<story><title>The dangers of high status, low wage jobs</title><url>https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-of-high-status-low-wage-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>I think the point is that nobody wants to make some account, then pre-load that account with money, and then wonder what the balance is, etc. etc. etc. Yuck! If this problem is going to be properly solved, someone has to solve the [evidently very hard] problem of being able to send $0.25 over the Internet without all these accounts and without getting overwhelmed with fees from the banking establishment.&lt;p&gt;If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical, business, or security constraints, what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site. Isn&amp;#x27;t something like that the holy grail? No need to &amp;quot;have an account&amp;quot; at the web site, and &amp;quot;have an account&amp;quot; with the payment processor or pre-load things with funds or any of that garbage. I already have a bank account, why do I need a handful of other accounts all over the place?&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s the UX. I think it would be successful. But nobody has managed to build it yet.</text></item><item><author>khalladay</author><text>I could be misremembering, but this seems like an idea that&amp;#x27;s been tried (and failed before). I have a memory of a service whose pitch was that you&amp;#x27;d load funds into an account (a 1 time large transaction to get past the CC fees), and then individual sites could request micropayments from that account balance. No crypto then of course, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure adding crypto makes this idea functionally different from how it looks without it.&lt;p&gt;I could be totally off my rocker, but I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure I remember this from sometime around the early 2010&amp;#x27;s ?</text></item><item><author>ekanes</author><text>Please ignore if this takes us off-topic, but is this a case for micropayments, done via cryptocurrency?  Because I think a successful implementation of micropayments might solve for this.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want to subscribe to any regular news, but I&amp;#x27;d be happy to click a button that gives $.25 to the author&amp;#x2F;site.&lt;p&gt;That doesn&amp;#x27;t work with CC fees, but if micropayments done via crypto (there are many with low&amp;#x2F;no transaction costs).</text></item><item><author>bwestergard</author><text>&amp;quot;If you’re curious why unionization has taken the journalism world by storm the last few years, you don’t have to look to politics or in-group signaling for an explanation, basic economics will get you all the way there.... You reduce quantity of labor supplied and end up with higher equilibrium wages for those who manage to get their foot in the door. Of course, this will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot in the $3200&amp;#x2F;mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and using “semiotics” correctly in a sentence, but that’s neither here nor there.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is a cute theory, and tickles some people&amp;#x27;s ideological fancy. But if the author had done more research, they would know where the CWA-NewsGuild is actually doing most of its new organizing (hint: not New York), what sorts of contract articles they bargain around hiring, and what the status quo in non-union newsrooms is.&lt;p&gt;In brief, the Guild has been organizing tons of local newspapers in small cities and rural areas, particularly those bought up by private equity firms who want to cut the newsroom to the bone. They bargain contract articles that curb the nepotistic in-group hiring practices common at non-union papers.&lt;p&gt;Source: I&amp;#x27;m a former NewsGuild member, but at a software company, not a newspaper.&lt;p&gt;Take a gander at the NewsGuild president&amp;#x27;s twitter account and you&amp;#x27;ll see many examples of these campaigns: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;gaufre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;gaufre&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meetups323</author><text>This is what Web3 is supposed to be. &amp;quot;Want to store some data? Just pay the market rate for data storage!&amp;quot; Of course they chose the most expensive and unwieldy data storage mechanism imaginable.&lt;p&gt;Inb4 &amp;quot;but X chain is so cheap!&amp;quot;, all chains are cheap until they&amp;#x27;re popular. Make a chain that gets faster&amp;amp;cheaper to commit on as the amount of compute on it increases (as you would expect... pretty much any CS thing to work) and you&amp;#x27;ve solved web3. Oh but then the asset is inherently inflationary and people care more about getting in on the next big hockey stick than sound financial instruments. So... there you have it.</text></comment>
<story><title>The dangers of high status, low wage jobs</title><url>https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-of-high-status-low-wage-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>I think the point is that nobody wants to make some account, then pre-load that account with money, and then wonder what the balance is, etc. etc. etc. Yuck! If this problem is going to be properly solved, someone has to solve the [evidently very hard] problem of being able to send $0.25 over the Internet without all these accounts and without getting overwhelmed with fees from the banking establishment.&lt;p&gt;If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical, business, or security constraints, what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site. Isn&amp;#x27;t something like that the holy grail? No need to &amp;quot;have an account&amp;quot; at the web site, and &amp;quot;have an account&amp;quot; with the payment processor or pre-load things with funds or any of that garbage. I already have a bank account, why do I need a handful of other accounts all over the place?&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s the UX. I think it would be successful. But nobody has managed to build it yet.</text></item><item><author>khalladay</author><text>I could be misremembering, but this seems like an idea that&amp;#x27;s been tried (and failed before). I have a memory of a service whose pitch was that you&amp;#x27;d load funds into an account (a 1 time large transaction to get past the CC fees), and then individual sites could request micropayments from that account balance. No crypto then of course, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure adding crypto makes this idea functionally different from how it looks without it.&lt;p&gt;I could be totally off my rocker, but I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure I remember this from sometime around the early 2010&amp;#x27;s ?</text></item><item><author>ekanes</author><text>Please ignore if this takes us off-topic, but is this a case for micropayments, done via cryptocurrency?  Because I think a successful implementation of micropayments might solve for this.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want to subscribe to any regular news, but I&amp;#x27;d be happy to click a button that gives $.25 to the author&amp;#x2F;site.&lt;p&gt;That doesn&amp;#x27;t work with CC fees, but if micropayments done via crypto (there are many with low&amp;#x2F;no transaction costs).</text></item><item><author>bwestergard</author><text>&amp;quot;If you’re curious why unionization has taken the journalism world by storm the last few years, you don’t have to look to politics or in-group signaling for an explanation, basic economics will get you all the way there.... You reduce quantity of labor supplied and end up with higher equilibrium wages for those who manage to get their foot in the door. Of course, this will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot in the $3200&amp;#x2F;mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and using “semiotics” correctly in a sentence, but that’s neither here nor there.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is a cute theory, and tickles some people&amp;#x27;s ideological fancy. But if the author had done more research, they would know where the CWA-NewsGuild is actually doing most of its new organizing (hint: not New York), what sorts of contract articles they bargain around hiring, and what the status quo in non-union newsrooms is.&lt;p&gt;In brief, the Guild has been organizing tons of local newspapers in small cities and rural areas, particularly those bought up by private equity firms who want to cut the newsroom to the bone. They bargain contract articles that curb the nepotistic in-group hiring practices common at non-union papers.&lt;p&gt;Source: I&amp;#x27;m a former NewsGuild member, but at a software company, not a newspaper.&lt;p&gt;Take a gander at the NewsGuild president&amp;#x27;s twitter account and you&amp;#x27;ll see many examples of these campaigns: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;gaufre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;gaufre&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>Back in the dot-com era (and maybe since), there were some startups in the micropayments space.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical, business, or security constraints, what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site.&lt;p&gt;That sounds like exposing my bank account quite a bit too freely. The obvious approach is that you have an account with someone who collects the money and distributes it--and yes it would probably be prepaid.&lt;p&gt;In any case, if there were a demand the technical and UX problems can be overcome. The bigger issue, other than establishing the network, are getting people to actually pay per article--given that we&amp;#x27;ve mostly moved to all you can eat subscriptions for other media--at an amount that would actually pay the bills. And in light of the fact that a lot of people don&amp;#x27;t want mental transaction costs to decide if reading an article is worth it every time they want to read something. (Which Clay Shirky brought up 20 years ago.)</text></comment>