Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor • Hacker News Board

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#111

Post by pron » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 1:32 AM UTC

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #105

pron wrote: post #46

OMG! You guys! Aside from a few, most comments here are discussing how to actually do this efficiently. I think this might be forgivable as I assume many of you are quite young, but are you really suggesting exploiting poor populations for menial work w/o social benefits, without dignity, suggesting they walk into some booth, put in a few hours of work without even the physical presence of co-workers and bosses that…

lol, you must be in lala land. There are millions of poeple in the United States of America that live in Third World Country like conditions. Unless you're willing to empty your bank account and help them out, this is way it is. That's how the USA got started, that's how China is getting started, that's how Dubai got started. That's reality. The world is not perfect, a shitty job is better than no job.

Sure. Pretty soon I bet we'll hear some suggestions - all backed up by hard data, mind you - to reinstate slavery, only this time around it will be voluntary. After all, slave owners fed and clothed their slaves. It will certainly be an improvement over the way some people are living now, so that's a win-win, right? Then some people will say that slavery is wrong, plain wrong, whether it's voluntary or not, and whether it is beneficial to the slaves or not, only to be rebuffed by those in this forum who'll say there's simply not enough evidence to support the necessity of ethics, and others will say: well, that's just the way of the world.

Until that happens, we have before us the suggestion to build working-booths for the poor, where they can simply walk in and work for us, and get paid directly by a money dispenser so that we won't even have to see them or talk to them. And they won't even have to commute - we'll build those hi-tech sweatshops right in their slums. We won't even know their names, and if one of them gets sick - well, someone else will take his place and we won't even have to know about it because we can't really be bothered by poor people and their problems. They should be thankful that we need cheap labor so much that we're even willing to employ them (as long as they don't have to come into the office) - it's certainly better than whatever they must be doing now; selling drugs, probably - after all, that's what poor people do, right? All we have to think about now is how to prevent them from cheating us and stealing our money.

How come people are so sure they can revolutionize the world with some stupid web or mobile app, sure that they can disrupt the market and unseat market leaders, but when it comes to social issues some of those very same people sound like slaves to power themselves? How come hackers who are supposedly able to "think outside the box" sound like old, bitter, fatalist, soulless conservatives?

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#112

Post by marshallp » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 1:49 AM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #95

marshallp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a pretty good idea, walmart crowdsourcing shelf stacking. Startups might be able to offfer that as service smaller stores right now. Also, the possibility for automation is then great as well. Companies could offer assistive devices and software to the freelance shelf stackers for increasing their productivity, all they way to full blown robots. Can also apply this to other tasks such as crowdsourced…

Robotics is not as cheap as you think. I've brought systems in to factories to do seemingly simple things that cost easily $250k without batting an eye. You can pay someone more than minimum wage for many years for that kind of money. What would robots capable of stocking shelves cost? $500k? It's just not worth it. McDonalds has how many thousands of stores - and they don't bother automating that much. Amazon.com st…

Industrial robots are heavy and thus expensive because they lack visual servoing. Heartland robotics plans to bring out a lightweight low cost robot this year. Also, the predator algorithm invented last year can do real time visual servoing that wasn't possible before. Add in a person to cover in the gaps and you might be golden.

If the above is true, why hasn't it been done you might ask.

I might be wrong, but you could have the said the same thing about why a search engine that didn't suck wasn't around in 1997 - why didn't microsoft, or yahoo, or ibm have that, or even buy it from sergey and larry?

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#113

Post by Klinky » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 1:59 AM UTC

pron wrote: post #99

orangecat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this won't improve their lives one bit. Proof by assertion is not terribly convincing. Not every transaction that is marginally beneficial to both sides is movement towards a global optimum "Marginal" is more than zero bits. Think about this: is this suggestion going to provide the poor with true social mobility? I could easily see that happening. Is this something our society can be proud of - poor people wo…

I don't consider actively exploiting the poor as "not improving their lives enough". Neither do I consider marginal benefit a positive if it comes at the cost of exploitation. Thirdly, I don't see anyone moving from selling drugs to doing menial mechanical turk work. Lastly - I'm not standing in anyone's way. By all means - go and try to turn America's poor into Silicon Valley's drones rather than invest in their fut…

I agree with your compassion for humanity, but I'd think you're overemphasizing the benefits of having physical co-workers & a boss. There are many self-employed individuals who relish not having to deal with such things. I'd rather see emphasis on how this system would help someone improve their life & their community, instead of just being exploited by rich people in a foreign country.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#114

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 2:29 AM UTC

gregholmberg wrote: post #87

gojomo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements. Minimum wages are implemented with noble motivations, but are based on a broken mental model, where the edict alone can lift everyone who would have made less up to the new statutory minimum. In fact, many of the people who would be employed at lower wages aren't (yet) productive eno…

Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements. This is in fact their purpose. Minimum wage laws destroy low-paying jobs by making them illegal, preventing the least competitive members of our society from having the hours and days of their lives "mined" by an employer for negligible compensation. That having these laws "reduces w…

I've never been to Brazil, so I won't comment. But I live in India, so I'll discuss the situation here. The GDP/capita here is $3k/year, adjusted for purchasing power.

Pass all the laws you want, there is simply not enough wealth (i.e., not enough material and skilled labor) for everyone to live in a house that meets building codes. No matter what you redistribute (note: India has very low inequality [1]) or demand from people, you can't squeeze water from a stone.

[1] Nominal inequality is low, but inequality of living conditions is high. This is the exact opposite of the US, where the rich have a PS3 and an XBox, and the poor are stuck with only a PS2.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#115

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 2:59 AM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #97

gojomo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can look up the debate via the Wikipedia article and other sources. The case for reduced jobs in most situations is very strong, the arguments about overall welfare more intense. Often analytical (rather than emotional) minimum wage proponents admit a small decrease in total employment but think the benefits to those who make the cutoff helps offset that. That might even be true in a growing economy with generall…

Let's say we cut minimum wage in half. How many jobs are going to be created? If it's not profitable for the business to hire a worker at $7 an hour, is it going to be at $3/hour? That's a business with crazy low margins. Pretty much right now minimum wage workers usually do service jobs (fast food, waiting, etc), household chores (cleaning, landscaping), farming, or no-skill manufacturing. No-skill manufacturing is…

If you pay $3/hour in the US, you are going to get the people who can't even get a minimum wage job. I doubt a lot of companies want to hire those people for any price.

All you are saying here is that the min wage is harmless because it's set below market rates. I.e., it's like setting a $0.25/gallon price floor for petrol, or passing any sort of "keep doing what you are already doing" law.

But if that is the case, then why would wages decrease if we eliminated the min wage?

As for the pent-up demand for $3/hour workers, you can see it every time a company outsources or offshores. My company (located in India) wouldn't exist if we had to pay $7.25/hour, for example. (Of course, market rates for the people we need would probably be higher than $7.25 in the US, so the min wage is a moot point - lowering it would not affect our costs or our hypothetical US employee's wages.)

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#116

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 3:09 AM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #61

URSpider94 wrote: post #54

I've been sitting here for 10 minutes or so trying to find the right way to critique not just the article, but also the tone of the discussions here. I think the best thing that I can say is that this experiment flies in the face of everything that pg, Steve Blank and the other leaders of Lean Startup methodology are teaching. If the customer here is a member of the "urban poor" (or what some commenters have decided…

> ... then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change? In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work. To the question of what poor people would want to do, the answer is very often "who cares what they want, they're poor!" It's not this blatant -- often it'…

In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work.

This is more or less true. Go look up labor force participation rates of the poor - most poor adults don't have a job, and aren't looking for one.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#117

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 3:13 AM UTC

pron wrote: post #111

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, you must be in lala land. There are millions of poeple in the United States of America that live in Third World Country like conditions. Unless you're willing to empty your bank account and help them out, this is way it is. That's how the USA got started, that's how China is getting started, that's how Dubai got started. That's reality. The world is not perfect, a shitty job is better than no job.

Sure. Pretty soon I bet we'll hear some suggestions - all backed up by hard data, mind you - to reinstate slavery, only this time around it will be voluntary. After all, slave owners fed and clothed their slaves. It will certainly be an improvement over the way some people are living now, so that's a win-win, right? Then some people will say that slavery is wrong, plain wrong, whether it's voluntary or not, and wheth…

...to reinstate slavery, only this time around it will be voluntary.

Go look up the definition of slavery. Your post is internally contradictory.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#118

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 3:36 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #62

yummyfajitas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can either take away welfare benefits; or you can give much more rewards for working. A third, mostly unexplored option, is to reduce the status/luxuries of people accepting welfare. I.e., instead of receiving housing vouchers and money to buy food/clothing, they could receive dormitory rooms (no TV or XBox), healthy dormitory meals and government issued grey jumpsuits. Under such a system, there would be a signi…

This sounds eerily like the current Republican platform. Abuse of the welfare system has been explored in the past and found to be a tiny minority of all people receiving it. Let's not punish those people who use the system correctly on account of those that don't, hm?

Abuse of the welfare system has been explored in the past and found to be a tiny minority of all people receiving it.

Depends on what you mean by "abuse". Most poor people don't work and don't even look for work, preferring to collect free money. That's not "abuse" in the sense that welfare rules allow people to do this, but it is behavior we should try to prevent.

Ultimately I favor eliminating welfare and replacing it with a guaranteed unskilled job having below market pay. That's the perfect way to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor - no work, no welfare.

I'm not sure how this relates to the republican platform - as far as I know, the two front runners (Romney and Santorum) are basically democrats on economic issues. But I haven't followed closely, so feel free to correct me.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#119

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 3:41 AM UTC

pault wrote: post #60

yummyfajitas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can either take away welfare benefits; or you can give much more rewards for working. A third, mostly unexplored option, is to reduce the status/luxuries of people accepting welfare. I.e., instead of receiving housing vouchers and money to buy food/clothing, they could receive dormitory rooms (no TV or XBox), healthy dormitory meals and government issued grey jumpsuits. Under such a system, there would be a signi…

I disagree; this form of welfare is increasingly common here in the states. We call it prison.

Anyone who is down on their luck can walk into prison, receive benefits, and move out as soon as they find something better?

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#120

Post by imcqueen » Mon, Feb 27, 2012, 3:42 AM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #68

shingen wrote: post #4

What this article is effectively advocating, but can't or won't say outright, is that America needs the ability to pay people less than the minimum wage. Someone working all day at mechanical turk, is likely to fall below the federal minimum wage rate in terms of what they're pulling down per hour. Is it ok for companies to utilize mass scale labor at what becomes in reality a sub minimum wage rate? Particularly if m…

Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements. Minimum wages are implemented with noble motivations, but are based on a broken mental model, where the edict alone can lift everyone who would have made less up to the new statutory minimum. In fact, many of the people who would be employed at lower wages aren't (yet) productive eno…

without minimum wage wouldn't simple Supply and Demand take over and cause wages to plummet for unskilled workers? Compare it to software engineering, lots of demand and not enough qualified people = well compensated software engineers

without the minimum you are correct that theoretically more jobs would exist, but at a pay rate so low that it would create an incentive not to work at all. the government assistance required for an employeed unskilled worker and an unemployed one would be about the same, whats the motivation to work?