something that I used to enjoy saying with no ill intent or bad feelings whatsoever. It's a sad situation. When I use the socially correct terms I feel as though I'm being forced to speak a certain way and it doesn't feel empowering, in fact it makes me feel vulnerable in a way that I don't necessarily want to be with every stranger that I come across.
Well... the culture of your ancestors can't do anything for (or against) you in the present day. The so-called Anglo-Saxons were sometimes Anglo, sometimes Saxons, and in many cases neither - e.g., the Normans were a separate culture and a separate people until they invaded and essentially reverse-assimilated. That whole process is very much organic; preserving an identity to specific ancestors long dead, when the culture that defines you has changed, would not be.
How do you "lose all organic connection to the culture of your ancestors" simply by calling yourself Latinx? You're surely not suggesting they abandon the traditions, holidays, food, music, clothing, dancing, and all of the rest of their cultural connection, simply because of one label?
I am an Irish-American who plays the music, hates the food, but if I wanted to call myself of "European" ancestry, that wouldn't abandon all of my musical culture, it may just be a trendy label in the zeitgeist.
He didn’t call himself European, or white, utterly anodyne words. He called his name Anglo-Saxon. That you didn’t immediately understand the difference shows that you don’t get it. Which is fine. If you’re not Irish and don’t claim to be that’s cool. You do you. Americans do their American thing, Irish people do their Irish thing and we all happily exchange cultures and products and talk shit about each other as humans are wont to do.
Knowingly or not it's not hard to take the point which is that "Anglo-Saxon" has lost any meaning beyond fair skinned at this point for the vast majority of people. Anyone reading the source knew what the author meant even those who were knew and were annoyed by the incorrectness.
The comparison to "latinx" is apt though - I should see it as a flag but instead it's like nails on a chalkboard because it's everything I don't like about language policing.
Definitely in the USA. Ever since the first mongrel landed on this fair shore they've been trying to drum in an appreciation for History. It has not taken. People here must on some level understand that there is a past but they cannot keep any of it straight.
> How do you "lose all organic connection to the culture of your ancestors" simply by
I don't think there is such a thing as losing the culture but a development into a different direction after the fork (migration).
A classic identity problem of the Indian diaspora or the Turkish immigrants in Germany or the Irish in Boston, or the Italian in NY is that they have retained many of the traditional values that were popular at the time in their countries before they left. But their old countries have moved on in every sense. These tribes then become more conservative because they feel like they have to defend their values from outside groups and from lack of new values that they can tie to their old labels. But what they "defend" no longer reflects the reality back in the old country.
This leads to some strange (but IMO understandable behaviors) where the old is much more idealized than what their peers do back in the old country. E.g.:
- Turkish AKP voters in Germany who only remember all the prosperity Erdogan has brought to an economically failing Turkey.
- The 3rd or 4th gen Italians in the US are hardly Italians in todays sense of Italy (even their food is laughed at back in their own country.
- Eventually the culture changes so much that it has no parallel to what it used to be.
That is neither good nor bad IMO it just is a natural progression and adaption to their new environment. Shedding the old values and stories people tell themselves takes not years but generations. The odd thing about the US is that despite its many influences from all around the world it is still a country where many groups hold on to what they think are their roots while actually it's a constant state of change and no longer exists.
Who cares though. I was raised Jewish but don't practice anymore. Theoretically there's a line if ancestors going back 3000 years to pass down beliefs and practices to me. But they aren't actually valuable so I don't want them. Sunk cost.
My wife's ancestors are likely genetically pure going back many centuries from the other side of the world. Her mother's family were nobility before they came to America. Our kids are a thing that probably didn't exist at all prior to the 20th century and they're fantastic. And they know their culture to be New Yorkers.
This is so on-brand for HN - the article is about a writer now working as a delivery driver which is a juicy topic in itself, but most of the discussion is down the rabbit hole on an entirely tangential matter.
If it is so tangential, why did the author of the piece insist to mention it, and the editor decided to keep it? Looks to me like they wanted to start a conversation, and you are making the environment here not inclusive by shutting down unrepresented voices.
> Lurching west in stop-and-go traffic on I-80 that morning, bound for Berkeley and a day of delivering in the rain, I had a low moment, dwelling on how far I’d come down in the world. Then I snapped out of it. I haven’t come down in the world. What’s come down in the world is the business model that sustained Time Inc. for decades. I’m pretty much the same writer, the same guy. I haven’t gone anywhere. My feet are the same.
When I’m in a rhythm, and my system’s working, and I slide open the side door and the parcel I’m looking for practically jumps into my hand, and the delivery takes 35 seconds and I’m on to the next one, I enjoy this gig. I like that it’s challenging, mentally and physically. As with the athletic contests I covered for my old employer, there’s a resolution, every day. I get to the end of my route, or I don’t. I deliver all the packages, or I don’t.
Delivering packages is a fine job doing honest labor. Amazon pays well. He has a good attitude. He is doing something the modern world needs. No shame in that.
If I was down on my luck I would have no problem doing whatever job exists. I have washed dishes, and I enjoyed that job. I think a lot of people think some types of work are beneath them but I respect all people who are productive members of society - and the flip-side is that I despise people who say these jobs are so “terrible” they need to be outlawed or whatever.
Yeah - I liked that part of his essay too, I also just generally liked his writing.
There’s something satisfying in this kind of work with clear explicit goals and getting through the list everyday.
I think a lot of society issues seem to stem from how he briefly felt, that this kind of thing was a sign of failure or that he was embarrassed to tell friends at the holiday party.
The irony to me is that this kind of work is probably more valuable to society than sports illustrated and day to day almost certainly so.
If there was more cultural respect for these kinds of jobs, people would feel better about themselves while doing them. I think there should be. I was glad he felt good about it at the end.
This can’t be overstated. Dignity means having the financial stability required to comfortably live in a decent neighborhood, get married, and raise a family.
Oil industry workers don’t seem to carry much clout, kind of a dirty job with a lot of physical labor, but pays quite well and has for a while.
Truckers can still make an upper middle class salary, especially if they own their truck or focus on a niche (refrigerated, military deliveries, cross border, etc.)
I was actually thinking of underwater welders when I wrote that. Not all oil industry jobs pay well but that one really can, and it carries the cachet to boot. It's definitely manual labor royalty - dangerous, highly skilled and pays up to $300k.
Truckers are not doing so well these days, and where they do make a lot it's typically because of backbreaking labor and/or taking on financial risks. This still only gets you into lower/mid tier software dev wages.
"I was actually thinking of underwater welders when I wrote that. Not all oil industry jobs pay well but that one really can, and it carries the cachet to boot. It's definitely manual labor royalty - dangerous, highly skilled and pays up to $300k."
A lot of the "well paying", low-status jobs mentioned in this thread are dangrous... long-haul truckers, construction workers, underwater welders, even electricians are jobs where you have to risk your life to do them, and many of them are statistically dangerous as well.
So whether the people who have such jobs are "well compensated" for risking their lives like that is debatable.
Certainly an IT manager job that paid the same as a trucker would be far more preferable in terms of safety, and would therefore be far better compensated when the danger of being a trucker is taken in to account.
Of course, low-paid delivery jobs are even worse when you consider that those low-paid delivery drivers have to risk their lives on the road to deliver your packages.
There's always a labor shortage of some kind if you're the one paying the wages.
In truckers' cases it must be a shortage of experienced truckers willing to partake in backbreaking labor and take financial and health risks for $60k / year.
In Canada at least, any contractor/constructing job.
Plumbers, electricians are educated specialists making very very good hourly wage but won't get same status as say IT manager.
Bonded cleaner with great references can easily be 50 bucks an hour.
Truck drivers, forklift operators have steadily been well compensated and need certified skillset but again don't get same perceived class status.
Note I'm not saying I don't / these jobs shouldn't have respect :). Question was which well paid jobs are seen as different conferring class status despite good pay and this is the general perception I've observed.
That's not amazing. Construction is also notorious for ruining your body (health problems / early retirement a necessity) so it's not even as good as a 66k CAD office wage.
That has a lot more to do with personality than career. If you’re an irritating know-it-all weirdo, people aren’t going to like you regardless of your job. I’ve known engineers like that that, but most people I know and work with are normal people and are respected.
That victim blaming just plain doesn't line up with reality. Outright assholes are downright lionized. Perfectly upright people are looked down upon for "weird" fields or ones which make them feel insecure or inadequate.
Sounds like lawyers and doctors (or plenty of people really).
> weirdo
That is a bit of a stereotype. I suspect a large percentage of software jobs are filled by standard people. The weirdos do stand out, but I don’t know anyone who actually fits the Hollywood stereotype.
And weirdo be replaced by equally socially unacceptable traits (arrogant or closed-minded etcetera) that apply to doctors and lawyers.
> There’s something satisfying in this kind of work with clear explicit goals and getting through the list everyday.
This sums up my mid career crisis. I miss the jobs of my youth where I was just scheduled, showed up, did tasks, and left when scheduled. Of course, a flaw of memories like this is I mainly remember the good parts. When I really try, I remember things like lack of flexibility (working from home, leaving early to meet the plumber/doctor, etc) and honestly how difficult living on a low wage actually was and that was before all the responsibilities I’ve accumulated (family, homes, etc).
Also, I always found these jobs truly fun. The carefreeness of other employees and they types of characters you came across was eclectic and interesting. Corporate America does not allow of much of that and is fairly homogeneous even when diversified.
I laughed at your phrase "even when diversified".
They promote all forms of diversity except diversity of thought. You'll get a far more interesting range of views from a small team of people delivering pizzas than you will from people working at Google.
Every argument against Amazon-the-employer I have read recently seems to pretend that the people who work there have no choice but to work for Amazon, as if they didn't pick the job for themselves out of the array of possible options available to them.
I have a lot of issues with the way Amazon operates, but precisely nobody is forced to work there. This article does a good job of pointing that out.
The array of possible unskilled jobs in almost every populated place is almost always >1.
It turns out that Amazon actually competes for labor in a vast market for same. So many people work there because they have to be a better option than most unskilled labor jobs because they have so many packages to deliver.
I’d you don’t have a lot of financial resources, and work a low paid job, you also tend not to have the time resources to explore the option. It comes at a high transaction cost.
My experience with wage workers that are struggling to make ends meet is different. They spend a lot of time looking for better jobs and side gigs. Like, it is their primary focus.
I believe that in the USA you would have a much harder time finding an able-bodied person who cannot find an available job vs. someone with multiple options. My news this week is full of stories of employers who cannot find enough labor. We are very far away from a jobs crisis.
> My news this week is full of stories of employers who cannot find enough labor.
If someone said this about employment in software dev there'd be a thousand comments about how there isn't a shortage of labor, just of labor at the price point businesses want to pay.
There's a difference though. The news stories you're reading are about employees that are offering pay that's at a similar rate as unemployment benefits.
Workers are not OK working on slave wages that these employees want to pay them.
This is true for almost all labor "shortages" when there is anything less than full employment. If you struggle to find workers at a given wage, you're not paying enough. It's not like the world is out of people.
A true labor shortage could exist without full employment with ramp up time issues with skilled labor. That also means a shortage across the whole scope not just a single employer. As in "even if you paid a million a year salary you couldn't suddenly get 100 people capable of proficently reading and writing a long dead language when there are only seventeen professors world wide who can". The issues would correct themselves eventually longer term with sustained demand and training though.
> My news this week is full of stories of employers who cannot find enough labor.
Yeah, they can't find enough labor because they want to pay people $15 an hour in an area where the median home price is $572,000. I work in logistics. I occasionally overhear some of executive staff down the hall from my office complain about being unable to keep workers in a non-climate controlled warehouse, lifting enormously heavy things, for 8 hours a day, in one of the richest areas of Texas that isn't Houston or Dallas.
Gee, I can't imagine why people wouldn't want to work in a warehouse in 100 degree F weather, lifting 30-80 lbs. boxes for 8 hours.
So I pulled data on that warehouse and it's location. In-N-Out is hiring just 10 miles away for $16 an hour. Yeah, it's not a great job either, but it's air conditioned. And you won't be lifting anything heavier than a box of fries. Furthermore, the cheapest rent within a 10 mile radius of that warehouse is $1700. Good luck paying that on $15 an hour.
So yeah, I can understand why employers can't find workers...
The market is always a negotiation between buyers and sellers, naturally.
I have for years always gotten emails from recruiters trying to hire me as an FTE for SWE jobs in nothing towns in flyover states at 6x less than what I charge, too. Those positions are similarly unfilled.
People pick their best options available, usually.
If they can't find/keep labor for $15/hour, that means the price for labor in their market is greater than $15/hour. That's a good thing, as that's not true most places on this planet.
Surely it makes no sense to compare the median home price to the lowest paying jobs? We don’t really expect people who earn the least to be buying the median house. (And it’s silly to think that 100% home ownership is some kind of ideal, it has a lot of negative consequences so we’re better off with many people renting).
This claim would be stronger if you compared to the bottom 10% of housing, say.
Not sure what the housing market is where you live, but you can't get a house here, unless you make an offer 35% over asking and have cash on hand. Could you get a house for < million? Perhaps but it'll be "a fixer upper" to put it humorously. You're more likely looking at a trailer, and those have 5 year waiting period.
You understand that this is very unusual right? I mean, mere seconds of googling can show you that the average house price in the U.S. is about 270K, not 570K, and the average purchase price is not 35% over-asking unless there is a sudden epidemic of people under-asking and misvaluing their own homes.
> Where did all the money come from in last 1 year to inflate the prices to this insanity.
We've been printing trillions over the past 15 years or so. And we've disproportionately accumulated it at the top (including the audience here, although the top 1% and 0.1% are doing even better than that). That money has to go somewhere. Traditional conservative investments have low rates of return right now - think low interest rates - and housing has historically been seen as "safe". And it's providing fantastic returns.
Take COVID - nobody wants to move, so housing supply is low. Tight supply is just exacerbating an existing issue, especially sharply over the past year.
Totally anecdotal: I just moved from SF to Seattle, somewhat related to my job. We were outbid half a dozen times, often by cash offers. I remember one of them in particular, because we got beat way over asking by a cash buyer, and it was rented on Zillow the week after closing. Housing is an asset class, not a place we live.
> I don't understand why employers cant simply pay more and pass on the costs to their consumers. What's stoping them.
Passing costs onto consumers is a bit of a lie used to scare consumers into opposing wage increases. You can only pass on so much cost, and it depends in part on the elasticity of demand for your product.
Anyhow, employers generally can pay more, but they are optimizing for their shareholders and return on equity. That's going pretty well if you look at the market. But that's why the market isn't reflective of the economy as a whole.
100% this. Quantitative easing basically caused epic asset inflation- great for the capital owning class, but royally fucking over the poors and young workers.
In Seattle back in the day a teacher could own a house in the city and pay it off without a sweat. Nowadays, unless you are a doctor or software engineer or patent lawyer it's kind of ludicrous idea.
"Take COVID - nobody wants to move, so housing supply is low."
I was under the impression that lots of people wanted to move out of the cities both because the high population of cities made living in them much riskier than living in more rural/suburban areas in terms of infection risk for COVID, and because with the economy hurting from COVID-related lockdowns living in cities (especially expensive ones like SF) was much less affordable.
Maybe, but I suspect those are mostly renters moving out. SF single family housing supply was also fairly tight - didn’t seem like that was who was leaving. We were renters so it wasn’t too hard to bail.
> Where did all the money come from in last 1 year to inflate the prices to this insanity.
This area of Texas is not well-known to most people. It's a bit of a well-kept secret. While Austin is new money and trendy, and Dallas is cosmopolitan, this area of Texas is old... old money.
> I don't understand why employers cant simply pay more and pass on the costs to their consumers. What's stoping them.
Our company not only has two nationwide competitors, we have significant regional competitors across America, and on top of that, we're having to fight Amazon as well.
I get CC'ed and BCC'ed on most shifts in company policies because it can directly affect logistics and I need to be able to actively work around or with these policies, and things are getting so crazy that Directors of Operations at each warehouse are being tasked with asking low-level warehouse employees to clock out 15 minutes early each day just to avoid any possibility of overtime.
Obviously this creates logistics problems because when a warehouse fills up, you can't send any more stock from suppliers there. So I've had to fold COVID-19 absentee reports into our data analysis, because the loss of productivity from workers can directly affect storage space. For instance, one warehouse currently has three people out with a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis, but we contact traced another seven people between those three, so that's 10 workers out, 3 of which for at least a few weeks, possibly months. The other 7 until they're cleared by medical doctors. That could mean roughly a 30% reduction in ability to process merchandise at that location for up to a week or two, and around an 8% decline for several weeks or months.
So we can't pass the cost on to consumers because why would you buy a headlamp assembly for your Audi A6 from us for $479 when you can get it from Amazon for $382?
I think the question "why employers cant simply pay more and pass on the costs to their consumers" was rhetorical. Of course most employers cannot do this because their competitors will undercut them. They can only do it for costs that are imposed on all players, like government mandated minimum wage.
And I would bet you a week's pay the "job creators" who are complaining they can't find people willing to work for peanuts doing backbreaking miserable labor are the first to claim "we're full, no more immigrants!" to the US when there are plenty of folks in neighboring countries willing to work these jobs and pay taxes...
I'm not sure how that refutes my point that there are millions of people south of the border willing to work these backbreaking jobs for low pay if only our government could come up with some sensible immigration bill.
That these same people also exploit undocumented people is a separate issue. Give them papers and you'll have no problem finding jobs!
I am refuting your point that people complaining about labor shortages shouldn't be voting republican. Which doesn't make sense because these ppl want
1. low regulation, taxes and lax labor laws.
2. availability of immigrants.
GOP provides both of these. Why would they care if ppl working for them are illegal or on h2 visa.
> Give them papers and you'll have no problem finding jobs!
Trump admin increased h2 visas despite what you are claiming. We had the highest number of h2 visas allocated under Trump and Bush and lowest under Obama admin. Obama slashed these visas by half from bush era.
Most of the resistance to seasonal visas comes from democrat voting unions who lobby against these visas. They lobbied obama govt to slash those visas under the guise of protecting their local union memebers.
But yes your larger point that Republicans are fine with migrants they can exploit for a few years as long as they can make sure they "go back to their country" is well taken!
Literally no Democrat in leadership has ever proposed "undocumented hordes of people flooding across the borders". And like maybe 3-4 of hundreds of elected democrats have ever proposed anything close to "open borders"
This is what people whose brains have been melted by MAGA twitter and Fox News believe the "other side" wants.
There was a BIPARTISAN senate immigration reform bill that passed the senate in 2013. THIRTEEN Republicans voted for it and every Democrat and independent did.
It went to the house and died there because the Republican majority leader Boehner knew it would pass and refused to let it be voted on. He was beholden to the most xenophobic, bigoted Republicans in his caucus and thought they would vote him out of leadership if he let it pass. He ended up losing his job anyways shortly thereafter for other reasons.
Now the entire Republican party is beholden to the xenophobic bigots and I guarantee you the exact same bill wouldn't find more than 2 votes from a Republican in the senate.
So no, there is no "both sides" here. Democrats have been remarkably consistent about what an immigration compromise looks like, and even were able to pass it in the senate 7-8 years ago, only to be blown up by the Tea Party ur-Trumpists. The GOP has only moved further to the right and will never support anything close to that.
> Yeah, they can't find enough labor because they want to pay people $15 an hour in an area where the median home price is $572,000.
No, as in, can't find skilled labor for a good salary. The notion that only unskilled labor is sought after is incorrect. Good people are always hard to find. Smart people are always hard to find. But most workers are average, and it is hard to find a job that can support a half million mortgage for the worker who is average.
What is also true is that there is skilled labor in shrinking industries and that labor is not easy to transfer to other skilled industries. You can take a smart person in logistics and convert them into a highly sought after programmer with enough time and the right attitude, but if you already have a family then you can't handle the dip. Skill mismatch is a real problem, particularly given our penchant for outsourcing. But I don't see why meeting the mortgage needs of half million dollar homes should be the yardstick by which you judge a labor market.
And for all the shrieking about Amazon destroying "mom and pop" shops these people never admit that Amazon pays their employees much more, often 2x what the mom and pop's did.
Or did you really think mom and pop were paying the teens running their bookstore $17/hr? You think they had great health insurance and other benefits?
I personally think it's ridiculous that people find it amazing that 15 an hour is considered amazing pay for anyone that isn't a teenager working their first job, but Amazon gets high praise for doing it. Most people on here would laugh at a job that pays 600 a week, 2400 a month or 28800 a year before taxes.
15 is there minimum though. Meaning any teenager with a driver's license is getting 15. This guy (a grownup with no delivery experience) was getting 17 plus overtime.
I am here saying that, yes that paltry $15 an hour you scold Amazon for paying? Well mom and pop they drove out of business was paying about HALF of that.
I felt bad for him in the moment when he talked about being judged for being a senior and doing a "menial" job. Being a delivery driver is certainly not a high status job but I think it's a reminder not to allow ourselves to look down on any particular role in society. We need all these types of work for the gears to keep turning.
It's not an issue of "looking down" though. We absolutely need these jobs (some of them anyway, we don't really need restaurants for example). That's all the more reason to ensure that they are sustainable. We need rules so that people are paid well, working in safe conditions, not being overworked, etc. As a society we need to ensure that people doing vital stuff like delivery are protected and taken care of, for our sake as well as theirs. Post-Covid, Amazon has essentially become a core part of US infrastructure, as much or moreso than the USPS.
And of course, all of this is even more important for the reason the article highlights: These are the jobs people end up in now. In a country with a vanishing middle class and terrible social safety nets for seniors, increasingly large numbers of people end up here. Not just criminals, those who aren't especially bright or those who are a bit unlucky, but good, capable ordinary people have nowhere else to go now. If we're all going to be living here now, we need to start cleaning the place up.
"We need all these types of work for the gears to keep turning."
Ok, we can all agree that until a high level of automation is achieved, such jobs are necessary.
But how many of the people defending the need for such jobs would actually want to do them?
Usually they're happy to let other people do them, but would balk at doing them themselves.
This is especially true for "dirty" or "unsavory" jobs such as garbageperson, exterminator, food processing / slaughterhouse worker, etc.
People are usually happy to hire such people or consume their products, and talk about how essential they are, but would never want to be one themselves.
On top of that, they'd usually look down on people with these jobs and never dream of associating with them or inviting them to their parties.
A professor friend of mine told me once that one of the secretaries was lamenting that "even garbagemen get paid more than I." Curmudgeon that he was, he suggested that she quit and become a garbageman. She replied in an offended tone "no way would I do a filthy, disgusting job like that."
Amazon treats their workers like shit. Nearly all low-wage (and yes, Amazon is still "low-wage" given the work involved) employers do. In Amazon's case they then hire armies of corporate apologists to swarm social media and astroturf any time anyone tries to talk about the shitty way workers are treated. All of this is well established fact at this point.
I'm glad the author is doing well. But these are not good jobs. They are not stable, sustainable, safe or high paid enough. A person could have, presumably, led a pretty good life as a writer for a national magazine like SI. It would not destroy them physically. It would probably not destroy them mentally. They would not be forced to carefully regiment their bathroom breaks, or pee in bottles. They would not be forced to work in stifling hot warehouses. They would not be forced to compete with robots and automated processes and suffer when they inevitably failed to be as fast. Writing for SI is (was) a job. Working for Amazon is exploitation. If you can't see the difference, you either haven't taken the time to read about what Amazon jobs are like, or you're arguing in bad faith, possibly because Amazon is paying you to do so.
I worked at a UPS hub before Amazon was much of a thing, and I can say that what you're describing is nothing new or specific to Amazon. Logistics companies, especially in the warehouse/sorting areas, are abjectly horrid to work for.
There's a good book on such jobs called "Nickel and Dimed"[1] by Barbara Ehrenreich, who went "undercover" and worked a bunch of such low-paid jobs.
A quote from the book:
"When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you ... The "working poor" ... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone."
I did customer service for an energy company. At the time they paid well! It wasn’t IT, but it taught me a few things. When I was able to do a stint in the hardship division for a few months, it showed me a side of society I hadn’t seen before.
If company has huge billion dollar profits, then they don't pay well. This is pure greed and exploitation.
They get great value out of their employees but they don't share it amongst them. They share just enough so they don't look too bad to an untrained eye.
They share it with anyone willing to take a risk and buy a share.
Working at a job doesn't automatically give one ownership rights, any more than the mechanic who fixes your car gets a share in the proceeds when you sell it.
Many companies, however, do provide ownership rights to employees in the form of stock purchase plans and stock option plans. I don't know if Amazon provides such to warehouse workers, but I'd suspect it would be good business to do so.
Payment in salary and real shares (without dilution) is one of the ways that could work. For example if company made 1 billion profit, they could use 30% to buy stock or use their own and redistribute it to employees into their real broker accounts.
This is a great parody of the WASPy romanticization of a hard days work. Plainly stating the classic implication that shitty jobs are actually humbling learning experiences when white. Even more comical because I don’t think it’s satire.
> Plainly stating the classic implication that shitty jobs are actually humbling learning experiences when white
I'm familiar with the implication that hard work can be a humbling and rewarding experience, but I'm not aware of any such "when white" qualifiers.
FWIW, I grew up on a farm and did a bit of construction before embarking on a career as a software engineer, and I can absolutely affirm that hard, physical work is rewarding. Though white, I didn't find it especially "humbling" because my family was solidly working class and frankly it never occurred to me to feel ashamed of hard work as though it makes me lesser than those from more delicate stations in life.
That said, I don't know that working as a delivery person for Amazon is comparable to farm work or construction with respect to satisfaction.
Fair point - switch white for upper middle class, my bad. I wasn’t making a point against them being humbling and learning experiences, but rather against the idea you can dip your toes in for a minute and be washed of your pretension (while writing an Atlantic article).
Journalism has become such a tough field. I know a number of people who do OK in it. But I know a whole lot more who do writing-related stuff for companies that sell products.
How can we fix that? Many of my family members and friends have little to no interest in reading or learning, although they do have strong opinions on just about every topic.
In my mind, demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read. They have enough things trying to grab their attention that provide an instant gratification — whereas journalism or reading some well researched or written article requires mental effort and investment and almost an appreciation. I personally didn’t appreciate good journalism or writers until I tried writing (mostly technical documents).
I learned two things quickly. Not only did I need to know the subject matter but I needed to convey it in some form that made sense, didn’t just lead to unrelated questions that derail what I’m trying to achieve, and didn’t put the reader to sleep. This is a hard problem, in my opinion.
There are a great many people who would like to know the answer to that question but, for the most part, almost no one has. (Almost because there are a few global brands, especially those that provide financial reporting, that are doing OK but most aren't.
There are a lot of reasons, not least of all that the Internet broke the newspaper bundle that forced people advertising in the classifieds for roommates or the local car dealership advertising a sale to effectively subsidize the paper's prestige foreign bureaus and investigative journalism because where else were they going to advertise?
Plus, you don't need a subscription to SI any longer to keep up with whatever is going on in the world of sports.
"How can we fix that? ... demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read."
The education system needs to be radically reformed to teach kids to value reading, knowledge, and learning for its own sake and not just to pass tests and get in to schools that will get them high paying jobs. Critical reading and thinking skills also need to be taught more effectively.
Unfortunately, such reform is difficult to undertake in a society which mostly doesn't value any of that, and when politicians consider critical thinking among their voters to be detrimental to their own interests.
I agree. Its not in decision makers interest to fix education. It's a lot of work and elections won't wait for you to finish. A crap education might even be politically expedient - and I'm sure politicians have been campaigning to fix it for over 5 decades at this point.
The presumption that the average person is interested in learning, or can be taught to be interested in learning, especially regarding difficult subjects like science and math, is completely false. The average person is fundamentally incompetent and lazy, and that's the danger of excessively optimistic and unrealistically empowering western culture - you end up with an army of ignoramuses who drastically overestimate their knowledge and abilities, and simultaneously as a consequence become less able to recognize competence or it's value in, for example, politicians or authority figures. I think this is one of the major accelerants in the decay of western society, at least in the US.
I think the point of maximum leverage is making it easier to support good journalism via tools that don't have a corruptible middleman. It's impossible to support truly independent journalists via platforms like Patreon when those platforms are in bed with institutions like Vice, anyone who is truly independent and covering dangerous stories is subject to being memory-holed. But the desire to directly support real journalism is there, I think it just needs a robust payment system which is also robust to corruption in its own organization.
Meh -- they've done themselves such harm in recent years by embracing activism and deliberate bias that it's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry.
That said, I'll applaud whichever journalists are brave enough to start pushing their industry/art back towards objectivity and diversity of perspective.
Embracing activism isn't necessarily a shooting oneself in the foot, it can be a way of trying to ensure greater profitability. A case in point is The Guardian which took a huge turn in the last decade ago from traditional British working-class themes to trans issues and the specific kind of race debates originating from the US. By doing so, the newspaper could, firstly, win the allegiance of self-identified "woke" readers (who are often affluent and thus a target for advertisers). But even for other readers, culture-war-related reporting can get people all fired up and thus generate views and ad impressions.
Interesting idea. What do you imagine would happen to the global health correspondent when there's not a pandemic going on, or the war correspondent when there's not a war going on?
I pay for the Guardian mostly because it's the only paper I know that covers global stories and gives climate breakdown anything resembling the degree of coverage it deserves. For a while I subscribed to The Times, but felt dirty supporting a Murdoch-owned paper.
The presence of bias in an individual jounalist as a human is expected. But being a professional means having some standards that boost trust in the profession overall.
Clearly you wouldn't say that judges and police and prosecutors should just follow their biases and go after whoever they want or protect whoever they want.
Journalists don't have any legal obligation to follow standards, but they do have a professional obligation.
So the fact that all information is biased is an excuse to force your own ideological bias into every communication?
This is as much of a fallacy as the common "everything is political" refrain. It's nothing but a dangerous rationalization of tribalism which breeds distrust of institutions and disenfranchises political minorities when the entire establishment leans in a particular direction and simultaneously determines the set of "acceptable" or "authoritative" sources. News media, "fact checkers", Wikipedia editors, etc. are implicitly colluding and the results are already manifesting with long term disastrous cultural and political consequences that we are yet to fully witness. There is no excuse for the hyper polarization of modern media, it is a disservice to everyone, and we need to un-normalize the kind of insidious activist journalism that has infested all of our major publications, though the system is self reinforcing at this point.
I mean...many of them do? At least in America, that's a thing. Now it might not be the ONLY factor (I don't believe most MDs are out here prescribing things that patients wouldn't find beneficial) but it plays into their equation. And occasionally we do hear stories about pill farms...
I have seen the opposite with doctors in my experience, going with what is the cheapest working option for the patient be it handing out several free sample packs to try a drug to checking for best covered option as a default. Like "XR is more expensive but we can subsitute three times a day for as cheap with your minimal plan vs okay you have good insurance, I can switch you to XR". I guess it is just good medical practice to help ensure dosage compliance if they aren't trying to ration the expense.
"Many" in my post was not meant to imply "most". I have no idea how many doctors are more focused on the money vs saving lives, but it's >0%. I will say my experience as a patient has reflected what you're describing, and that it would likely be that "doing what is best for my patient" often involves doing what's best for their bank account.
I just know I worked in pharma advertising, and we def identified who helped push product. There's a reason the industry is so heavily regulated, well actually many reasons, but one of them is def because drug companies exploit US insurance practices using copay and other programs which allow. And people doctors definitely have different attitudes when speaking with "Dude with platinum level insurance" and "Dude who has no insurance and works as a waiter".
Telling the truth for a living may be a drag, but playing on the readers' emotions and biases for ad traffic revenue seems far more soulless by comparison.
Most people I know don't mind reading a journalist that is open with their biases as long as that journalist is objective when it comes to facts. The problem in today's media is that biased journalists ignore facts or just outright lie when the facts don't jive with the narrative they are trying to push. Its one thing to report on a story and spin the facts in such a way that correlates with your perspective and entirely another thing to conceal facts or invent your own. Most legacy "journalism" has devolved into a toxic brew of woke hot takes and the uncritical, anonymous dissemination of intelligence agency assertions.
The Guardian was mentioned above, and is an excellent example of this. The Guardian never made much attempt to hide their social and political biases in the past, but it was still a widely respected and credible newspaper, even to those who didn't necessarily share the same perspectives. Unfortunately, The Guardian, like most other legacy news outlets, went off the rails at some point over the last 5 years. They stopped reporting the news, and starting inventing it. Anyone following their coverage of the Assange saga saw numerous examples of this such as the, "Manafort met Assange in the embassy" fairy tale (including details like what Manafort was wearing to make the lie extra convincing). The problem is, it never happened! Yet still, 4 years later, it sits on their website, no retraction, no correction. The credibility problem is real.
Personally what I find most frustrating is the two-facedness of it. State your bias. Maybe each reporter should have a visible profile above the article below the headline stating their “political compass results”. Why does CNN/Fox News continue to claim they are objective reporting when they have been caught so often failing to do so.
At the least, maybe explaining the other party’s perspective (as still flawed as this would be).
Ex: situation at the border
Republicans call it a crisis, they cite x, y, z. Their main argument is that illegal immigration causes X....
Democrats argue that the situation is at the root because of Y....
Be out about the biases. We all have biases, deceptively trying to hide them is worse: be completely out with them.
> Everyone has biases, attempting to hide them is just gutless.
I think this is situation-dependent.
A lot of product review journalism is nigh-worthless because giving robust reviews would cut off the freebies, previews and ad spending they depend on.
It's easy to imagine how that could be more objective: Just stop accepting freebies.
On the other hand, some situations are almost impossible to make objective: If you're a political journalist reporting on a politician doing foo today, and you know previously they promised not-foo, does reporting that context make your reporting more objective or less?
Weird thing to say for a dying industry that's basically whoring itself for the highest bidder. You want objectivity and unbias? Those are not cheap, and until the whole journalism industry is fixed, you're going to keep getting what we have.
> Meh -- they've done themselves such harm in recent years by embracing activism and deliberate bias that it's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry.
Journalism's financial problems predate "recent years," and perhaps those problems have actually lead to or exacerbated the problems you're complaining about. E.g. investigative journalism is hard, time-consuming, and expensive; an underfunded, short-staffed newspaper may turn to other, cheaper things to fill its pages and attract readers.
This is a particularly naive viewpoint on journalism / the publishing industry. Journalists may be the face of the industry, but they're not the primary deciders. They don't control the business decisions, or indeed many of the individual editorial decisions.
Just like one little nugget of anecdata. I used to work at a radio station in a small market that was 1/3 stations run out of the same building by the same owner, an older conservative woman who inherited the business. One station was all-talk (AM) one was country (FM) and the other was classic rock (FM).
All. Three. Stations. Had to carry Rush Limbaugh over the objections of FM program managers. Why? Because Alvina liked Rush. She wanted to blanket the airwaves with his show. And she didn't have to deal with any competition in the little corner of the world where the stations aired. People don't see those decisions, though.
Granted this is a particular egregious example, but by and large TV/radio/cable/etc. programming is at a macro level dictated by upper echelons of the business, not by the front-line reporters or editors.
Print publishing has been gutted over the past 20+ years by a lot of factors. (Radio even longer, see Clear Channel, et al.)
Consolidation. A move from print publishing to web publishing that has required more and more intrusive tracking and obsession with clicks -- not quality, just "how many page views?" and then "how many uniques?" or whatever the metric du jour happens to be. I've been on the publishing side and corporate side, and I've never once heard a company factor quality of content into its advertising decisions. Which means it's a race to the bottom -- not in terms of bias, but in terms of "what gets eyeballs?"
People love to bitch about the quality of journalism, etc. but yet... they keep consuming it. They certainly don't want to pay for good journalism. Not as individuals, not with corporate marketing dollars. If an ad buyer can get 10x the clicks and leads with crap than they can get with well-reasoned and well-researched content? They'll buy crap every time. And blame the journalists/press/publications for the quality and then do it all over again.
Not to mention the effects of Google and Facebook, which are hard to understate.
Google has done a huge number on publications that initially managed to navigate the print -> online model. Its dominance on online ads has done a lot to harm publications, and not only monetarily. Facebook has trained people to expect their information funneled through their feeds and has inserted itself between the audience and publications. Traffic that used to come directly to the publication now funnels through Facebook -- or never actually arrives at the publication at all. Hard to make a buck that way.
This isn't even getting into consolidation of local newspapers by conglomerates and private equity[1].
If front-line journalists are biased one way, I assure you the upper management through ownership are biased in the other direction by and large, excepting (perhaps) some social issues where bean-counters have seen that the winds have changed and it's more profitable to be visibly progressive vs. visibly conservative.
I went corporate a number of years ago because the writing was on the wall. If I'd stayed in publishing as a freelancer / writer / editor it would be years of paddling faster to make the same money. Companies didn't give two shits about quality, just shove something out the door that would play on social and/or SEO. If you think the people doing the work are deciding to embrace that, you're sorely mistaken.
I keep on hearing the kvetching about not being willing to pay for good journalism but where the hell can I actually find it? It comes across as pure entitlement on their part, especially since I recall the various youth targetted moral panics like rainbow parties and "pharm parties" of taking literally everything in the medical cabinets like a bowl of skittles and taking them randomly - there were not nearly enough dead bodies or hospitalizations for that level of stupidity. Let alone trivially Google research refutable claims - it is one thing to write at a third grade level, it is another to be out fact checked by third graders.
"solutions journalism" is an really interesting effort to adapt journalism to current realities in a positive way.
"It investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, examples of people working toward solutions. It focuses not just on what may be working, but how and why it appears to be working, or alternatively, why it may be stumbling. Using the best available evidence, it delves deep into the how-to’s of problem solving, often structuring stories as puzzles or mysteries that investigate questions like: What models are having success reducing the dropout rate in public schools? How do they actually work? What are they doing differently than others that’s resulting in a better outcome?"
Well, for one thing.. then I'm a publisher, not a journalist. Running a business does not appeal to me in the slightest.
Secondly, most of the problems facing publications are market forces that aren't going to go away just because the person at the helm does care about quality.
There are publications that succeed by the skin of their teeth. LWN for example. But that's a pretty rare, niche example that would be very difficult to replicate.
Your newspaper can be as simple as a web site you create. There's almost zero cost of entry. It can be grown organically, as you develop a reputation for real journalism. Start small by specializing in articles on one topic like, say, what the city council is doing or what Boeing is doing. Become the go-to source of accurate information on that.
It'd be like the olden days when random people would print and distribute pamphlets like "Common Sense".
It's important to understand the causal direction here. As the industry took hit after hit while the internet gained dominance, media outlet like Fox News pioneered highly opinionated reporting & commentary, and it worked. Viewers & readers were more attracted to content that raised an emotional response. There's blame to put on the industry, but I can't separate that from the how the internet changed the economics of news media & how that mixed with human nature.
Incidentally, if you're looking for a good source of non-opinionated reporting, Reuters is probably one of the best. It tends to be more straightforward factual reporting, and I can't find any media ratings that place it outside the center/minimal-bias zone.
Humans give greater credence to those expressing negative opinions. The media and politicians take advantage of this to get attention and votes. In the past the limited competition in the media allowed the voice of reason to prevail. Now the race to the bottom has made that a losing proposition for running a business selling information.
"Journalists are pushing their own viewpoints and no longer being objective" is a complaint that's been with us since as long as there's been journalism, though. The Nixon administration famously toyed with the idea of creating their own news service because they believed the news organizations of the day were biased against them. Hell, the phrase "yellow journalism" goes back to the late 1800s and the often sensationalist New York World, a paper whose publisher declared it as "dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse-potentates." That activist publisher was Joseph Pulitzer. (His battles with equally sensationalist rival publisher Hearst led to the "yellow journalism" charges.)
They didn't choose activism because they are lazy or ideologues (although the industry may increasingly populated by lazy ideologues). The journalism industry chose activism because it sells better than objective journalism.
I could start an online paper about my local town and write purely objective stories. "Town council meeting today went as expected, complicated issue without clear solution continued unsolved". That probably won't get very many readers though. For one thing, relatively few people live in my town so few people will care. For another, the internet has conditioned people to get news for free, so the only way to monetize results in getting very little money (e.g. ads) from each reader, and, as just established, we'll have few readers because the town is small.
The revealed preference of news readers is to look at outrageous stuff and polemics. Get involved in a culture war about who did what why and what it means - that could attract millions of readers who you can slightly monetize to earn enough to get by. Do real journalism and few people will read it and they won't pay you won't for it... So...
I'm not saying this in a judgmental way. I don't pay for news either. I read what comes up on twitter, hackernews, linked to by friends, etc. I have an ad-blocker and I skip whatever content has a paywall that I can't bypass. I realize I'm part of the problem, but in a "tragedy of the commons" way. That is, the world would be better if everyone paid for and paid attention to primarily local and "hard-hitting" fair journalism, but there would be zero perceptible positive change if I switched to that model and perceptible negative costs for me for doing so.
Journalism is not "reporting exactly what happened" - journalism is supposed to be investigation, and to draw conclusions.
Obviously there's bias, but that's the point: journalism has never and should not be "this person said 1 thing, someone else said a different thing". It's the path of "should you drink bleach? Scientists say no, this random nutbag says yes."
I started out in print journalism in the 90s, it was such a cool thing back then in my country. I switched to internet content when it just started because it was exciting, not because I foresaw any decline of journalism on the horizon. And then interacting with the devs of the website I was working for reminded me that tech was actually my real passion, so I made the switch to being a developer myself. I'm grateful for that decision pretty much every single day ever since.
I know that many of us here don't like what labor unions have become in the 21st century. But they do need some labor representation that can ensure the trucks used by drivers have working lights, mirrors, and safe tires, and that the company negotiates use of restrooms around the city. Maybe just a "safety only" union that only deals with safety issues?
A forum mostly frequented by us overpaid workers doing little-more-than-if-any work that society actually needs is not the right place to discuss unions. Of course people in our industry, no matter devs or ops or founders or "founders", despise unions as they get in their way with demands of some basic workers rights. But there are industries where unions are desperately needed to keep workers sane, safe and overall dignified. With little first hand experience it's just too easy to dismiss that.
While "urinating in bottles" sounds like some sort of standard by which to indict, if you tried it you would find it's quite convenient. I'd guess that it's far down on the list of drivers' actual concerns.
What are you proposing should replace this? Trips back to the depot would be terribly inefficient. Portapotties in trucks would be just fancier bottles. And time to visit public restrooms would be better spent taking an actual break and then still using the bottle.
A little company I worked for ~20 years ago (Michigan, U.S.A.) had a female UPS driver. Her route was ~99% residential - so extremely few bathrooms. (Vs. it was easy, then, for UPS drivers delivering to office buildings, restaurants, etc.) We made it clear that she was free to use our bathroom at any time. She made it clear that our package delivery time & pick-up time could be far, far better than "that's where you are on my route" when we needed them to be.
(And I'm sure more things got shipped UPS than should have...I guess you'd call that "UPS's cut" of the deal.)
Apparently, drivers are given plenty of break times and are allowed bathroom breaks, but this behavior continues. I wonder what the economic impact of putting a portable toilet closet in the truck is? Each truck would have 30% less capacity? Would employees get less breaks then?
It seems to me that a lot of the problem is (and will be) the instrumenting of jobs. The ability surveil a workforce is only going to go up. Everyone, medical techs, cashiers, plumbers, non-rockstar software developers, are going to end up with that bottle.
My foray into 'blue collar' society (in large urban areas at least) taught me this clear and wide: most of it is run by vultures. The simplest equipment is optional, safety equipment is optional, hygiene is optional. Inhumane production rates are mandatory. Companies will scam you as much as the first stranger on an undeclared gig.
It's adversarial relationships from top to bottom. People are clueless, and don't want to make things better. Things rot as long as people involved are accepting, or forced to accept, the situation. Actually one gig I did was newspaper delivery and it's clear that the web took a lot of the money from them and they're barely surviving at the cost of employees.
Another factor, systems struggle accelerate when out of the mean, the lower the company is the lower the work life is, the worse the employees they can get is .. less means, less profits, more work.
Labor unions work when a firm is earning economic rents, and there is a political struggle over who gets those rents. For example the auto-industry prior to the invasion by Japanese imports.
The issue is that when there are no economic rents, then labor unions no longer work and indeed become an added cost. A lot of people don't seem to understand that, neither do they understand that economic rents are something that dissipates over time as new entrants come in with cheaper products. Especially in the world of free trade where you are competing with China and other low cost countries (in China labor unions are controlled by the state and starting your own is illegal).
But the trouble with journalism is not that fat cat firms are swimming in loads of cash and only if workers could orgnanize and demand a bigger slice of the pot they could get that. So the job security that a union job can provide an individual in one industry is not generalizable to a dying industry where companies are going bankrupt and need to cut costs as their revenues shrink.
But, you object, what about places like Germany where basically every firm is unionized? Well, unions in Germany are very different. Germany didn't even have a minimum wage until recently. None. And pay in Germany is lower. So you can't look at, say, what an UAW worker or Teamster in the US makes and then think that's what a typical worker in Germany is making because they are all unionized. So again we have this generalizability problem, where the _real_ sources of high income for workers are not unions but increasing return to scale, high productivity jobs. That is why tech workers make more than journalists. And that is why nations like Germany or China that want a society of high wage jobs fight to keep their manufacturing sector and high value add sectors, while nations like the US that are focused on short-term GDP growth have no issue selling off their high productivity jobs and shipping them overseas, at which point no amount of unionizing is going to help bring those high wage jobs back. Similarly when your industry is going bankrupt and shrinking, no amount of unionizing is going to give you the job security and good wages the prevoius generation of workers had in the same industry. This is not a problem of labor policy but industrial policy, and no amount of labor policy intervention is going to solve the industrial policy problem.
Not that I dislike your idea or unions at large, but mission creep will be inevitable: limiting hours and mandating benefits to ensure physical and mental health of the drivers will be linked to safety, and the whole host of benefits for worker wellness in the name of safety will follow. What you are asking for is what OSHA is for.
Article linked from the submission was from December 25, 2018, and the tweet from Feb 16, 2019. Seems likely that writing this article (and first having the experience of delivering for Amazon) got him hired. Good for him!
Exactly, good for him. Some people just know how to write. I rarely read more than a couple paragraphs in pieces like this, but he grabbed me until the end.
And writing that piece for The Atlantic is a fine accomplishment, too.
I read somewhere (or internalized) something like: great mythologies are full of good humor. I love how his opening paragraph is of angst so relatable (social group) and so laughable (here's my consulting partner, Rabbit).
The world has more than enough activists, opinion writers, and propagandists that call themselves "journalists" but exceptionally few actual journalists.
Lets not degrade the word Journalists like Apple has degraded the word Genius....
Some exacerbated by every recent trend, it seems. Every “I’m starting a Substack!” story seems to be for someone that’s going to post endless reams of their opinions and not do an ounce of actual original reporting. I know Glenn Greenwald won a Pulitzer but it wasn’t for the kind of writing he posts now.
Completely wrong. Actually, there’s an iceberg effect at play here. There are many more reporters than journalists, delivering pure news every day, doing in-depth reporting. And it makes sense logically: the number of people who have large enough audiences to generate an income by simply being controversial is rather small in the large scheme of things.
It can be all three at the same time. Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss are two figures on opposite sides of the political spectrum who have both mastered this.
The internet has commoditized facts. It doesn't matter who reports the news as it is everywhere in minutes as soon as it breaks. There is little to no reward for being first. The financial incentives therefore all push these companies into more profitable areas of journalism outside of reporting.
I listen to a lot of retrogaming and retrocomputing podcasts, ANTIC and Retronauts are my favorites.
It turns out ANTIC interviews quite a few people from the old computer magazine and book industry, and retronauts is mostly made up of struggling video game journalists who cycle between the same magazines and being jobless or freelance. A few of them, especially the more senior folks basically have thrown in the towel and now work for other companies entirely within the video games industry.
What's really interesting about the ANTIC interviews is how close those folks were to the thing that basically displaced them (computers and ubiquitous networking), and yet none of them seems to have predicted it happening. To them the publishing and periodical industries had always been there and always will be. Their own employer going out of business was more due to local market forces affecting them or mergers between companies.
For the record, it didn't occur to me either. In the mid 90s I was sitting next to an incoming T-1 line at a startup ISP sending off physical envelopes with job applications to gaming and computer magazines I enjoyed hoping to become a journalist myself. One of the magazines that did reply (by mail btw) went out of business itself about 6 years later.
Someone close to me has worked at Macy's their entire career, through college, after college, through grad school, after grad school. Nearly 15 years now.
Much as you mentioned these folks not seeing the closure as a result of the Internet, but rather local competition dynamics, no matter how many stores close or odd situations happen, they believe the precise details of each narrative are what matter (i.e. the alcoholic manager) rather than the continual pattern of the store they're working at closing, every 2-3 years like clockwork
Lots of fashion stores with 50+ years of history have gone bankrupt. I guess we'll see if the likes of Primark or Zalando will still be around in 2050.
Exactly, secular trends are hard to spot when you know the details. Tech people look at the alternate present where your revenue is 30% better without the internet, but that's "imaginary" in some sense, it really was the manager who put the store under
Amazon is clearly a monopoly, but consumer prices are "low", so they get to keep at it. A lot of the early anti-trust cases in history were pretty petty, and anything has precedent for not being a monopoly. But when you can literally under cut competition until they go out of business, then raise prices afterward, you're a monopoly. Example Diapers dot com, the undercutting did lower prices for consumers.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadThis is what assimilation looks like. Someone with an Irish name calling themselves Anglo-Saxon. It’s like a Hispanic person calling themselves Latinx, proof that they have lost all organic connection to the culture of their ancestors.
This is a somewhat tenuous topic too because there's a whole lot of history and bad blood after the times I'm speaking of and there's a different but similar issue currently brewing over there as well.
I guess you meant more that the term fell out of use in England at some point, and Norman-descended people in England called themselves English. But even so, Norman is still a recognisable ethnicity - norse people who settled in France, spread by conquest into England, Malta etc. It could be a useful contemporary or historical label even if those people at a given time called themselves something else.
But the Normans who invaded Ireland came via Wales largely and were not called English until the 16th century
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubgaill_and_Finngaill
Are you claiming that the Duchy of Normandy is a post 1800 ret-conned invention? You think it never actually existed?
The people in Wales, Scotland and Ireland were the Celts, with some subdivisions (Picts etc).
But it looks like both terms are more loaded in the USA [1], so I don't want to speculate on the intent of the comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons#Legacy
This isn’t true. The Lowland Scots are no less culturally Anglo-Saxon than the English. They were slightly less successful than the English at extirpating all traces of Celtic culture from their homeland but it wasn’t for want of trying.
Now if we take the gender out of every word in that sentence it would look something like "lx doctorx toma (we loose el, here) café por lx mañana", el wasn't necessary in the sentence to beging with, so that's fine, but the rest of the sentence becomes pretty hard to read to anyone that speaks Spanish, there's no practical way of pronouncing that unless you use the English pronunciation of the letter x.
To add more depth to this, in spanish to give a gender neutral statement, you default to the male version of the noun, for example, for a group that has boys and girls, you would just refer to them as "los niños", people feel this could be dismissive of girls, if there is at least one boy in a group of girls you'd say "los niños" and depending of the context it is implied that the group has both girls and boys, so in some latin american governments they are required by etiquette to form sentences like "las niñas y los niños" instead of just "los niños" this is called around here "inclusive language" but even then most Spanish speaking people think that is impractical and unnecessary.
That said, the latinx movement is kind of relevant in Argentina IIRC, but in most other latin american countries the idea will be met with a lot of resistance and rejection.
Most “Latino” people are of at least part Native American or African ancestry; whereas “Latin” refers originally to speakers of Romance languages. Thus most (of course not all) “Latinos” who call themselves that are identifying with the subset of their ancestors who enslaved and conquered the others.
Please don't deny their agency.
I would go even further than that. The US-centric idea of Latino as a unified identity (let alone with the x), often based on North-American stereotypes of Mexican and Caribbean cultures, can be off-putting in Latin American countries. As an example, here's the comedy-rock song «No Somos Latinos» («We are not Latinos») from Uruguayan band El Cuarteto de Nos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onQU3sp8_Jk
Generally speaking when you're in your country you'll sometimes have strong opinions about your neighbouring countries, Hondurans are this, Guatemalans are that, but when you're outside your country and you run into other latin american people, in my experience it was something really special we would greet each other as if we were long time friends, I think there's something more to it than language, I think most latin american people can relate to a certain kind of burden that comes with living in a latin american country, those burdens and the problems our societies have are pretty similar all around and I think when we meet in foreign countries we immediately relate in the way we perceive our societies and the things we've lived through.
Just as an anecdote, I went to Paris for a vacation and I went into a Five guys restaurant, usually you have to pay for a soda refill, but there was a dominican guy who was a waiter and he heard me and my SO speaking Spanish and he immediately smiled and came over and we had a nice conversation about our countries, and he let me refill our sodas for free, it's really nice and I don't know if other regions have something like this
To my untrained ear, les neen-yes sounds more in line with los neen-yos and las neen-yes than lecks neen-yecks (if that's how you'd pronounce it).
I’m in agreement with you that é is the natural neutral replacement letter. But I don’t think this is a serious attempt to change the language so much as a serious attempt to signal group membership.
It became popular in writing first too.
Some people do say Latine. Probably it will replace Latinx eventually.
It’s mostly used for political purposes in the US by non Latin American people as well as a few Latin Americans in the political sphere because it’s a useful political tool for the time being.
> only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
[1] If you are not a monarch giving yourself a numeral is pretentious.
that's mostly cultural. in some cultures (e.g., asian ones), it's normal to have multiple names for different levels of familiarity, and to adopt new names as circumstances dictate.
with that said, criticizing (someone else's) naming choices is a wholly aesthetic opinion and should be disregarded (perhaps politely).
Modern historians don't use the term Anglo-Saxon much these days, so it's not especially important.
To you. And to a bunch of people who have to live in fear of being canceled - a.k.a., fired for - in the case of historians - reminding the world of uncomfortable truths.
Just as an illustration of why the term "Anglo-Saxon" muddles things, we have the person in the article who seems to think that Murphy is an Anglo-Saxon surname, when it is clearly Celtic in origin. I'm not doubting that the author is Anglo-Saxon... just pointing out that his suname, itself, is not.
I'm not a historian, so I'm just relating the parts of the issue that I understand. There are articles online by historians that go into greater depth explaining why historians tend to avoid the term "Anglo-Saxon" these days, and why the term became so popular in the 18th and 19th century.
Not sure what "uncomfortable truth" you are referring to. If you have something to say, spit it out. I also don't understand why someone would "fear being canceled" just because they used a somewhat obsolete term.
Akin to saying that someone from Philly might as well be from LA, it’s all just a city. Or that the Warriors might as well be the New York Yankees, it’s just sports.
PS; this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA – not anglo-saxon
There is a lot more melting recently. Europe historically has been pretty big on cultural identity because everyone had/has a grudge with their neighbors for trying to assimilate them at the edges.
Slavs for example (I’m from Slovenia) can trace or Slavic lineage all the way back to the 600’s and the fact we haven’t been assimilated into German or Italian despite being part of their countries for centuries is a point of pride.
There is still a recognized small German minority in Slovenia from back in the 1300’s when they tried to deal with the slavic problem by encouraging people to go settle in our area, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire but we of course wanted to keep it Slavic.
To be fair, as late as the 1940’s the germans were trying to germanize the slavs.
Some of these grudges are very fresh and ongoing. Look at how the Catalonians are fighting against being called Spanish
No, there really isn’t. It may look like there is because of the post WW2 ethnic cleansing leading to more or less monoethnic monolinguistic nation states but the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were always indifferent to what the peasants “were“, like the peasants themselves, mostly. People cared a lot more about religion than ethnicity almost everywhere in Europe until after the French Revolution. The tiny urban, bourgeois or well traveled population were the exception. Everybody else mostly just rolled with it. Most French people didn’t speak a Romance dialect modeled after the Parisian one until well after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
The bigger question is whether we want to.
As a fellow European I don't think it's going to happen. Not in a hundred years. We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening. We might get to the point where people will define themselves with dual nationalities, like Polish-German, but this we see even today.
I recall some people from Netherlands getting upset that English was becoming quite prolific to the point that University courses are sometimes held in English.
I think this happens to some extent in other countries in EU too?
Germany, Spain, and France seem highly unlikely to adopt English without a fight - not sure about other countries. But I wouldn't rule out some movement towards greater dominance of major languages.
methinks, the Protestant elite wanted to keep out the Catholics
This is not true. They were the worst sort of white, the worst sort of people, Catholics, but the US legal system went to great lengths to categorize people by racial category and all of the ethnic groups you named were always considered white.
https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-a...
At points in time, some states have had laws on the books that 100% differentiated between "white" people and other European immigrants.
Take an ancestry / 23andme/ myheritage test and see what comes up. You would be surprised.
It also doesn't help that our literary sources for this period are very few, non-contemporary (i.e., talking about what happened a few centuries ago), and reliant on state societies talking about non-state societies. Naturally, they use inconsistent terminology for talking about the ethnicity of who is where, and the term "Saxon" appears to be pretty interchangeable for much of northern Germany. The modern term "Anglo-Saxon" thus effectively means "English German," arising largely to distinguish the Saxons who lived in England from those who lived in Germany.
Functionally speaking, you can divide the ethnicities of Britain into 5: the original Celtic speakers, the Romanized Celtics who were part of the province of Britannia, the first wave of Germanic immigrants (Anglo-Saxons), the second wave of Germanic immigrants (the Norse), and the third wave of Germanic immigrants (the Normans), this one largely limited to a very small ruling class.
One question, do the Normans count as Germanic? I thought they were from Scandinavia originally and then spent enough time in France to pick up the language?
It is much less clear if Normans should also count as Germanic. I wrote it as such mostly for the pun of having England be invaded by three waves of Germanic peoples from three different places. The actual reality is murkier, as the Normans themselves are an amalgamation of existing Breton, Gallo-Romanic, and Frankish (another Germanic people!) peoples with a hefty Norse influx both before and after the ceding of territory to Rollo. It's probably more accurate to say that the Normans represent a new cultural identity which is a fusion of several that came before it, just as the English did with their several invasions, or the French did during their centralization push in the Early Modern.
But that's surely an anachronism, since correctly it would need to be "Danish German"?
Are not all black people Yoruba? (Well, of course they aren't...)
That said, I question the relevancy of this comment to the story.
I'm curious: what kind of Native Americans were they that would willingly adopt Spanish names as indigenous, and not mestizo, peoples, especially given that Spanish contact was pretty violent across most of North America?
The whole "woke" / "political correctness" movement is mostly bored white people.
This is the result of a group of people with no real major battles left to fight. You make up an enemy to give your life purpose.
I know I’m being hit with downvotes to my name the more I try to explain this but I’d rather speak the truth and be punished than stay quiet and take it to the grave.
I am an Irish-American who plays the music, hates the food, but if I wanted to call myself of "European" ancestry, that wouldn't abandon all of my musical culture, it may just be a trendy label in the zeitgeist.
The comparison to "latinx" is apt though - I should see it as a flag but instead it's like nails on a chalkboard because it's everything I don't like about language policing.
Maybe in USA, I don't know anyone who uses it like that.
I don't think there is such a thing as losing the culture but a development into a different direction after the fork (migration).
A classic identity problem of the Indian diaspora or the Turkish immigrants in Germany or the Irish in Boston, or the Italian in NY is that they have retained many of the traditional values that were popular at the time in their countries before they left. But their old countries have moved on in every sense. These tribes then become more conservative because they feel like they have to defend their values from outside groups and from lack of new values that they can tie to their old labels. But what they "defend" no longer reflects the reality back in the old country.
This leads to some strange (but IMO understandable behaviors) where the old is much more idealized than what their peers do back in the old country. E.g.:
- Turkish AKP voters in Germany who only remember all the prosperity Erdogan has brought to an economically failing Turkey. - The 3rd or 4th gen Italians in the US are hardly Italians in todays sense of Italy (even their food is laughed at back in their own country. - Eventually the culture changes so much that it has no parallel to what it used to be.
That is neither good nor bad IMO it just is a natural progression and adaption to their new environment. Shedding the old values and stories people tell themselves takes not years but generations. The odd thing about the US is that despite its many influences from all around the world it is still a country where many groups hold on to what they think are their roots while actually it's a constant state of change and no longer exists.
My wife's ancestors are likely genetically pure going back many centuries from the other side of the world. Her mother's family were nobility before they came to America. Our kids are a thing that probably didn't exist at all prior to the 20th century and they're fantastic. And they know their culture to be New Yorkers.
When I’m in a rhythm, and my system’s working, and I slide open the side door and the parcel I’m looking for practically jumps into my hand, and the delivery takes 35 seconds and I’m on to the next one, I enjoy this gig. I like that it’s challenging, mentally and physically. As with the athletic contests I covered for my old employer, there’s a resolution, every day. I get to the end of my route, or I don’t. I deliver all the packages, or I don’t.
Delivering packages is a fine job doing honest labor. Amazon pays well. He has a good attitude. He is doing something the modern world needs. No shame in that.
If I was down on my luck I would have no problem doing whatever job exists. I have washed dishes, and I enjoyed that job. I think a lot of people think some types of work are beneath them but I respect all people who are productive members of society - and the flip-side is that I despise people who say these jobs are so “terrible” they need to be outlawed or whatever.
There’s something satisfying in this kind of work with clear explicit goals and getting through the list everyday.
I think a lot of society issues seem to stem from how he briefly felt, that this kind of thing was a sign of failure or that he was embarrassed to tell friends at the holiday party.
The irony to me is that this kind of work is probably more valuable to society than sports illustrated and day to day almost certainly so.
If there was more cultural respect for these kinds of jobs, people would feel better about themselves while doing them. I think there should be. I was glad he felt good about it at the end.
Both because Amazon pay is decent, but more so because it’s more about class expectations than it is about pay.
Lots of jobs make a lot of money, but are still not considered high status.
The only ones I can think of are ones which suddenly started paying a lot due to some market quirk (e.g. miners in Australia in the 2010s).
Class expectations just take a while to catch up (or never do if the market quirk doesn't persist).
Construction would probably be another.
Basically “blue collar” jobs that require a lot of expertise.
I’d guess some variation and small business risk, but I think many do well.
Truckers can still make an upper middle class salary, especially if they own their truck or focus on a niche (refrigerated, military deliveries, cross border, etc.)
Truckers are not doing so well these days, and where they do make a lot it's typically because of backbreaking labor and/or taking on financial risks. This still only gets you into lower/mid tier software dev wages.
A lot of the "well paying", low-status jobs mentioned in this thread are dangrous... long-haul truckers, construction workers, underwater welders, even electricians are jobs where you have to risk your life to do them, and many of them are statistically dangerous as well.
So whether the people who have such jobs are "well compensated" for risking their lives like that is debatable.
Certainly an IT manager job that paid the same as a trucker would be far more preferable in terms of safety, and would therefore be far better compensated when the danger of being a trucker is taken in to account.
Of course, low-paid delivery jobs are even worse when you consider that those low-paid delivery drivers have to risk their lives on the road to deliver your packages.
This strikes me as just making up reasons why examples that disprove the status/pay point aren’t really disproving it.
If you can just make up reasons why your position is right anyway even in cases where it’s not, then it’s basically unfalsifiable.
I thought there was a trucker shortage happening?
In truckers' cases it must be a shortage of experienced truckers willing to partake in backbreaking labor and take financial and health risks for $60k / year.
Plumbers, electricians are educated specialists making very very good hourly wage but won't get same status as say IT manager.
Bonded cleaner with great references can easily be 50 bucks an hour.
Truck drivers, forklift operators have steadily been well compensated and need certified skillset but again don't get same perceived class status.
Note I'm not saying I don't / these jobs shouldn't have respect :). Question was which well paid jobs are seen as different conferring class status despite good pay and this is the general perception I've observed.
Average is 66k CAD / year, apparently.
That's not amazing. Construction is also notorious for ruining your body (health problems / early retirement a necessity) so it's not even as good as a 66k CAD office wage.
We live in a bubble and respect good hackers but normies don't like nerds.
Hollywood portrays us between weirdo and pervert, while glorifying lawyers and doctors.
Sounds like lawyers and doctors (or plenty of people really).
> weirdo
That is a bit of a stereotype. I suspect a large percentage of software jobs are filled by standard people. The weirdos do stand out, but I don’t know anyone who actually fits the Hollywood stereotype.
And weirdo be replaced by equally socially unacceptable traits (arrogant or closed-minded etcetera) that apply to doctors and lawyers.
If you work in software people think it’s cool.
It maybe was low status 20 years ago, but since 2010 or so it’s changed.
Even in NYC the finance people prefer to talk about their app ideas rather than admit they work at a bank.
Compare that to someone who drives for Amazon - the cultural status is not the same.
This sums up my mid career crisis. I miss the jobs of my youth where I was just scheduled, showed up, did tasks, and left when scheduled. Of course, a flaw of memories like this is I mainly remember the good parts. When I really try, I remember things like lack of flexibility (working from home, leaving early to meet the plumber/doctor, etc) and honestly how difficult living on a low wage actually was and that was before all the responsibilities I’ve accumulated (family, homes, etc).
Also, I always found these jobs truly fun. The carefreeness of other employees and they types of characters you came across was eclectic and interesting. Corporate America does not allow of much of that and is fairly homogeneous even when diversified.
I have a lot of issues with the way Amazon operates, but precisely nobody is forced to work there. This article does a good job of pointing that out.
The array of possible jobs could be one or none.
If a basic income existed your point could be true. That's not reality today.
It turns out that Amazon actually competes for labor in a vast market for same. So many people work there because they have to be a better option than most unskilled labor jobs because they have so many packages to deliver.
If someone said this about employment in software dev there'd be a thousand comments about how there isn't a shortage of labor, just of labor at the price point businesses want to pay.
Workers are not OK working on slave wages that these employees want to pay them.
Yeah, they can't find enough labor because they want to pay people $15 an hour in an area where the median home price is $572,000. I work in logistics. I occasionally overhear some of executive staff down the hall from my office complain about being unable to keep workers in a non-climate controlled warehouse, lifting enormously heavy things, for 8 hours a day, in one of the richest areas of Texas that isn't Houston or Dallas.
Gee, I can't imagine why people wouldn't want to work in a warehouse in 100 degree F weather, lifting 30-80 lbs. boxes for 8 hours.
So I pulled data on that warehouse and it's location. In-N-Out is hiring just 10 miles away for $16 an hour. Yeah, it's not a great job either, but it's air conditioned. And you won't be lifting anything heavier than a box of fries. Furthermore, the cheapest rent within a 10 mile radius of that warehouse is $1700. Good luck paying that on $15 an hour.
So yeah, I can understand why employers can't find workers...
I have for years always gotten emails from recruiters trying to hire me as an FTE for SWE jobs in nothing towns in flyover states at 6x less than what I charge, too. Those positions are similarly unfilled.
People pick their best options available, usually.
If they can't find/keep labor for $15/hour, that means the price for labor in their market is greater than $15/hour. That's a good thing, as that's not true most places on this planet.
This claim would be stronger if you compared to the bottom 10% of housing, say.
Where did all the money come from in last 1 year to inflate the prices to this insanity.
So asset inflation is eventually going to make impact on labor prices and cause inflation. Then is why FED so cocksure that inflation is no big deal.
>So yeah, I can understand why employers can't find workers...
I don't understand why employers cant simply pay more and pass on the costs to their consumers. What's stoping them.
We've been printing trillions over the past 15 years or so. And we've disproportionately accumulated it at the top (including the audience here, although the top 1% and 0.1% are doing even better than that). That money has to go somewhere. Traditional conservative investments have low rates of return right now - think low interest rates - and housing has historically been seen as "safe". And it's providing fantastic returns.
Take COVID - nobody wants to move, so housing supply is low. Tight supply is just exacerbating an existing issue, especially sharply over the past year.
Totally anecdotal: I just moved from SF to Seattle, somewhat related to my job. We were outbid half a dozen times, often by cash offers. I remember one of them in particular, because we got beat way over asking by a cash buyer, and it was rented on Zillow the week after closing. Housing is an asset class, not a place we live.
> I don't understand why employers cant simply pay more and pass on the costs to their consumers. What's stoping them.
Passing costs onto consumers is a bit of a lie used to scare consumers into opposing wage increases. You can only pass on so much cost, and it depends in part on the elasticity of demand for your product.
Anyhow, employers generally can pay more, but they are optimizing for their shareholders and return on equity. That's going pretty well if you look at the market. But that's why the market isn't reflective of the economy as a whole.
In Seattle back in the day a teacher could own a house in the city and pay it off without a sweat. Nowadays, unless you are a doctor or software engineer or patent lawyer it's kind of ludicrous idea.
I was under the impression that lots of people wanted to move out of the cities both because the high population of cities made living in them much riskier than living in more rural/suburban areas in terms of infection risk for COVID, and because with the economy hurting from COVID-related lockdowns living in cities (especially expensive ones like SF) was much less affordable.
> Where did all the money come from in last 1 year to inflate the prices to this insanity.
This area of Texas is not well-known to most people. It's a bit of a well-kept secret. While Austin is new money and trendy, and Dallas is cosmopolitan, this area of Texas is old... old money.
> I don't understand why employers cant simply pay more and pass on the costs to their consumers. What's stoping them.
Our company not only has two nationwide competitors, we have significant regional competitors across America, and on top of that, we're having to fight Amazon as well.
I get CC'ed and BCC'ed on most shifts in company policies because it can directly affect logistics and I need to be able to actively work around or with these policies, and things are getting so crazy that Directors of Operations at each warehouse are being tasked with asking low-level warehouse employees to clock out 15 minutes early each day just to avoid any possibility of overtime.
Obviously this creates logistics problems because when a warehouse fills up, you can't send any more stock from suppliers there. So I've had to fold COVID-19 absentee reports into our data analysis, because the loss of productivity from workers can directly affect storage space. For instance, one warehouse currently has three people out with a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis, but we contact traced another seven people between those three, so that's 10 workers out, 3 of which for at least a few weeks, possibly months. The other 7 until they're cleared by medical doctors. That could mean roughly a 30% reduction in ability to process merchandise at that location for up to a week or two, and around an 8% decline for several weeks or months.
So we can't pass the cost on to consumers because why would you buy a headlamp assembly for your Audi A6 from us for $479 when you can get it from Amazon for $382?
You are wrong. businesses are primary drivers of illegal immigration into the country they want more immigrants not less.
That these same people also exploit undocumented people is a separate issue. Give them papers and you'll have no problem finding jobs!
I am refuting your point that people complaining about labor shortages shouldn't be voting republican. Which doesn't make sense because these ppl want
1. low regulation, taxes and lax labor laws.
2. availability of immigrants.
GOP provides both of these. Why would they care if ppl working for them are illegal or on h2 visa.
> Give them papers and you'll have no problem finding jobs!
Trump admin increased h2 visas despite what you are claiming. We had the highest number of h2 visas allocated under Trump and Bush and lowest under Obama admin. Obama slashed these visas by half from bush era. Most of the resistance to seasonal visas comes from democrat voting unions who lobby against these visas. They lobbied obama govt to slash those visas under the guise of protecting their local union memebers.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/biden-agenc...
Check these numbers for yourself here
https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/FY08-A...
https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
Seems an important fact that's left out here!
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/president-trump-extends-ba...
But yes your larger point that Republicans are fine with migrants they can exploit for a few years as long as they can make sure they "go back to their country" is well taken!
This is what people whose brains have been melted by MAGA twitter and Fox News believe the "other side" wants.
There was a BIPARTISAN senate immigration reform bill that passed the senate in 2013. THIRTEEN Republicans voted for it and every Democrat and independent did.
It went to the house and died there because the Republican majority leader Boehner knew it would pass and refused to let it be voted on. He was beholden to the most xenophobic, bigoted Republicans in his caucus and thought they would vote him out of leadership if he let it pass. He ended up losing his job anyways shortly thereafter for other reasons.
Now the entire Republican party is beholden to the xenophobic bigots and I guarantee you the exact same bill wouldn't find more than 2 votes from a Republican in the senate.
So no, there is no "both sides" here. Democrats have been remarkably consistent about what an immigration compromise looks like, and even were able to pass it in the senate 7-8 years ago, only to be blown up by the Tea Party ur-Trumpists. The GOP has only moved further to the right and will never support anything close to that.
No, as in, can't find skilled labor for a good salary. The notion that only unskilled labor is sought after is incorrect. Good people are always hard to find. Smart people are always hard to find. But most workers are average, and it is hard to find a job that can support a half million mortgage for the worker who is average.
What is also true is that there is skilled labor in shrinking industries and that labor is not easy to transfer to other skilled industries. You can take a smart person in logistics and convert them into a highly sought after programmer with enough time and the right attitude, but if you already have a family then you can't handle the dip. Skill mismatch is a real problem, particularly given our penchant for outsourcing. But I don't see why meeting the mortgage needs of half million dollar homes should be the yardstick by which you judge a labor market.
Let us know if it's still an issue after the pay increases and work condition perks increased?
What they are not raising wages? Was the article looking at justifying some political point of view?
Or did you really think mom and pop were paying the teens running their bookstore $17/hr? You think they had great health insurance and other benefits?
I am here saying that, yes that paltry $15 an hour you scold Amazon for paying? Well mom and pop they drove out of business was paying about HALF of that.
And of course, all of this is even more important for the reason the article highlights: These are the jobs people end up in now. In a country with a vanishing middle class and terrible social safety nets for seniors, increasingly large numbers of people end up here. Not just criminals, those who aren't especially bright or those who are a bit unlucky, but good, capable ordinary people have nowhere else to go now. If we're all going to be living here now, we need to start cleaning the place up.
After all, who'd want to shop groceries at a dirty place when there's a nice, clean place just a bit down the road?
Ok, we can all agree that until a high level of automation is achieved, such jobs are necessary.
But how many of the people defending the need for such jobs would actually want to do them?
Usually they're happy to let other people do them, but would balk at doing them themselves.
This is especially true for "dirty" or "unsavory" jobs such as garbageperson, exterminator, food processing / slaughterhouse worker, etc.
People are usually happy to hire such people or consume their products, and talk about how essential they are, but would never want to be one themselves.
On top of that, they'd usually look down on people with these jobs and never dream of associating with them or inviting them to their parties.
QED
I'm glad the author is doing well. But these are not good jobs. They are not stable, sustainable, safe or high paid enough. A person could have, presumably, led a pretty good life as a writer for a national magazine like SI. It would not destroy them physically. It would probably not destroy them mentally. They would not be forced to carefully regiment their bathroom breaks, or pee in bottles. They would not be forced to work in stifling hot warehouses. They would not be forced to compete with robots and automated processes and suffer when they inevitably failed to be as fast. Writing for SI is (was) a job. Working for Amazon is exploitation. If you can't see the difference, you either haven't taken the time to read about what Amazon jobs are like, or you're arguing in bad faith, possibly because Amazon is paying you to do so.
edit: and that was a union gig.
A quote from the book:
"When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you ... The "working poor" ... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed
If company has huge billion dollar profits, then they don't pay well. This is pure greed and exploitation. They get great value out of their employees but they don't share it amongst them. They share just enough so they don't look too bad to an untrained eye.
Working at a job doesn't automatically give one ownership rights, any more than the mechanic who fixes your car gets a share in the proceeds when you sell it.
Many companies, however, do provide ownership rights to employees in the form of stock purchase plans and stock option plans. I don't know if Amazon provides such to warehouse workers, but I'd suspect it would be good business to do so.
I'm familiar with the implication that hard work can be a humbling and rewarding experience, but I'm not aware of any such "when white" qualifiers.
FWIW, I grew up on a farm and did a bit of construction before embarking on a career as a software engineer, and I can absolutely affirm that hard, physical work is rewarding. Though white, I didn't find it especially "humbling" because my family was solidly working class and frankly it never occurred to me to feel ashamed of hard work as though it makes me lesser than those from more delicate stations in life.
That said, I don't know that working as a delivery person for Amazon is comparable to farm work or construction with respect to satisfaction.
> rather against the idea you can dip your toes in for a minute and be washed of your pretension
In my mind, demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read. They have enough things trying to grab their attention that provide an instant gratification — whereas journalism or reading some well researched or written article requires mental effort and investment and almost an appreciation. I personally didn’t appreciate good journalism or writers until I tried writing (mostly technical documents).
I learned two things quickly. Not only did I need to know the subject matter but I needed to convey it in some form that made sense, didn’t just lead to unrelated questions that derail what I’m trying to achieve, and didn’t put the reader to sleep. This is a hard problem, in my opinion.
There are a great many people who would like to know the answer to that question but, for the most part, almost no one has. (Almost because there are a few global brands, especially those that provide financial reporting, that are doing OK but most aren't.
There are a lot of reasons, not least of all that the Internet broke the newspaper bundle that forced people advertising in the classifieds for roommates or the local car dealership advertising a sale to effectively subsidize the paper's prestige foreign bureaus and investigative journalism because where else were they going to advertise?
Plus, you don't need a subscription to SI any longer to keep up with whatever is going on in the world of sports.
The education system needs to be radically reformed to teach kids to value reading, knowledge, and learning for its own sake and not just to pass tests and get in to schools that will get them high paying jobs. Critical reading and thinking skills also need to be taught more effectively.
Unfortunately, such reform is difficult to undertake in a society which mostly doesn't value any of that, and when politicians consider critical thinking among their voters to be detrimental to their own interests.
That said, I'll applaud whichever journalists are brave enough to start pushing their industry/art back towards objectivity and diversity of perspective.
I think the future will mostly be the best writers being directly supported by people interested in their beat.
I'm not sure how generic media orgs will continue on, but I'd expect the quality to continue to degrade.
Clearly you wouldn't say that judges and police and prosecutors should just follow their biases and go after whoever they want or protect whoever they want.
Journalists don't have any legal obligation to follow standards, but they do have a professional obligation.
This is as much of a fallacy as the common "everything is political" refrain. It's nothing but a dangerous rationalization of tribalism which breeds distrust of institutions and disenfranchises political minorities when the entire establishment leans in a particular direction and simultaneously determines the set of "acceptable" or "authoritative" sources. News media, "fact checkers", Wikipedia editors, etc. are implicitly colluding and the results are already manifesting with long term disastrous cultural and political consequences that we are yet to fully witness. There is no excuse for the hyper polarization of modern media, it is a disservice to everyone, and we need to un-normalize the kind of insidious activist journalism that has infested all of our major publications, though the system is self reinforcing at this point.
If doctors just prescribed whatever gave the bigger commission from drug companies, would you ever trust a doctor?
I just know I worked in pharma advertising, and we def identified who helped push product. There's a reason the industry is so heavily regulated, well actually many reasons, but one of them is def because drug companies exploit US insurance practices using copay and other programs which allow. And people doctors definitely have different attitudes when speaking with "Dude with platinum level insurance" and "Dude who has no insurance and works as a waiter".
The Guardian was mentioned above, and is an excellent example of this. The Guardian never made much attempt to hide their social and political biases in the past, but it was still a widely respected and credible newspaper, even to those who didn't necessarily share the same perspectives. Unfortunately, The Guardian, like most other legacy news outlets, went off the rails at some point over the last 5 years. They stopped reporting the news, and starting inventing it. Anyone following their coverage of the Assange saga saw numerous examples of this such as the, "Manafort met Assange in the embassy" fairy tale (including details like what Manafort was wearing to make the lie extra convincing). The problem is, it never happened! Yet still, 4 years later, it sits on their website, no retraction, no correction. The credibility problem is real.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...
At the least, maybe explaining the other party’s perspective (as still flawed as this would be).
Ex: situation at the border
Republicans call it a crisis, they cite x, y, z. Their main argument is that illegal immigration causes X....
Democrats argue that the situation is at the root because of Y....
Be out about the biases. We all have biases, deceptively trying to hide them is worse: be completely out with them.
I think this is situation-dependent.
A lot of product review journalism is nigh-worthless because giving robust reviews would cut off the freebies, previews and ad spending they depend on.
It's easy to imagine how that could be more objective: Just stop accepting freebies.
On the other hand, some situations are almost impossible to make objective: If you're a political journalist reporting on a politician doing foo today, and you know previously they promised not-foo, does reporting that context make your reporting more objective or less?
Journalism's financial problems predate "recent years," and perhaps those problems have actually lead to or exacerbated the problems you're complaining about. E.g. investigative journalism is hard, time-consuming, and expensive; an underfunded, short-staffed newspaper may turn to other, cheaper things to fill its pages and attract readers.
Just like one little nugget of anecdata. I used to work at a radio station in a small market that was 1/3 stations run out of the same building by the same owner, an older conservative woman who inherited the business. One station was all-talk (AM) one was country (FM) and the other was classic rock (FM).
All. Three. Stations. Had to carry Rush Limbaugh over the objections of FM program managers. Why? Because Alvina liked Rush. She wanted to blanket the airwaves with his show. And she didn't have to deal with any competition in the little corner of the world where the stations aired. People don't see those decisions, though.
Granted this is a particular egregious example, but by and large TV/radio/cable/etc. programming is at a macro level dictated by upper echelons of the business, not by the front-line reporters or editors.
Print publishing has been gutted over the past 20+ years by a lot of factors. (Radio even longer, see Clear Channel, et al.)
Consolidation. A move from print publishing to web publishing that has required more and more intrusive tracking and obsession with clicks -- not quality, just "how many page views?" and then "how many uniques?" or whatever the metric du jour happens to be. I've been on the publishing side and corporate side, and I've never once heard a company factor quality of content into its advertising decisions. Which means it's a race to the bottom -- not in terms of bias, but in terms of "what gets eyeballs?"
People love to bitch about the quality of journalism, etc. but yet... they keep consuming it. They certainly don't want to pay for good journalism. Not as individuals, not with corporate marketing dollars. If an ad buyer can get 10x the clicks and leads with crap than they can get with well-reasoned and well-researched content? They'll buy crap every time. And blame the journalists/press/publications for the quality and then do it all over again.
Not to mention the effects of Google and Facebook, which are hard to understate.
Google has done a huge number on publications that initially managed to navigate the print -> online model. Its dominance on online ads has done a lot to harm publications, and not only monetarily. Facebook has trained people to expect their information funneled through their feeds and has inserted itself between the audience and publications. Traffic that used to come directly to the publication now funnels through Facebook -- or never actually arrives at the publication at all. Hard to make a buck that way.
This isn't even getting into consolidation of local newspapers by conglomerates and private equity[1].
If front-line journalists are biased one way, I assure you the upper management through ownership are biased in the other direction by and large, excepting (perhaps) some social issues where bean-counters have seen that the winds have changed and it's more profitable to be visibly progressive vs. visibly conservative.
I went corporate a number of years ago because the writing was on the wall. If I'd stayed in publishing as a freelancer / writer / editor it would be years of paddling faster to make the same money. Companies didn't give two shits about quality, just shove something out the door that would play on social and/or SEO. If you think the people doing the work are deciding to embrace that, you're sorely mistaken.
[1] https://prospect.org/health/saving-free-press-private-equity...
"It investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, examples of people working toward solutions. It focuses not just on what may be working, but how and why it appears to be working, or alternatively, why it may be stumbling. Using the best available evidence, it delves deep into the how-to’s of problem solving, often structuring stories as puzzles or mysteries that investigate questions like: What models are having success reducing the dropout rate in public schools? How do they actually work? What are they doing differently than others that’s resulting in a better outcome?"
https://medium.com/@soljourno/what-is-solutions-journalism-c...
https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/
Secondly, most of the problems facing publications are market forces that aren't going to go away just because the person at the helm does care about quality.
There are publications that succeed by the skin of their teeth. LWN for example. But that's a pretty rare, niche example that would be very difficult to replicate.
It'd be like the olden days when random people would print and distribute pamphlets like "Common Sense".
It's important to understand the causal direction here. As the industry took hit after hit while the internet gained dominance, media outlet like Fox News pioneered highly opinionated reporting & commentary, and it worked. Viewers & readers were more attracted to content that raised an emotional response. There's blame to put on the industry, but I can't separate that from the how the internet changed the economics of news media & how that mixed with human nature.
Incidentally, if you're looking for a good source of non-opinionated reporting, Reuters is probably one of the best. It tends to be more straightforward factual reporting, and I can't find any media ratings that place it outside the center/minimal-bias zone.
I could start an online paper about my local town and write purely objective stories. "Town council meeting today went as expected, complicated issue without clear solution continued unsolved". That probably won't get very many readers though. For one thing, relatively few people live in my town so few people will care. For another, the internet has conditioned people to get news for free, so the only way to monetize results in getting very little money (e.g. ads) from each reader, and, as just established, we'll have few readers because the town is small.
The revealed preference of news readers is to look at outrageous stuff and polemics. Get involved in a culture war about who did what why and what it means - that could attract millions of readers who you can slightly monetize to earn enough to get by. Do real journalism and few people will read it and they won't pay you won't for it... So...
I'm not saying this in a judgmental way. I don't pay for news either. I read what comes up on twitter, hackernews, linked to by friends, etc. I have an ad-blocker and I skip whatever content has a paywall that I can't bypass. I realize I'm part of the problem, but in a "tragedy of the commons" way. That is, the world would be better if everyone paid for and paid attention to primarily local and "hard-hitting" fair journalism, but there would be zero perceptible positive change if I switched to that model and perceptible negative costs for me for doing so.
Obviously there's bias, but that's the point: journalism has never and should not be "this person said 1 thing, someone else said a different thing". It's the path of "should you drink bleach? Scientists say no, this random nutbag says yes."
(Whoever pays the bills decides the content.)
I don't think unions are the magic wand that a lot of people assume they are
What are you proposing should replace this? Trips back to the depot would be terribly inefficient. Portapotties in trucks would be just fancier bottles. And time to visit public restrooms would be better spent taking an actual break and then still using the bottle.
(And I'm sure more things got shipped UPS than should have...I guess you'd call that "UPS's cut" of the deal.)
Apparently, drivers are given plenty of break times and are allowed bathroom breaks, but this behavior continues. I wonder what the economic impact of putting a portable toilet closet in the truck is? Each truck would have 30% less capacity? Would employees get less breaks then?
It seems to me that a lot of the problem is (and will be) the instrumenting of jobs. The ability surveil a workforce is only going to go up. Everyone, medical techs, cashiers, plumbers, non-rockstar software developers, are going to end up with that bottle.
It's adversarial relationships from top to bottom. People are clueless, and don't want to make things better. Things rot as long as people involved are accepting, or forced to accept, the situation. Actually one gig I did was newspaper delivery and it's clear that the web took a lot of the money from them and they're barely surviving at the cost of employees.
Another factor, systems struggle accelerate when out of the mean, the lower the company is the lower the work life is, the worse the employees they can get is .. less means, less profits, more work.
The issue is that when there are no economic rents, then labor unions no longer work and indeed become an added cost. A lot of people don't seem to understand that, neither do they understand that economic rents are something that dissipates over time as new entrants come in with cheaper products. Especially in the world of free trade where you are competing with China and other low cost countries (in China labor unions are controlled by the state and starting your own is illegal).
But the trouble with journalism is not that fat cat firms are swimming in loads of cash and only if workers could orgnanize and demand a bigger slice of the pot they could get that. So the job security that a union job can provide an individual in one industry is not generalizable to a dying industry where companies are going bankrupt and need to cut costs as their revenues shrink.
But, you object, what about places like Germany where basically every firm is unionized? Well, unions in Germany are very different. Germany didn't even have a minimum wage until recently. None. And pay in Germany is lower. So you can't look at, say, what an UAW worker or Teamster in the US makes and then think that's what a typical worker in Germany is making because they are all unionized. So again we have this generalizability problem, where the _real_ sources of high income for workers are not unions but increasing return to scale, high productivity jobs. That is why tech workers make more than journalists. And that is why nations like Germany or China that want a society of high wage jobs fight to keep their manufacturing sector and high value add sectors, while nations like the US that are focused on short-term GDP growth have no issue selling off their high productivity jobs and shipping them overseas, at which point no amount of unionizing is going to help bring those high wage jobs back. Similarly when your industry is going bankrupt and shrinking, no amount of unionizing is going to give you the job security and good wages the prevoius generation of workers had in the same industry. This is not a problem of labor policy but industrial policy, and no amount of labor policy intervention is going to solve the industrial policy problem.
https://twitter.com/ausmurph88/status/1096838031804227584
And writing that piece for The Atlantic is a fine accomplishment, too.
I read somewhere (or internalized) something like: great mythologies are full of good humor. I love how his opening paragraph is of angst so relatable (social group) and so laughable (here's my consulting partner, Rabbit).
Lets not degrade the word Journalists like Apple has degraded the word Genius....
That is neither journalism, nor reporting. That is editorial.
A journalist's job is to be accurate and communicate most of a complex topic concisely.
I'd argue the internet is pretty bad at that, for any sudden news event.
"Since then, as Jeff Lebowski explains to Maude between hits on a postcoital roach, “my career has slowed down a little bit.”"
s/Jeff Lebowski/The Dude
I believe The Dude made that distinction very clear in the movie :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be7Og9Gc_KY
Joking aside I truly admire this man's outlook and ability to take a pretty big setback and make a positive out of it.
It turns out ANTIC interviews quite a few people from the old computer magazine and book industry, and retronauts is mostly made up of struggling video game journalists who cycle between the same magazines and being jobless or freelance. A few of them, especially the more senior folks basically have thrown in the towel and now work for other companies entirely within the video games industry.
What's really interesting about the ANTIC interviews is how close those folks were to the thing that basically displaced them (computers and ubiquitous networking), and yet none of them seems to have predicted it happening. To them the publishing and periodical industries had always been there and always will be. Their own employer going out of business was more due to local market forces affecting them or mergers between companies.
For the record, it didn't occur to me either. In the mid 90s I was sitting next to an incoming T-1 line at a startup ISP sending off physical envelopes with job applications to gaming and computer magazines I enjoyed hoping to become a journalist myself. One of the magazines that did reply (by mail btw) went out of business itself about 6 years later.
Much as you mentioned these folks not seeing the closure as a result of the Internet, but rather local competition dynamics, no matter how many stores close or odd situations happen, they believe the precise details of each narrative are what matter (i.e. the alcoholic manager) rather than the continual pattern of the store they're working at closing, every 2-3 years like clockwork
Maybe a union...
That is, I'm not anti union. I wish they were completely superfluous, though.