Results for “service sector” 459 found
Those new service sector jobs (Japan)
So she rented Japan’s “do-nothing guy.”
Their near-silent lunch lasted about 45 minutes. Shirai ordered her favorite dish and intermittently asked questions. She shared memories of her marriage and showed him a photo from the wedding. He nodded and gave curt answers, sometimes a dry laugh. He never initiated conversation.
It was exactly what Shirai wanted.
“I felt like I was with someone but at the same time felt like I wasn’t, since he existed in a way where I didn’t have to be attentive of his needs or think about him,” said Shirai, 27. “I felt no awkwardness or pressure to speak. It may have been the first time I’ve eaten in complete silence.”
And:
A handful of other “rental” people have similar shticks, like a guy who gets hired to be treated to meals and a self-professed “ugly” guy who claims to boost others’ self-esteem. But Morimoto has cornered his niche market of doing nothing for cash, and many people now hire him for the novelty.
Here is the full story.
Those older service sector jobs
Putin has said that at one stage he was reduced — while still a serving lieutenant colonel of the KGB — to moonlighting as a freelance taxi driver in order to supplement his income.
Here is a very good FT article, mostly about the elite circle surrounding Putin, by Anatol Lieven.
Yes those new service sector jobs are getting weirder
On Thursday afternoon, 30 top TikTok stars gathered on a Zoom call to receive key information about the war unfolding in Ukraine. National Security Council staffers and White House press secretary Jen Psaki briefed the influencers about the United States’ strategic goals in the region and answered questions on distributing aid to Ukrainians, working with NATO and how the United States would react to a Russian use of nuclear weapons.
Here is the full story, via Bryant Seaman, and several other MR readers.
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs
Brainstorming a wedding hashtag? Good luck finding one that hasn’t #beendone.
More than a decade of wedding hashtags have flooded social-media sites to help couples curate guests’ photos on their special day. But soon-to-be-newlyweds are finding it harder to identify a clever, distinctive phrase…
Wedding hashtags have historically often combined a couple’s names and wedding year or date, says Marielle Wakim, Ms. Wakim, founder of hashtag-writing service Happily Ever #Hashtagged.
“It’s so beyond #JimandPamWedding2016 at this point,” she says.
Ms. Wakim launched her Los Angeles-based business in 2016 as the wedding-hashtag trend was booming. Her prices range from one hashtag for $50 to five for $125. Some couples prefer having options or multiple hashtags for different events, such as a bachelorette party and wedding ceremony.
Clients want personalized, tailored, creative hashtags, she says. Some have had specific requests, like Disney -themed hashtags or ones that incorporate specific Chance the Rapper lyrics.
Here is the full WSJ story, via Daniel Lippman.
Those new vaccine service sector jobs MIE
A man in New Zealand who reportedly received up to 10 Covid vaccines in a day on behalf of others is under investigation by the country’s Ministry of Health, Newsweek reported.
Reports indicate that the unnamed man was paid by multiple individuals to pretend to be them while obtaining a vaccine, in an effort to avoid vaccination requirements.
Here is the full story, via Air Genius Gary Leff. Not long ago I was wondering how many vaccines you could take in a day and still survive…this is data!
Those new service sector jobs China markets in everything
At 40 years old, Zheng says she’s tired of searching for the perfect man. So she’s decided to hire one instead.
Whenever she feels like some male company, the divorcée heads to a café in central Shanghai named The Promised Land. There, she spends hours being pampered by a handsome young server, who fetches her drinks, watches movies with her, and listens attentively to her anecdotes.
The sessions cost over 400 yuan ($60) each time, but Zheng says they’re worth every cent.
“The butlers respect me and care about my feelings,” she tells Sixth Tone. “Even if you have a boyfriend, he might not be this sweet, right?”
…The outlets have found success by tapping into the frustrations of Chinese women, many of whom feel society remains far too patriarchal…
Wang Qian, a 24-year-old student, is a regular visitor to the café. She tells Sixth Tone she enjoys the feeling of empowerment she gets from spending time there.
According to Wang, many of the men she meets in normal life are pu xin nan — a term popularized by the female comedian Yang Li that roughly translates as “men who are so average, yet so confident.” The butlers, however, are considerate and never mansplain anything to her, she says…
The butler feels he has to be flawless to progress at The Promised Land. The café imposes a rigid hierarchy. Butlers are divided into three levels: entry, advanced, and celebrity — with each priced differently. To spur competition, the managers hang a board on the wall displaying the number of tips each server has received.
Here is the full story, interesting throughout.
Those new service sector jobs? — drive your own kid to school
Bus drivers are in such short supply that EastSide Charter School in Wilmington, Del., is offering parents $700 to drop off and pick up their children for the school year.
The article is interesting throughout. It turns out there is a shortage of bus drivers, a shortage of buses with working AC (chip issues), and some schools are flush with cash due to government stimulus.
Can you call this a new service sector job?
Dave Taube has won a computer, a whitewater rafting trip, and several grills. There’s also the kayak, the powder-blue Coors Light onesie, and the Bruce Springsteen tickets. He recently took home $10,000 from Cost Plus World Market in its “World of Joy” sweepstakes. Recently, he found himself in the running for a trip to Antarctica, which would be the thirty-sixth vacation he’s won. His photo and caption, submitted in response to the prompt, “Tell us what you miss about international travel,” got enough votes to make the top 20. Next, the entries went to judging. In Taube’s photo, he’s slung with cameras and wearing safari duds, half-smiling, with a silver goatee. Strategically, he submitted his caption as a poem to make his entry distinct.
Taube, who is 65 and a decades-long resident of the Pacific Northwest, is a sweeper, a term that distinguishes the committed competitor from the casual, onetime entrant. Each day, he enters about 60 sweepstakes—which are random draws—and contests—which are judged.
And this:
Years ago, he entered a contest for “the most boring person in the Pacific Northwest.” He won a whitewater rafting trip, a plane ride, and a certificate for a tandem parachute jump. He sold the certificate.
He is producing…”contest liquidity”? Publicity? Contest legitimacy? In any case he is paid for his labors, albeit in kind. Here is the full story.
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs work from a distance
Soon, she said, money began flowing into her account. “Please take all of my money for your trip, I don’t deserve it,” wrote Betaboy10, who gave $500, according to screen shots she provided to The New York Times. Another, named SubMike00, sent $250. A user who goes by Peter Zapp sent $400, along with the message: “I’d do anything to be owned by you.”
Welcome to the lucrative world of financial domination, a form of B.D.S.M. that has flourished during the pandemic, when many sex workers and their customers have migrated online because of social distancing precautions. The concept is simple, even if the allure is not immediately self-evident: “finsubs” (short for “financial submissives”) send monetary “tributes” to a financial dominatrix, who could be any gender, in exchange for being humiliated and degraded.
“It’s controlling someone through their wallet,” said Mistress Marley. (The Times agreed to identify her only by her professional name to prevent stalkers from finding her.) “I love waking up every day realizing that submissive men pay all my bills and I don’t spend a dime.”
…Giving away your hard-earned money may seem counterintuitive or unpleasant, like paying off credit cards and student loans. But for finsubs, who are also known as “pay pigs,” it is liberating and titillating.
And:
Financial domination is helping Charlie, 29, a sales manager in Ohio, identify as a transgender woman, even as she presents as a man in her “vanilla” life, she said. King Kourt, her findomme, has full access to one of her bank accounts, she said, and as part of a “consensual blackmail” arrangement, King Kourt threatens to expose Charlie as a woman in exchange for money.
The idea, both said, is to encourage Charlie to live as she wants in public as well as private.
Giving up financial control may also help some finsubs become more empathetic. William M., 31, a technology manager for a school system, said that he spends $300 a month on Queen Astro, 31, a findomme from Los Angeles. Every time he sends money, she publicly belittles him on Twitter or degrades him on Skype.
“I used to be much more self-centered,” William said.
And here is paragraph that is totally wrong:
In that sense, financial domination is not so different from some marriages. “We don’t call it findom,” Dr. Kort said. “We see it as romantic, as one partner telling another, ‘I’m going to take care of you.’ In findom, it becomes erotic, but it’s the same dynamic.”
Here is much more from The New York Times. Seems to me like a pandemic-driven shift in the terms of trade to the suppliers! Work backwards and infer the underlying elasticity of demand.
Maine marijuana markets in everything those new service sector jobs
In Maine it is legal to use and possess marijuana (within limits), but illegal to sell it or give it away. And so how might a transfer be consummated?:
Cannabis Delivery Services are illegal in Maine. Gifting Cannabis is illegal in Maine. Don’t worry though! It is still legal for an Adult age 21/+ to carry 2.5oz of Cannabis Flower and up to 5 grams of concentrates!
So under your scenario you are in Maine vacationing, living, etc… and you lost your weed. OH NO! Who do you call? The INCREDIBLES.ME Psychic Service! We have Psychics roaming all over Portland communicating with their deity, their spirit guides, and having religious moments of clarity. We can guarantee to find your LOST WEED!! (For a small, but very worth while fee!).
Just login to this site, and select the cannabis or cannabis products you lost, and give us your address. We will find YOUR weed and get it back to you ASAP. Fees vary based on the time it takes us to find your weed, the quantity of weed we have to locate, and the distance in which we have to travel to get YOUR LOST weed back to you.
Here is more, via Jacob F.
Those new Filipino service sector jobs
In the Philippines, one popular blockchain-based game is even providing pathways out of poverty and helping spread the word about novel technology. Created by Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese startup, Axie Infinity is a decentralized application (dapp) on the Ethereum blockchain where players breed, raise, battle and trade adorable digital critters called Axies.
Ijon Inton, an Axie player from Cabanatuan City, which is about 68 miles north of Manila in the province of Nueva Ecija, first learned about it in February of this year when his friend stumbled across an explainer video on YouTube. Intrigued by the “Play to Earn” element of the game, he decided to give it a go.
“At first I just want to try its legitimacy, and after a week of playing I was amazed with my first income,” said Inton, who is currently earning around 10,000 PHP ($206) per week from playing the game around the clock.
Inton soon invited his family to play, too, and after a few weeks, he also started telling his neighbors. A crypto trader since 2016, Inton helped his friends set up a Coins.ph account so they could buy their first ETH and get started. Now, there are more than 100 people in his local community playing to earn on Axie, including a 66-year-old grandmother.
Here is the full story, via Nicanor Angle. How would you have responded to these sentences a decade ago?:
“We definitely want to get people who are outside of Ethereum, outside of the dapp space, outside of NFTs, into Axie,” Jiho said. He has observed other Axie play-to-earn community clusters in Indonesia and Venezuela, but thinks this might be the first evidence of a multi-generational household of dApp users.
What lies next in store for us?
Those new service sector jobs
Neal Katyal has argued 43 cases before the Supreme Court. Until the coronavirus pandemic hit, he hadn’t once enlisted his son as an assistant.
Now, Mr. Katyal and other lawyers appearing in the nation’s highest court have to argue their cases remotely, which often means from home. In November, as Mr. Katyal prepared in his home office to represent the city of Philadelphia in a case about religious objections to same-sex parents, he worried about the street noise.
So he gave his 19-year-old son $100 and instructed him to go outside and dole out cash to quiet down any noisemakers. Sure enough, minutes before the hearing began, a truck rolled up, idling loudly.
“Oh my God, the justices are going to be so mad at me,” Mr. Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, recalled thinking. Fortunately, the truck drove away without his son having to intercede.
Here is the full WSJ article.
UK fact of the day, those not always so new service sector jobs
Britain’s fishing industry adds less value to the UK economy than the Harrods department store. But its importance to coastal communities almost prevented a Brexit trade deal between the UK and EU.
Here is the full FT story, via Adam Tooze.
Those old and new service sector jobs
In case you thought Cambridge ceremonies were just for the tourists: the porters in my college have been delivering food to self-isolating students & announcing their arrival with an actual plague bell
Here is the link, via John Chilton and Irwin Collier.
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs
Pornography is the most common form of sexual experience available online — so common, perhaps, that a market for rarer intimacies has emerged.
Bottles of influencer bath water sell for $30 a jar. Some cam models have scaled back on erotic performance because they can earn more money selling homemade cookies and hair clippings. You can even pay a stranger to gorge himself on snacks from Trader Joe’s, if that’s your thing.
For some people, such work is a full-time job; others see it as a side hustle — one where the hourly pay can be considerably higher than the going rate for, say, dog walking or bartending. Plus, it doesn’t require leaving your dorm room or apartment…
Ella says that in her first semester at Parsons, she made around $800 a week from a few different sex-work-based revenue streams, including selling photos of her feet…
Still, what’s the appeal, one may ask, of having someone pay you to count your stretch marks, or selling pictures of your phalanges to strangers?
Do note this (Average is Over!):
Becoming a successful online sex worker isn’t easy. To gain a following, freelancers have to be savvy marketers, be highly proficient in search engine optimization, know how to budget, maintain a blog, and have pretty advanced video editing and producing skills.
Mz. Kim has created courses to help people build that skill set, including “Monetizing Your Appeal Online: Content Strategies for Models”; before the pandemic, she held classes across the country. Part of her gospel is: “It’s not about starting a profile on Twitter. You have to provide something more than selfies. You have to think about: What is your core appeal?” (Next week a new class, “Investing for Sex Workers,” will go live.)
Here is the full NYT piece, with plenty of further examples.