101–110 of 500 posts
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My girlfriend is Qatari and it is almost universal there to have a live-in maid.
Or be a live-in maid. It seems unlikely more than half the people have a live-n maid.
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Inflation is defined based on utility, not a certain level of society. The second would be something like GDP growth, much higher than inflation, and definitionally a zero-sum game. Inflation says that you would rather prefer to live it today's society at say $60,000/year (with smart phones, cars, Internet TV), than yesterday's society at say $50,000/year (with two maids, but none of the technology). Introspecting, I…
> Introspecting, I would say the above decision is true for me. An alternate perspective (not contrary, just different)… My uncle and late aunt were linguists in Central and South America. They were funded modestly with American funds. When abroad, they did not have a car, but they did have a housekeeper (cooking and cleaning) and one or two nannies (two when their 3rd kid was young). They got around by scooter, or t…
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Philippines as well. If you don't speak the language you are paying a premium for food, travel, communications, and potentially rent.
In Thailand I can say this isn't the case
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Philippines as well. If you don't speak the language you are paying a premium for food, travel, communications, and potentially rent.
My experience in SEA in general and Bali specifically (as a Malaysian), prices are not simply a matter of speaking the language. Vendors often charge based literally on your social class/status.
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I had a fellow American friend who lived in Bali for a year in the mid-70s. When he arrived, he shopped for his own food and cooked it. But he found that, since the merchants charged people by their social class, he could hire a housekeeper and have them buy and cook his food for the same price as buying his own found. And people expect him to do this.
In Egypt, that's true unless you haggle. You can always haggle to get close to Egyptian prices, but if I didn't have my friend with me to show me how to do that, I would have paid American prices the whole trip. I'm sure a lot of places work similarly. At the end of the day, they want to make a sale, doesn't matter who you are just what they think you'll pay.
The most obvious thing that this fails to address is literally the largest expense that the vast majority of people have, and the need for it has not changed: housing. The idea the Christie’s multi bedroom apartment would be as cheap as stated is laughable and demonstrably false. The unwillingness of governments to include cost of housing in inflation calculations is more reflective of their pressure to make the land…
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I had a fellow American friend who lived in Bali for a year in the mid-70s. When he arrived, he shopped for his own food and cooked it. But he found that, since the merchants charged people by their social class, he could hire a housekeeper and have them buy and cook his food for the same price as buying his own found. And people expect him to do this.
In Egypt, that's true unless you haggle. You can always haggle to get close to Egyptian prices, but if I didn't have my friend with me to show me how to do that, I would have paid American prices the whole trip. I'm sure a lot of places work similarly. At the end of the day, they want to make a sale, doesn't matter who you are just what they think you'll pay.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals#Comparison_of_...
Eastern Arabic ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ ١٠
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Well, it's describing the iPad... with off-shored real-time tutoring providing most of the value. Even for the niche that can afford that (which should be larger than the niche that can afford in-person tutoring), I'm not aware of any services.
> with off-shored real-time tutoring providing most of the value Yes, a critical part of the Illustrated Primer was that it was paired with real-time tutoring by a remote human, and turned out to be most effective when the remote human was regularly the same person who cared for the child on the other end.
That is not really true. The remote human only provided the voice. Miranda the character who ended up reading up the lines for Nell most definietly had no input into the direction the fictional story she read up had, nor she had the sophistication or the situational awerness to be considered the tutor.
The fictional technology has this strange twist that the AI in question can do the hard job of individualised training and emotional support, but can’t do local voice synthesis.
Just an example of what I mean to those who didn’t read the book: The fictional AI tutoring technology was manufactured for the educated grand-daughter of the CEO of a tech company. A copy of this AI gets to a poor, illiterate young girl who is physically abused by his step father. The AI manages to deduce this situation on its own and adapts to the changed circumstances (a situation which is lightyears away from the one it was developed for). It starts to teach the girl to read while also teaching her elementary martial art and survival skills. The AI on its own also decides when it is time for the girl to run and escape from the troubled home, knows how to evade security drones and etc. These are all conveyed through story beats in the fictional story read up to the girl by a remote actress true, but the remote actress (Miranda) is just a passive voice. In fact she suspects through the lines she has to read up that there is a girl somewhere out there who is in trouble, but she doesn’t know anything about her or how to even find her.
So no, in short this is nothing like “remote tutoring” as one would understand that.
It should be noted that in those days low-wage workers might spend half their income on food.* Presumably as a live-in maid her room and board were provided, so her compensation was not as low as her salary alone might imply.
*cf https://ahundredyearsago.com/2019/05/30/percentage-of-u-s-to...
> “The full treatment, including surgery and chemotherapy, can reach between $8,000 and $10,000 for a dog or cat.” Meanwhile, full cancer treatment for a human can easily cost 100x that, because care for pets is a free market and care for humans is very far from it.