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…
Even in English, he/his was considered gender-neutral in context. It's only in the last few years that a plural "they" has confusingly taken its place. I still get tripped up when I see singular "they." I have to stop and re-read the sentence because I think I missed something.
Meh -- they've done themselves such harm in recent years by embracing activism and deliberate bias that it's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry. That said, I'll applaud whichever journalists are brave enough to start pushing their industry/art back towards objectivity and diversity of perspective.
Faux-objective journalism is such a soulless drag. Everyone has biases, attempting to hide them is just gutless.
The presence of bias in an individual jounalist as a human is expected. But being a professional means having some standards that boost trust in the profession overall.
Clearly you wouldn't say that judges and police and prosecutors should just follow their biases and go after whoever they want or protect whoever they want.
Journalists don't have any legal obligation to follow standards, but they do have a professional obligation.
Meh -- they've done themselves such harm in recent years by embracing activism and deliberate bias that it's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry. That said, I'll applaud whichever journalists are brave enough to start pushing their industry/art back towards objectivity and diversity of perspective.
Faux-objective journalism is such a soulless drag. Everyone has biases, attempting to hide them is just gutless.
So the fact that all information is biased is an excuse to force your own ideological bias into every communication?
This is as much of a fallacy as the common "everything is political" refrain. It's nothing but a dangerous rationalization of tribalism which breeds distrust of institutions and disenfranchises political minorities when the entire establishment leans in a particular direction and simultaneously determines the set of "acceptable" or "authoritative" sources. News media, "fact checkers", Wikipedia editors, etc. are implicitly colluding and the results are already manifesting with long term disastrous cultural and political consequences that we are yet to fully witness. There is no excuse for the hyper polarization of modern media, it is a disservice to everyone, and we need to un-normalize the kind of insidious activist journalism that has infested all of our major publications, though the system is self reinforcing at this point.
> 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…
Amazon treats their workers like shit. Nearly all low-wage (and yes, Amazon is still "low-wage" given the work involved) employers do. In Amazon's case they then hire armies of corporate apologists to swarm social media and astroturf any time anyone tries to talk about the shitty way workers are treated. All of this is well established fact at this point. I'm glad the author is doing well. But these are not good jobs…
There's a good book on such jobs called "Nickel and Dimed"[1] by Barbara Ehrenreich, who went "undercover" and worked a bunch of such low-paid jobs.
A quote from the book:
"When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you ... The "working poor" ... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone."
How can we fix that? Many of my family members and friends have little to no interest in reading or learning, although they do have strong opinions on just about every topic. In my mind, demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read. They have enough things trying to grab their attention that provide an instant gratification — whereas journalism or r…
"How can we fix that? ... demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read." The education system needs to be radically reformed to teach kids to value reading, knowledge, and learning for its own sake and not just to pass tests and get in to schools that will get them high paying jobs. Critical reading and thinking skills also need to be taught more ef…
The presumption that the average person is interested in learning, or can be taught to be interested in learning, especially regarding difficult subjects like science and math, is completely false. The average person is fundamentally incompetent and lazy, and that's the danger of excessively optimistic and unrealistically empowering western culture - you end up with an army of ignoramuses who drastically overestimate their knowledge and abilities, and simultaneously as a consequence become less able to recognize competence or it's value in, for example, politicians or authority figures. I think this is one of the major accelerants in the decay of western society, at least in the US.
Journalism has become such a tough field. I know a number of people who do OK in it. But I know a whole lot more who do writing-related stuff for companies that sell products.
How can we fix that? Many of my family members and friends have little to no interest in reading or learning, although they do have strong opinions on just about every topic. In my mind, demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read. They have enough things trying to grab their attention that provide an instant gratification — whereas journalism or r…
I think the point of maximum leverage is making it easier to support good journalism via tools that don't have a corruptible middleman. It's impossible to support truly independent journalists via platforms like Patreon when those platforms are in bed with institutions like Vice, anyone who is truly independent and covering dangerous stories is subject to being memory-holed. But the desire to directly support real journalism is there, I think it just needs a robust payment system which is also robust to corruption in its own organization.
Oil industry workers don’t seem to carry much clout, kind of a dirty job with a lot of physical labor, but pays quite well and has for a while. Truckers can still make an upper middle class salary, especially if they own their truck or focus on a niche (refrigerated, military deliveries, cross border, etc.)
I was actually thinking of underwater welders when I wrote that. Not all oil industry jobs pay well but that one really can, and it carries the cachet to boot. It's definitely manual labor royalty - dangerous, highly skilled and pays up to $300k. Truckers are not doing so well these days, and where they do make a lot it's typically because of backbreaking labor and/or taking on financial risks. This still only gets y…
Meh -- they've done themselves such harm in recent years by embracing activism and deliberate bias that it's hard for me to feel too bad for the industry. That said, I'll applaud whichever journalists are brave enough to start pushing their industry/art back towards objectivity and diversity of perspective.
Faux-objective journalism is such a soulless drag. Everyone has biases, attempting to hide them is just gutless.
Faux-objective journalism is such a soulless drag. Everyone has biases, attempting to hide them is just gutless.
If doctors just prescribed whatever gave the bigger commission from drug companies, would you ever trust a doctor?
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?
I personally think it's ridiculous that people find it amazing that 15 an hour is considered amazing pay for anyone that isn't a teenager working their first job, but Amazon gets high praise for doing it. Most people on here would laugh at a job that pays 600 a week, 2400 a month or 28800 a year before taxes.