This sort of argument comes up all the time, claiming governments somehow screw everything up but private industry has some sort of amazing track record at producing value.
There’s a continuous stream of evidence to the contrary, particularly if you’ve ever worked for large companies and seen the kind of wasted resources that go toward pet projects and other high value items that fail miserably.
The difference of course is that one costs tax payers whereas the other costs shareholders, and in one case (government and tax payers) there is some hope of oversight and accountability. If shareholders actually knew about this sort of waste I am not sure they would ultimately care because they may chalk it up to the cost of doing business.
> There’s a continuous stream of evidence to the contrary, particularly if you’ve ever worked for large companies and seen the kind of wasted resources that go toward pet projects and other high value items that fail miserably.
There's also a continuous stream of evidence not to the contrary, particularly if you've ever worked for the government and seen the kind of wasted resources that go toward pet projects and other high value items that fail miserably.
The difference of course is that one costs taxpayers whereas the other costs shareholders, and in one case (government and tax payers) the only feedback mechanism is votes every couple of years, which don't really make any difference because incumbent reelection rates are in the high 90s even though Congress's approval ratings often drop into single digits. Whereas shareholders (or their proxies, mutual funds) can simply sell a company's stock if it looks like the company is wasting resources; stocks get traded every day.
Unfortunately I don’t recall which podcast it was, perhaps 99% Invisible, but one had a show on this. One of the things they mentioned was that during WW II now-liberal enclaves like Berkeley told the federal government that they wouldn’t allow housing to be built for black shipbuilders, and similarly Richmond refused but eventually relented on the condition they all be moved out at the conclusion of the war.
There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.
> As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.
Questions like this, although very interesting, just don’t fit the Q&A format they are promoting, where they aim to be free of debate and opinion.
Around the time of Occupy Wall Street I was predicting that we would either see populists start winning elections and/or a violent uprising sometime in the next couple decades.
I still think we’ll continue headed in that direction until we start to heal some of the fractures in the US and start to find some common ground and work toward common benefit rather than strictly towards short-term selfish interests.
The term 'populist' used to just mean popular. It was synonomous with democracy. We've somehow repurposed it to mean something that's closer to authoritarian and bigoted.
My observation is that a lot of teachers knew they were going into a profession known for low pay but lacked the financial literacy and practical experience at college age to understand that “low pay” meant “struggling to survive” rather than “you’re not going to own the biggest house on the block.”
As a result they walk out of school with debt, find it difficult to find a position (because e.g. some high school level positions in the US have very few vacancies), and end up taking whatever they can get or if they cannot get anything in teaching take some other low-wage job after following their passion led them to a short-term dead-end.
I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.
I don’t know how often they are successful at getting photographers for these types of things but I know that if I were going to shoot for those kinds of wages I would rather donate my time to a charity that I support.
To be clear, I sometimes shoot events for free as a favor. And I sometimes shoot concerts or sporting events just because I feel like it. And if you find my photos on Flickr I'll probably give you permission to use them for free. (Though if you want to pay me, that's fine too and I do sometimes get annoyed with the presumption that I'm not going to ask for a fee.) But I'm probably not going to take you up on a minimum wage offer unless it were something I was going to do anyway.
The general sentiment here seems (to me, anyway) to be that photography is one of those things that many people _are_ going to do anyway, which is why it's very difficult to be highly paid for it.
If so many people are willing to do something for free, is it really fair to vilify someone for inquiring as to whether you are one of those people?
In general, my doing something that I want to do for free is different (usually) from you asking me to do a job that you want done for free.
Now, of course, there can be exchanges that don't involve money changing hands. Perhaps part of the deal is that I get into a concert (or whatever) for free and that may be perfectly reasonable. I do attend events on media passes on the (implicit) condition I'll publish a story about some aspect of the event.
I think his gist is that, of course a developer should expect to be paid more than that because they're special. But photographers just click pictures so they should be grateful to make anything at all.
There's a little more to being a photographer than clicking a button, but it might not look like that from the outside. It's like calling basketball "just tossing a ball around".
I'm not keen on how most professional photographers for these events don't point out they'll retain copyright on all shots. I know what that means, but they let their customers find out when they aren't allowed to get raw/negatives or prints from anyone else.
I'll take a work for hire option, thanks, without the attitude that it's an art and they're above that.
In all fairness, when I was an undergrad long ago I earned beer money doing various photography-related jobs for the alumni association and other such groups for not a lot of money. But, today, $100 to go somewhere, spend 4 hours doing something you otherwise probably aren't interested in doing, and probably spend the rest of the day editing? $100 for basically a day really isn't great money unless there were some reason you wanted to do the job and the money was just a little something extra.
> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.
I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or relatively cheap lenses, too; you don't have to be a gear-head who spends all their profits on their kit for no appreciable difference in how much people are willing to pay.
Most of us don't have $500-1000 to pay a photographer so we simply don't bother and rely on friends and family for it. I might consider getting professional pictures of my family if it didn't cost the obscene amount that it does. There's probably a market on the volume, low-cost side that simply isn't being tapped because photographers are often such dilettantes.
For someone who wants to break into photography, finding a steady supply of low-paid jobs to build up the portfolio and their name recognition for word-of-mouth marketing is probably the best way to go. You wouldn't want to be running at these wage levels for more than a year, but to start, well, there's certainly worse paths.
Depends where you are. Pretty sure I've made under $25/hr most of my development career. And that was just fine, in the Atlantic City, NJ area, because the cost of living was pretty low and I had no interest in moving or commuting to a big city.
EDIT: Although I guess it might've been a bit more if you include the value of health insurance and such.
It's almost never a good idea to start by charging less. The people who don't want to pay your rates are just looking for the easiest excuse and weren't going to become customers anyway.
The bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings. A run-of-the-mill wedding probably costs about 50k, so to have nice pictures from it you'll spend maybe 10% (?) on a photographer. So 5k for a day and a half of work? This puts a lower bound on other photo shoots as well, since there is never going to be a shortage of weddings.
I'm not sure exactly how to interpret "the bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings".
Do you mean by total revenue, or for a given photographer?
I ask because in general people who do weddings tend to focus on those almost exclusively for their income (the same is true for some of the other categories I mention below).
The way I think of it is that there are perhaps only a few sources of steady income that pays a livable salary with photography:
- weddings
- headshots
- real-estate
- advertising / marketing
In many cases either photographers are being asked to do more these days (e.g. write the editorial that the photographs go with) or people who wouldn't traditionally have photography as part of their job are being asked to do the photographic work on top of their existing responsibilities (e.g. journalists who are asked to bring a camera along and snap some shots for a story).
[EDIT: I am not sure where the day and a half of work figure comes from, either. It is typical for something like an edited/touched-up photo album to be delivered a few weeks after a wedding shoot, with the photographer doing a few shoots in between and then sitting down and editing several in a batch over the course of a week or two until they are happy with the results.]
> If that were the case, why don’t we have several of these prank days per year? Maybe monthly?
If New Year's is so great, why don't we celebrate it twice a year? If Christmas is so good, why doesn't Santa bring gifts every month?
> It’s because on a scale of 0-10 these pranks usually rate somewhere between 0 to 2 in terms of humor and > 2 in terms of annoyance.
For your example, yes
But a lot of the "pranks" aren't really pranks per se but more of just having fun and expressing creativity
If you look at what Google does each year, they've always had fun and creative ideas, that don't fool or annoy anyone and are enjoyable (with a few exceptions)
I recall reading an article several years ago where they pointed out that 50% of PhD candidates in Biology who were surveyed were hoping for tenure track positions in academia. The other 50% expected to go elsewhere. Of the 50% wanting a tenure-track position, the expectation was that there were enough positions available for 1/6th of them.
My daughter has had a strong interest in biological subjects, but when we talked about careers some years back we both agreed that going for a PhD would be a bad move. She was more interested in medicine, and that's turned out to be a much better career path.
For what it’s worth I was told at one point that PVCs are the leading indicator for sudden cardiac death, so it may have been worthwhile to get checked out either way.
Dozens != 20k. At a normal heart rate of 60 bpm, that's 1/4 beats in a day. And that's only an average. You might be getting strings of consecutive PVCs, which has some risk of sudden cardiac death.
One day, I got one out of four PVCs, regular as clockwork. That was... rather alarming. I knew what they were, but that was a ton more than I was used to. Yeah, I went to the ER for that...
It was definitely surprising to me to see grown men in suits throwing up on the streets nearly every one of the seven nights I spent in Tokyo. I don’t recall seeing any of that in the three nights I spent in Kyoto but having said that I didn’t have many late nights there.
I’ll add that the attitude towards things like stimulants that help people with ADD/ADHD is also a bit bizarre to me.
I’m was just in Tokyo, Shinjuku area. Around 5-6am while walking back from Golden Gai I saw guys in suits stumbling back; one guy face planted pretty hard and there was some blood.
Overall it was fun as a foreigner but it’s weird to see this as acceptable but marijuana (even medically) as not acceptable.
FWIW, many cities in Saudi Arabia including the capital Riyadh ban even tobacco in public: you need to drive 30km out of the town to the city limits to find a cluster of hookah bars.
There’s a continuous stream of evidence to the contrary, particularly if you’ve ever worked for large companies and seen the kind of wasted resources that go toward pet projects and other high value items that fail miserably.
The difference of course is that one costs tax payers whereas the other costs shareholders, and in one case (government and tax payers) there is some hope of oversight and accountability. If shareholders actually knew about this sort of waste I am not sure they would ultimately care because they may chalk it up to the cost of doing business.