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My Life as a TaskRabbit

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Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#31

Post by chimeracoder »

lotharbot wrote: post #29
chimeracoder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People grossly overuse (and abuse) the term unemployment like this. First, an unemployment rate of 0% is bad . This is because not all unemployment is bad. Frictional unemployment is actually a good thing (to a certain extent), because the alternative is having people stuck doing jobs they don't want when better jobs are available. Structural unemployment is what happens when $old_industry dies because $disruptive_te…

The term used was un der employment.

Please take the time to read through my comment, and you'll see that I address this - 'underemployment' is a misleading term that not only conflates several distinct concepts but also implies a connection with something that it's not.

It's like using the term 'intellectual property' when discussing the Pirate Party vs. MPAA. Aside from the fact that patents and copyrights are completely different legal concepts, the word 'property' already implies a right to ownership[1] that one side asserts doesn't exist to begin with.

[1] '...inalienable rights... Life, Liberty, and Property' - Declaration of Independence (first draft).

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#32

Post by sweded »

fumar wrote: post #9

I became a task rabbit almost three weeks ago. I have bid on at least thirty jobs. I have spent a total of 5 hours checking the site for jobs. I have not been assigned one task. I have applied for several graphic design gigs. Most people want a logo designed for thirty to fifty dollars. Some people want ebooks created from word documents for under a hundred dollars. The hard labor tasks is where the money is. Those j…

Have you tried using 99designs to get some graphic design gigs?

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#33

Post by mik4el »

chimeracoder wrote: post #28
mik4el wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about the US legal situation but here in Sweden there is so much legislation to protect workers that a TaskRabbit kind of service becomes hard to achieve.

IANAL, but I'm almost positive they don't have to do this in the US. In the US, hiring contractors exempts you from many of the taxes and liabilities of hiring employees, and they are also exempt from most benefits (their right to litigation against the company is also limited). US readers will certainly be familiar with Vector (ie, Cutco knives) - they get away without providing any benefits/insurance, without reimb…

Thanks for your reply. Talked with some more informed friends about the situation in Sweden and their conclusion is that work like TaskRabbit probably could exist in some kind of grey area (especially when it's one private individual working for another private individual for a small amount). However when the service grows the unions will try everything to make your workers "unionized" implying that either the service company (e.g. TaskRabbit) or the buyer needs to pay insurance and minimum-wage for the work being performed - basically hiring the individual.

I guess this is not interesting for must of you US readers but it could be telling of what could happen to your TaskRabbiters.

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#34

Post by mik4el »

gbhn wrote: post #6
mik4el wrote: post #4

What kind of risk/liability does these "employees" generally take? Like washing someone's unlocked car, is the employee liable for any damages or the company? If I'm do carpenting work distributed from TaskRabbit and hurt myself so badly I get disabled, do TaskRabbit have insurance for me? What is the standard for this? One reason why buying services is expensive is that the service provider takes risk and needs to i…

This is a huge point. A single uninsured mistake with an expensive car could potentially wipe out carwashing earnings for months. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4492619 )

This could be mitigated by TaskRabbit cooperating with an insurance provider and selling "insured" work. There are great margins on insurance as we all know. In their TOS TaskRabbit basically says "TaskRabbit.com Only Provides a Venue" (check it out: http://www.taskrabbit.com/tos). Why don't some retail-insurance megacorp approach them? This could be TaskRabbits no1 source of income instead of their no1 problem...

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#35

Post by [deleted] »

unohoo wrote: post #25
brown9-2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they even need to spread to the suburbs?

that's where majority of the US population lives -- the sprawl if you may. If you simply restrict to SF/NYC and downtown areas (which in a lot of the US cities are mainly office buildings and not housing), you're not going to able to expand your business.

[deleted]

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#36

Post by JumpCrisscross »

unohoo wrote: post #25
brown9-2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they even need to spread to the suburbs?

that's where majority of the US population lives -- the sprawl if you may. If you simply restrict to SF/NYC and downtown areas (which in a lot of the US cities are mainly office buildings and not housing), you're not going to able to expand your business.

The majority of Americans live in cities, not suburbia - 71.2% of the U.S. population lived in urbanised areas as of 2010.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-ur...

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#37

Post by jcdavis »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #36
unohoo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's where majority of the US population lives -- the sprawl if you may. If you simply restrict to SF/NYC and downtown areas (which in a lot of the US cities are mainly office buildings and not housing), you're not going to able to expand your business.

The majority of Americans live in cities, not suburbia - 71.2% of the U.S. population lived in urbanised areas as of 2010. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-ur...

The "urbanized areas" referred to by that article are mostly subsurbs.

'According to the Census Bureau, a place is "urban" if it's a big, modest or even very small collection of people living near each other. That includes Houston, with its 4.9 million people, and Bellevue, Iowa, with its 2,543'

That counts all 4.9 million people in the Houston Metro as being "urban", which is a joke. Maybe a few hundred thousand tops live in what you might characterize as a real city environment-the vast vast majority of is suburbs

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#38

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jcdavis wrote: post #37
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of Americans live in cities, not suburbia - 71.2% of the U.S. population lived in urbanised areas as of 2010. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-ur...

The "urbanized areas" referred to by that article are mostly subsurbs. 'According to the Census Bureau, a place is "urban" if it's a big, modest or even very small collection of people living near each other. That includes Houston, with its 4.9 million people, and Bellevue, Iowa, with its 2,543' That counts all 4.9 million people in the Houston Metro as being "urban", which is a joke. Maybe a few hundred thousand top…

Urbanized areas contain 50 000 or more people while urban clusters have 2 500 to 50 000 people. The 71.2% figure I presented is for urbanised areas, i.e. 50 000+; including the 2 500 - 50 000 urban clusters it rises to 80.7%.

>"Maybe a few hundred thousand tops live in what you might characterize as a real city"

Manhattan alone contains 1.6 million people; your few hundred thousand tops estimate for the U.S. urban population is very short.

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#39

Post by MaysonL »

chimeracoder wrote: post #31
lotharbot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term used was un der employment.

Please take the time to read through my comment, and you'll see that I address this - 'underemployment' is a misleading term that not only conflates several distinct concepts but also implies a connection with something that it's not. It's like using the term 'intellectual property' when discussing the Pirate Party vs. MPAA. Aside from the fact that patents and copyrights are completely different legal concepts , the…

Underemployment: how about the difference between U6 and U3? That seems like a reasonable first cut, and this guy seems to possibly fit.

Re: My Life as a TaskRabbit

#40

Post by huggah »

philwelch wrote: post #24
grueful wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know all those jobs claiming you can earn up to $big_number a week? That's their all-time record. The odds of real numbers resembling it are low.

The national median household income is around 45k. The third quintile starts just under 35k. Are you really going to say that half of the US population is "underemployed"?

Location also makes a huge difference; in San Francisco (where he lives), median household income is over $65k and the median rental price for a 1 bedroom apartment is over $2k. If Mok makes $3.5K / month, that probably qualifies as underemployment.
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