...and things could change at any time.
In the modern workplace, it's best not to get too used to the way anything works.
In this week’s edition of “This Was a Real Job,” intrusive weather is an issue in every workplace…but not our biggest problem, actually.
Once again I’m AJ Freeman, and “This Was a Real Job.”
This Week in Work: Hypernormality Closes out Bonnaroo
The business of fun (doesn't that get more to the point than "entertainment industry?") generates untold revenue for the least fun people alive on a yearly basis, efficiently commoditizing all of human playtime into convenient consumable packages.
At least, that's the way the system is designed. Sometimes real life makes other plans.
You see, corporate music festival Bonnaroo took place this past weekend...some of it, anyway.
The event kicked off on Thursday as scheduled and featured a performance from the Insane Clown Posse, a pendulous fruit for jokes that instead of picking I will polish by reminding you that the band has maintained its popularity for over a quarter-century without a major label record deal.
Now, I'm not a Juggalo or anything--color scheme doesn't work for me, I'm more of a hypersaturated polychromatic type of mf--but through reddit I understand enough about the ethos of ICP and its fanbase to understand that they would appreciate the lesson to be learned here and the circumstances around what turned out to be the international affair's headlining grand finale.
You can't just turn the music up and hope your problems go away...that's actually an ICP album title, which is a lie probably but neither of us know enough about their discography to definitively dispute it so let's just move on.
As any insurance company doing business in Florida or Louisiana must know, intrusive weather is just part of the world we live in now. Tornado Alley has been expanded to include the East Coast, hurricanes sometimes arrive arm-in-arm these days, once-in-1000-years events come around thrice each Olympiad.
These actors make events--and the future in general--much harder to plan.
Sometimes that means outdoor activities must be canceled due to wildfire smoke. Sometimes that means the Insane Clown Posse end up closing the show at Bonnaroo.
Though this eternal gig worker's heart goes out to all the hourly staffers who just lost a nice little weekend paycheck to help offset all the higher prices this month, these are the new realities of work which we must all live with or die from.
Of course, if you think too hard about the implications of people paid very handsomely to know exactly what they're talking about knowing less and less about their fields of expertise year after year, you might start to question whether it's even worth it to save up for next year's $5,000 destination concert and maybe invest that disposable income on solar panels or home generators or seed stocks or um, game cartridges.
They might also begin to wonder how many times event organizers will be able to invest millions of dollars and countless billable hours into producing almost nothing, whether they will continue to gamble on large-scale outdoor events when disruptive weather becomes more and more of a sure bet over time.
They may even find time during their long flight home to ponder whether this is the truest shape of the future, with tied hands and canceled plans defining the 2020s as surely as the World War Era claimed the entire first half of last century.
Hell, if they spend too much time with it on their minds, folks who took a week off of work to do the single thing they will enjoy that year may even reflect upon the extent to which the inaction of our--ahem--leaders on climate change over the past decades share responsibility for this outcome?
...but it's just Bonnaroo we're talking about here, so refunds will be available through the promoter and that's it, okay?
Maybe Update Your Resume: Everyone in Broadcast Media Not Involved with the Making of this Commercial
The NBA Finals are underway, and if you're a purist of the sport who has been pining away for highly competitive team-based basketball the way Naismith envisioned, this series between the Indiana Pointers and Oklahoma City Bucketeers is the perfect thing for you to read about somewhere tf else.
I'm sure costless labor will circle back for the players’ and coaches’ jobs as well.
No, instead what we're here to talk about today is a commercial that aired for the first time during a game in the league's championship series: one entirely generated by AI.
The video, generated with the premium features in Google’s new Veo generation service, was produced on a total budget of $2,000, which is about what it costs to rent a room to film a commercial involving objects, or hell, to buy a decent moving picture camera in the first place.
The production playing field has been leveled in a major way...and yes, that may be the best news since penicillin for anyone trying to experience the finest anime titties with realistic jiggle physics, but not so good for those human beings currently employed in rendering same.
Turns out, AI-gen video imagery has come a long way since 2023.
This commercial, for whatever the fuck it's for--probably car insurance, dick pills or online gambling since it aired during a sports game, I really don't care do u--is reasonably not-uninteresting to look at and fills up 30 seconds of airtime...I cannot sufficiently stress to you that in this age of unabashed brainrot, it is good enough.
No wait, I feel like you don't understand...did I mention this primetime national broadcast content was made for TWO THOUSAND US DOLLARS??
Costuming and props for a commercial can easily eat that much, and that's before you pay for the time and labor of a professional filmmaking crew, who may not even answer your email with only $2,000 at stake.
Hell, you yourself might even have $2,000 to put into an artistic vision (and if you could support such an investment in creative endeavors at this point, please consider making a small donation via PayPal, every bit helps these days).
Please understand that anyone who tells you that they could do more for less is scamming you in the fn face.
This means that everyone with a related job is hereby placed on notice...I look forward to next year's American football-based premium advertising block, where all the most penetrative advertising will be showcased...there may be more people on the field than working for the ad firms, and you don't even have to know how many players on an American football team to understand that riff.
Again, it's just not important...there will be enough robots to play all professional sports with time.
Talent Visa Tracker: Kilmar Abrego Garcia
The Talent Visa Tracker section of "Real Job" has long chronicled opportunities around the world for location-independent laborers, previously spotlighting locales as Uruguay, Estonia, Canada, and the Czech Republic that have recently made overtures toward enterprising newcomers from abroad.
However, even constructs such as visitor visas, work permits, and the immigration process are impacted by real life realities...yes, a country may offer a digital nomad visa or path to expedited citizenship, but what if the people in that country...um, don't want you to have it?
In the previous edition of "Real Job," instead of tracking a class of visitor permits, we turned our attention to a single member of the global workforce by the name of Mahmoud Khalil, who suddenly found himself in a cage in the midst of an afternoon stroll around American City.
While Khalil was, um, fortunate enough, to remain in the custody of Louisiana on still undetermined criminal charges, in the time between publications a similar fate has befallen another migrant laborer, one Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was also seized from the street and locked up for reflecting insufficient photons.
Arresting agents also notified the mother of Garcia's child, who was with him at the time, of the 29-year-old father's arrest. The transition plan developed at the scene called for the toddler to be transferred to Child Protective Services due to Garcia's abrupt unavailability, offering her a 10-minute pickup window...which is not a joke, it just has the cadence of one.
Entrenched broadcast media, doing a typically outstanding job of providing plausible justifications for implausible actions, has referred to this series of events as a "mistaken deportation," which from inside of the story would sure look like a bunch of mfs showed up one day, zip-tied you into an unmarked vehicle, and kidnapped your ass clear across the Equator to hold you in one of those prisons they show on "World's Worst Prisons," but this was different cuz there was court documents and all that so nbd, normal news thanks for watching our YouTube channel.
AI is amoral due to lacking the context for the concept, billionaire-curated media outlets--who ideally would provide context--must have a different explanation.
In a convincing entry into the long-debated merits of pen and sword, the sitting administration was 1) barred from deporting Garcia--which, lol--and 2) repeatedly instructed to facilitate his return to the US.
This federally-enforceable court order, delivered to an administration that can apparently manifest a fully functioning fast food restaurant anywhere on the Earth's surface in under 12 hours, failed at this task for months.
Of course, this is an explicitly apolitical publication, and so discussing the potential outcomes resulting from the effective decommissioning of a nation's judicial branch as part of a unitarian seizure of a nuclear state is beyond the scope of this workplace-centered newsletter.
What is undeniable is that roving goon squads looking to ensnare "some guy walking around in a sports hat" on a regular basis is an unconventional promotional program for a country planning to host major international workforce enhancing events such as the World Cup and Olympic games in the next couple of years.
In studying these development, "Real Job" asks: How will this bold new marketing strategy shift the paradigm of the US tourism industry?
Readers who do concern themselves with García's current status will note that he is currently back in the United States...prison system, awaiting trial on human trafficking charges.
Although his guilt or innocence is also outside our sphere of coverage and his lawyer has dismissed the charges as "preposterous," it is interesting to learn that the Uno Reverse card is applicable in a US federal court.
Garcia's saga unfolds against the backdrop of these random removals becoming ever more commonplace on American streets, with visitors of all statuses along with native citizens and even elected officials subject to sudden and disorderly detention.
All told, it may be inadvisable for prospective visitors to consider employment opportunities within the US at this time.
Hope Spot: No, Más!
It's 2025 and the secret is out: mfs are getting dumber.
Between all the missing steel and school funding burned up in the desert a billion dollars a day on the other side of the world and this year's 18th birthday of the modern smartphone which deposited a universe of brainrot directly into the pockets of every child born after 2007, there is now a sizable segment of the population of some countries whose brains effectively do not work.
They are not only dumb as shit, they are dumb as fuck...quibble with my unvarnished delivery if you want, but look around and then call me a liar.
That's wtf I thought.
...but yeah, lemme resume using the voice of our professional oppressors: Although salaries in the US and similarly underdeveloped nations remain woefully inadequate on average, the true value of an effective educator has never been more apparent...and that's why this week's Hope Spot centers on a recent advancement in Mexico.
Last month, as teachers across the North American nation celebrated Día del Maestro (Teachers' Day for the D students) with a massive multiday demonstration in the capital against the raising of the retirement age past 58, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a universal 9 percent pay increase retroactive to 1 Jan 2025 along with an additional 1 percent raise to take effect with the start of the school year AND an additional week of vacation.
The pay rise is similar to the one teachers received last year, and there were also other benefits announced, but I have a dominantly American readerbase so I'll stop with the details before I make poor Ed major in Alabama cry.
In a world where making unproductive choices is highly incentivized, Mexico has elected to look forward at a more educated future. Better compensation in teaching means the profession attracts more talent who provide superior education to more engaged students blah blah blah society gets demonstrably better.
On the other side, why the fuck would any student currently enrolled in a US public school go anywhere near the public education system for a career?
What, be like that guy from that place I hate who eats vienna sausages out of a can in his rusty subcompact at lunch, the one that also delivered my burrito bowl last Saturday night? Nah probably not.
If you want to teach people, there are better paying jobs writing cheerily-narrated training modules for new hires in some tall glass slave plantation in Dubai. If you want to work with children, you can subject yourself to the children of media magnates, oil barons, and technofascists in some thousand-acre New England private school. If you want to feel the thrill of being shot at, there are better paying jobs in and around the US military...and they're always hiring!
10 years from now, Mexican children will benefit from a more capable crop of teachers and the smarter children that they create while a lot of kids to the north will be warehoused 80 to a class led by an oversized Tickle Me Elmo and sponsored by Mountain Dew.
Seriously, you tell me the last time you heard of people actually doing a job that matters getting a 10 percent raise across the board, I'll wait.
Hell, next newsletter might come out before you find an answer.