The dangers of high status, low wage jobs | Hacker News Reader

The dangers of high status, low wage jobs

economistwritingeveryday.com

424 pointsjger15372 comments

"If you’re curious why unionization has taken the journalism world by storm the last few years, you don’t have to look to politics or in-group signaling for an explanation, basic economics will get you all the way there.... You reduce quantity of labor supplied and end up with higher equilibrium wages for those who manage to get their foot in the door. Of course, this will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot in the $3200/mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and using “semiotics” correctly in a sentence, but that’s neither here nor there."

This is a cute theory, and tickles some people's ideological fancy. But if the author had done more research, they would know where the CWA-NewsGuild is actually doing most of its new organizing (hint: not New York), what sorts of contract articles they bargain around hiring, and what the status quo in non-union newsrooms is.

In brief, the Guild has been organizing tons of local newspapers in small cities and rural areas, particularly those bought up by private equity firms who want to cut the newsroom to the bone. They bargain contract articles that curb the nepotistic in-group hiring practices common at non-union papers.

Source: I'm a former NewsGuild member, but at a software company, not a newspaper.

Take a gander at the NewsGuild president's twitter account and you'll see many examples of these campaigns: https://twitter.com/gaufre

Don’t you think you’re just postponing the inevitable? Newspapers historically made most of their money from the classifieds when most people are using Facebook and Craigslist and the like.

Then you have the fact that “only old people buy newspapers”

Everyone is always delaying the inevitable. It is the only thing anyone can do. None of us (or our companies) are getting out of this alive.

The difference is that millions of people aren’t going to wake up one morning and say they want to start buying physical newspapers.

I had a similar reaction when I read the grandparent post. Could we not say the same about most retail shops and people who work at them? "Bah, why bother? In the long run, you will all be replaced with robot pickers in an Amazon warehouse." And yet, the retail "experience" continues to innovate / find / create experiences that people cannot have with pure online shopping.

Would you invest in either a bookstore or a big retail shop in a mall today?

In the U.S., the gutting of newsrooms has largely already happened, with disastrous consequences for democracy. There is simply too little actual investigative journalism, particularly at the local level, being done today. There are too few independent newsrooms.

Consider that this was already a plotline in the early 2000s TV show "The Wire", written by former Baltimore-Sun reporter (and NewsGuild member) David Simon.

The papers being organized are those that found a business model that works to a degree. The fight now is largely about whether their owners will continue to operate real newsrooms, which requires employing journalists at a living wage and having a fairly long time horizon for investment, or whether they will become essentially hollow brands with little original content.

But to your point: yes, the broader political question of how the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains unresolved for now.

I think a big part of the problem with funding the news is the way papers handle online payments. I would happily pay a dollar or two to have online access to the NY Times, WSJ, or even my local town paper for a day. What I absolutely do not want to do is spend $500+ on 3 or more subscriptions that I will not read, or not read much of, on most days. For papers that still have a print edition, you can buy the day's paper. I don't know why you can't do the same thing online.

You misunderstand. The subscriptions are not the key to revenue. The dollar even per article would be even less so. They are qualifiers for the ad demographic.

The NYTimes seems to be doing quite well on subscription revenue.

The NYT has subscribers across the country (and beyond) as it covers broad US and world events. I doubt a local paper that principally covers local/state news will have that same reach.

The NYT, WSJ, FT, The Economist, and maybe a few others have a national and international (to greater or lesser degrees) audience who are willing to pay $100/year or so for a subscription. That's a much tougher sale when your audience is almost entirely just, say, Philadelphia.

And for the same reason, local papers are going to have paltry ad sales.

At the end of the day, none of this looks good for local news, but that doesn’t been that subscription sales aren’t a viable business model to some degree.

Not sure why people are downvoting you. Here are some numbers from Feb 2021:

> Total subscription revenue in 2020 was up 10 percent, to $1.195 billion.

> Total ad revenue at The Times fell 26 percent in 2020, to $392.4 million.

> Adjusted operating profit rose 1.4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2019, to $97.7 million, and 0.9 percent over the year, to $250.6 million.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/business/media/new-york-t...

Just because the NYT was successful doesn't mean that model translates at all to local independent newsrooms. It doesn't even necessarily translate to other large national news papers.

The resulting problem is exactly why people complain about too many streaming services. You could easily have to juggle national, state, and various local-level subscriptions. Maybe multiples at every level. Plus any other publications specific to other hobbies or interests you might have.

Just because it works once, doesn't mean it will work for everyone.

I absolutely agree. I've had some conversations with my local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican about this, since their subscription cost seems sort of absurd for the value. They point out (correctly, IMO) that the really small upper bound on their potential subscriber base really forces their hand a lot, a problem that the NYT does not face and likely never will (given its national and international reach).

I mean, the ad model doesn’t seem to be working all that well for local news rooms either.

My point was simply to show a counter example that news must survive off of ad revenue.

The old model of subscriptions covering cost of production + ads delivering the profits is just dead.

I see your point, but I don't think it's a good counter-example. News needs a new paradigm entirely most-likely. The NYT isn't "the news" and the only options seem to be subscriptions and/or ads. For smaller operations, the problem gets a lot harder a lot faster since there's an upper-bound on the number of people they serve.

> The NYT isn't "the news"

I’m not sure what you mean by this.

At the end of the day, I think the answer is that local news rooms just aren’t going to be viable, by and large. This is a consequence of a century long trend to begin with.

The way I see it, either you have a broad enough reach, or you have to niche yourself into the broader content generation ecosystem. Local news publishing that just reprints of AP stories or talking about some new pop health study of the week isn’t going to survive. To the degree that local investigative journalism is valuable, it’s going to have to find an entirely new model to sustain itself.

Or, more likely, simply die, and take fair local government with it.

Is 'fair local government' correlated to the presence of robust local media? Seems like a sad state of affairs if that is indeed the case..

corruption is an endless feature of human communities. one way to keep it somewhat under control is to publicize it to the broader community rather than allow it to remain secret. the corruption doesn't need to be extreme enough to warrant legal action (though it might); it could just be "bad for most people, good for a few".

stupidity has most of the same properties.

the main feature of those human communities that we've used for a few hundred years to try to accomplish that control is called "a free press".

I feel like the NYTimes could take more papers under its subscription - e.g. give subscribers the option to bundle in a state and municipal paper, that the NYTimes essentially vets as a local affiliate (I’m guessing this would probably lead to substantial overhead on their end, though).

1/3 of their revenue from ads is a lot. especially since the ads are probably high margin

The New York Times is the only legacy media company to successfully pivot into digital, and pivot properly at that. In 2014, an internal innovation report [1] laid out the challenges the Times faced and what it needed to do to be successful. To the Times’ immense credit, it succeeded and then some. I worked at a digital publication that was cutting edge on the types of digital and audience engagement work the the Times was trying to chase and used to say that “we are trying to become the New York Times before the Times becomes us.” And in 2016, we had layoffs and the company “pivoted to video,” and as I said to some colleagues the night of the layoffs (I was spared but many other were not), the Times won. (The pivot didn’t work and the company would sell for 1/5 of its valuation 18 months later. But at this point I’d just left media for tech.)

The Times is the exception. It’s the Apple amidst a sea of Commodores and Ataris and DECs. The Times is the exception and is exceptional as a business reinvention story, but it is the outlier, not the norm.

(The Journal has always had a paywall (even in the mid 1990s when it sold digital editions over dial-up), tho its porousness has ebbed and flowed, and as such, has never had the same degree of challenges that faced local papers or the national papers like the New York Times, WaPo, and the LA Times)

[1]: https://www.scribd.com/doc/224608514/The-Full-New-York-Times...

> The New York Times is the only legacy media company to successfully pivot into digital, and pivot properly at that.

I'm more familiar with the UK media market, where quite a few legacy media publications have pivoted into digital successfully. Whatever you think of the Daily Mail/Mail Online, it's very successful. The Guardian is doing well without a paywall (although it has a large endowment to sustain it). Smaller publications such as the Spectator (which is about legacy as it gets) are doing well with a digital subscription model. And then there's The Economist, of course.

I think the Daily Mail is a good example and this is a reminder to never speak in absolutes.

That said, I don’t think any of those other examples pivoted the way the Times pivoted. The Times didn’t just digitize the newspaper or combine the newsrooms. It started to do real digital first and product first investments. The Cooking app, the Games vertical, the investment into audio and video, the tremendous investment in data tools for its journalists for multimedia storytelling (consider the impact of Snow Fall, even a decade later).

The Daily Mail may have successfully managed profitability, but I wouldn’t put it on par with the transformation that happened at The Times. The Times looked at the innovation happening at BuzzFeed and Mashable (where I worked for many years) and Vice and Vox and has not just been able to compete with them, I would argue that it has largely vested them. Whatever else you think of their journalism, that alone, is nothing short of remarkable. And I cannot think of another legacy media company that has transformed itself the same way.

Well, success in this context means digital+profits. There's nothing particularly digital about the Guardian's work - it's just ordinary text - and they are incredibly unprofitable. They really shouldn't count.

I’m glad they were able to figure that out, and now the question that arises in my mind is whether there is any hope for finding a model that props up local investigative journalism. Even if all those local news organizations became non-profits and had access to a very effective digital media platform that made it effortless to produce online content (including mobile-friendly functionality), and maybe even charge micro-payments for some of the individual articles, would it be enough? Or would it not work? Can they only survive if they do real news while selling other stuff?

> The New York Times is the only legacy media company to successfully pivot into digital, and pivot properly at that.

How about the Financial Times or The Economist?

The Economist is so small (staff of 75 writers, not sure how large the whole organization is but it’s still very small) that I don’t think it counts the same way something like the Times counts. That isn’t to take anything away from The Economist, but a magazine isn’t the same scope, to me. Especially since the magazine has changed hands a few times. And if I’m going to be brutally honest, The New Yorker is actually the magazine that has adapted to digital the best and if it were its own business and not one of the things propping up Condé Nast, I’d list it alongside the Times.

(Thinking about it more, The Atlantic is close to successfully pivoting but I don’t know if I can say it has done it quite yet. And again, it had to sell itself)

FT is a fantastic newspaper but I think it’s much more akin to WSJ, where its paywall and subscriber base insulated it from the challenges than a lot of other papers. But that’s a good call-out as a paper that has done its part to pivot like the Times has. (It has also been sold, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but is worth noting).

The Times, to me, is unique in that it’s investment in its tech has been as significant as it has. And not just for the apps like Cooking and Games, but the commitment to the full stack within its storytelling, its video, its audio. It is really remarkable from a product perspective, as much as from a journalism perspective. The core product it offers is still news, but it has managed to really change the medium and packaging of its offerings in a very demonstrable way.

WSJ has also pivoted quite successfully and maintains pretty much the same operating model as NYT.

I realize these are basically the two highest profile legacy news products, so broadly your point stands.

Totally, and WSJ never had the same challenges because it never took down its paywall/had a different subscriber profile/etc. But yes, those are the two that have managed to stay successful and that’s a testament to both of their teams.

The “qualifiers” are way too high for anyone who isn’t from the boomer generation. I can afford it, but I cannot justify it.

Agreed, micropayments would be clutch here.

“Journalism” has never been good when it comes to covering anything that didn’t effect the White middle class.

Journalist reflexively took the word of the police department and prosecutors and didn’t believe minorities when they complained about police misconduct. It was only when everyone could film the police that it became apparent.

On the other side, the rise of Trumpian populism came about because everyone ignored rural White America including journalist.

I think Walter Lippmann covered this pretty well 100 years ago in his book Public Opinion (an excellent book by the way, I highly recommend it). Newspapers get money from the public through a hidden commodity tax by way of advertisements. In order to get this to work, they need to sell their circulation, and the value of the circulation depends on the buying power of those in it. As such, the goal of a newspaper has to be to keep it's target audience happy by giving them what they want:

> Circulation is, therefore, the means to an end. It becomes an asset only when it can be sold to the advertiser, who buys it with revenues secured through indirect taxation of the reader. The kind of circulation which the advertiser will buy depends on what he has to sell. It may be "quality" or "mass." On the whole there is no sharp dividing line, for in respect to most commodities sold by advertising, the customers are neither the small class of the very rich nor the very poor. They are the people with enough surplus over bare necessities to exercise discretion in their buying. The paper, therefore, which goes into the homes of the fairly prosperous is by and large the one which offers most to the advertiser. It may also go into the homes of the poor, but except for certain lines of goods, an analytical advertising agent does not rate that circulation as a great asset, unless, as seems to be the case with certain of Mr. Hearst's properties, the circulation is enormous.

> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.

Especially relevant today, with the number of advertisement driven companies.

Also from the book, how newspapers will often let erroneous stories die rather than correcting them and angering passionate readers:

> The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.

The heyday of the newspaper also had disastrous consequences for democracy, such as the Spanish-American War.

Lest we forget NYT being used as a mouthpiece for Dick Cheney and forming the foundation of the invasion of Iraq. I'll stump for the importance of journalism at any level (esp. the local level) but the willingness of major outlets to accept and regurgitate anything from cops/3-letter orgs is absolutely confounding.

Reminds me of when every US newspaper basically plainly copied what the gov said about the strikes against Kata'ib Hezbollah being in response to a hit and run toyota-rocket attack of theirs on a US base.

Not a soul that took note of the fact that Kata'ib had denied any involvement or that this happened very far away from where they held power and deep in territory with an enemy local group that had instantly claimed the attack.

Thank you to post about this important issue. The demise of diversity in news sources is that local politics will lose its Fourth Estate (media) that acts as a check-and-balance. National politics will continue to be closely monitored by national papers. To all readers of any nationality: This issue will affect any democracy that sees a sharp decline in local news sources.

> But to your point: yes, the broader political question of how the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains unresolved for now.

It's been funded by for profit organizations, that have a vested interest in controlling what is newsworthy and what is ignored, and who gets discredited and maligned. Unbiased news died with Operation Mockingbird in the 60's and it's corpse has been dancing along like Weekend at Bernie's.

I don't think folks appreciate just how tetering-on-the-edge local corruption already was before local newspapers started to die. Expect to see a lot more crazy stories coming out when small towns and small cities go so far into private-fiefdom territory that someone outside notices. The only remaining significant bulwark to ruining-the-country levels of corruption is state auditors—and that's if they're not corrupt themselves.

Larger cities may be OK a little while longer since they usually still have some local investigative reporting.

It's one of several reasons I'm no longer sure the Web is compatible with healthy democracy.

One thing I have read about though, is that, since unlike radio or tv stations there is no real regulator of who owns how many websites, conservative media networks are creating news sites for towns using a local contractor for local stories, and then having national or international stories be presented with a conservative slant.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/hundreds-of-hyperpartisan-...

There is more than one solution to the problem. As the problem gets worse, the need for a new solution will overcome the friction that was preventing that solution from taking place. Upper government ought to be proactive about helping those solutions along, so fixing the problem doesn't involve killings.

I would love to buy a subscription to a newspaper. As far as I can tell, nobody wants to sell me one without ads and trackers. It does not appear there is a big enough market for a publication that serves the interests of subscribers.

I canceled all of my subscriptions after asking politely that they do something about the third party tracking.

There's also been a huge rise of non profit journalism.

The only hyper local paper in my region that seems have worked out a stable model, delivers to everyone free and is the only outlet that covers local events.

> Newspapers historically made most of their money from the classifieds when most people are using Facebook and Craigslist and the like.

Really? I didnt know that. I assumed ad sales were how newspapers made money.

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...

I was off when I said “most”

> Newspaper classified advertising peaked in 2000 at $19.6 billion. In 2012, the most recent year for which data are available from the Newspaper Association of America, classified advertising was $4.6 billion — a drop of about 77 percent in barely more than a decade.

> In 2000, classified ads accounted for about 40 percent of newspaper industry ad revenue. In 2012, classifieds made up about 18 percent of the ad revenue in an industry that was barely half the size it had been a decade earlier.

Please ignore if this takes us off-topic, but is this a case for micropayments, done via cryptocurrency? Because I think a successful implementation of micropayments might solve for this.

I don't want to subscribe to any regular news, but I'd be happy to click a button that gives $.25 to the author/site.

That doesn't work with CC fees, but if micropayments done via crypto (there are many with low/no transaction costs).

I could be misremembering, but this seems like an idea that's been tried (and failed before). I have a memory of a service whose pitch was that you'd load funds into an account (a 1 time large transaction to get past the CC fees), and then individual sites could request micropayments from that account balance. No crypto then of course, but I'm not sure adding crypto makes this idea functionally different from how it looks without it.

I could be totally off my rocker, but I'm pretty sure I remember this from sometime around the early 2010's ?

The failure in the 2010s, is due to (lack of) network effects (from lack of participation), among other things. Crypto doesn't necessarily solve this but things like the Solana cryptocurrency enable solutions built on top of it.

I think the point is that nobody wants to make some account, then pre-load that account with money, and then wonder what the balance is, etc. etc. etc. Yuck! If this problem is going to be properly solved, someone has to solve the [evidently very hard] problem of being able to send $0.25 over the Internet without all these accounts and without getting overwhelmed with fees from the banking establishment.

If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical, business, or security constraints, what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site. Isn't something like that the holy grail? No need to "have an account" at the web site, and "have an account" with the payment processor or pre-load things with funds or any of that garbage. I already have a bank account, why do I need a handful of other accounts all over the place?

There's the UX. I think it would be successful. But nobody has managed to build it yet.

This is what Web3 is supposed to be. "Want to store some data? Just pay the market rate for data storage!" Of course they chose the most expensive and unwieldy data storage mechanism imaginable.

Inb4 "but X chain is so cheap!", all chains are cheap until they're popular. Make a chain that gets faster&cheaper to commit on as the amount of compute on it increases (as you would expect... pretty much any CS thing to work) and you've solved web3. Oh but then the asset is inherently inflationary and people care more about getting in on the next big hockey stick than sound financial instruments. So... there you have it.

The blockchains you are thinking of were never meant to be data storage layers. The proof-of-storage chains (at least, the ones that store "real" data) are much more reasonable, check out prices for storage on FileCoin.

The distinction here is that nodes publish proof that they have data stored on chain, rather than publishing the data itself on chain.

Yep, proof of storage is the only way forward as far as I'm concerned. At least of the currently available options. But they aren't great for representing a ledger. Some sort of hybrid is needed.

Back in the dot-com era (and maybe since), there were some startups in the micropayments space.

>If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical, business, or security constraints, what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site.

That sounds like exposing my bank account quite a bit too freely. The obvious approach is that you have an account with someone who collects the money and distributes it--and yes it would probably be prepaid.

In any case, if there were a demand the technical and UX problems can be overcome. The bigger issue, other than establishing the network, are getting people to actually pay per article--given that we've mostly moved to all you can eat subscriptions for other media--at an amount that would actually pay the bills. And in light of the fact that a lot of people don't want mental transaction costs to decide if reading an article is worth it every time they want to read something. (Which Clay Shirky brought up 20 years ago.)

See Iota - the only zero fee crypto with realistic ambitions for supporting smart contracts.

As long as the reader needs 'an account' this will never take off. There should be some way to load money into my computer and then drag a quarter or half dollar coin onto an article that I want to read.

The only information that needs to transfer is the coin's value. There is absolutely no need for any account information to propagate off of my computer. But the current state of the internet basically guarantees that the most syphilitic tech whore lead is going to shout from the mountain tops who paid what to view which article and then carve it into stone which is subsequently dumped into a landfill.

> I think the point is that nobody wants to make some account, then pre-load that account with money, and then wonder what the balance is, etc. etc. etc. Yuck!

Those free-to-play phone games seem to survive ok while making players pre-load a balance before they can buy their in-game advantage items with it.

> Those free-to-play phone games seem to survive ok while making players pre-load a balance before they can buy their in-game advantage items with it.

Those games largely depend on addicting people to intermittent rewards and harvesting a disproportionate amount of their revenue from relatively few 'whales'.

Sounds like flattr.com would have worked for you.

> what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site.

Now imagine someone making that button 1x1px, same color as background, in the footer, and js clicking it regularly every seconds you spend on some random spam site.

Similar technology is actually already deployed in the real world. All you need is a phone number of a person browsing your website to automagically subscribe them into monthly mobile charges.

I think you are talking about Blendle which up until a few years ago let you pay by the article for many major newspapers and magazines.

I miss it.

If you have a paywall, a subscription works a lot better. If you don't, ads have a better CPM than donations.

This has been trialed several places before and never taken off, the type of people willing to engage in micropayments at all, but who will never subscribe at any price point, seems to be quite small.

Not entirely true. There are a few porn sites that have had success moving away from "all scenes access" subscription models to load up an account and purchase individual scenes from the pool models. And, of course, services like Clips4Sale have always worked this way. I suspect it would work well enough for any kind of cross platform video on demand service, not just adult, but no such thing exists right now because streaming providers largely don't work with each other the way porn providers do, preferring to own both the content and the platform.

Another part of this is I guess the payments aren't really "micro" in the video case, as filmed scenes are more expensive to produce and more valuable to consume than most written articles, so they can charge more per scene than anyone would ever pay per article.

https://webmonetization.org/ the transactions need to batched, e.g. once per month

Not just journalists, but politicians, priests, etc. The filtered bubble of their society becomes the pole star of their existence, and the rest of the world gets devalued.

Used to be, near any event that generates news coverage, there would be a bar where the journalists hung out. Listening to the conversations there would tell you what the story was going to be, as well as how it differed from the facts. The audience that mattered was the rest of the media clique; the actual paying "audience" was the chum that everyone took for granted.

Can often see the same thing on Twitter now - it’s cool to see in real time

I went to high school with a guy who is big in the self described Left-wing journalist Twitter.

I remember very distinctly watching an article - well, the ideas core to that article - he'd written percolate from New Republic to The Atlantic to The New York Times over a period of about a month. What was interesting was that in his original article, the concepts he presented were presented as radical, and as a thought experiment. By the time it made its way down to the NYT a month later, those same concepts were presented as obvious solutions that "both sides" should agree on as a matter of course, and any disagreement was just intellectual folly.

The conversation about these ideas had already happened on Twitter; NYT was just reporting the score.

It is interesting to see the overton window slide in real time.

Can you link these articles? I'd be interested to see this evolution you describe.

People don't present themselves as extreme. I think what happened is that a lot of people ran this "thought experiment" and it made a lot of sense to them.

edit: The New Republic was passed from a famous racist to a founder of facebook to a Democratic party bagman and banking heir. Characterizing it as an extreme left outlet is bizarre, because at times it wouldn't even count as center-left.

From the first paragraph of wikipedia: "Through the 1980s and 1990s, the magazine incorporated elements of the Third Way and conservatism."

So first of all you're responding to what you want to read, not the actual content of my comment. I said that the friend of mine in question was a self described hard Leftist, and that he was big in leftist oriented Twitter. I made no statement about New Republic...which is in fact a hard left publication. When you were looking at Wikipedia, did you skip the part where they were owned by that guy in the 1980s because it came out that the editors and owner were spies for the USSR, EDIT and they were trying to revamp their image /ENDEDIT? Or the bit about their return to their leftist roots since their sale in 2016?

Furthermore looking at who owned an institution 30-40 years ago doesn't really add any value to the conversation about what they are today.

Dude.

The New Republic isn't a GOP outlet, sure. It might even occasionally slightly hurt centrist sensibilities, which would put it left of the NYT. But if you think that's "hard left", you haven't seen hard left, or even moderate left.

Try something like wsws.org, or The Jacobin. The New Republic isn't remotely that.

> I made no statement about New Republic...which is in fact a hard left publication.

What are the actual ends of the spectrum on which you identify the NR's position as "hard left" ?

I’ve seen Breitbart comments accusing the AP of being communists.

They’re about as milquetoast neoliberal as you can get, but they typically skew towards diversity and democracy which is probably enough to make you a steenkin pinko to some people.

It's the same on both sides. The Hunter Biden "laptop saga" moved from NY Post -> Fox News -> Wall Street Journal.

This was after Fox and WSJ passed on the story initially. Once it got traction from NY Post, they ran with it. Sean Hannity even claimed to have the laptop in his possession. Then he said it was stolen. Then he got it back, but couldn't share any of the juicy details cause his "lawyers wouldn't let him" [1]. They wouldn't even let other news organizations look at the incriminating emails [2].

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/sean-hannity-says-lawyers-wont-020500...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/here-s-what-h...

I had a LOL moment when Rudy Giuliani posed with one of the computers on TV, because apparently the Mac guy wasn't smart enough to know the difference between an OSX based Macbook Pro and a Windows based LG.

I've heard rumors a lot of the grouthink happens as Twitter users share lists of accounts to block and coordinate in private Google Docs.

Wouldn’t not witnessing this yourself or similar be a similar kind of groupthink behavior? In an us vs them mentality.

> Wouldn’t not witnessing this yourself or similar be a similar kind of groupthink behavior? In an us vs them mentality.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying... not doing these things is just groupthink in the opposite direction?

Edit: Maybe there's a better word for it: bubble building.

Edit 2: I do believe Twitter fosters the 'us vs them' mentality you mention; I tried to point out only the tip of the iceberg is visible publicly.

I’m saying that “I heard rumors of X” is the same bubble-type behavior that’s being criticized in the conversation flow just towards an out-group (aka a group on a different social media platform).

Thanks for taking the time to clarify.

How would you recommend initiating a conversation to discuss when 'the actual paying "audience" was the chum that everyone took for granted' but one actually can't 'see the same thing on Twitter' except due to intermittent OPSEC/OSINT failures?

I don't know about journalists, but given the idiotic replies to the posts of the computer scientists I follow on Twitter, I'm not sure I blame them for producing content for other top computer scientists.

One day some rando really will solve P=NP and they'll show you! (Divide by P and N=0 obviously)

Uh... you mean N=1, unless P=0... :p

I said what I said

Yep, just look at the covid lockdowns and superstars posting crying videos, wanting sympathy from regular people, for being locked in ther multimillion dollar villas with tennis courts and swimming pools.

Bubbles are bad... but if you don't want to escape from one by yourself, you'll stay there forever, your bubble won't move by itself.

Bubbles eventually burst, just ask an economist.

Australian housing? Not yet. It's been... forever. Never burst in modern times. They even managed to ride the Global Financial Crisis tsunami in 2008. The income-to-sale-price multiplier is simply mind blowing. I do not understand it!

Ref: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-...

Supply constraints are powerful things

Also hoarding something, that has limited quantity.

What happened to the wealthy?

They used to keep these things amongst themselves rather than announce everything to the public.

They used to use hidden signals of wealth to show themselves to each other but not reveal themselves to the public —but now it’s a contest for crass popularity.

I guess Robin Leach opened the crack and Instagram et al opened the floodgates. It’s a bit pathetic.

What the hell happened to the “millionaire next door” types? Someone who had wealth but you’d never know it?

The real wealthy folks still are hush about their capital. The folks you see flinging cash and status around are - and always have been - the nouveau riche.

Perhaps but Bezos, Branson, Ma, Musk, etc, aren’t the quietest bunch regarding their monies. We even have those who are wealthy but need to tell us how unwealthylike they live such as Dorsey.

Just be.

>Perhaps but Bezos, Branson, Ma, Musk, etc, aren’t the quietest bunch regarding their monies.

Well, those are also crude nouveaux riches. Heck, they even had to somehow work for their money (even those of them that got some hefty support from their parents).

As opposed to several generations of old money.

>the nouveau riche

I'm not even sure that many are really rich. I recently read that the average net worth of a Ferrari owner is less than one million pounds and that most Ferraris are financed.

Real wealth is what you don't spend.

Real wealth is what you get to enjoy.

Net worth isn’t a good measure of being rich; high negative net worth means you’re rich too. All the average people are in the middle.

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Low net worth includes people with $0, but also people worth negative millions because they have a lot of debt. The only way to get that much debt is if you’re rich.

It’s better to look at assets excluding debt. This also shows the problem with student loan relief, which is it mostly benefits dentists.

Not really, wealth is usually a measure of assets rather than income.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wealth.asp

How would you know they aren't still majority? There were always conspicuously wealthy people, but now there are more wealthy people in general. It's inevitable both the quiet and noisy segments would grow even without other changes.

My theory is that too many of the “wrong” people got rich, so the luxury industry and media worked together to increase consumption and funnel the nouveau rich money to the “right” wealthy people.

I certainly agree society has gotten a lot more ostentatious, to the negative. But there's still a bit of a "kids these days" vibe to this comment; people (by which I mean the long-established aristocrats) have been decrying the tasteless, crass vulgarity of the nouveau riche since at least the late Roman Republic.

While mostly being angry they can’t display the crassness of the new even richer class.

The Guilded Age on HBO right now is a great show about this.

Anyone who read The Great Gatsby in high school should be familiar with the disdain for the nouveau rich amongst old money. The movie Caddyshack also does a good job at depicting this.

> What the hell happened to the “millionaire next door” types? Someone who had wealth but you’d never know it?

They're still around, and people still don't know it. Some of those older people you see working at the grocery store have been "retired" from executive positions and need something to do until they reach retirement age. Lots of diligent people working normal jobs and without vices manage to become quite wealthy while living unremarkable lives.

These people will always be interesting to me. They "won" the game, they accumulated wealth and made a comfortable life for themselves. Yet they usually live frugally and die with several millions just because they never actually spent the money.

Some of my relatives were like that. Lots of money in the banks, 70 years old, yet his wife would chastise him for buying a small $16k Mazda truck to replace his +10 years old $12k Ford truck.

That's how "new money" turns into "old money". Low time preference on a generational scale is all it takes.

Only if you inculcated the same standards into your children, which is definitely not a given. If you were just a miser and your children didn't understand your reasoning, I would expect them to blow their entire inheritance and leave a pittance to their children.

Couldn't this be addressed with some kind of legal entity like a generational trust where the children don't have direct access to the principle?

Yes, absolutely, and it would be a great idea if you don't trust the financial competence of your beneficiaries, but you want them to have access to your assets. The problem is that those trusts may be viewed as overly restrictive or unnecessarily burdensome to the beneficiaries and so may not be created in the first place. IE beneficiary needs $X for a rational business investment, but can only get $X/4 out of the trust within the timeframe, even though 1000*$X in total is in the trust.

> IE beneficiary needs $X for a rational business investment, but can only get $X/4 out of the trust within the timeframe, even though 1000*$X in total is in the trust.

I mean, the trust can (usually) invest money without it being considered a distribution. I suspect that happens a lot based on the trustifarians I see in capital-intensive businesses and crushing it (due to below-market cost of capital).

I feel bad for their competitors having to prove themselves to a bank or other arms-length financier.

Often happens over three generations not two

The mindset that "wins" the game (as you put it) is the same mindset that carefully considers whether a 16k truck is really worth the expense.

If you start inflating expenses "because you have money", you don't become the old guy with lots of money in the bank.

The reason most people want to be rich is to have a good lifestyle. Sure, lifestyle inflation is a thing and you want to have money in the bank for emergency and retirement, but being the old guy with lots of money is no better than being the old guy with a solid retirement fund if you're just going to sit on the money.

> but being the old guy with lots of money is no better than being the old guy with a solid retirement fund if you're just going to sit on the money.

I'm confused - those are the same person.

Most "millionaire next door" types are not people who suddenly had a million dropped into their account.

They're the people who routinely make good choices with their money. That includes putting it in a diversified investment portfolio and taking full advantage of all the legal ways to reduce expenses (of which - retirements accounts are a great option - the tax savings you get filling your 401k compound to quite a nice bit of cash over a 40 year timeline, not even mentioning the principle you contributed).

So in this case - I'm with the guys wife: He's 70 already, what's he really going to be using that truck for? It sure isn't going to be heavy labor (he's 70). Couldn't a smaller more efficient car have done the same job? And it's a 16k truck - so it's either incredibly low trim and lightly used, or nice but heavily used (because 16k is dirt fucking cheap for a decent truck unless it's 10+ years old).

So is she nagging because he spent 16k, or because he spent 16k on something that's not really practical for that point in their life? I'd bet money it's the later.

Not even mentioning - a 70 year old might easily live another 25 years. Blowing all your savings now is a terrible call if you need long term care later in life (you want to talk about expensive, long term care makes that 16k truck look like a match box car)

Don't get me wrong - if you're perfectly happy with your lifestyle despite spending very little money, that's absolutely okay. My point is, you can not just overspend, you can also oversave - if you have the money to make your life better (really better, not wasting-money-better), you're on the wrong side of this.

That larger truck might be a waste of money, but it might also be easier to get into, save fuel and keep you safe in the case of a crash. Now, most people are clearly on the overspending side of things, but a large pile of cash won't make your corpse more comfortable either.

Sure - and you can get hit by a bus tomorrow, making the whole discussion a moot point.

That doesn't change the fact that the people who end up in the situation the OP was referring to (decent amount of capital late in their lives) tend to be the same people who have decided that they can, in fact, live a comfortable life without having to spend a ton of money. They aren't always right, but my point is that folks without that mindset aren't the ones in that position later (at least not usually).

What's the point though. You just skimped your whole live to end up old and with a bunch of abstract "wealth".

Best way to do it is to buy exactly what will fulfill you, and not a cent more. Maybe that 3 week trip to ___ will, maybe the expensive dinner won't. Etc.

I think you're implying a value judgement I'm not making.

Who's to say they think they're skimping?

Who's to say that they didn't buy exactly what fulfilled them, and it was only 20% of their take-home pay, so they just shoved the rest of it into investments?

Basically - money certainly matters, but only to a point. Once you're fairly comfortable satisfying your genuine needs (food, clothing, shelter, time) more money isn't really going to change how you feel.

It's a mental trap to assume that happiness can be bought, if only you had a bit more money. It leads to empty, hollow, soulless people.

---

> Best way to do it is to buy exactly what will fulfill you

My advice? Buying things will never fulfill you. Real fulfillment isn't about having the next shiny ____.

I'm not saying you shouldn't buy that thing, but you should be doing it with intention - How does this fit into my life? What uses do I have for it? Who will I share it with?

No I think we are on the same page. I'm just assuming these are "excessively frugal" type people. Agree 100% that money only matters to a point. I've traveled to many places, and had a few "luxury" type experiences and I'm certain that the juice isn't worth the squeeze for that type of stuff.

I would say the main two goals would be to: have enough money to work when/on what you want (this could be like 500k), and the long term goal is have enough money to make a bigger impact on a community or even the world (prob like 10 mil - 1 bil).

> They used to keep these things amongst themselves rather than announce everything to the public.

When did this happen? Do you mean the gilded age where the wealthy had giant, showy mansions built now used for various museums, or funded massive libraries and stuff in their name? Do you mean when the wealthy hung up painted portraits of themselves everywhere? Do you mean when the wealthy were building literal castles and starting literal wars on their name? Do you mean when royalty proclaimed to be a royal was to be divine??

I don’t think the wealthy have ever stfu’d about their money…

> What the hell happened to the “millionaire next door” types? Someone who had wealth but you’d never know it?

Remember your audience here. You're surrounded by them.

I think you have a valid point, although I think it should probably be the "decimillionaire next door" to keep up with inflation and retain its original meaning. This is a case where the floor dropped out and the ceiling is falling, when a "millionaire" doesn't really mean what it meant many years ago.

In 1904, $1M inflation adjusted is $31M now. In 1956, it's $9.9M. Seems to have peeked at 2007/8. The uptick to "billionaire" started around 1982 which is about $2.79M. Words are very discrete bins and usage lag.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Millionaire%2C...

While there is a very valid point that many who frequent this site may be considered millionaires and by some, considered wealthy relative to the median in current times, that isn't to say the median hasn't been falling in terms of the sheer scale of wealth these days.

I’d rather have a million now than 31 million in 1904.

The quality of life difference isn’t measurable in money.

You mean deca, not deci.

> What happened to the wealthy? They used to keep these things amongst themselves rather than announce everything to the public.

Still happens.

See this $600 hat which is sold out, used as a wealth signaling mechanism. And also as an aspirational luxury good now that the masses are aware.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/succession-morning-show-luxury-...

They've been replaced with nouveaux riches who want to show off to their poor friends (and enemies) that they've "made it".

The "millionaire next door" also has low time preference, which is how they made their money. They don't spend extravagantly but reinvest that money into their business, stocks, real estate, etc. That's also why they're stealth rich.

If we even accept the premise (and it's a doubtful one, obscene wealth was always visible), it's worth pointing out that a lot of wealth is generated simply by being in the public eye. Cynically put, the not-wealthy like having a look at the things they'll never have enough to hand over money for it.

As for "millionaire next door", they're still around. The US has 20 million of them. But most of the "next door" wealth is achieved through doing a "normal" job. (I.e. jobs that most other people can relate to, and could possibly achieve working in)

Ostentatious wealth is requiring arbitrage of some form, at scale. Celebrities arbitrage fame. And it's a smart business, because part of their payment is more fame. Hence the "crass popularity" contests. People pay them for that popularity and make them more popular.

There have always been rich people who flaunt their wealth and crave attention, just as there are those who are, as you say, the "millionaires next door". The difference is now, I can easily check in on the lives of the ones who crave attention anywhere in the world. We no longer have "local celebrities" like we used to, as their fame is rarely only covered by the local papers.

People always seem intrigued by the lives of the rich and famous, and tabloids have been milking that for generations. Before the internet, that was the best way to keep up to date on celebrity gossip, and it was a lucrative market (see also: MTV Cribs).

It just seems like the rich are so much worse these days because it's so easy for them to get attention. Some have even turned it into an art form, knowing how effective ragebait is at getting clicks. (Remember Logan Paul's Japanese forest video?) Combine that with the reduction in our media landscape and increase in outlets which just report on drama, many of which get reposted with only minor rewording on more general outlets, and it's much more difficult to escape this stuff today.

All this said, I would agree that the rich generally are worse today, but that's a byproduct of capital coalescing in new forms to lobby for awful laws spurring greater inequality, and it would have happened without the internet. They were also bad in the past, but unless you went out of your way, it was difficult to get a grasp on how wealth multiplies and the horrendous practices of many large corporations. The popularity contest becoming inescapable, on the other hand, is a direct result of our hyper-connected world.

> What happened to the wealthy?

I wonder the same thing, especially with respect to the lower rung of wealth. I'm shocked at how much of the top 1% views themselves as victims of higher rungs of the top 1% instead of having attitudes commensurate with their wealth, privilege, and social status.

That bar has now been replaced with Twitter, and other social media, but it is hard to listen to the conversations because of the number of voices all speaking at once...... the truth is out there, just hard to find.

"Authoritative Sources" are not the solution either, which is what most social media companies seem to be banking on as the solution to "fake news" but their chosen authority are just as prone to reporting non-sense as some random guy with a blog

> Used to be, near any event that generates news coverage, there would be a bar where the journalists hung out

Just curious, how old are you and what year do you believe this “used to be” ended?

I’m 40 and my guess is that this time is 25+ years gone by?

I'm 49; and i dunno about "ended". Its no longer required to attend a physical place to "cover a story," but I'm sure that bar is still there at every big event.

My understanding (based on some podcasts I’ve heard on) is that journalism has developed journalists not being by in a physical place except at very big events is due to newspapers closing/lack of money. There simply isn’t enough funding to have a well-considered reporter report on a specific subject or region where they then are in a place and regional education to then comment when something major happens. Now national newspapers ship reporters out to major events who simply don’t have the know-how of on the ground context and therefore can come away with drastically different conclusions than the people who actually live there.

It's been replaced with various private whatsapp groups. A surprisingly large amount of UK politics coverage is Laura K and Robert Peston reading out messages they have been sent by various leakers.

I am living near a medium sized city in Germany; here journalists from the local newspaper are very present at events, may they be cultural or political. A few days ago an incident made international headlines. After a few hours the place where the incident happend was full of journalists.

> but I'm sure that bar is still there at every big event.

Why are you sure of this?

I believe that where journalists gather, there will be drinking (and other intoxicant consumption). Usually as a herd.

Perhaps the profession changed; my observations are dated.

You're confusing (as so many people do, alas) the jobs of "reporter" and "journalist".

The former is a job where you are required to attend a physical place to cover a story, required to talk to people, required to gather facts. Of course, you might do all of these badly, you might even lie about having done them, but that's the structure of the job.

The latter is a job whose name comes from the practice of writing "journals", and has little, if anything to do with reporting. Journalists do not "cover stories", they write about things that are happening, informed by the work of reporters, but also other folk: researchers, essayists (an even less-connected-to-the-story form or journalism), lobbyists, politicians, and yes, their neighbors. They've been around for at least 350 years in European-linked cultures, and probably a lot longer than that if you take a broader view.

Computer programmers too. My irony meter went off scale when this article hit HN.

"You tell me where a man gits his corn pone, and I'll tell you what his 'pinions is" -- Mark Twain

Computer programming is a high status, low wage job? I'm not sure about the "high status" part, and I'm even less sure about the "low wage" part. It pays pretty well, even if you're not at a FAANG.

It's somewhat the opposite in fact (not exactly low status, but not on the forefront of a cool job either). It's the wordcel vs shape rotater meme/discourse.

What is that meme about?

https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wordcels-numbercels-defi...

tl;dr think NY Times writer vs nerd programmer

It's def a low-mid status but high paying job. Nobody cares, they just say "wow you must be smart" and that's it.

Not just journalists, but politicians, priests, etc

Yes: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/11/19/have-journalists-and-acad.... Journalists, and academics in the humanities, have become more cleric-like.

Economists are even more priestlike than humanities professors.

I still remember the gamergate... The secret discussions and the amazing width of pushing the same narrative by publishing same story on multiple platforms... Still probably going on in many cliques...

What is the source for the claim that so many American journalists under 40 live in the area encircled in the map in the tweet? The source for wages in journalism having gone to hell? The source for unions restricting the supply of labor? If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages?

I also think the author's characterization job status is wrong. Journalists mostly hang out with journalists so whether journalist is a high-status job or not is irrelevant since they are all journalists. Working for Google has high status in some circles but probably not among Google's own employees. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of all journalists write for the Washington Post or other recognizable papers. Not a lot of status in writing for marketing agencies or obscure trade press magazines.

> If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages?

They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws restricting supply some legitimacy.

Unions work best when (among other factors) everyone has a feeling that they are not better than the others and can substitute for each others. Writing fails this in general because writers want to have their own voice. You want everyone to know it was you writing, and a guest writer will have a different voice and different ideas. Note that in corporate writing the above doesn't apply and so unions are more likely to have a place (but corporate writing is mostly by marketing and probably better paid and so the union doesn't really have as much to do and so there is less reason to pay those dues)

>They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws restricting supply some legitimacy.

I think the bigger hurdle is that the people they'd need to convince, politicians, are by nature of their profession, very well versed in public messaging and "journalist adjacent" skills and deal with journalists on the regular and therefore very likely to say "lolno" to any request for a moat of regulatory capture.

Plumbers and electricians would never have been able to get the regulatory capture they have if the people they needed sign off from had been equally well versed in their skills and exposed to dealing with them.

Did you know the sector with the sharpest rise in union membership last year was media?

"Among the industries with a growing share of union membership is journalism, where 33 workplaces voted last year to organize with labor unions, according to Poynter, the media industry news outlet. In 2021, employees at Politico, Forbes, The Atlantic and Insider all joined NewsGuild, while journalists at MSNBC voted to organize with the Writers Guild of America East."

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/590631-union-member...

When your skills are replaceable you have very little leverage. Journalist are certainly a field where these days you can be easily replaced even by possibly unpaid intern. Only if you have build a name and grinded it out you have some leverage. Thus union is little help if you could just fire your entire staff and pay a few editors to hire new people.

I understand the sentiment of your post.

Zero trolling: For a very high quality pool of journalists and writers at The New Yorker, do you think that also applies?

I hold the opinion that certain media outlets have out-sized caché (attraction) in their country's culture and are able to "punch about their weight" and draw incredible talent for the wages. It is almost like an inverted veblen good! Examples that come to mind: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Nikkei Shimbun, Der Speigel, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Re-reading that list before clicking 'reply', I wonder if all of them have strong employee unions. It seems possible.

EDIT: What about public radio and television in highly advanced democracies? It is a pretty similar situation. High quality staff, peanuts for wages, but they don't have commercial pressures. US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan all have outstanding, neutral public broadcasters. (Queue the 1000x naysayers that will say "Oh, it's never been worse -- see recent scandal XYZ".) Is the answer: Gov't funded (taxes) public broadcasters that cover news that struggles to make money in the private sector? Maybe.

ITYM "cachet" not "caché".

> Journalist are certainly a field where these days you can be easily replaced even by possibly unpaid intern

Only if you're a median journalist. If you're a top 1% caliber journalist you're not replaceable. It's much like software engineering, social media influencers, and Hollywood in that regard. 10x skill gap between median and top and heavily bimodal comp model as a result.

A few items that popped up from quick searching:

* On journalist wages - https://ajr.org/2014/05/05/reporter-pay-falls-u-s-average-wa... - wages are not growing and the employment pool is shrinking. A comparison with BLS data shows a similarly slow wage growth pattern.

* Unions, in some circumstances, can restrict labor supply. This is called exclusive unionism and historically it's been used for everything from keeping racial minorities out to keeping the secrets of bagel-making under wraps. Here's the latter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel_Bakers_Local_338

The picture is a bit unclear, with the data we have available.

For example, the NYT is paying journalists more than they ever have, historically (this is why so many big names are working for them in the last few years). They also are employing more people as journalists than they have historically.

It appears that we're going through two trends in news.

One is centralization at the news aggregation level (i.e. newspapers, whatever), which benefits the journalists who ride that centralization and harms the journalists who find themselves outside.

The other trend is decentralization at the news production level (individual journalists), which benefits the small number of journalists who can capitalize upon a platform for themselves as individuals online and "harms" (scare quotes because it's hard to quantify) the companies who cannot collect rent on their talent, and consumers who depend on companies for news aggregation.

There are a lot of people in this second category who would not classify themselves as "journalists", but are still "producing news". Their income is difficult to measure, since they are usually not W-2 employees, and may not identify as journalists.

Together, these trends may actually increase the size of the pool of people who can plausibly be called "journalist"s, and increase wages along with it. But it's a much more difficult universe to measure and segment, so the data might not agree with reality for a while.

I can believe journalist wages are not growing though your source in eight years old.

The thing about bagel recipes seem to be about trade secrets not labor supply restrictions. How to make bagels is not a secret. I checked the sources the Wikipedia article cites and none of them mentions anything about secret recipes.

At the time, how to make bagels was not widely available information. The union tightly controlled their trade secrets and shut down any shop that didn't work with them. Membership was limited to family members of early members. Sounds like controlling the labor supply to me, though I understand that this is an opinion and others may disagree. All of this is material you can find fairly readily documented.

Should that prove insufficient, I refer you to a 1913 essay by Booker T Washington: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1913/06/the-neg...

Choice quotes include:

> One does not have to go far to discover the reason for this. In several instances Negroes are expressly excluded from membership in the unions. In other cases individual Negroes have been refused admittance to unions where no such restrictions existed, and have been in consequence shut out from employment at their trades.

The essay details several specific instances.

My point is not that unions are inherently exclusionary. My point is that they can be and occasionally have been put to that use, effectively limiting labor supply. Much like pre-unionism guilds often were.

I don't know the history of bagel baking. Though it seems odd to me that bagel bakers would be allowed to keep bagel recipes away from bakeries they work at. My suspicion is that the group we're discussing did not act as a labor union at all, but rather as a trade association trying to control the bagel market on behalf of bakery owners.

As a general rule, if someone is complaining about "the left", they aren't a person who actually cares about accurate statistics. In the dopamine economy, it's all about coming up with seemingly witty hot takes that reaffirm the world view of a group of people who take pride in their lack of critical thinking.

The right as well.

My observation is that generally only people who complain about neither or both tend to care about statistics.

You are correct that rage addicts exist all across the political spectrum, though I don't think "the right" is nearly as much of a trigger phrase as "the left". There are plenty of other phrases used by left leaning rage mongers, but "the left" has for years been curated to trigger strong negative emotions towards half of the US population. People who use that phrase know exactly what they're doing, or are at least parroting someone who does. People who intentionally use negative trigger phrases to gain traction are not typically people whose opinions are worth spending much energy on.

>I don't think "the right" is nearly as much of a trigger phrase as "the left".

I dunno, "the left" has their own terms to incite rage: far-right, white supremest (rarely any evidence), racist (same), right-winger, evangelicals, Nazi, deplorable, redneck, etc.

"The right" uses terms: liberal, socialist, communist, SJW, etc.

If you are strictly speaking in terms of which is more insightful and limit it to "the left" or "the right," I guess it depends on which circle you are closer to. I can see the argument for "the left" as being more insightful, but that might just be because of the circle I'm currently closer to.

I try to use terms such as those as a red flag. Anyone who tries to make a generalization for a spectrum as broad as "the left," or "the right," is trying to sell me something. I try to stick to policy, everything else is usually just theatre to distract from policy.

Somewhat related, Hillary Clinton was talking with BLM members about how to change things in 2015. She caught a lot of flack about it, but she was absolutely right when she said, "I don't believe you change hearts. You change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate." That's why I tend to stick to policy. Full disclosure, I don't particularly care for the Clintons.

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/19/9174077/hillary-clinton-black-...

Are you saying that nobody on the left (okay, sorry, the "not-right") ever uses negative trigger words in reference to their political rivals?

Are you aware that from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the word "liberal" was worthy of enough derision that people would openly cringe at the term? Republicans were fantastically successful at two things politically: tying the support of social programs to the Red Scare and gathering support of trickle down economics by opposing desegregation efforts.

The irony is that going corporate and writing marketing copy will earn you way more money than journalism ever will.

There's probably something to this analysis, but to go from "jobs that depend on cultural as opposed to financial capital can lead to overly homogeneous groups with strong and at times bizarre in-crowd behaviors" to the idea that a majority or at least a very large group of writers and journalists are "a hilariously homogeneous monolith of progressive cosplay, often producing little in the way of insight or information, surviving emotionally off the status returns of living in a bubble of mutual-affirmation and shared anxiety", well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd.

> well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd.

Fully agreed. Markets exist to convert the various forms of capital.

For example, you participate in the labor market, where you convert your education and know-how into liquidity.

Cultural capital is already exchange for financial capital: art is sold, and people pay to visit prestigious museums.

What's missing here is a market where social capital can easily be converted into financial capital, at low cost and with as little friction as possible: the elusive "micropayments".

Remember the old idea of "commoditizing your complement": for web2.0 (social media), tech companies have commoditized the participation that create their core value. They benefited tremendously through network effects, sending these profits mostly towards the shareholders, with a few crumbs sent to the tech workers (I know a lot of people think developers are "highly" paid because they get paid low 6 digits wages, but in a company with over $1M in ARR per capita, I politely disagree)

I believe NFT/cryptos/etc. will pave the way for inverting this commoditization: well known authors/influencers will want to commoditize the tech companies, who'll have to respond by offering deals.

We are starting to see that: look on the gaming forums where people say they use Bing... because it pays for their free gamepass every month!!! Bing is good enough for what they do, so people react to the incentive and switch!

If you have the choice between, say instagram and tiktok, and it's essentially the same thing for you, you may decide to share content on instagram if they can compensate you in a way that's meaningful to you. It may be hard for them to give you cash, but it could be easier to give you something else that's essentially the same to you, or that can be traded for cash.

Yes, I think the author got stuck in the mire. I took the point: The current situation is making a group of people incentivized to fall in-line with the “established truth”. Things like groupthink, authoritarianism, tyranny, and fascism thrive on such insularity.

I've heard an opinion from people on Team Right that "it's just our bad luck that we got stuck with the antivaxxers and Capitol stormers this time around, this could just as easily have come from the other team".

That's how I read this article's conclusion, and then the rest kind of works backwards from that conclusion:

> It’d all be pretty innocuous if I didn’t worry that today’s progressive writer’s commune is also a breeding ground for tomorrows purveyors of reactionary fearmongering and misinformation.

My own worry about the drying-up of print display ads and the end of classifieds, which led to the demise of the steady union career at the midmarket metro daily, and everything that happened afterward, is different. I worry not that people are reporting the wrong thing, but that there are too few people doing the job to even have a "right" or "wrong" set of journalists to read on a topic. In a US metro area of under 500k people there may not be any reporter who is going to open-to-the-public committee meetings and small-scale corruption can basically happen in public. This doesn't seem healthy for democracy.

> "it's just our bad luck that we got stuck with the antivaxxers and Capitol stormers this time around, this could just as easily have come from the other team".

The bulk of the "right" has been anti-intellectual for a long time - there are some sensible and nuanced points of view coming from that side of the political spectrum, but they've always seemed to be in the minority. You do also see a lot of anti-intellectualism on the left these days, especially with the new "woke" craziness, but that's a much more recent phenomenon and we have yet to see a proper reaction to it.

You do understand, you just called out the "Right" (one of the 'two' affiliations) as .. "anti-intellectual for a long time"

I also wish everyone told me their favorite color was the one I like.. Since we only have two colors in the world! It has just turned into such a reductionist petty immeasurably false set of talking points. We need to stop this, we need it to stop immediately!

And that's a midmarket city. You can imagine what reporting in most 10K to 20K towns looks like.

"can lead to" is the sort of statement that is only slightly more modest than "will lead to", in practice. Like, it could also be that it can lead to both heterogeneity and homogeneity, depending on other factors (or even chance). If the author believes the one, the author should put a probability on that outcome, rather than just assume the worst.

It also misses the other rather obvious factor: newspapers have owners, editors and readers. Owners often are very open about their agenda, editors have owners to please, historic reputations to uphold and their own politics (which is often a bit more firmly established than a twentysomething first jobber's) and the subset of the population that actually pays for newspapers has their own opinion of the sort of content it wants to read.

Most of the stereotypes about bubbles of young underpaid, overeducated middle class status-chasers living in the capital and associating mostly with other young people, journalists and politicos/intellectuals could be applied to the UK, but our mainstream print media leans right (with a couple of very outspoken exceptions, whose journalists live in the same bubble!), as you might expect from the personal politics of their owners, and newspapers are bought in much greater numbers by older, more right wing people

Academia risks becoming another such field. Professorial salaries are not commensurate with the educational years, as there is little demand for published research in journals. As a result, journals demand payment from the writers themselves.

While certainly not every doctoral candidate hails from a wealthy family, there is a pursuit of status that does lead to similarly homogeneous views.

Paying for journals to publish your papers is a thing academia did to itself. Publish or perish, demanding papers in a few cherry-picked journals to continue your career, and basically funneling grant money into journals hands is something that can only be changed from within academia.

Somewhat comparable to F/OSS, except without the grants.

How is that similar to foss?

Ah yes just like every open source project must pay a grand to github to host their code. /s

What are you even talking about?

I don't have to pay anything to publish code I wrote. Peer review only happens in Linux distributions.

A lot of industries make sense in the context of their time, I'm sure having a few papers with esteem and influence as primary status indicators made a lot sense back in the day.

There's just some things that are stuck in rigid unchanging organizations/industries. Anything heavily government reliant or bureaucratic, which universities are probably the best example of, is going to be extremely slow at adapting to the world.

Just like how lawyers still use fax machines.

It's extremely hard to be different and make change/stand-out in those organizations. Which also relates back to the articles point about cultural insularity.

This could be a reversion to the mean. Historically the arts, science and philosophy were mostly hobbies of the wealthy - either doing the work itself or sponsoring it. Not really a "money-making" activity but a hobby or clout-chasing activity.

this is the answer, STEM could easily fund itself in a free market. The same can't be said of the many other college degrees that are now funded mainly by student loans. Government created a distorted market that ruined many people's lives by trapping them with debt for a degree that provided no real world value

STEM covers a lot of ground. Undergraduate biology and mathematics degrees probably don't confer any great employment advantage other than as a generic degree that demonstrates you have some facility with technical stuff--which isn't necessarily that much better than an English-adjacent degree depending upon what you want to do.

Undergrad math degrees pay off pretty well. As a group math degrees are second after engineering degrees for highest median starting and lifetime salary for people with only an undergraduate education.

Relevant graphs on pages 12, 13, and 19. Math, statistics, and computer science are lumped in together on pages 12 and 13, but the graph on page 19 shows that the median salary for all three is very similar.

https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

That makes sense I guess. Even if you don't go on to do grad-level math or physics, it's a good foundation and preparation for a lot of other quantitative occupations. Whereas chemistry and biology have often been considered being "pre-med" majors to a non-trivial degree. They're less of a foundation at the undergraduate level for well-paying jobs.

>the median salary for all three is very similar.

Though note that this data is almost 10 years old. It wouldn't surprise if computers rose more than the average.

if you have a math degree you can do pretty much anything you want. Pure math as an academic probably isn't great pay but FAANG and hedge funds will pay massive money for people good at math who are willing to learn to code

I feel like the student loan issue wouldn't have been so bad if they were mandated to be used in state for public schools. You aren't going to be six figures underwater with an in state tuition bill of what like $14k before any aid or scholarship at UCLA. If you work full time in the summer you can put a huge dent in that too. Landing a favorable internship in a summer can actually net you ahead.

Big time. I remember hanging out with the AI team here in Toronto before deep learning took off. Then it took off and Microsoft just bought the research team out from under UoT's feet. It was a sky high payout.

Same thing for the government too. I'm civically minded, so I've taken a couple contracts here and there to help out the Government of Canada, but man is it a pay cut. But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?

Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly. But this is just padding extra waste and cost.

But this is what exponential tech is going to look like, at least until AI replaces us then who knows.

Here in the US, politicians, especially on the right, love to highlight and criticize public employees, especially if their salaries seem too large. But Federal employees salaries are not too large, barely competitive with the private sector. If you want government to work well, attract talent by paying them what they'd earn outside of it. But all that just comes from an ideological interest in shrinking government so they can drown it in a bathtub. If you make sure government doesn't work well, then you have an excuse for eliminating it.

I think the problem is the distribution. SOME government employees (at least in Canada) are seen as being paid too much because the pay is clustered really closely together and often don’t reflect market pay.

You get software engineers that get paid 70k a year but also janitors that get paid 70k a year with the same number of years in.

From what I've heard, another part of why the government struggles to get good IT workers is that the processes for getting anything done are Kafkaesque, even compared to large enterprise roles.

There are other things governments could do though.

Coming from a US perspective, the biggest one would be to pass some kind of law that employment contracts can't prevent you moonlighting for the government. I'd probably be willing to pick up some contract work to do on the cheap, but I can't because of my employment contract.

Another is that the government already has access to a lot of things I don't, and I'd be willing to trade my time for access to some of those things. Free flights on army cargo planes would be a great perk. I would totally do some work if they'd let me drive a tank for like 30 minutes and fire the cannon down the range a couple times. They probably have access to HPC clusters that would tempt some (I don't have the skills to have the interest, but I'm sure many do).

Government pensions are another option, although they'd have to require less than 40 hours a week of work to qualify. It might end up being more expensive than just paying more.

Tax breaks are another option. Someone would have to figure up the demand curve, but a 10% cut to my effective tax rate would be tempting depending on the amount of work required.

Free education would be another option if they could offer it for part time work.

I don't feel that the government has gotten particularly creative in trying to attract talent. The pay is bad, the job is a bureaucratic nightmare, and the perks kind of suck other than the pension.

The downside is that a lot of those are likely to piss off the rest of the government employees.

There is red tape, yes, but there are upsides to doing contract work for them too. The sheer scale of impact is daunting. Millions of people looking for work and you help them figure out the areas their recommender system needs improvement? That's tens of thousands of homes that now have employment where they wouldn't have. Just think of the cascading impact.

I don't know how to do it in the US, but in Canada you should be able to get these types of short-term gigs if you do a bit of networking in Ottawa and mention that you're a specialist in X, and that you want to help out here and there to give back. Wont take long. People want to bring in experts that will take occasional lower pay for impact.

Edit:

Also, the servers are BEEEEFY, haha. They might be cloud first these days, but when I was there it was still all on-premises and man alive are those machines huge.

I think the Public Service in Canada also suffers from extremely opaque hiring practices. Unless you're aware of what they're looking for in a resume or the PS style cover letter, you're just sending in your resume to the void. FSWEP is the unofficial actual hiring route. Then the average time for a lot of hiring outside of getting "bridged in" is 9 months or more. Most people find that absurd.

I do know some CCs and branches are trying to make changes but the PS in general is an absolute dinosaur for hiring and shows no signs of improving to match the bleed they'll have as people start retiring out.

> Then the average time for a lot of hiring outside of getting "bridged in" is 9 months or more

I recall someone I hired had also applied for a government job while completing his degree. They called him back a little more than a year after. Of course, his salary out of college was 4x what they were offering but can you imagine what candidate the government ends up with? The people who are still looking for a job in tech a whole year after graduation…

Yeah I don't know what it's like going in the front door. I just sounded smart at a lunch with someone that worked for the Prime Ministers Office. When they were having trouble with something I got a really random email haha.

It's also one reason most Senators are millionaires.

You wrote: <<to pass some kind of law that employment contracts can't prevent you moonlighting for the government>>

This is a brilliant idea. In some sense, the gov't is the biggest non-profit in any modern nation. Large corporations love it when you "moonlight" at a non-profit. Your are idea is not so far-fetched! I'm sure lots of techies would love to pitch-in and help to improve an online gov't service -- be it local, regional, or national.

> But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?

Pay your consulting firm 100x more than they would pay any one government employee, and not ask questions about how much of that goes to each consultant.

>Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?

Yes. Why not?

One is a job in a market, with no "external" validation to make up for the lack of pay. The other is one of the most elite legal jobs in the world.

> But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?

No need to look at a few prestigious positions. Aren’t doctors on government payroll over there? There’s already a precedent to paying some government employees market rates it seems.

> Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly. But this is just padding extra waste and cost.

It also changes the dynamic to fixed price bids where the government has to understand its own needs well enough to write such a bid. Probably the best case-study of that going extremely wrong is, ironically also Canadian, with the Phenix pay system. The government gave the contractor what they understood to be their payroll rules but it turns out they were not what was agreed to. The whole saga lasted almost a decade and cost billions.

> as there is little demand for published research in journals

Not sure what you mean by this - for advancement in academia this is 90% of what hiring or promotion committees demand.

> journals demand payment from the writers themselves

From the institution, not the authors.

> From the institution, not the authors.

Typically the authors pay the journal out of their own funding.

Well I'd call that institutional money. 'Writers have to pay' makes it sound like they're paying from their own personal cash.

Sometimes they do. Regardless, if it's often coming from funding that implies the authors have to have grants or come from institutions that are willing to pay, which disadvantages individuals without resources (they often have discounts for those without resources but in my personal experience the discount is absurdly small, like 15%, which is a lot for someone who just doesn't have external resources to publish under that model, if they're asking for 2k+ per paper).

Either way it creates a backward incentive structure, of pay to access.

Nowadays though the research is secondary to grant funding, so hiring and promotion committees don't even care about that.

I was on a promotion committee where someone had a large grant but was not publishing. This went on for years and the response from significant segments of the department every year was literally something like "they have a large grant, it's fine, of course they'll publish".

Publications are seen as a dime a dozen, and open access and issues about replicability and so forth have just added to the sense they're not worth much. The attitude is more along the lines of "if your ideas are really that important and high impact, it will convince the federal government to pay for them." It's very much the classic betting market idea, that true value is revealed only when money is on the line.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, just my experience, in the US. I personally think the current funding system creates distorted incentive and reward systems, and that the original idea of academics was to insulate from that a bit or at least provide an alternative to traditional for-profit models.

If something doesn't change I think this trend will only accelerate. Journals will maybe become seen as irrelevant, with grant or funding receipt being seen as the actually rigorous form of peer review. Everything will become a form of seeking VC funding, either from private or public funders. Again, whether that's the best model for funding anything in the US, private or public, profit or nonprofit, is a different issue.

There was an academic fellowship with something like a $40 application fee and it got like 1000 applicants so the fellowship was funded by the application fee! That is literally a circular prestige economy.

just as a data point to this. I worked for a PepsiCo, massive company. The position requires a PhD and you have to live in metro NYC, pay was only 80k.

So not just professors, but a lot of positions that "require" a PhD pay poverty wages when someone has given up any kind of earnings for 5-6 years developing skills getting a PhD.

There is a big problem with east coast jobs (mid-atlantic to NYC) from "older" companies that require tech experience and a PhD but do not want to pay accordingly because theyre stuck in an 80s mindset.

As a PhD you might aspire to better but a position in NYC on $80k is hardly "poverty wages".

For starters, there's this little thing called "commuting" you may have heard of. Ordinary people, without PhDs, do it plenty. The NYC Pepsi offices seem to be a medium-short walk from Christopher St. PATH; you would have no trouble living in Jersey City or Hoboken on the (computes) ~$2000/mo rent that would be 'affordable' at such pay. I bet you get tax-deductible transit benefits, too, and a monthly pass is around $100.

There are people in New York working full time jobs to make $15/hr, $30k a year. That's a lot more like the "poverty wages" you name.

80k a year minus student loan payments.

I couldn't imagine living in any HCOL city with less than 100k minimum. If others want to struggle, fine.

But logically why not live in Chicago off that 80k, and take a 20 minute L ride to work.

However, professors were historically from the gentry. It was always a position of status and privilege, especially before World War 2. It was only when the demand for higher education surged (largely by the GI bill but also by the computer revolution that created the white collar jobs today) that this changed.

Further, the amount of published research has also exploded as the supply of qualified applicants has surged. That said, I think eventually the journals problem will solve itself - people inside academia are trying to figure a way out already.

Not risks, has become.

Universities take a cut (30 - 50%) of grant money brought in by profs. The incentive structure for good science is broken.

Academia is a racket.

They also charge tuition that doesn't exist for grad students. Your classes year 1 or two in most stem phd programs are going to basically be the professors from the department giving research talks trying to get you to join their lab. Then they end and you are doing research or TAing for the department for the next 3-however many years. Only the thing is, the school still makes you sign up for tuition units, for a special class that only has grad students in it, and when you look at your bill you are charged full tution for this nonexistant class that just exists on paper. Your funding, whether it be the from your professor in an RAship or from the department in a TAship or an outside fund like the NSF, has to pay for this nonexistant classes tuition. You might be a line item of 90k a year on the grant budget, but you only see 35k from the nonexistent tuition. The rest just poofs into smoke into the inner workings of the school bureaucracy.

It's basically money laundering with extra steps, and there is no way out because literally every school does this and too many people on academia have Stockholm syndrome.

Grad students are so terribly underpaid in Academia. Salaries should go up 3x at least across the board for stipends. Grant funding agencies are spending millions of dollars on scientists who are only seeing salaries of at most $35k in the highest cost of living areas to do things like study cancer or climate change.

It's kind of an open secret, but usually grant aims are somewhat vague. It's up to the grad student saddled with those couple of aims for their thesis work to identify what exactly to do. To vet the literature for methods. To order equipment or reagents. To conduct the experiment or analysis. To write up and interperete the results. To outreach to collaborators and set up meetings. To draft up the results into a published paper. Sometimes grad students are even relied upon to pen the next grant. The big joke is by the time you are done with your PhD project, you know more about the topic than anyone in the department or your professor or your committee. I think that actually typically happens by third year. Professors are tied up with administerial duties, class, and several other projects they may be juggling, along with their personal lives. You are lucky if your professor has five hours a week to devote to your particular project.

It is so shameful that grad students are the backbone of modern research yet we pay them competitive salaries with In n Out. It's no surprise how grad students are so likely to have significant mental health issues considering the workload doled upon them for pittance pay that they have to figure out how to make work over years of other costs rising, while they are often without a raise.

Why should they increase? Please don't shoot the questioner, but is your thought that this would increase the quality of scientific output?

Yes, because people are depressed. People are committing suicide. People are opting to not go to grad school in the first place. Why put people through that pain when they don't have to be put through it if they were only paid more fairly for their responsibilities and the skills they bring to the table?

I'm not sure I would consider being a journalist a high status job anymore. Trust in the press, and the prestige that goes along with it, has been in a nose dive for years. It may just be my own bubble, but even the old guard publications are seen as having barely more integrity than the tabloids these days, and that goes for both sides of the political spectrum.

I suppose journalists may still believe that have high status, and that is the mechanism that really matters.

I think the article's points about 'status' apply more to 'status among your peers', yes.

Well it's no different now than it ever was. If you want free news, you could get that back in the day, there were these terrible free newspapers. If you wanted a real newspaper you had to pay. So can still get somewhat better news on the Wall Street Journal, but for a price.

> I suppose journalists may still believe that have high status

It's how that "high status" is quantified. A journalist might look at their twitter profile, see the blue checkmark, see their 50k followers, and see their inbox filled with the ire of those on the other side, and conclude they are "high status".

Problem becomes, what is "high status" for one person is just "wasting time on twitter" to another person.

50k followers is elite tier, I can show you NYT journo bluechecks in the low four figures, who regularly get dragged by anonymous accounts with robot avatars.

The difference between being high status and wasting time on twitter gets, extraordinarily, blurry.

It has been in a nose dive for "everyday" people. But there is a whole section of society where they are treated as minor celebrities. The number of those people are shrinking (thankfully) but they are sizable enough for some journalists to break out and make bank through their substacks e.g. Bari Weiss is bringing in 800,000K a year via substack.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-times-walkout-wei...

I don't think she is particularly interesting but a lot of people do.

Bari Weiss falls into the category "homogeneity creates rewards to heresy" in the article.

Bari Weiss is heretical to mainstream journalism because she has pushed back against CRT, mask mandates, etc.

Because she's a sane-sounding lefty that is voicing some concerns that the left-wing media is afraid to touch, she has found a great market for her content, just as the article says.

Maybe. I get your point. I saw the clip of her on Bill Marr's show that has been floating around. She has pushed back when it was safe to do so. The tide was already turning on that.

I think that's a large part of the point though. The author is claiming that journalists take the job because they believe it is high status. When others disagree the journalists move near each other so that they can circle jerk over their status without the pesky normal people who disregard them.

I thought about teaching as a career. I'm passionate about science and math, I'm great with kids, I'm a decent teacher...but the stress was insanely high for the compensation and benefits. I was doing entry-level assistant work at age 22-25 to see if I liked teaching, getting paid $20k a year with no benefits to mostly deal with the 10% who are crazy bad kids every day...not worth it.

One example, I had an 8th grader jump on a desk and scream "I LOVE TACOS" repeatedly. I told him to get down and be quiet, we're trying to learn about robotics. He then called me a racist (because I'm white and I don't love tacos? I do though). I talked to him after class, turns out his family life was in chaos and he needed help at home.

I would absolutely love to be a teacher but the compensation and horror stories about the administration and parents is very disheartening.

This doesn't cohere into an argument, its like a loose pile of grievances and suppositions about...who, exactly?

For easier scanning I've extracted this author's ideas as to what constitutes "heresy":

- Accusations of politicians and celebrities

- Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let your kids leave the house

- Election conspiracy theories

- A new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid

- Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out

Do these things sound at all similar to each other, like they would be produced by a homogenous group of people? Does it sound reasonable that these things are produced by low-paid writers in Brooklyn due to the financial pressures of middle age? As far as I can tell, the progressive unionized sports writers of Brooklyn have been more vocal than anybody against the public relations arm of the NFL, to take one example.

I wonder if the unidentified group of people this guy has a problem with - who do the "progressive cosplay" and produce "little in the way of insight or information" - are even that low paid. Journalism on the whole doesn't pay well, but some national outlets in NYC really do! Unfortunately, this article has no insight or information on the topic.

As someone with small children, I found myself wondering whether the parents of these Brooklyn writers have actually done their children a service or disservice by funding a financially impossible career.

While there is something to be said for being able to follow one’s interests unconstrained by the need for money, it also seems like a hollow, grasping existence to chase status and popularity amongst a clique of likeminded fellows.

I suppose one could say something similar for a career spent chasing money, but at least money sometimes vaguely (vaguely!) approximates creating value for other people.

I knew a few folks like this. 20 something, out of college, entry level job in some field that doesn't pay them nearly enough for where they are living. And mom and dad are subsidizing the apartment and lifestyle.

When I talked to a few of them about the situation, my burning question was always "what is your plan". I think for many of those folks there was no plan, this was the plan, and your parents helping you out was just normal.

Personally it always bugged me. Like what is going to happen to all those people when the checks stop coming, when the credit card stops getting paid. Some of my less privileged friends hated that group for their privileged but I honestly just felt bad for them. I don't know when, but under this current system, at some point in the future, you are going to be royally screwed.

They just join the labour force like everyone else. They'll just be 41 doing the job that other people did at 21.

I have a friend whose family weren't wealthy but they tolerated him playing video games and bumming around not doing much else for 15 years after he finished uni. He eventually had to get a job. Sure, he's behind his peers in terms of salary/career advancement now but not by so much where I'm even sure he made a mistake by avoiding work for so long.

> Personally it always bugged me. Like what is going to happen to all those people when the checks stop coming, when the credit card stops getting paid. Some of my less privileged friends hated that group for their privileged but I honestly just felt bad for them. I don't know when, but under this current system, at some point in the future, you are going to be royally screwed.

They'll get a nice inheritance, like a $500k+ house. Then they can either sell and invest, or live there mortgage-free.

The checks really won't stop coming. But if you're not a complete moron, it would be hard to very quickly squander the wealth your parents built up. Some will, inevitably, but most will keep going. Some of them will get higher wages too.

But it's going to be a looong time before the "check stops coming".

They don't stay 25 forever. In the long run, they often settle down with another professional. Maybe one with a better salary and/or better benefits. Then they have less than two kids. Maybe just a couple cats.

The big question is what they do after the divorces that 30-40% of them will have. Maybe they get jobs in HR or PR?

> I’m willing to argue that the reach, imprint, pageviews, and followers; the eyeballs that your work generates, is the prinicipal source of status within the modern journalist community.

I would not argue that, not among peers. Like any profession I suspect writer's peers may be jealous of one another's page views but are still going to be ultimately judged by the quality of their work. And their peers will likely judge better than most what is thoughtful, thorough, researched writing and what is hackish.

> Status skews even less equally than income…

> Status can’t pay the rent…

> Twenty-two year-olds will often accept status in lieu of wages…

I guess I don't see the world through status-colored lenses or know anyone who does so the rest of the article and its points were built on a premise foreign to me.

The author also appears to misrepresent unions in my opinion, portraying them more as a "protectionist" mechanism for workers, a way to fend off other workers with lower skills. When corporations held (hold) all the cards a collective of workers was the only way the worker had any bargaining power.

Although I agree with the general sentiment of this article- journalists gravitates towards their career not for the job itself. I think he's making a pure speculation on the "journalists have rich parents" point.

I think it might be something much simpler, like "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low".

Of course, when the barrier to entry is low- and most candidates are indistinguishable- you hire your friends; which inevitably leads to homogenization.

There was a thread on Twitter a while ago pointing out a slew of journalists who frequently wrote articles attacking tech companies and specifically how each of them came from wealthy families. This idea that journalists are by and large people from well to do backgrounds is an idea that has been floating around for a couple years now.

Edit: Here is a tweet in that vein Balaji in particular had a lot of tweets on the journalists are often from wealth idea.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1256819545546735616

I love it when "critical" of tech companies is transformed into "attacking". The tech industry is now the biggest industry in the world, ranking billions in profits every year, having the power to influence elections, human rights violation, etc. Of course they should be criticized and not get a free pass. Too many years they were only reported as "startups" doing "good".

People were specifically upset with unfair negative articles it wasn’t about factual criticism.

The New York Times doxing a popular pseudo anonymous blogger for example Slat Star Codex, there were articles dragging people for making charitable donations just a lot of stuff that was more gossip and hit pieces injected with the journalist’s opinion and not news.

Also articles dragging tech for not being “diverse” when journalism has a much bigger lack of diversity problem.

https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-diver...

> there were articles dragging people for making charitable donations

You mean articles stating correctly that donations are not a sustainable way of financing and tech billionaires should instead pay higher taxes? Cause that's the articles I remember and that's not an unfair article. Just one you and others may not agree with.

Then why not write an article advocating a higher taxes policy? Taxing doesn’t magically make money multiply in fact a donation managed properly can endow a charitable organization indefinitely that is never the case with government taxation since taxes are always spent and never invested. Your argument makes no sense.

I don’t understand how reporters apparently don’t advocate for higher taxes. Wealth tax has been a radar on political reporting beat for ages. Elizabeth Warren campaigned on it and tons of ink was spilled analyzing on if it would work, how it would work, and headlines made over bill gates being “scared” of it or whatever.

Additionally, it can be true that one endowment to a charity can keep the charity perpetual while also criticizing that charity overall is not a sustainable model of good in society broadly. One of the things that come to mind is that a billionaire is unlikely to fund an anti-billionaire charity, for example a charity for renters rights and renter organization Eg. Rent strikes and the like.

What does advocating for that position have to do with dragging someone for donations to charities?

Also why are journalists advocating anything they should be reporting facts. Advocacy belongs in the opinion section.

Reporters are always advocating based on what they believe are facts from their backgrounds. That’s why media in America are always covering less wealthy countries as “war-torn x dealing with militant y” and never the same language to America. There was a hilarious thread in which a Kenyan reporter did headlines on America the same way America reported Kenya.

And it doesn’t have anything to do with the other. I don’t even know why it was brought up as an alternative.

>since taxes are always spent and never invested

Are not the road networks and other such infrastructure investments? What about the basic science research the government funds?

If every billionaire gave 50% of their net worth to the government, we would still have massive deficits.

It would be unfair if the article was demonizing, say, Jack Dorsey for not paying enough in taxes, unless Jack has gone out of his way to lobby to get his tax burden lowered. Otherwise, he is merely living within the rules of the system, and the article should be attacking the politicians who are responsible for our tax laws.

The New York Times wrote article about the blogger in the same exact way articles about people in journals have always been written. Just because the blogger is generally in tech does not mean the New York Times has to treat him in some complete different way then any other subject.

> The tech industry is now the biggest industry in the world

Is it though? I can’t find reliable sources (likely because “tech” isn’t specific enough), but some site says tech is 10.5% of US GDP. That’s not even close to being the biggest industry.

The problem is that alot of the "criticism" seems be around economic protectionism not actual criticism. They are critical that a tech company dare allow an a person from the unwashed masses to have as big of a megaphone for their speech as the gilded elites from an established journalistic outlet

Being critical of something immediately makes you into a “hater”. People have been trained to either be all in on something or to completely reject it. It’s really not allowed to be in the middle. “Pick a side”.

Do you happen to have a link to that twitter thread? I'm curious to read it.

It wasn’t just one but look at Balaji Sirinvasin’s timeline starting around summer 2020. He was a big proponent of the idea.

Yes, but how much is a "slew" relative to the entire roster of working journalists?

Is it attacking people like Elon Musk to point out that he wants others to not be able to benefit from the same sorts of government assistance his companies have benefited from or is it simply pointing out he isn't being consistent?

No I believe the specific thing that set people off was a hit piece against the female CEO of Away a relatively small company that sells luggage. They tried to cancel her because she tweeted something about how she though many media outlets had low standards of reporting and much of their content bordered on liable.

They then wrote negative articles about her saying she should have been using her time to talk about other issues like BLM or Gay rights. The whole premise was ridiculous as if tweets are a limited resource.

Here's a few from the UK, mainly on the Tech Side

https://issuu.com/futurepublishing/docs/tvb87.digital_janfeb...

"Media and Journalism are essentially hobbies for wealthy, young people"

> I think it might be something much simpler, like "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low".

I have read enough bad documentation to know there is a hot market for documentation writers. Now, if only english-adjacent degree holders knew about ... well, the documented stuff.

A lot of journalists and would-be journalists end up doing corporate stuff like tech writing, content marketing, PR, etc.

> "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low"

Y'know, maybe journalists should learn to code. Tim Apple said that learning to code is important.

The barrier is extremely low; now anyone with a wordpress can call themself a “journalist” and there isn’t anything anyone can do to stop them. They really don’t even need the English degree although sometimes it can be evident when they do not.

> you hire your friends; which inevitably leads to homogenization.

This is very common, in many industries. Maybe moreso, with journalism (I am not very familiar with that industry).

Also "you hire people that don't make you uncomfortable."

I strongly suspect that this also happens with software development. "Cultural outsiders" (like me), have a very hard time getting in the door. I am quite sure that one reason that many older folks don't get hired, is because CEO <= 30, and doesn't want people around, that make them even slightly uncomfortable. Since they're the boss; what they want, they get. In "classic" corporations, CEOs are generally in their 50s, or older, and don't feel particularly challenged by older folks. They have to hire younger folks; even if it makes them uncomfortable.

I've learned the value of a "heterodyne" workplace. There is definitely friction, caused by clashing cultures, but the product is often wonderful.

>This is very common, in many industries. Maybe moreso, with journalism (I am not very familiar with that industry).

I am somewhat familiar being on the board of a student newspaper. And it's extremely true in journalism. The students who went on to being journalists (or editors etc.) all did it through connections. You probably don't get a job on something like the editorial page of the WSJ by sending your resume around.

Shrugs.

Hasn't this always been the case? Some rich kids do drugs, some rich kids tweet. So, what?

They are little puppets in a larger game. If you think these rich kids make any of the decisions that give rise to braindead quibbling over who can use which bathroom or what pronoun ought to be used for years on end - you are wrong.

These are just distractions. The question to ask is, who is paying for these distraction generators and why?

You can't get status from just living in New York and tweeting. You need to be part of an organization, that many people are funding, protecting and enabling.

If you ignore it, it makes their entire effort futile. It is easy to do too - just find something that actually interests you instead. Don't fall for their cheap tricks and help your fellow friends/family do the same and it'll magically resolve itself, sooner than you think :)

Uh, ad revenues?

As far as I can tell, the NYT and Facebook have the same ‘share content, sell ads’ business model.

The nice thing about one line answers to complex questions is how simple and short they are.

The not so nice thing is how wrong they are.

Is it true that a large amount of the journalists in the US live in Brooklyn? That doesn’t match my understanding, even at the “everyone knows …” level. When I think of the pundits, the Washington DC area comes to mind.

The journalists with access to political power are in D.C. The cultural and business journalists are in New York and the entertainment "journalists" are in Hollywood. All speaking in the main, of course.

I moved to NYC from Chicago, no cow-town, and there was a massive increase in the number of cultural journalists and writers I meet.

This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of those as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm alone here. I thought he was going to focus on roles like non-tenured professorships and post-docs, mid level non-profit jobs, and the clergy.

Oh there's clearly status to being a published author--at least in many circles. And I would say also an NYT or WSJ journalist.

There is status to being a published author people have heard of or with some acclaim. Not really outside of it. Poets with published chapbooks, or novelists published indie, or even mid-list authors don’t really have much status. Also if you write romance, forget about ever getting respect from anyone, even other authors.

> This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of those as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm alone here.

You and I don't think of them as high status. However there is a proportion of people that do pay attention to writers, these maybe TV, films, media, politicians that are all within the "Cathedral". You see this a lot of Twitter. Politicians pay a lot of attention to Twitter and tbh I doubt many normal people ever pay attention to what people see on twitter.

Those writing jobs are seen as high status because you can be influencing on "important" things. If you ever watch clips of corporate news talking point shows they end up inviting a lot of the same people on. Many of these are writers for smaller publications that are safe enough i.e. inside the Overton window to present "balance" or be presented as "experts". Simply being on TV for a few minutes is seen as a big deal (especially to older people 50+).

>If you ever watch clips of corporate news talking point shows they end up inviting a lot of the same people on.

Both individual reporters and TV show producers develop a go to list of people who at least seem to know what they're talking about, usually don't have too much of an axe to grind, are presentable in the case of TV, etc. And, yes, to a lot of people they can't really imagine being invited on a TV show so someone who is "must be a real expert" which often isn't the case.

The author of the piece seems to be taking the tweet about half the journalists under 40 living in that area pretty literally.

I don't know if the author of the tweet intended it that way (and if he was speaking figuratively I wouldn't fault him, it's just a tweet), but I don't quite buy that anyone could really estimate the number of journalists in an area drawn by someone else by eyeballing a map on Twitter. I also don't quite buy that half of the journalists under 40 live in a specific part of New York City, when Washington DC, Los Angeles and (for nerds) San Francisco also have their own share of that population.

A complicating factor that I hear from some of the disillusioned journos is that journalism works best when it's blue collar. Seeking status, and the kind of compromises made to maintain status contribute to the fact journalism is in the dumps. It's not my opinion, but it's an interesting one.

Maybe the bottom needs to fall out for a few years for journos to get their act together. But signs point to that's exactly what's happening and all we got was a bunch of bitter and vindictive twitter addicts trying to hold onto what little glory they had.

We have nothing to talk about. When you have two options you have an illusion of choice. It is a duopoly in the corporate world. A 'competition' they love and enrich each other with.

Just look at the way they have change labels on all sides. 'Far' right, 'Progressive', 'conservative', not worth a word more. It gives the two 'parties' more worth in the purpose their words have than trying to understand the inflections a dog makes as a complete sentence.

Yes, ideas have meaning and somethings politicians say actually represent them. Apart from that nearly worthless sentance.. I can't tell you the last time I voted for someone and had a realistic means to contact them about some issue.

The last time I contacted my senator was while I paid international call rates and when I asked for a reply on the issue the representative actually laughed at me and said no. We can't do that and this phone call has gone on three minuets longer than the average. I have many other people waiting sir! So what is the point? They literally can't pay staff to reply to my question. What is the senator view on issue X?

Worthless elected leaders.

This article is extremely on pointe with respect to insight... But missed the mark to the Northeast by a few hundred miles.

Replace "New York" with "DC" and "writer/conspirist" with "legislative aid/lobbyist" and you begin to comprehend the true scale of this horror. Reporters are relatively insignificant by comparison.

> You want to get paid: move to cheap suburb of a medium sized city and start writing heresy, the more inflammatory the better. Accusations of politicians and celebrities. Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let your kids leave the house. Election conspiracy theories and a new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid. Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out. Anything that someone is willing to pay you to write because nobody else will write it for free.

This escalated quickly. I somehow expected a more nuanced take at the end than this rushed version paradoxically reinforcing a superficial stance critiqued before.

Well, the overall point comes across and is an interesting take but fails to be substantial i.e. backed by some more convincing data instead of an initial gossip over the gossip.

If you are going to pay for something, you want to pay for it in money if at all possible. Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion fee. When you pay journalists in attention instead of cash. When you pay politicians in power instead of cash.

I think that in the case of journalism the problem is the hardest. I disagree with the author that the problem can just be solved by people doing local journalism. That pays less in both money and attention. The bottom line is that good journalism is a public good in an extremely strong sense, and is very unlikely to be provided by the market. But obviously the government employing an army of journalists is not any kind of solution either. Whereas we could much more easily implement congestion pricing, or pay politicians more money.

Let people crowdfund good-quality journalism/blogging/policy work. Patreon and GoFundMe are good first starts at the problem, but of course their political bias is highly problematic. If anything, it is all the more urgent to fund high-quality work on the other side of the political spectrum - surely they deserve way better than their current focus on Trumpism and anti-vaxx protests!

>Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion fee.

On the other hand, it's a lot easier for a bureaucrat to siphon off a congestion fee to fill his own pockets or his friends' pockets, than it is to fill his pockets with "willingness to sit in traffic".

> And why do I get the sense that I can summarize at least half of them as White children of the upper-middle class

Did the author learn nothing from the recent Whoopi Goldberg incident? They don't want to be identified as white anymore, because they don't want lose status or oppression points.

I really like my low status high wage job!

Journalists get caught in a local maximum: the more they move toward proclaiming loudly and fervently the most common narrative, the more success they have locally in the graph. But to achieve big success requires big risks outside the local curve exploring uncommon narratives. This may require a short-term loss of income/eyeballs that the professional journalist can't afford.

The bigger problem occurs when the high perceived status/low wage folks decide they deserve a lot more than they have and foment revolution. Academics and those steeped in academia are more likely to lead this, but then the journalists quickly follow and amplify. Also applies to people getting degrees from universities then being unable to get a job much better than barista.

> Also applies to people getting degrees from universities then being unable to get a job much better than barista.

This is a real problem for an entire generation. If those in power don’t wise up and listen they’re inviting “revolution”. I fundamentally don’t understand why the wealthy ruling class is unable to grasp that their long-term welfare is entirely dependent on the welfare of the working middle class. Unemployed and underemployed middle class people are a leading indicator that the system that props up wealth in America is buckling. Somethings gotta give. And yet our leaders ignore it.

I doubt that revolution this time will come from journalist or academic class. It seems they are currently against the working class which is important power behind such event. Just see how positive the messaging about protests by those are...

My God, I wish I had read an article like this when I was 22. I started out in one of these high-status low-wages - HUGE mistake. I intuited some of the things the author is saying here, but it took many wasted years for me to be able to articulate these thoughts in my own mind and change course.

Very impressive article that clearly explains the issue.

On the flip side, are there dangers of "low status, high-wage" jobs?

E.g. certain blue-collar jobs can pay as high as any white-collar jobs.

Another example would be programmers can be seen as a low-status, high-wage job. They are paid a lot and trusted to do their job, but the main high-level decisions are still made at higher levels above the programers.

The only problem I see there is a missing market, or as explained in the article, "2. Status can’t pay the rent". But I disagree with the premise that you need a direct intermediary.

Sooner or later, I think companies like twitter or reddit will want to "lock in with golden handcuffs" their most valuable writers, those who result in precious ad money eyeballs.

Otherwise, these writers may go to those who'll pay them. Some may decry that, but I think it will incentivize both to behave.

If you need fresh examples, I find Rogan tone regarding the whole Spotify thing very telling: he's as nice to them as someone who's received a $100M cheque :)

And on the other side, how Spotify handled that despite the various pressures exerted, is also very telling: they're as nice to him as any pro-sports manager would be to a highly paid star player, who in the course of the contract is expected to generate way more revenue for the team that what they pay him (or... they would not pay him that much in the first place!)

Both parties benefit tremendously from the deal, which gives a strong incentive for everyone to behave.

The author has noticed part of the trend in journalism: the "extreme upper who’s public standing achieved escape velocity, allowing them to go independent via Substack and earn vastly higher incomes".

The only reason it's currently limited to the upper tail is due to frictions and transaction costs / legal issues etc. making it easier to pay $100M to 1 person vs $1 to 100M people. However, that's not set in stone.

With the financial upheaval that crypto will unleash onto the world, I believe that status WILL end up paying the rent: reddit could certainly spin some coin to pay the people they value. Writers will moonlight under a nom-de-plume, until it starts paying more than their daily job. If it's not reddit, then some other company will.

I'm not certain why crypto is hugely important here. Can reddit not just ask people to link a paypal/some other banal payment provider if they would like to pay content creators?

I see two huge reasons: 1. friction and legal issues when it comes to money being send to people 2. lack of a second market for current reddit badges etc.

Now if said badges were say NFTs and could be traded for something else easily, I would agree with you.

Isn’t reddit already doing this with NFTs and a secondary market? And I think it’s not working out so great.

Edit: I can’t for the life of me find the link but I swear there was an article posted to HN in the last week or so about Reddit giving mods an exclusive NFT or token of some sort that the mods were then selling for significant sums.

> Edit: I can’t for the life of me find the link but I swear there was an article posted to HN in the last week or so about Reddit giving mods an exclusive NFT or token of some sort that the mods were then selling for significant sums.

IDK, but it's bound to happen eventually, one way or the other!

I think we're in the very early stages for something that will change the power dynamics in social media

> legal issues when it comes to money being send to people

how is the mode of sending money the problem here?

The mode is a problem when sending fractions of cents (the elusive micropayments), but the core problem is sending money in the first place.

Giving people that's not money comes with fewer administrative burden - and even less if it's digital.

Crypto is important because those invested in crypto have to keep growing the market to find new people to buy they stuff they own.

This is exactly what YouTube does already. In fact I see no reason why Twitter couldn't spill ad money to the content (tweet) creators within the next year or two, creating a similar ecosystem. Maybe the value attributable to individual creators would be too small? Videos are quite a bit bigger than tweets (in terms of what matters most, the eyeball time), after all.

Why would crypto be the missing piece to micro-monetization? You had me till that paragraph but there's no reason Reddit can't pay contributors in cents per thousand likes if currency is really the bottleneck. If it can be properly valued, it can already be properly paid.

> Why would crypto be the missing piece to micro-monetization?

Accounting fees, laws regarding employment, the "tiny problem" of child labor...

Something I've found very interesting on reddit gaming subs is how a lot of gamers easily admit they use Bing simply because it gets them a free gamepass every month.

Could Microsoft give them an equivalent amount of money? Maybe, but the costs in red tape alone would eat a lot of what they'd get.

A gamepass paid by Microsoft rewards points achieve the same thing, without having to consider the legality of say whether compensating someone below 18 to use a search engine could constitute child labor.

Microsoft has tried to shove Bing down people throats using various strategies, but this one works! I see it as one early type of micro-monetization, and crypto as what will enable that for most companies who can't mint xbox gamepass :)

> Accounting fees, laws regarding employment, the "tiny problem" of child labor...

And you think that crypto has no fees, that it can't be taxed, and that children can't get it?

> And you think that crypto has no fees, that it can't be taxed, and that children can't get it?

I think that companies rolling their own (or adopting low fee ones) can mitigate all this - along with making these problems other people problems (capital gains -> you, KYC -> exchanges!)

Oh, and BTW:

> that it can't be taxed

It's interesting you're shoving these words in my mouth :)

I guess it goes with the usual irrational crypto hate that often flies here... but FWIW, I think reddit may be more concerned with the legal implications of paying cash (W9, and OMG the paperwork, accounting etc.)

Imagine how much worse it would be for reddit at scale (friction!)

About taxes, for a coin, it's up to the individual to declare what they did with that they received, or the parents of said individual :)

Then no need to bother with age checks or expose yourself to potentially thorny contractual or PR issues (ex: parents monetizing their kids' videos on youtube)

Your hate for all things crypto may prevent you from noticing the huge opportunities that await given the various problems it solves, and which may be all that's needed to create the missing market here.

> I guess it goes with the usual irrational crypto hate that often flies here... but FWIW, I think reddit may be more concerned with the legal implications of paying cash (W9, and OMG the paperwork, accounting etc.)

"irrational crypto hate" says the guy who doesn't think that there are any tax forms involved at all when paying people for work in-kind using volatile securities.

Well, double down on tax stuff all you want, I replied fairly to your biased views.

Your answer makes me think you're missing the forest for the trees if you still refuse to see the reduction in paperwork and the gains from automating/internalizing some stuff that most companies can't do (Microsoft can mint gamepass, what about you?)

Crypto doesn't enable that. Blockchain is nothing but a very expensive way to maintain a shared spreadsheet. There is nothing crypto can do that a regular-ass database can't do faster, cheaper, and more reliably.

> Crypto doesn't enable that.

Actually, it does, by solving an entire class of coordination problems!

> Blockchain is nothing but a very expensive way to maintain a shared spreadsheet. There is nothing crypto can do that a regular-ass database can't do faster, cheaper, and more reliably

Sure, if you accept the "small" constraints of requiring centralization or mutual trust, which usually requires paperwork and lots of procedures... which was the point of my comment.

You don't like crypto so it must be pointless or a mass delusion, and everyone is wrong but the HN is right?

Sure, just like how the iPod was called lame or how dropbox was nothing that anyone couldn't do with just a little bit of SFTP :)

>solving an entire class of coordination problems

Coordination problems that you wouldn't have if you just decided to not use crypto.

Proof of work helps resolve byzantine faults, big whoop. Know what else solves byzantine faults? Trusting an authority, which Reddit would be anyway in your hypothetical UpvoteCoin.

Also, the problems aren't "solved" in any new way. The crypto "solution" to the byzantine solution is the same as the classical one: assign an authority to set the ground truth. The only thing that's different is that instead of picking a single authority, the authority is randomly assigned via lottery with a ticket price in kilowatt-hours.

> Sure, if you accept the "small" constraints of requiring centralization or mutual trust, which usually requires paperwork and lots of procedures

Mutual trust does not require paperwork and procedure. Trust is absolutely trivial. You have, throughout this conversation, trusted that Hackernews will record your comments and render them faithfully to everyone else in this thread, without even thinking about it. What did that cost you? What paperwork did you have to sign? What taxes did you have to pay?

Trust is not a bad thing, and it costs nothing, certainly not as much as crypto transaction fees which fluctuate moment to moment with the needs of the network and frequently spike over $80. Would you be having this conversation if you knew that, upon hitting enter, your accounts would be charged an unknown transaction fee and miner tip?

> Sure, just like how the iPod was called lame or how dropbox was nothing that anyone couldn't do with just a little bit of SFTP :)

2010 called, they want their irrational optimism that crypto will ever have a use case outside of buying drugs, ponzi schemes, and money laundering back.

sounds like you're missing the point of crypto. it's not about the data management, I think some ETH clients use postgres internally, the blockchain as a network is about removing central coordinators and trust assumptions (including ones we take for granted in our society)

The only trust that crypto removes the need for is the trust that a transaction will be recorded. You still need to trust that the person on the other side of the transaction will uphold their end of your bargain, which is literally the only thing that actually matters in any transaction.

When I swipe my credit card at the grocery store, I'm not worried about whether or not it will show up on my bank statement. Switching that transaction to crypto solves nothing, it gives me no additional assurances to whether the food I just bought is poisonous, whether somebody was watching over my shoulder for my pin, whether a delivery for something out of stock that I ordered will arrive, or anything else.

In fact, using crypto would make me less confident about those things because, since crypto transactions are eternally immutable, I can't get my money back if they screw me.

Being able to trust the fact that a transaction happened is not a useful innovation.

I don't see how this solves any problems.

How would this hypothetical reddit coin work? Does reddit mint them or do the users have to buy them? How are they distributed? (e.g. based on interaction vs awarded by users)

If this is to be a payment system, then these coins have value, value which can be taxed. Sure, meeting up with some dude and paying cash might avoid it, but the success of Coinbase shows convenience is king, and the demographics of reddit are far different than the initial Bitcoin crowd, so these exchanges would pop up much sooner. Even if reddit manages to dodge the tax situation by minting coins themselves (vs charging sales tax on purchased coins), the tax man will be more than happy to collect records from exchanges.

You may be right in that distributions of virtual coins may not fall under any existing labor regulations, but I don't see that as a good thing. "Just think how much money we could save by skirting labor laws through paying people in crypto" is only a win for the employer.

But even if these coins have no real value and can only be used on reddit for virtual goods reddit wholly owns (e.g. reddit gold), considering how people farm karma, a meaningless virtual number, I can only see more perverse incentives being created for those running repost bots.

Edit: Much has been said about the state of Youtube monetization over the years and how infuriatingly often that yellow "limited/no ads" icon appears for seemingly no reason, about the drop in payouts, abuse of copyright claims, and how some people take advantage of the system (see: Dan Olson's video "Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8). But despite all this, I think the current state of Youtube would be more fair than a hypothetical reddit monetization scheme, and most micropayment schemes I've read about for that matter.

I've gone from not giving a shit about crypto to being repulsed by it because of comments like this. Using smilies to convey the benefits of using shitcoins to skirt around child labour laws? Employment laws? And proper accounting/taxation? Thanks but not interested.

> Using smilies

Is the problem the form, or the message?

> And proper accounting/taxation?

Interesting, here's yet another person shoving words in my mouth!

Nowhere in the above or anywhere else did I even suggest people shouldn't pay the taxes they owe if they make capital gains.

And FWIW, taxes are a very small problem in the grand scheme of things: my core argument is about reducing friction, which may allow a missing market, even for companies that are not at the scale of Microsoft and can't mint a gamepass.

> Sooner or later, I think companies like twitter or reddit will want to "lock in with golden handcuffs" their most valuable writers, those who result in precious ad money eyeballs.

Reddit already "pays" their writers, they pay them in upvotes. But seriously though, that's how places like Reddit get their content. You want to post because you think "people might like this", and "I might get a ton of upvotes" and "I might even get some awards". Now all of these things are completely worthless, but the point is to trick your brain into thinking those things hold value in an attempt for you to post.

> Reddit already "pays" their writers, they pay them in upvotes

Good enough for now, but then it's a high status zero wage job :)

> Now all of these things are completely worthless, but the point is to trick your brain into thinking those things hold value in an attempt for you to post.

Think further: not _if_ but _when_ a company comes with a good way to exchange this social capital for more traditional financial capital, it will crush those who don't allow that.

If journalism is similar to art, this seems obvious. When we consider the many classical periods of art, we see that the majority of the artists lived in the same location, knew each other, and had the same circle of funders for their work. It is essential to be able to compete with someone on your level.

Is this really a high status job? Or is it the journalism industry relies on internal status?

If it is about general status, then these individuals should be able to leverage that status and connection into better jobs or wages, including outside of that industry.

High status to whom? Anyone not an east-coast academic or urban professional?

I don't think journalism is widely-respected by the general population. Most local TV news anchors are an embarrassment because they to regurgitate Sinclair's "must airs" and bleeds/leads gore.

Oh is this yet another article about how writers make dirt these days? And then people wonder why journalism is going to hell while also loudly telling writers to stop whining about their pay and get a real job.

Journalism is going to dirt because it isn't practiced. Or to put it in a more honest way: newspapers don't want to, or cannot afford to, pay for it anymore. Easier to just repeat press releases, or report on the latest twitter nitwitting.

Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist. She's paid over a $1k just to access court records in the last year, out of her own pocket. Investigative journalism is expensive.

I'm a writer and blogger who doesn't make squat. My writing has repeatedly hit the front page of HN but it almost never gets submitted by anyone but me and then I get harangued for "self promoting." I write a great deal more than what I submit here and I submit a lot less than I used to. No, that hasn't caused other people to submit my stuff more often.

People here don't want ads on your website. They use ad blockers. They don't want affiliate links. They don't want to leave tips or support your Patreon. They don't want your writing to be content marketing for some other means to pay your bills.

They de facto expect writing to be unpaid slave labor and then bitch and moan about how much writing sucks these days.

"You get what you pay for."

I bitch less than I used to. It seems to only be an excuse to hate on me some more, not effectively move the needle.

> [Unionization] will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot in the $3200/mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and using “semiotics” correctly in a sentence, but that’s neither here nor there.

Unionization leads to higher and considerably less stratified wages, which means that people from less means can afford to enter the profession. So, sure, the people who can afford rent in the cities where they work will have "heightened favoring" (aka better jobs), but they will be a different, more representative group.

One loose idea that I like is local community (the smaller, the better) hiring a journalist (or even better, a diverse group of journalists) directly. They would cover the local events and politics and maybe give some digest of the national/world level from other sources. Apparently in the US officials like sheriffs and school board members are elected, so maybe it could work in a similar way. This would probably need a bunch of stringent rules to ban collusions with politicians (which has been of course a problem even with commercial journalism).

Really interesting piece. Without any particular evidence other than my own perception on the discourse of journalism over the last 20 years or so, I had come to many of the same conclusions as the author (the leftward shift in journalism is due to decreasing wages and so people who accept status or the projection of their own ideology as currency will disproportionately take those jobs). I think teaching (at various levels) has similar forces impinging upon it.

The author has a very narrow focus on NYC pundits, but the problem is more general. Other high-status, low-wage jobs include much of Hollywood. If you've spent any time in LA, you've probably met actress-model-waitress types. Game developers are a somewhat similar group - too many people want to make games, and as a result salaries are low for the level of competence required.

What else?

Interesting article. A new manifestation of the priestly class that Nietzsche went on about in the Genealogy of Morality?

This idea is basically the background behind the recent "wordcel" term/meme that's been making the rounds.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato...

Meh. A lot of the low-wage journos discussed in the blogpost are less "wordcel" and more like "word salad".

Garbage article is just opinions based on broad stereotypes and the author's biases.

> a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are.

Part of the problem in journalism is that someone motivated to share their core ideas should be an author, not a journalist. These are different jobs.

>2. Status can’t pay the rent

>Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly exchange for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such as a person desperate to market their latest brand of protein powder or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for access to your status.

This should be number 1, and probably the only item on the list. The word influencer should evoke in you a deep dread. Sure there's neo fascist authoritarians, but they aren't really the dangerous ones. It's the sales people. In order to convince a person that they need to buy something, you usually have to get them to believe something that isn't true. That's obviously not a stable system.

I was wondering: is being an influencer a low status high paying job? Because that is who journalists are indirectly competing with if we funnel ad-spend through until it reaches media.

"Influencer" in the Instagram sense is probably very power law. I'm sure the vast majority make squat.

I haven't left my house in over a week. The insulation is real.

Chris Hedges entered the chat.

Every public K-12 teacher entered the chat.

`journalists`? hahahaha

i actually live in this area, they are mostly corporate sell outs or small time `progressive` emos/flakes

the hood ain't cheap either.

I think one of the dangers is that it will ultimately lead to discontent, and all of the consequences of that.

> There is a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are… The problem isn’t that writing generates status, but rather that this status is grossly out of proportion to the wages they are earning in the market.

I feel like there's something implied here that says we should be listening to those who have the most money.

But in fact those journalists whose status/audience is out of proportion to their wages... are more representative of America than wealthier people. The median income of these journalists/pundits may still very well be higher than the median income of America.

If they have a monolithically wrong idea of what is going on in "America" or are monolithically unrepresentative of America (I think that's the complaint?), it's not because they homogenously have wages lower than other "high status" people -- and it will not be solved by increasing the wages of journalists/pundits, and or changing the set of who is listened to, to higher income people.

Some of the explanations in the OP are more interesting, like:

> Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly exchange for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such as a person desperate to market their latest brand of protein powder or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for access to your status.

Chomsky and Herman's 1988 _Manufacturing Consent_ is about the pressures journalist have to just take the statements of powerful people (whether in government or industry) and report them as facts (or at best as the story) without doing more investigation. But it was written in a more innocent, pre-social-influencer era, where they never would have conceived that journalists or pundits were actually taking outright payment (which they would have called bribes) for this -- even though I don't think journalists made substantially more then. Rather, they explained and showed how it just made the journalists job so much easier. The journalist didn't have time to do actual investigation, it was so much easier to just go on press conferences and press release. Which is surely even more true today with newsrooms that have been (often literally) decimated since 1988.

I think the OP is onto something... but I don't think it actually has much to do with journalists wages, the central thesis of OP.

In general, if we were somehow able to magically shift the journalist/pundit class to be higher-income -- and thus even less representative of the country as a whole -- I don't see this leading to improvements in any way.

Is this effectively the same reason so many crypto folks have consolidated in Miami?

this is exactly also true for grad students in the physical and biological sciences.

Really? I’d have thought they would be out there inventing the world of tomorrow.

The entire clothing industry is applied biochemistry. Electronics is applied physics and chemistry.

How can there not be a demand for that?

yep. You get paid higher if:

- you go straight out of undergrad to industry

- you only do a masters

- you "drop out" after a masters

- you are sponsored by industry to take a 5-6 year "sabbatical" to get a PhD (which is status-driven, but still tied to "demand", as you say).

- you go to industry without doing a postdoc

If you are in the PhD program to get into academia, it is very much a status-driven, low-paid pursuit (I got paid 26k/yr for ~80h/wk average 6 years, probably generally was working 100-days-straight) and all of the problems in the article apply (including tendency to groupthink in the service of promotion, attracting status-seeking; stupid 20-something men). As a grad student, the undergrad "dishwasher" lab tech was getting paid more than I was (raw; not dividing by hours). Even for postdocs the misery is true. I gave myself a pay raise and hours reduction when I quit being a postdoc and started driving for lyft full-time ~50h/wk on the road, but carve out about 10-ish for like logging off to do social things with friends because I was "in the city anyways".

For a deeper dive on the topic check out the book Bad News. [1] The title references "woke media", which might turn some off. But it's actually written by a liberal, not a conservative out for blood.

There is a lot of very interesting history, including a bit about how the Jewish publisher of the NYT insisted that "because Jews were not a race, Hitler's persecution of them was not a Jewish problem but "the problem of mankind"".

I bet Whoopi wished she her crisis management team was aware of that quote last week!

1: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Media-Undermining-Democracy/...

This reads like someone who just got dumped by a journalist living in Brooklyn.

Ah, yes, private media and factual information. Like water and oil.

Also the left is socialism and communism, not liberalism. Get it right, else youre feeding the culture war the politicians want us to keep fighting.

This is what a de facto aristocracy looks like.

There are an awful lot of jobs and careers that are purely the domain of the wealthy. Unpaid internships and low wages are only part of the reason. Social connections are probably a far bigger factor (IMHO).

Personally I don't care if fashion is dominated by trust fund babies. Politics however? That's a different matter. The dangerous part is how Ayn Rand acolyte billionaires have managed to dupe a good portion of the population to literally fight to the death to prevent Jeff Bezos and like 7 other people pay slightly more taxes and pay for the society that makes their wealth possible is the scary part.

At the very start of the article, I was deathly afraid the author would conclude these people should be paid more. Most of the white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in Brooklyn don’t actually have any firm values of their own; they’re just floating along with the cultural tide and trying to fit into the bubble. If they had their own money, they would definitely shut up more-whether or not they contribute anything to society and deserve more is a separate question.

> Most of the white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in Brooklyn don’t actually have any firm values of their own and are just trying to fit into the bubble.

Arguably neither do most of the Christians

I am definitely not a Christian but I find that statement blatantly ridiculous and counterfactual. A Christian will hold a firm set of values for their entire life, whether or not they actually practice those values (not a Christian-specific problem). The average Brooklyn liberal will give Lindsey Graham or Biden a run for their money on flip flopping as the breeze changes.

The only value they necessarily hold is that faith alone yields salvation, i.e. fuck up all you want if you ask for forgiveness. maybe you can include some obvious ones like 'dont murder'.

Meh Christian values are not so well defined

> I am definitely not a Christian but I find that statement blatantly ridiculous and counterfactual.

I am a Christian, and stop trying to use Christians as a target of the “noble savage” trope.

> A Christian will hold a firm set of values for their entire life

Not more likely than anyone else.

> whether or not they actually practice those values

If a belief you state doesn't guide your decision-making, it's not a value just a PR position.

But Christians also, while remaining Christians, can drift around a pretty broad space of even public moral positions.

> The average Brooklyn liberal will give Lindsey Graham or Biden a run for their money on flip flopping as the breeze changes.

It's interesting that the people you use as touchstones of flipflopping, despite your claim that Christians are universally steadfast, are both Christians.

What does it mean "don't have any firm values of their own" ? What kind of example can you provide ?

An example might be someone who once said "Labeling records for language is fascism!" but now fully supports blocking the distribution of content they now find offensive.

Some people cannot see the contradiction, to them it seems a matter of "but thats what we want" alone.

A lot of people pick teams and shape their values based on what the team tells them. You see that a lot in political parties. When “their” party pushes for something their supporters are for it. When the “other” party pushes something they are automatically against it. Same with the latest calls for censorship. People would be outraged if the “other” side had called for censorship but if “their” side calls for censorship they support it. Also see allegations about sexually abuse. People’s level of outrage about allegations is usually closely correlated with how much they agree with the person otherwise.

The main reason I want them to be paid more has nothing to do with deserving more. The overwhelming majority of journalists certainly don’t do work that deserves higher pay. The problem with the low pay is that they become highly prone to viewing the world as much worse than it is and sowing discontent. A financially comfortable journalistic class that feels the weight of taxes is more likely to defend hard work and keeping the fruits of their labor instead of arguing for an ever larger unaccountable and ineffective government apparatus to fix problems that they could fix themselves with their own money.

Yes- that’s roughly what I’m saying as well - they would shut up more if they were beholden to a corporation that feeds them a lot more. I conclude differently than you in that I take issue with what I interpret to believe would be society bribing them to achieve this outcome. Many of them have a deeply negative impact on society, so it sounds like paying off someone to stop a temper tantrum, which is a hard pill to swallow for me.

> they become highly prone to viewing the world as much worse than it is and sowing discontent

So pay them to keep them sweet so they can accurately portray people's live back to them as being wonderful?

I don't think it takes poorly paid journos to "sow discontent". The fact is people need their material needs met and a sense of self-respect to be content. Many people really do not have those 2 things.

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