When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder"
We never win, and sometimes accepting that is the right decision.
To not be loved is a simple mistake, to not love one another is a fatal mistake.
It all seems to grow from a Seed of Ignorance:; a complete lack of understanding of what someone else's job actually entails, coupled with the subjective measure of how difficult a thing is which is largely based on our own narrow limitations and experiences. It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector.
There are extreme cases, such as people dying and no one realising that their work is not being done, and that is rare, but a certain amount of slacking off, spending time of social media, etc. is not at all uncommon.
I mean, the statistics support the extraordinary amount of time spent on social media all throughout the day across all generations.
Company A(CA) had tons of open channels between sales, engineering and machining. Sakes reps had to spend time with the service dept every few months, helping with repairs and what not. One sales guy opted to do it more often because it helped him understand the products better, which helped him sell. Engineering and machining were constantly showing each other different things that could improve production. We barely needed management, leavjng them to focus on administrative crap nobody else wanted to do. It was quite wonderful and remarkably effective. I miss that job, actually.
Company B(CB) did the opposite. All departments, and I mean all had walls between them, both metaphorical and physical. Department heads were the only conduits and they were unreliable at moving info between depts, not to mention reluctant to work with each other. Things constantly had to be reworked, tons of money wasted on parts nobody could use, quality assurance was always an after-thought, etc. The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death. It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.
So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB? Both shops are the same size and offered very similar products and services. Those are just two of my examples, too. I've been with a handful of shops for a long time, and the latter is always a hellscape to work in.
> Company B(CB) did the opposite. [...] The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death.
> So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB?
Murphy's law says Company B. :-(
(Please, please tell us different!)
> It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.
YM AlterCation?
Might be smart in many instances to do cross training, and on the job perspective expanding, but at the end of the day: it's usually better to let the animous live...and the spice flow.
In my experience, it seems to apply to every sector out there. I got started in a different industry than what I'm active in now, and what you describe I have seen across any type of job I've held.
I wish there was a good term for it like we have "fundamental attribution error" for that other pernicious cognitive fallacy.
The core mistake is that believing that all we know about something is equivalent to all there is to know about something. So if you don't know anything about welding, you assume it must be brain-dead simple because your knowledge of it is so tiny. If you don't know anything about engineering, you assume it's just pushing buttons.
It's not just about people's jobs, either. It shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.
Conversely “you’re not really working” comes from blue collar workers.
Both sentences are the same and they are usually used by assholes from one or the other side that either feel attacked or feel superior.
There is no intrinsic value in any of those statements besides what it is saying about person using it - that person is an asshole.
Even if it is technically true - why would anyone actually say that to someone?
Edit: it's also telling from a status standpoint that you characterized the blue collar comment as "insulting upwards." It would probably go a long way to avoiding those types of comments in the first place if people didn't implicitly think blue collar work is "below" white collar work.
I think that especially calling white collars out as not doing real work is often lovingly. It can be said by assholes, but the language around physical labour is often “tough love”. I’m not sure calling blue collar workers unfulfilled is very often lovingly though, so I think most people who do that are assholes.
What is interesting in the debate to me, is that I see a lot of IT work as blue collar work. Not all of it, but a lot of what we do is basically trade-skill related similar to how plumbing is. It’s just no physical. Over all though, I think it’s best to spend very little time on people who actually mean it hatefully when they call you X. Who cares what assholes think?
Society has loads of edge cases like this.
I broke my arm a few years back, went to hospital, and a surgeon put some titanium plates and screws in. The orthopaedic surgeon spends a lot of the day standing, they repeat similar work every day with minor variations, they can't work remotely, they're exposed to hazardous chemicals, they have face-to-face interactions with customers, they earn money by working rather than from investments or inheritance, they're union members, they get paid overtime, they wear blue employer-issued workwear, many do shift work, and they literally put in screws for a living.
And yet nobody would say surgeons are blue collar workers.
Maybe because of the $500k salaries, or the air-conditioned hospitals they work in, or because their status is equivalent to doctors who are pretty much the definition of upper-middle-class tie-wearing knowledge workers.
Very few surgeons are union members. They frequently work for outside groups and are paid per procedure. The ones that do work for the hospital on salary don’t get overtime.
>status is equivalent to doctors
They are doctors. Both in title and in function. Most surgeons only operate a couple days a week. The rest of their time they see patients in clinic, and an outside observer couldn’t tell the difference between their work environment and a primary care physician’s.
You are onto something though. My wife is an ER doctor and her job is very similar to blue collar service jobs (if you consider service jobs blue collar).
She doesn’t make her own schedule. She works insane shifts (one day she could work 7a-4p, the next 10p-7a). She interacts with patients directly all day.
The pay is a lot better, but the hours are worse than any retail job I’ve ever heard of, and you can’t call in sick. Her coworker was sick and could barely get out of bed, but she came in early to have a nurse give her an IV so she could power through her shift—that kind of thing is very common.
Plus you have the ultimate responsibility for every patient that comes through the door. You have to make sure you don’t miss anything serious every time—while at the same time, making sure that you don’t spend too much time with each patient. And the ER you’re working in is full because the floor is too full to admit new patients but the ER can’t just shut the door, so patients are boarding in the halls.
Oh and if you mess up, you can literally lose your house when a jury awards someone more than your malpractice insurance will cover.
They're not a union member the same way a teacher, police officer, or steam fitter is but they're not as far removed as your typical programmer, for example.
As for medical specialty boards, getting board certified is much more like an engineer passing the PE exam than joining a union.
Also collective bargaining with your employer is the primary benefit of joining a union, and the primary purpose of joining a union. Without that function a union would be unrecognizable to the average union member.
Powerful unions
The vast majority of doctors aren’t even members of the AMA.
And currently the AMA’s position is that congress should fund more resident slots which is the limiting factor for the number of doctors.
>precisely why doctors and lawyers get paid so much
I don’t know that regulation is precisely why. It surely contributes, but doesn’t explain all of it.
Carpenters are very rarely regulated, HVAC technicians usually are. The training required is similar. The average salary difference is less than $10k a year.
Doctor’s (and lawyer’s) salaries vary drastically by specialty, and number of doctors in a specialty doesn’t explain all or even most of the pay disparity.
There are far fewer pediatric emergency medical physicians than GI docs, but GI docs make way more money. The extra income has nothing to do with restricted supply, it’s a side effect of the way insurers pay (by procedure and GI does way more procedures).
"Exhausting work," lol.
The only people who say nonsense like this are the people who've never done manual labor for a living. I've done both and there's just no comparison of exhaustion levels.
I've also done both and each can leave me profoundly exhausted in very different ways. Neither flavor of exhaustion is worse than the other, just different.
When someone compares programing to manual labor implying that programming is more tiring or at least as tiring, yes, absolutely, 100%, it's incredibly difficult for me to respond with empathy. Impossible, even. It's clear that person has had an incredibly sheltered life.
Thanks for asking? I guess???
I live on a horse farm. My day starts and ends with heavy manual labor working around animals that can kill me in an instant if they're in a bad mood or I have the misfortune to get in the middle of a beef between two of them. Most of yesterday, the temperature was in the single digits Fahrenheit with wind gusts to 50mph.
I'm also a programmer. There are some days I couldn't tell you which of the two jobs is the more exhausting.
My experience as someone who needs to do both is that often "game recognizes game", so great office workers will appreciate great blue collar workers and vice versa — if given the chance.
Every blue collar worker had situations where they had to wait because some lazy office bum that had to give them paperwork would rather chat with their collegues than do their job.
And every white collar worker had situation where a craftsperson communicated in single word fragments, went off and was seen to smoke cigarettes for half the time only to write them down as work hours while leaving things broken afterwards.
The only thing capable blue/white collar workers hate more than that is uncapable people on their own side.
I would suggest putting in the time to find a different definition of "win" for your life, rather than accepting it.
Ironically enough, that you cannot see past the emotional language and describe the quote as "alienating me" also demonstrate an lack of empathy for me, but I guess that's beyond the topic.
> Ironically enough, that you cannot see past the emotional language and describe the quote as "alienating me" also demonstrate an lack of empathy for me
I wouldn't be surprised if I actually have below-average empathy, but unfortunately for you, people like us still get to vote, and shame isn't a great way to get support on controversial issues. Anyways, your choice in language has real utility, so it's not really a matter of whether or not I'm empathetic. I support welfare as a social safety net, but not welfare solely for the sake of redistribution of wealth. If the political camp that is advocating for welfare is using language that suggests the second purpose of welfare, then I'm less inclined to support them.
Ironically, the people who say "you're selfish and greedy if you don't give me the money you earned" and "you have no empathy" have no empathy or consideration for the people they want to take from.
I feel like that extrapolating a lot from someone who just emotionally doesn't feel well.
> the fact that someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves
I don't think you understand how poverty works (in most countries at least). Have you ever lived close to the poverty line and/or earned below minimum wage?
> you're selfish and greedy if you don't give me the money you earned [...] the people they want to take from
No one says this, but at least that you wrote this makes it clear that you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.
Yes. I grew up in poverty in an area far from any big cities in the '70s and '80s. We only had eggs and meat because we raised chickens and rabbits. Half my calories during the summer months came from the garden.
>No one says this, but at least that you wrote this makes it clear that you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.
I paraphrased. What was actually said was "I hate living in a country where everyone is greedy and don't want to support the poor and homeless."
> you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.
Your comment ended in a way that demonstrated no interest in a good faith discussion. Preemptively telling the people who disagree with you that they have no empathy is a sure-fire way to guarantee that tone of response.
E: Both your comments so far in this subthread are predicated on invalidating the opinions of other because you assert they don't have the right life experiences to know how it is.
Tell us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase withnout telling us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase.
> When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder"
Do you really though? I know there's a lingering sentiment from somewhere, but at the same time... I don't recognise this sentiment at all, neither from personal experience nor anecdotal from diverse / random people on the internet in 2024.
On the other side of things, because I still do a lot of that sort of "trade work" to help out friends since it's my background, I get a lot of "how do you know how to do all this, aren't you glad you went to school and don't have to do this every day, have you tried to convince your family to go back to school?" (and of course, the republicans are bad / dumb undertones, even present in the linked article)
People will always find something to beat you over the head with. The most important thing is not to let them infect you with their negativity.
Did he really say that? Farmers are the original WFH-ers.
You never win everything simultaneously, yes.
People filter themselves into jobs they would rather do, when they have awareness of the possibilities. With social media that awareness is increasing.
I’ve had friends who had the definition of blue collar standing job and chose to transition to nursing, which is another standing job.
Immigration status and lack of language skills may tie you to standing jobs, but if people want to learn and grow out of them, in the US there are pathways. If someone curates a course on career pathways via youtube and spreads them through immigration centers and schools and social programs that will help even more people find their way.
I find healthcare workers to be an interesting mix in this discussion. Their work is extremely physical and mental, and emotionally draining. Demand for it will only go up. Compensation for it will likely go up. Who picks up the jobs will be enlightening. Yes you have the bottleneck for doctor and nurse training, but CNA and PA are not as limited. Doctor liability is an extreme source of stress, but that somehow doesn’t apply to nurses as much, so even doctors recommend their kids become nurses.
I need both.
Too little brain work and my thoughts are racing (unproductively) and my sleep needs fall down to ~4h (happens on vacation) which isn’t actually enough to make me feel rested.
Too little physical activity and I’m restless and can’t focus, can’t sleep, and generally stuff falls apart.
> Many people prefer good workouts instead
The secret to understanding exercise is knowing that there are both physical and mental benefits.
Definitely. We all do.
But yeah, it's not a dichotomy.
In case you haven't done that before: I suggest an experiment where you try to have a moderate amount of exercise (w few min in zone 2 cardio) before or during a break at work. Do it for 2-3 weeks and see if there's a difference in your cognitive performance.
I'm saying that not only because:
- there's scientific consensus that lack of exercise negatively impacts our cognitive abilities. Your thought sponge is a part of your body; our minds and bodies are not separate systems. *
- At some point I realised I was used to my default mental state (or performance, so to speak), and never noticed how much better I could feel/think after including more exercise in my life.
* many people would agree that Descartes and mind-body dualism is to blame here, at least partially.
My own anecdotal experience is that because of several factors, I had to explore many things before I could figure out that I can actually learn to code, enjoy it, create useful things and be (relatively) good at it. All of this was necessary to actually be able to produce some code for a living.
Here's a list of some of the factors that may affect your desire, aside from some innate interest and intelligence:
- Having access to a computer at an early age and in the formative period
- Parental interest in computing and/or STEM
- Parental understanding of computing and/or STEM (informal tutoring)
- Parental pressure/expectations to pursue computing and/or STEM
- Learning disabilities (ADHD, dyslexia, numeracy)
- Introversion/extraversion
- Visible role models in STEM
- Addictions (gaming, social media, TV)
- Effective teaching of math and computing concepts as a jumping board
- Knowledge of English (given that most programming concepts were defined in English first)
- Early successes and/or rewards in coding/STEM as opposed to non-STEM
- Social valuation of programmers and STEM (i.e., "nerds")
- Parental socioeconomic status
- Number of siblings (e.g., with respect to competition or pressure to leave home early)
- False beliefs ("I'll never be good at math/coding")
- Learning consistency and discipline (i.e., spaced repetition)
- Knowledge of how to learn difficult subjects effectively
- Recognition of fun or social usefulness of coding (with respect to any other pursuit)
- Understanding of implications of choosing particular options (e.g., college prep, career progression) instead of others, at particular stages in life (12-18 years old, with family)
- Familial duties (caring for a parent/sibling, having kids early)
- Sunk cost fallacy (i.e., 3rd year medical school, working vs going back to school)
Again, intelligence and innate desire will play a role, but I think there is nothing genetic about loving to look at some text on a computer. Personally, I met enough intelligent people, STEM and non-STEM, who think they should've just developed a desire for programming because they're burned out, exploited, fatigued and/or underpaid. These aren't implications most could predict when they made significant career choices.
Feels almost absurd to see that framed as (just) a bad thing. (I would think Sitters are more likely to be exposed to the indoors, which includes a lack of sunlight and fresh air, possible exposure to mold and bad ventilation, and heated arguments over hot-desking.)
Unfortunately, while medically known and even legislated (forced breaks), problems of sitting workers are still widely ignored (often by themselves too) until too late or trivialized.
This is literally the example from which we learned that standing and walking around helps prevent heart attacks.
Likewise what makes you think that the epidemiology was hard? The statistics were absolutely brutally obvious. The main problem was getting people to look at the data, not interpreting it.
See https://bcmj.org/articles/exercise-and-heart-review-early-st... for some of the early history that is involved here.
To be fair, the twist did get me. I thought it was leading up to discussing injury rates, or health in old age. Since I'm not from the US, the pivot to discussing race wasn't very interesting/relevant to me.
I think it’s just not as top of mind in other places, but its there.
But I also have the impression that you have more knowledge of racism than some other countries. I mean the Dutch obviously have a horrific racist history.
Race is far more important in the US: it seems to be fundamental to people's identity and how they are regarded in a way that is difficult to grasp from outside. It is strange to me that people who accept self-identity of gender regard race as an immutable inherited characteristic.
The nearest parallel is caste in India. It is inherited, immutable and hierarchical.
Desegregation has been slow, and you can't really desegregate inherited wealth.
That at least is my coarse observation as an outsider and I stressed qualifiers as there are no absolutes here, just fuzzy clouds of human attributes with some overlaps and no hard borders.
The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.
That's the other side from the one that most strongly regards "race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic" as far as I can see.
Personally I've seen two correlations in different directions.
Race is important to the swastika-tattoo crowd on the far right, no doubt.
Meanwhile on the left, a lot of people acknowledge a widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs that can support a family without a degree. That even though the median family's situation has been improving for decades, a lot of people haven't shared in the benefits. To me this is obviously a matter of class.
But I look at American analysis and discussion, and 95% of the time they ignore class, and instead analyse it through a racial lens - reinterpreting the widening gap between rich and poor as a widening gap between white and black. The along comes Trump, and he gains a load of support from the white working class simply by acknowledging that yes, they are struggling.
So I can certainly see what graemep is getting at.
Significant US analysis, that with any meat, looks to race, class , and income to quintile the US demographic and examine the prospects of each rank and the mobility across groups.
Recent years have seen books such as Paul Fussell, CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), and a host between.
The difficulty for the US has been the dumbing down of public discourse, that was the condition that permitted a Trump to sweep through on a popularists platform.
I have posted this before so a bit reluctant to repeat, but its relevant. i wrote a blog post about my view and experience of race in different cultures : https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
I'm pretty surprised to hear that. Nearly every program I've seen in my adult life that explicitly uses race as an important factor in who gets hired or promoted or funded has come from the left. The left is also the group that is in favor of gender self-identification. Maybe these aren't always the exact same people, but the overlap politically is strong.
That's not to say that conservatives don't hold or express racist or bigoted beliefs, but I'm not sure I've ever seen an overt effort to only hire white people or exclude brown people.
I am not convinced. Even Americans who accept gender self-identity AND claim to be anti-racist usually have a problem with regarding race as a superficial characteristic, and rarely seem to accept people self-identifying as a different race to their "real" one.
> The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.
My point is that BOTH sides in the US regard race as an immutable fundamental characteristic.
> Since I'm not from the US, the pivot to discussing race wasn't very interesting/relevant to me.
Indians do a lot better economically than Bangladeshis, black Africans better than black Caribbeans, etc. People from some Eastern European countries do a lot worse than visible minorities. Of the white minorities the Irish were traditionally close to the bottom of the heap historically, but for the last few decades have done well, especially educationally, probably boosted by the quality of Catholic schools (religious schools can receive state funding here and many are therefore free to attend).
Its clearly mostly to do with lack of intergenerational social mobility. Its worth noting that the group doing worst educationally in the UK are white working class boys.
In Sri Lanka which is also my "home" country for a different definition of home the minorities are not "economically lower class" but have faced significant racism and religious discrimination (both sometimes violent) - but have also done the same themselves.
[1] All numbers I know of that compare ethnic groups lump the three biggest native groups into one, "white British".
There is a literal mountain of evidence that both color and race in the US correlate negatively with outcomes, perhaps in differing amounts, but if you ignore that, you’re also ignoring some evidence. There a lot of possible confounding reasons why one black group might fare better than another on average in the US, and that means that if you care about being accurate about whether race and class are linked, then it’s extremely difficult to separate them, and nearly impossible to declare they’re not linked. The biggest problem with your claim is that race and class absolutely were linked in the past without question, when blacks were slaves, and we have never had a period in US history where the socioeconomic outcomes of blacks matched whites on average. The situation has improved, but we have plenty of evidence we’re not there yet, and so it’s impossible and almost certainly wrong to claim that either race or color has little to do with class.
Is it not this way? How about where you are from, since you're "not from the US"?
(More baffling is how the US is in complete denial of its class system - so much so that anyone who tries to talk about class is immediately told they're talking about race)
But yet, we're all mushed into the same category and expected to think alike and have the same ambitions. It's frustrating, but there's not a whole lot that I can do about it other than engage with people using my own perspective.
While race is of course an issue in all countries, few countries hold on to their racial divide as strongly as the US.
Nonetheless, I didn't mean that discussion about race wasn't relevant or interesting to me. I simply meant that discussion about the racial divides in the US aren't relevant to me.
Since I hear and read about US specific race issues a lot I usually avoid the topic and was a bit annoyed that this post baited me into investing so much time before it revealed what it was about.
Each and every one of these groupings have faced discrimination in one context or another, and all of them would be described as 'white' in American terms. Actual Asian people are too far out of context to really be considered on more than an individual basis; there aren't a lot of them here.
Germans vs Turks
Han Chinese vs non-Han Chinese
Canada vs first nations
Many countries have their racial underclasses.
The actual data would still have made as much (or more) sense if it was white vs blue collar, but I suppose no one would be surprised by that, and wouldn't have clicked through long enough for the "switch" to hit.
I'd argue sitter vs stander distinction also makes this presentation more visceral, memorable and understandable. Collar color would feel unnecessarily abstract and boring.
It's perhaps less relevant now that a lot of people can roll out of bed and start their remote job in sweatpants, but it's stuck with me.
(Despite being solidly white collar, I still shower of a night)
The majority of Americans I know shower in the morning. Japanese bath/shower at night as a general rule. A western person I know married to a Japanese person said their partner thought they were gross to climb into bed all dirty (not bathing at night). My friend thought "waking up sticky from sleep and staying sticky all day is gross". My friend's solution was to bath both in the morning and at night. Their partner still only baths at night.
Also more importantly, I think the main point of the article is that it's not just two clusters; there are several interesting axes to look at. E.g. electricians are "standers" but have autonomy; bookkeepers are "white collar" but do little problem-solving, etc.
> bookkeepers are "white collar" but do little problem-solving
If you want to see it, skip to the "explore" part and then enter "I solve problems daily" and "Bookkeeping" in the UI.
(Also I interpreted "standing/sitting" as basically being a catchy title - I think the author's premise is that all the axes he examined are relevant, not just the standing/sitting one.)
If you think that then I’d wager you’d never had to digitise any form of economic based system. I need an accountant to even begin to tell me how to do their weird nonsensical math, because it’s not actually math but law. Law which is open to interpretation. Law which still has to be boiled down to financial calculations and budget planning.
In Germany you get a green tariff when you produce solar energy. You do this in most of Europe, but in Germany the tariff goes away if you exceed a certain amount of energy production, as in, you’re either paid X or you’re paid 0.
No definition will be perfect, but this one does pretty well as you point out.
It also naturally provides an objective gradation, which many definitions that stand in for blue collar” or sit in for “white collar” won’t provide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...
Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774>
In that presentation, I was happy with how succinctly they were able to get down to what makes environments "high-risk", and I found the classification of "a quiet place to study" as a basic necessity (and its relationship to the prevalence/absence of "chaotic routines") as being particularly striking and memorable:
> Researchers determined risk by asking lots of questions. For example, they asked whether the kid has basic necessities, like electricity or a quiet place to study.
> They also asked about factors that could destabilize the home environment – chaotic routines, parents who have disabilities, or relatives struggling with substance abuse.
(So many environments nowadays, even the ones that are ostensibly created to fulfill this sort of thing, are just total failures at actually providing them. I'm thinking of things like public libraries. I live in Austin and have a major axe to grind about the public libraries here, which are nothing like what you'd get if you were actually interested in the pro-social goals that you'd think a public library would have in its charter. A teenager looking to escape their high-risk environment or an adult who's had their feet knocked out from beneath them basically stands no chance at getting out of their predicament if their only option were to use the public libraries here, which would unfortunately act more like a vortex to ensure they stay in the suck. But this is all beside the point.)
I suspect but cannot prove that there's a similar link to the presentation of information—that the best presentation is simple static media, ideally printed, that is supplemented by these types of exploratory environments so that you can make the main resource come to life. Failing that, you'd want the printed presentation, sans interactivity, and then finally as a last resort, just dumping the person into these kinds of presentations. cf: the widely felt phenomenon of handwritten notes being better than notes typed on a laptop + Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Please indulge me on your short tangent on Austins public library, how can they improve? Same budget?
>Standers are more likely to be exposed to the outdoors—something that will become more and more dangerous as our planet warms.
and
>America got rich selling cotton picked by enslaved Black people. America built the Transcontinental Railroad with Chinese immigrant labor, only to ban Chinese immigration a few decades later. And America feeds itself with animals killed and processed by Black and Hispanic meatpackers.
? If so, I'm not sure how either of those points are "barely coherent", and the characterization made by the gp is a gross misrepresentation of site's claims.
In both jobs the work environment can be designed to be ergonomic enough. Which does not apply to more variable work.
Additionally, jobs, where the workers have more rights can take more sick days. There’s a culture of not taking a sick day when you’re a construction worker.
Also: exposure to disease, violent patients (especially in psychiatry), slippery floors, sharp instruments, used needles...
When I was having work done on my home, the 4 people who were working on it were all overweight/obese. Bill Gates was wire thin in his '20s despite his job entailing sitting at a computer all day.
I suspect this has to do with metabolic differences (with people with higher IQs having faster metabolisms relative to body mass due to more NEAT or other factors) than just diet and exercise.
It seems obvious to me that being poor makes it harder to be healthy. Stand all day and you're too tired to cook or exercise after work. You end up eating calorically dense, ultra processed foods because they're quick to prepare and easy to come by. The stress takes a toll on you physically, but there's no time to see a doctor, and your health insurance sucks. Even if you wanted to exercise, and found a cheap gym, you're more likely to develop something like a repetitive use injury that makes movement painful. And you're probably not getting good sleep, which affects your metabolism as well.
I'd be interested in whether the poverty/obesity correlation holds outside the US or if it's unusually high here. My guess is that it's mostly an American thing.
I read it the exact other way around: Wasn't GP saying that higher IQ leads to a slimmer body?
(Presumably because the brain is burning more calories; not that I know what "NEAT" means in this context.)
No it has to do with differences in dietary habits.
It costs a lot to eat healthy short of growing your own stuff.
> Visual storytelling makes ideas more accessible
From an a11y standpoint, that statement is very ironic. Because for visually impaired people, the effect is the opposite of what the sentence claims.
A lot of people are uninterested in long texts or in this case parts of the expected audience might also have literacy issues.
Most other countries, the “nerds” are popular because folks know that they are going to earn big money shortly after. Here? They’re treated like little versions of the United CEO.
> Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
> They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.
When you get to the Senior+ level in software, the buck often stops with you, and if you can't figure something out it can be a big ego hit. I never woke up or went to sleep wondering if I would be able to do landscaping or stock shelves the next day, but I often fall asleep stressed about how to architect something at work.
Ownership of problems is worth a lot of money, thats why CEOs get paid so much. In most other jobs you can blame a chain of managers and processes, but with engineering if you fail the blame falls straight on you.
But CEOs don't seem to "own" any problems, do they? However bad they fuck up, they still get to sail away into the sunset on their "golden parachute" separation deal.
I stopped there. I am here to read news about tech, not propaganda lies. Also flagged this.
> When the Social Security program began paying benefits in 1940, there were no restrictions on benefit payments to noncitizens.
> In 1996, Congress approved tighter restrictions on the payment of Social Security benefits to aliens residing in the United States. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA)23 prohibited the payment of Social Security benefits to aliens in the United States who are not lawfully present, unless nonpayment would be contrary to a totalization agreement or Section 202(t) of the Social Security Act (the alien nonpayment provision).24 This provision became effective for applications filed on or after September 1, 1996. Subsequently, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 199625 added Section 202(y) to the Social Security Act. Section 202(y) of the act, which became effective for applications filed on or after December 1, 1996, states, "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no monthly benefit under [Title II of the Social Security Act] shall be payable to any alien in the United States for any month during which such alien is not lawfully present in the United States as determined by the Attorney General."
https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20161117_RL32004_1ac9e9...
Also, many (maybe all?) documented non-citizen immigrants are eligible for social security if they meet the other criteria, so there's no reason to assume the author is arguing "for extending citizenship en-masse". Nor even that they are arguing for more visas being granted at all
A significant portion of "illegal" immigration is folks who have overstayed a legitimate work visa (and hence obtained a social security number during the visa application process), and there's also the whole bucket of folks who applied for a social security card under the DACA (which protections have since been mostly rescinded).
So-called "undocumented immigrants" can be quite well documented and even pay social security taxes: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/01/28/undocumented-immigran...
The north got rich off factories and wage earning labour. To equate the wealth of America to the south is a falsehood. And not a helpful one. It misleads you into missing the travesty of slavery: it did not build a nation. It gave leisure to a couple lucky families at the expense of hundreds per plantation.
The industry and wage earning of the north is what built America.
But the textile mills in the Northern states also got their cotton predominantly from the South. Not to mention the tobacco, rice, etc.
uhhh... who is gonna tell him? that those industries in the north imported goods from the south.
Americas racism was primarily southerners being racist. It took white liberals to liberate everyone else, and we have to thank and celebrate the white liberal, not shit on them yet again.
Here is the list of GPD countries in 1861, before the start of civil war:
1 - China - $199.6 billion
2 - India - $125.7 billion
3 - United Kingdom - $85.8 billion
4 - France - $72.3 billion
5 - Germany (Prussia and other states) - $52.4 billion
6 - Russian Empire - $49.6 billion
7 - United States - $44.2 billion
8 - Japan - $33.0 billion
9 - Austria-Hungary - $30.1 billion
10 - Ottoman Empire - $17.5 billion
Source: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/the-world-economy_...
I guess there's a certain type of audience this works with, but I'm not part of it.
Very pretty and very dark and totally impenetrable.
We also spend too much time on sympathy for people at the very bottom of the income tables, often there out of laziness or crime, compared to people who have twice the stress by being both low income and working hard for a living. They deserve more visibility.
When I got to the slide about immigrant workers, I broke down, crying, sobbing tears—no no no no that can’t happen here tears. I already knew. It was something I already knew.
The reality of such a thing is so horrible to contemplate that even if you can attach the faces of people you know to the coming horror, you’re more likely to think of it in abstract terms. 20 million people is a number we can’t fathom. But data allows us to process it in an abstract way, and can connect the abstract to something cognitively meaningful.
When I saw the data arranged that way I was forced to confront the abstract representation of this category of people that drove home cognitively what could be coming.
Agree or disagree with the policy proposal, that is not what Trump has been saying at all. I don't know if this is an unforced error with some people in the discussion of American politics or a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters. There is a legal process for immigrating to the United States, it is a significantly easier process than that which exists in the majority of Western countries.
Those who follow the legal process are not being targeted by any policy proposal that's been espoused by any mainstream political candidate from any party in the United States, the issue has been and continues to be discussed only in the terms of people who immigrated to the United States illegally either via violating the terms of their visa, fraudulently receiving a visa, or crossing the border without a visa.
Please tone down your hyperbole.
many blue drones can't recognize their droneness, but will happily make fun of red drones.
That said, I wouldn't consider it a particularly "dangerous" job. It's just that, despite the popular discourse, jobs like being a police officer are also really not that dangerous either. When the effect size is small it doesn't take much difference to be amplified in the data. Being a roofer is far more dangerous than being a police officer, even though that's not the typical mainstream narrative, as an example.
It seems like a pretty series of infographics that are oriented towards some sort of narrative the creator is trying to impress on folks, something about guilt and unfairness?
It seems like the author put in a lot of work in order to demonstrate a thing that most people intuitively understand:
There's a large supply of unskilled or low skilled labor, so wages are less and the jobs are crappier and more physically demanding.
If you age stratify it, I feel pretty confident that you'd also see a trend that shows that most physical labor is performed by younger folks, and the percentage of their day spent doing physical labor mostly decreases as they progress in their lives and become more skilled.
I'm not talking just about desk jobs, I'm thinking (for example) of an apprentice electrician vs master electrician. One of those is going to get stuck doing the more physically demanding work while the other is in more of a supervisory role.
Born in a latin american country I was taught by my parents to always aim for the least amount of work for the most amount of pay. Basically avoid any standing job like the plague even though thats what they both did.
My mother yelled at me when I got my first job as a waiter and pressured me to find something else every month.
Eventually I got a IT desk job that paid minimum wage and worked my way up from there to software development.
A lot of standing job people do tell me they could never do what I do, sitting on a desk daily.
They're trying to insult you, not provide you with anecdotal information so that you can have a broader view of the world.
(But I've yet to upgrade to a treadmill desk.)
Eg.: I have 30 days of paid vacation, now I'm taking month off. Don't need to worry about my job, they cannot fire me. As I understand in US, if you take vacation longer than week, you're in the fear you will be fired. Is it true?
Job, IT, of course.
This is a common misconception which comes from the fact that there are no federal required vacations. That does not mean companies don't offer vacations as a benefit. I have yet see any positions without offering any.
In IT it's pretty much universally quite good. I had 5 weeks before, but now we switched to unlimited (as long as you do your job ok). I now take around 6 weeks per year, and I don't really need more.
You must never have been pressured not to take your vacation days or sick days. I think most people have been. I've seen people constructively fired for taking vacation, or even for taking their entire entitled maternity leave rather than cutting it short.
I have a coworker who takes off 3 weeks in a row every year. Never been an issue.
In general in the US, tech companies have excellent benefits -- including plenty of vacation. Not as much as Europe but it's not bad.
Also, I suspect that the OP is not a native English speaker, because there seems to be a subtle difference between a narrow standard metaphorical use of "slave labo(u)r" in English along the lines of "work that is done by enslaved people or by people who are treated as though they are enslaved"[1] and a wider use for example in German were "Sklavenarbeit" means something like hard work under degrading conditions.[2]
[1] As Merrriam-Webster defines it at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slave%20labor
[2] Cf. for example the lemma "sklavenarbeit" in Grimms' dictionary: "sklavenarbeit, f. arbeit, die ein sklave thun musz, die einem sklaven ziemt, harte arbeit. Campe, schlavenarbeit, lavoro, fatica da schiavo. Kramer deutsch-it. dict. 2 (1702), 562a: schlavenarbeit thun müssen, dover faticare da schiavo. ebenda; was ists für mühe und sklavenarbeit der ackerbau. Herder bei Campe." https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=S30002
[1] Oxford dictionary: " (informal) work that is very hard and very badly paid", https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
They need paid time off and paid maternity leave and all of that stuff because they can’t conceptualise putting away the money to do this themselves. Significant savings or investment are rare outside of a property.
It’s just money on the other side of the equation, government and socialised vs independent and free to use or not.
At the very bottom it’s not like it matters in either case, you might have time off but no money to do anything with it.
1) Several Americans live paycheck to paycheck with no significant savings outside of property either. One unexpected emergency is enough to empty the savings of most Americans [1](https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-emergency-away-study-shows-22...). The idea that Americans make more money and that makes up for the difference just doesn't play out in reality for all but the richest and luckiest.
2) Taking a 30 day vacation and coming back to the same job without any threat of repercussion is much more valuable than simply 30 days worth of saved wages. The average American worker can't just take 30 days off, even as leave without pay, and expect to come back to the same job. If they want a 30 day period with no work, the vast majority of American workers will have to quit their current job and then hope to be able to find a new one later - which certainly isn't a given if you're working unskilled jobs to begin with.
I have 5 weeks vacation and unlimited sick days every year.
lol, do you get most of your information from retards on reddit?
A month straight is probably a hard sell though, yes.
Besides parental leave and the very rare even for FAANG companies who offer month long sabbaticals once every five years, a month is a hard sell.
And nah, most if not all of my coworkers have taken two consecutive weeks off, and have taken roughly a total 25 days off the year excluding holidays.
* last time it was the red plastic cups, before that it was "being proud", etc. etc.
> As I understand in US, if you take vacation longer than week, you're in the fear you will be fired. Is it true?
No this is complete nonsense for 95%+ of jobs
Also the people who created the philosophical concepts that made the United States possible were all sitters.
1) Raising the minimum standards of the lowest bidders on the worker side. This could be done through collective bargaining or regulation, making it so nobody is willing to "defect" (in the prisoner's dilemma sense) and work for conditions below a certain standard, which means there's little to no supply of such workers.
2) Raising the standards on the demand side. This could theoretically happen if consumers are willing to preferentially purchase from places that provide higher standards for workers; effectively, coordinate and collectively bargain on the purchasing side. This seems unlikely to happen as consumers are even more likely to "defect" and purchase from the least expensive company. This is one case where a simplistic model breaks down: consumers' ability to collectively demand higher standards for how companies treat their workers is limited by the fact that consumers are getting their income and ability to afford higher standards from the work they're doing.
3) Lowering the supply of labor across the board. This would happen if fewer people are willing to do the job, such as if people didn't have to work in order to survive (e.g. UBI). If there isn't an endless supply of workers who have to tolerate whatever conditions get them paid enough to survive, satisfying demand for labor requires substantially higher standards for pay and working conditions. (Conversely, if everyone in a workplace wants to be there, it's easier to get quality output.)
4) Raising the demand for labor across the board. This isn't going to happen, as it'd run counter to some of the primary defining qualities of an improving society; even if it did, it would be likely to ultimately result in similar stratification between groups of workers.
5) Raise the mobility from one category of labor to another. Constantly being worked on in many different ways, but will inherently never be able to fully solve the problem because not enough people can take advantage of this option to avoid stratification.
The feasible alternatives here feed back both positively and negatively into each other.
Personally, I think implementing (3) via UBI is the one most likely in terms of feasibility. (Not politically in terms of passing it, but practically in terms of how monumentally effective it would be compared to the rest.) (3) is the option here most immune to the prisoners' dilemma defection problem.