Need a side job? The 10 best cities for 'gig economy' workers

The gig economy has become typified by piecemeal jobs found on platforms like Uber and Etsy, but that's just part of a larger sea change in the American labor force: 54 million workers considered themselves freelancers last year. Here are the 10 US cities with the most opportunities for them, according to Thumbtack.

2. Palm Bay, Fla.

Alan Diaz/AP
Spring breakers gather in South Beach at Miami Beach, Fla. (March 14, 2016). College students relax and have fun during their Spring Break.

Florida has more going for it than just sunshine: AngelList documents that there are 4,528 startups hiring in Florida. Palm Bay is located on Florida's "Space Coast," and one of the hottest private space flight companies, SpaceX, is currently hiring for jobs in Cape Canaveral. Palm Bay's startup scene may be further helped by Tampa, the major metropolitan area across the state. The Tampa Bay Technology Forum “is dedicated to advancing and promoting the people, projects and points of pride shaping the region’s future,” according to a statement on its website.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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