I'm so grateful to be a freelancer when I read stuff like this. Upwork has plenty to complain about but at least they don't dictate where I can live and work.
I'm a massive fan of epunk and I feel like I can't talk to anyone about it without looking crazy lol. Cyborg9k is my idol but I also love osquinn (which I guess is more hyperpop)
This is a perilous line of thinking! Let's try it with race - "Black homicide rates are seven to eight times those of whites".
And yet, here in Latin America, there are posters in every major city decrying the crisis of "femicidio" (murder of women). Not because they are disproportionately victims (quite the opposite), but because that's what's interesting to the American NGOs that decide what political issues are trendy and important.
In either case, it's interesting though, right? I may be coming across as the free market zealot here, but I don't really understand why special pleading for a class of workers is the right solution here.
If labor conditions are not as good as they're advertised, then isn't the expected outcome here that more people will try to find delivery jobs, resulting in more workers chasing fewer deliveries (assuming prices go up)?
Yes and no. Most children share homes with adults. I went on calls with my dad (he's a plumber) since I was 7 and helped him more and more as I became adolescent. Similarly, my current daughter sometimes helps me with coding jobs. It helps our home. So I guess child labor helps families and hurts single people, because it means families can grow additional workers.
Do you think there are labor laws preventing daughters from helping their dad with coding jobs? We are talking here about children participating in the labor market, not apprenticing with their parents in a casual way.
I think they were talking about states trying to get more teenagers working to help with the “labor crisis.” I had a similar upbringing to what you described, but idk if that’s what they meant.
I've done all of that except the butchery part (because that wouldn't make sense). She is homeschooled, and working with me on software projects is part of her homeschooling. Sometimes if the project is fun it could take all evening (like when we make videos demoing stuff for documentation).
As a kid, I went into dirty crawlspaces, helped my dad weld, and went on roofs, which for a little boy was pretty much the coolest thing imaginable. Whenever we were with a client who had a pool, my dad would ask the client if I could jump in, and they always said yes. I learned so much about technology from working on air conditioners. The process of troubleshooting, how machines work, and tons about sales and how to work with customers. My dad was also aggressive about SEO once that became a thing, but even before then, he did all kinds of marketing stuff himself.
I'm a freelancer today and wouldn't be able to if I hadn't been "forced to skip school for long evenings in the butchery", to put it into a phraseology that more matches your own. I think people have an idea of kids working based on school textbooks, which is sometimes (but not usually) accurate. When school textbooks teach the history of laws, it's always in this naive, doe-eyed kind of way.
Right now I'm in Guatemala, and child labor is everywhere, and to be honest, none of it seems as dreary as school does. Imagine as a kid being forced to do an office job where you sit down and do nothing for 6 hours, surrounded by friends who you cannot speak to, skipping play hours so you can study textbooks that teach a completely made up version of your country's history.
You picked a non-ideal time to post HN. I recommend posting it again on the weekend, so it gets the visibility it deserves.