What it's like to deliver 80 meals a day for a $2500/month paycheck in China | Hacker News Reader

What it's like to deliver 80 meals a day for a $2500/month paycheck in China

businessinsider.com

13 pointsMz9 comments

This article reads like a propaganda piece. I'm not saying the switch from fisherman to scooter delivery guy is a bad one (I can think of a lot of other nice things about it too), but the whole thing reads like an ad for Economy 2.0. It even has the, "And he even lost 70 lbs doing it!" zinger at the end.

"Summer is the peak season, people place orders late at night, and Jin has to deliver until one or two o’clock on the morning before waking up at seven or eight to start work again."

originally written by tencent reporter.

Like Uber and Lyft drivers who can't take pee breaks, or accept rides after they begin giving birth.

http://gizmodo.com/lyft-thinks-its-exciting-that-a-driver-wa...

If you know anything about giving birth, theres a tremendous amount of time between water breaking and labor. Women and encouraged to go for a meal and take a shower and rest up before the contractions get close enough so that you need to go to the hospital.

So it's not like she was in an emergency situation, it really is a fun little fact that she took one more ride before realizing that she was going to give birth that day.

It feels to me like she should have been able to rest and prepare for the birth, but instead she had to keep driving because Lyft offers no paid maternity leave for its drivers.

Having fathered three children I can tell you the later ones come out a lot faster than the first one :-) Our midwife warned us about that and she was absolutely correct.

Uber has implemented a pause button [1].

[1] https://newsroom.uber.com/behind-the-wheel/

From the article:

“I have to thank Jack Ma for creating all these job opportunities,” said Jin.

He insists on believing the person paying his wages into his bank account every month is Jack Ma, even though Feng Niao Delivery where he works is a logistics company supporting online food delivery platform Ele.me, and is not closely tied to Jack Ma.

I really admire the entrepreneurial spirit in China, it has a long and enduring history. But it has also historically pitted the merchant class against the ruling class. That is a natural consequence of the different impact on day to day lives of the citizens a businessman can make versus a politician. So merchants develop an aura of being the source of good, and for politicians who depend on having that aura, that can be threatening.

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