I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018) • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by cthalupa » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #50

Swizec wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are fighting words in Europe. We are very serious about our ethnicism. Akin to saying that someone from Philly might as well be from LA, it’s all just a city. Or that the Warriors might as well be the New York Yankees, it’s just sports. PS; this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA – not anglo-saxon

> this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA This is not true. They were the worst sort of white, the worst sort of people, Catholics, but the US legal system went to great lengths to categorize people by racial category and all of the ethnic groups you named were always considered white.

Half true. Historians have written on this quite a bit, but this article gives a solid overview:

https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-a...

At points in time, some states have had laws on the books that 100% differentiated between "white" people and other European immigrants.

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

#102

Post by username90 » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

hackeraccount wrote: post #58

barry-cotter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn’t call himself European, or white, utterly anodyne words. He called his name Anglo-Saxon. That you didn’t immediately understand the difference shows that you don’t get it . Which is fine. If you’re not Irish and don’t claim to be that’s cool. You do you. Americans do their American thing, Irish people do their Irish thing and we all happily exchange cultures and products and talk shit about each other as hum…

Knowingly or not it's not hard to take the point which is that "Anglo-Saxon" has lost any meaning beyond fair skinned at this point for the vast majority of people. Anyone reading the source knew what the author meant even those who were knew and were annoyed by the incorrectness. The comparison to "latinx" is apt though - I should see it as a flag but instead it's like nails on a chalkboard because it's everything I…

> "Anglo-Saxon" has lost any meaning beyond fair skinned at this point for the vast majority of people.

Maybe in USA, I don't know anyone who uses it like that.

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

#103

Post by justinator » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #97

cbozeman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Surely it makes no sense to compare the median home price to the lowest paying jobs? We don’t really expect people who earn the least to be buying the median house. (And it’s silly to think that 100% home ownership is some kind of ideal, it has a lot of negative consequences so we’re better off with many people renting). This claim would be stronger if you compared to the bottom 10% of housing, say.

Not sure what the housing market is where you live, but you can't get a house here, unless you make an offer 35% over asking and have cash on hand. Could you get a house for < million? Perhaps but it'll be "a fixer upper" to put it humorously. You're more likely looking at a trailer, and those have 5 year waiting period.

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

#104

Post by justinator » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47

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. If someone said this about employment in software dev there'd be a thousand comments about how there isn't a shortage of labor, just of labor at the price point businesses want to pay.

There's a difference though. The news stories you're reading are about employees that are offering pay that's at a similar rate as unemployment benefits.

Workers are not OK working on slave wages that these employees want to pay them.

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

#105

Post by jcranmer » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #20

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…

Angles and saxons were 2 tribes from modern day Germany who migrated to England for better farming and conditions. They're a very small part of "white". A very small part even of "British" descent. Even in England, not everyone is Anglo Saxon, the ruling classes are Norman, there are Celts still, Cornish people count themselves out, Londoners date back to pre-Roman times, vikings settled some areas...

Actually, the term Anglo-Saxon refers to the traditionally three tribes (and probably at least four tribes) who emigrated from the Frisian coast region (North Sea coasts of Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands): the Jutes (traditionally originating from Jutland, the main Danish peninsula), the Angles (traditionally from the neck that is part Danish and part German), and the Saxons (which would have been from what is now northern Germany). The fourth group of the Frisian coast is of course the Frisians, (originating from what is now northern Netherlands), and while they are not traditionally held to have been part of the emigration, it's thought that they also made the journey. Frisian today is one of the closest languages to English.

It also doesn't help that our literary sources for this period are very few, non-contemporary (i.e., talking about what happened a few centuries ago), and reliant on state societies talking about non-state societies. Naturally, they use inconsistent terminology for talking about the ethnicity of who is where, and the term "Saxon" appears to be pretty interchangeable for much of northern Germany. The modern term "Anglo-Saxon" thus effectively means "English German," arising largely to distinguish the Saxons who lived in England from those who lived in Germany.

Functionally speaking, you can divide the ethnicities of Britain into 5: the original Celtic speakers, the Romanized Celtics who were part of the province of Britannia, the first wave of Germanic immigrants (Anglo-Saxons), the second wave of Germanic immigrants (the Norse), and the third wave of Germanic immigrants (the Normans), this one largely limited to a very small ruling class.

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

#106

Post by skystarman » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #21

seibelj wrote: post #12

> Lurching west in stop-and-go traffic on I-80 that morning, bound for Berkeley and a day of delivering in the rain, I had a low moment, dwelling on how far I’d come down in the world. Then I snapped out of it. I haven’t come down in the world. What’s come down in the world is the business model that sustained Time Inc. for decades. I’m pretty much the same writer, the same guy. I haven’t gone anywhere. My feet are t…

Every argument against Amazon-the-employer I have read recently seems to pretend that the people who work there have no choice but to work for Amazon, as if they didn't pick the job for themselves out of the array of possible options available to them. I have a lot of issues with the way Amazon operates, but precisely nobody is forced to work there. This article does a good job of pointing that out.

And for all the shrieking about Amazon destroying "mom and pop" shops these people never admit that Amazon pays their employees much more, often 2x what the mom and pop's did.

Or did you really think mom and pop were paying the teens running their bookstore $17/hr? You think they had great health insurance and other benefits?

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

#107

Post by dominotw » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

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…

> where the median home price is $572,000

Where did all the money come from in last 1 year to inflate the prices to this insanity.

So asset inflation is eventually going to make impact on labor prices and cause inflation. Then is why FED so cocksure that inflation is no big deal.

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

I don't understand why employers cant simply pay more and pass on the costs to their consumers. What's stoping them.

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

#108

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #91

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm majority Anglo (like, actually from England), but I have a Spanish last name from one of my grandparents, who in turn is a patrilineal native American whose family adopted Spanish naming some time in the distant unremembered past. The author's terminology could easily be correct in reference to himself, irrespective of his name. That said, I question the relevancy of this comment to the story.

> native American whose family adopted Spanish naming some time in the distant unremembered past I'm curious: what kind of Native Americans were they that would willingly adopt Spanish names as indigenous, and not mestizo, peoples, especially given that Spanish contact was pretty violent across most of North America?

I'm not familiar with the details, sorry. Just repeating what I've been told by my dad. Granddad never really volunteered much demographic info about his family and, for better or worse, it is not something I interrogated too deeply. It doesn't impact me directly all that much as I am for all intents and purposes white -- that's what I answer on e.g. college applications or government forms, and it's what anyone would think looking at me. The only exception is my name.

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

#109

Post by skystarman » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

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…

And I would bet you a week's pay the "job creators" who are complaining they can't find people willing to work for peanuts doing backbreaking miserable labor are the first to claim "we're full, no more immigrants!" to the US when there are plenty of folks in neighboring countries willing to work these jobs and pay taxes...

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

#110

Post by nitrogen » Sun, May 02, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #85

gonehome wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - I liked that part of his essay too, I also just generally liked his writing. There’s something satisfying in this kind of work with clear explicit goals and getting through the list everyday. I think a lot of society issues seem to stem from how he briefly felt, that this kind of thing was a sign of failure or that he was embarrassed to tell friends at the holiday party. The irony to me is that this kind of wo…

There would probably be more respect even if nothing else changed except they paid more.

I knew a UPS long-haul driver who was making over $100k in 2003.