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

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

#61

Post by cbozeman »

klodolph wrote: post #11
the_lonely_road wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are not all white people Anglo Saxon? I don’t bother to call myself anything other than white, Anglo Saxon, European, Caucasian. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. I have Irish, English, Italian, and post world war 2 immigrated Polish direct ancestors. I don’t know what else to call myself nor do I particularly care. I don’t have a strong personal sense of identity tied up with any of those things. They are just words…

Anglo-Saxon is a somewhat outdated term that refers to the Germanic people that inhabit England and Wales. Easy way to remember is if you take "Anglo" + "Land" you get "Anglo-land", which morphs into the term "England". Modern historians don't use the term Anglo-Saxon much these days, so it's not especially important.

> Modern historians don't use the term Anglo-Saxon much these days, so it's not especially important.

To you. And to a bunch of people who have to live in fear of being canceled - a.k.a., fired for - in the case of historians - reminding the world of uncomfortable truths.

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

#62

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #28
barry-cotter wrote: post #2

> It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III) This is what assimilation looks like. Someone with an Irish name calling themselves Anglo-Saxon. It’s like a Hispanic person calling themselves Latinx, proof that they have lost all organic connection to the culture of their ancestors.

How do you "lose all organic connection to the culture of your ancestors" simply by calling yourself Latinx? You're surely not suggesting they abandon the traditions, holidays, food, music, clothing, dancing, and all of the rest of their cultural connection, simply because of one label? I am an Irish-American who plays the music, hates the food, but if I wanted to call myself of "European" ancestry, that wouldn't aba…

> How do you "lose all organic connection to the culture of your ancestors" simply by

I don't think there is such a thing as losing the culture but a development into a different direction after the fork (migration).

A classic identity problem of the Indian diaspora or the Turkish immigrants in Germany or the Irish in Boston, or the Italian in NY is that they have retained many of the traditional values that were popular at the time in their countries before they left. But their old countries have moved on in every sense. These tribes then become more conservative because they feel like they have to defend their values from outside groups and from lack of new values that they can tie to their old labels. But what they "defend" no longer reflects the reality back in the old country.

This leads to some strange (but IMO understandable behaviors) where the old is much more idealized than what their peers do back in the old country. E.g.:

- Turkish AKP voters in Germany who only remember all the prosperity Erdogan has brought to an economically failing Turkey. - The 3rd or 4th gen Italians in the US are hardly Italians in todays sense of Italy (even their food is laughed at back in their own country. - Eventually the culture changes so much that it has no parallel to what it used to be.

That is neither good nor bad IMO it just is a natural progression and adaption to their new environment. Shedding the old values and stories people tell themselves takes not years but generations. The odd thing about the US is that despite its many influences from all around the world it is still a country where many groups hold on to what they think are their roots while actually it's a constant state of change and no longer exists.

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

#63

Post by rm445 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #27
Grimm1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, Irish people would be of Celtic or Norman (Which I'll still probably get some pushback for saying.) ancestry. Anglo-Saxons settled the rest of the area and ever since there's been some type of issue between the groups. An Irish person describing themselves as Anglo-Saxon is entirely divorced from the roots of where many Irish people are descended, there has always been a lot of trying to erase and…

Note that no one callled them Normans before the 1800s. They called themselves English when they conquered Ireland. The Irish (Gaels) called them Saxons (Sassenach) or foreigners (Gall). After the conversion of the English to Protestantism there was a yawning chasm between the Old English (Catholic) and the New, but no one ever used Norman contemporaneously.

That can't be right. The Normans as a people played a major part in European history from at least the year 911 through the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). I've never seen the faintest indication that they weren't still called Normans after leaving Normandy, by themselves and others, e.g when invading England and Italy.

I guess you meant more that the term fell out of use in England at some point, and Norman-descended people in England called themselves English. But even so, Norman is still a recognisable ethnicity - norse people who settled in France, spread by conquest into England, Malta etc. It could be a useful contemporary or historical label even if those people at a given time called themselves something else.

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

#64

Post by deviantfero »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #49
deviantfero wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the hispanic comment, Spanish is a naturally gendered language, you cannot form a sentence without giving gender to at least the subject, for example "la doctora toma el café por la mañana" would translate to "the (female) doctor drinks (male) coffee by the (female) morning" because English is a mostly gender neutral language you would loose all gender information by literally translating that sentence. Now if we…

> That said, the latinx movement is kind of relevant in Argentina IIRC, but in most other latin american countries the idea will be met with a lot of resistance and rejection. I would go even further than that. The US-centric idea of Latino as a unified identity (let alone with the x ), often based on North-American stereotypes of Mexican and Caribbean cultures, can be off-putting in Latin American countries. As an e…

I would argue about that, I'm salvadoran, never been to the states and I would gladly say I'm latino, we even have an expression when we go abroad, "I miss the latino heat" which means that we miss the warm weather and friendly disposition of people in latin american countries, it's a weird phenomenon that you can't experience if you're not from a Spanish speaking country and have not gone abroad.

Generally speaking when you're in your country you'll sometimes have strong opinions about your neighbouring countries, Hondurans are this, Guatemalans are that, but when you're outside your country and you run into other latin american people, in my experience it was something really special we would greet each other as if we were long time friends, I think there's something more to it than language, I think most latin american people can relate to a certain kind of burden that comes with living in a latin american country, those burdens and the problems our societies have are pretty similar all around and I think when we meet in foreign countries we immediately relate in the way we perceive our societies and the things we've lived through.

Just as an anecdote, I went to Paris for a vacation and I went into a Five guys restaurant, usually you have to pay for a soda refill, but there was a dominican guy who was a waiter and he heard me and my SO speaking Spanish and he immediately smiled and came over and we had a nice conversation about our countries, and he let me refill our sodas for free, it's really nice and I don't know if other regions have something like this

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

#65

Post by nborwankar »

barry-cotter wrote: post #2

> It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III) This is what assimilation looks like. Someone with an Irish name calling themselves Anglo-Saxon. It’s like a Hispanic person calling themselves Latinx, proof that they have lost all organic connection to the culture of their ancestors.

This is so on-brand for HN - the article is about a writer now working as a delivery driver which is a juicy topic in itself, but most of the discussion is down the rabbit hole on an entirely tangential matter.

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

#66

Post by barry-cotter »

Swizec wrote: post #42
ipaddr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is nationalism. Northern French genes look like anglo-saxon or viking while southern France genes looks Ibarian or Italian. The generic pool in europe doesn't map to one country one set of genes usually. Some do better than others. At what point does someone become French considering it has been a melting pot for a long time?

In my experience the typical perception is that you’re X when your parents and grandparents are all X, hopefully also great grandparents. There is a lot more melting recently. Europe historically has been pretty big on cultural identity because everyone had/has a grudge with their neighbors for trying to assimilate them at the edges. Slavs for example (I’m from Slovenia) can trace or Slavic lineage all the way back t…

> There is a lot more melting recently.

No, there really isn’t. It may look like there is because of the post WW2 ethnic cleansing leading to more or less monoethnic monolinguistic nation states but the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were always indifferent to what the peasants “were“, like the peasants themselves, mostly. People cared a lot more about religion than ethnicity almost everywhere in Europe until after the French Revolution. The tiny urban, bourgeois or well traveled population were the exception. Everybody else mostly just rolled with it. Most French people didn’t speak a Romance dialect modeled after the Parisian one until well after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

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

#67

Post by cbozeman »

seibelj wrote: post #33
ipaddr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get forced to work in jobs they don't want to all of the time. The array of possible jobs could be one or none. If a basic income existed your point could be true. That's not reality today.

I believe that in the USA you would have a much harder time finding an able-bodied person who cannot find an available job vs. someone with multiple options. My news this week is full of stories of employers who cannot find enough labor. We are very far away from a jobs crisis.

> My news this week is full of stories of employers who cannot find enough labor.

Yeah, they can't find enough labor because they want to pay people $15 an hour in an area where the median home price is $572,000. I work in logistics. I occasionally overhear some of executive staff down the hall from my office complain about being unable to keep workers in a non-climate controlled warehouse, lifting enormously heavy things, for 8 hours a day, in one of the richest areas of Texas that isn't Houston or Dallas.

Gee, I can't imagine why people wouldn't want to work in a warehouse in 100 degree F weather, lifting 30-80 lbs. boxes for 8 hours.

So I pulled data on that warehouse and it's location. In-N-Out is hiring just 10 miles away for $16 an hour. Yeah, it's not a great job either, but it's air conditioned. And you won't be lifting anything heavier than a box of fries. Furthermore, the cheapest rent within a 10 mile radius of that warehouse is $1700. Good luck paying that on $15 an hour.

So yeah, I can understand why employers can't find workers...

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

#68

Post by barry-cotter »

rm445 wrote: post #63
barry-cotter wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that no one callled them Normans before the 1800s. They called themselves English when they conquered Ireland. The Irish (Gaels) called them Saxons (Sassenach) or foreigners (Gall). After the conversion of the English to Protestantism there was a yawning chasm between the Old English (Catholic) and the New, but no one ever used Norman contemporaneously.

That can't be right. The Normans as a people played a major part in European history from at least the year 911 through the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). I've never seen the faintest indication that they weren't still called Normans after leaving Normandy, by themselves and others, e.g when invading England and Italy. I guess you meant more that the term fell out of use in England at some point, and Norman-descended…

The people who invaded England and Italy were called Normans. The people who invaded Ireland called themselves English, and were called English by the Irish.

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

#69

Post by sneak »

cbozeman wrote: post #67
seibelj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that in the USA you would have a much harder time finding an able-bodied person who cannot find an available job vs. someone with multiple options. My news this week is full of stories of employers who cannot find enough labor. We are very far away from a jobs crisis.

> My news this week is full of stories of employers who cannot find enough labor. Yeah, they can't find enough labor because they want to pay people $15 an hour in an area where the median home price is $572,000. I work in logistics. I occasionally overhear some of executive staff down the hall from my office complain about being unable to keep workers in a non-climate controlled warehouse, lifting enormously heavy t…

The market is always a negotiation between buyers and sellers, naturally.

I have for years always gotten emails from recruiters trying to hire me as an FTE for SWE jobs in nothing towns in flyover states at 6x less than what I charge, too. Those positions are similarly unfilled.

People pick their best options available, usually.

If they can't find/keep labor for $15/hour, that means the price for labor in their market is greater than $15/hour. That's a good thing, as that's not true most places on this planet.

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

#70

Post by barry-cotter »

pessimizer wrote: post #43
seibelj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that in the USA you would have a much harder time finding an able-bodied person who cannot find an available job vs. someone with multiple options. My news this week is full of stories of employers who cannot find enough labor. We are very far away from a jobs crisis.

You can take a job that pays a penny an hour, but you can't live on a job that pays a penny an hour.

No you can’t. That would be illegal.
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