My buddy, Suze, is a freelance editor, so she's continually scanning the online job boards for new clients. She periodically sends me the worse job advertisements with wry notes about the downfall of civilization.
Here's a proofreading job. They are looking for someone who will proofread health related articles. Some of these articles are written by non-English speakers, which will require serious editing. They would like someone with experience. It's a 20+ hours per week job. For all that, they will happily pay you $150 per month.
A new blog that's devoted to healing and aspiration posts is looking for a blogger who knows HTML, WordPress, and SEO. That blogger should blog a 250-500 word post at least once a day, seven days per week. They estimate that writing that post should take you about 10 minutes per day. For all that, they'll pay you $50 per month.
Sign up, people!
Apt. 11d 
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for $60 a month.”
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They’ll get what they pay for.
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My favorite is the Craigslist job announcements and the fact that all the ‘education’ jobs are for childcare workers in the infant and toddler room at the daycare center. Granted, I think it’s important that kids get taken of well — but I seriously doubt that the main thing that’s going on in the 12 week old room is ‘education’. I suspect it’s a lot of diaper changing. And it’s discouraging that those are the only ‘education’ jobs available.
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Amy P has the right of it. Such potential employers are directed to the reply given in Arkell v. Pressdram.
(Also, Laura, do you know that your page takes 2-4 minutes to load?)
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I’m reading this as my college son just submitted his application for an unpaid editorial internship, where the responsibilities sound similar to some in the posted jobs. He’ll work for free so he can get experience to put on his resume.
I’ve advised him that writing skills are desperately needed and a prerequisite for many careers. However, our discussion included the point that those skills are more marketable if they can be paired with other ones, technical or problem-solving, for example. These job postings seem to support that.
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Is anybody else having problems loading the blog? There are a ton of pictures and ads on here. If others are having the problem, I might jettison the ads.
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I’m not. It isn’t the fastest site to load, but it is far from the slowest.
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Probably not as bad as it seemed this morning. Apparently I had accumulated a lot of open processes and slightly misbehaving scripts (too many tabs that try to phone home a lot — Gmail and FB, I’m looking at you — left open while the machien was in sleep mode). After a re-start and with just three applications running, I’m getting performance more like MH describes.
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The scary thing is that the content farms are nudging out more traditional media – not the grey lady or the top site in every category but the mid-range sites/brands/media. These are the ones that historically provide training and jobs and experience to people not super connected to the top establishment, or with the right upper-middle-class perspective.
That said I’m over the moon to learn about the Atlantic piece – yay!
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