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> While permalancing at Vice’s tech pub Motherboard I was paid a whopping $300 per story to write 382 articles over five years, covering everything from the dea

> While permalancing at Vice’s tech pub Motherboard I was paid a whopping $300 per story to write 382 articles over five years, covering everything from the death of local journalism and the empty hype surrounding 5G, to regulatory capture and the corrupt mess that is U.S. telecom policy. I read the linked articles, and honestly $300 seems pretty fair, maybe even a bit much. > brutal exploitation Umm, slaves on a sugar plantation were brutally exploited. Kulaks in the gulag were brutally exploited. Folks who sit at their laptops and work indoors are not brutally exploited. > an extraction class I don’t carry much water for executive leadership, but I wonder who extracted more money from the revenue of Vice: its executives, or everyone else on its payroll. As a class, do executives in the U.S. make more money than the sum total of welfare, public education and student loan forgiveness? The top 5% of earners pay 63% of taxes; the top 1% 42.3% Who is extracting from whom? I see more and more question-begging headlines like this. ‘Justice Smith Devastates Liberals!’ ‘Jon Stewart Crushes John Smith!’ ‘Congressman Jones Destroys Crybabies!’ ‘Peter Jones’s Threat to Our Democracy’ They aren’t journalism; at best, they are opinion. Too commonly, they aren’t even carefully considered opinion, just emotive bleating. They are worse than worthless, nothing but ragebait. Almost as bad are the clickbait title ‘Beloved Hotel Closes Its Doors For The Last Time’ (click and find out that it’s a motel in East Podunk); ‘Plastics Pose Danger To Your Kids’ (click and discover that it’s about infants smothering when given plastic bags to play with — something every knew was a bad idea literally decades ago). I think the ragebait is worse, but all of it is just horrible. And the rise of AI makes it easier and easier to generate this low-cost, high-noise dreck. The media landscape is doomed.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
> As a class, do executives in the U.S. make more money than the sum total of welfare, public education and student loan forgiveness? Great example of false equivalence! > The top 5% of earners pay 63% of taxes; the top 1% 42.3% Who is extracting from whom? The top is extracting the bottom. The top earners often pay, as a percentage, less than lower earners. But the fact they pay so much in absolute terms is because they have all the f'ing money! How did they get it? Through extraction from all those people who work as hard and likely harder than them, but still earn comparatively nothing.
hn_acker 3y ago
> Umm, slaves on a sugar plantation were brutally exploited. Kulaks in the gulag were brutally exploited. Folks who sit at their laptops and work indoors are not brutally exploited. 1. You are making a fallacy of relative privation. Problems that aren't as bad as other problems can still be big problems. If you're merely complaining about the semantics of "brutal exploitation", very unfair payment could be considered "brutal exploitation" in the context of treating mildly unfair payment as "[merely] exploitation". (Disclaimer: I have no idea what a fair payment for writing a journalistic article for Vice is, so I don't know how fair or unfair $300 is.) 2. Improvements of working conditions since the past are by themselves a terrible argument against further improvements of working conditions.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

> As a class, do executives in the U.S. make more money than the sum total of welfare, public education and student loan forgiveness? Great example of false equivalence! > The top 5% of earners pay 63% of taxes; the top 1% 42.3% Who is extracting from whom? The top is extracting the bottom. The top earners often pay, as a percentage, less than lower earners. But the fact they pay so much in absolute terms is because they have all the f'ing money! How did they get it? Through extraction from all those people who work as hard and likely harder than them, but still earn comparatively nothing.

hn_acker 3y ago

> Umm, slaves on a sugar plantation were brutally exploited. Kulaks in the gulag were brutally exploited. Folks who sit at their laptops and work indoors are not brutally exploited. 1. You are making a fallacy of relative privation. Problems that aren't as bad as other problems can still be big problems. If you're merely complaining about the semantics of "brutal exploitation", very unfair payment could be considered "brutal exploitation" in the context of treating mildly unfair payment as "[merely] exploitation". (Disclaimer: I have no idea what a fair payment for writing a journalistic article for Vice is, so I don't know how fair or unfair $300 is.) 2. Improvements of working conditions since the past are by themselves a terrible argument against further improvements of working conditions.