The Trevor Project, as an example, aims to reduce suicide in LGBT youth. If "encouraging kids not to kill themselves" is a "political" act to you, I really don't like your politics.
You're completely missing the point. He's saying that for everyone's sake, contextualizing the numbers improves the quality of everyone's understanding and helps determine the actual significance of the news. You and I both would benefit, not just him.
In the information age and the knowledge society, unfortunately we don't need this industrial revolution legacy of boom in population growth to service factories and mines and the AI era and app economy would exacerbate the problem and squeeze more people.
We as humanity at a crossroads in our history as species and a civilization and we need to stand up to this challenge and conquer our problems and fears.
Finally, I must congratulate on your contributions to the progress of humanity, every good word counts and every good idea enriches out lives.
I can attest to that. I am not American and I believe that one of the bright spots in America is the entrepreneurial spirit of its people in general.
People in America love taking risk and pushing the envelope experimenting with new stuff and technologies and that's one of the major strengths of this nation but I wouldn't go too far to express something like this far better than anyone else in the world. That's just absurd patriotism and there's no doubt about it.
It's taking them a long time since the announcement of the new framework at React conf. They said they would release an Android compatible version soon and still we're waiting for any updates beside the usual cliche.
Sorry for the inconvenience. If you need something to fill the time while waiting for them to deliver your free software, maybe you should try contributing to an open source project.
The lingering question for me now seems to be if these people can afford purchasing the services of Alfred & Co, why didn't they pick or hire a maid to do all the domestic chores & errands for them???
Good job Lauren ... I really enjoyed reading the article ... NYT caliber indeed but I wish that you could give more space to workers so they could express their points of view regarding the whole situation.
Don't underestimate the value in a multitude of skills. When Argentina's economy collapsed in 2001, I'd prefer to know how to write code, do laundry, and wash toilets than only knowing how to write code.
I went to university with a girl who didn't know how to operate a dishwasher. At first, I assumed it was because her family had not been wealthy enough to own a dishwasher; later, I found out it was because they were so wealthy they had servants who loaded and ran their dishwasher for them.
The problem I have with people who say things like this is that these things are easily Googlable. I didn't "know" how to do laundry until I went to college (my sister and I had specific chores and laundry was one of hers). During a fight with my sister when I was still in high school, I recall her using that as an insult: "You don't even know how to do LAUNDRY".
I needed to do laundry my first week of school: I couldn't (and to this day can't) even fathom what the phrase "know how to do laundry" meant. Separate whites and colors (or don't), put the clothes in the machine, and press the button.......what kind of mental deficiency is required for someone to think there's an actual gap between "knowing how to do laundry" and "not knowing how".
Loading a dishwasher and cleaning a toilet would seem to be similar. The only gap between "knowing" and "not knowing" is perhaps three seconds of Googling (in case there's some pitfall about what you can and can't put in there).
That example is not relevant in the slightest. Setting up a router quite clearly requires prior knowledge, even if that knowledge is something implicit like "familiarity with navigating Web UIs" or "general familiarity with basic networking concepts".
Neither of those are applicable to doing laundry. There's literally no knowledge required other than "clothes and detergent go into machine". Hell, you don't even have to know WHERE to put detergent because machines are variable enough that they usually just tell you where to put detergent.
Honestly, that stuff is a lot harder to do than you seem to think it is. My gf has never even bothered separating whites and colors and she's never ruined any article of clothing in the laundry. By contrast, setting up a router is not something you can just feel your way through without _any_ prior knowledge (even prior knowledge unrelated to that specific model). Shit, without prior knowledge you couldn't even get to the router config page.
> Or mixed ammonia and bleach to clean a floor?
The first part of your comment was a reasonable point, but what the hell are you talking about here? You do your laundry using bleach and ammonia....on your floor?
So you screw up once and you learn. Why do you have to learn now, when your labor is in demand, rather than later (accepting OP premise) when the value of your labor has been arbitraged away?
Presumably the people delivering groceries or doing someone elses laundry weren't making $50/hour in the same profession at some earlier point in their career.
But these jobs just didn't exist(unless you count full time maids for example), so it doesn't make sense to talk about job security or whether they were contractors or not.
I'm not sure we have enough data yet to say whether the people doing these jobs previously did or didn't have better paying or more secure jobs. Anecdotally, there are many people whose income and job security have severely declined, and who been relegated to low payed variable-workforce service jobs. I don't know to what extent people like that are represented among the taskrabbit-type service workers.
