I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

That is neither journalism, nor reporting. That is editorial.

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.

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.

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.

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...

(Whoever pays the bills decides the content.)

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.

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.

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.