121–130 of 148 posts
If you'd like to see what this looks like in practice see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Qt6bVc5mY&list=PLuh2SVJZ17... The hourly rate will flash every few seconds.
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I guess the article doesn't say it well, but this can be done in small scraps of time from wherever you currently are under circumstances where making money with a "regular job" would not be possible. If you make, say, an extra $5/day on what used to be your smoke breaks and lunch hour at work for an 8-5 job, you have an extra $180 or so a month without any additional overhead (for uniforms, whatever), scheduling con…
"Looked at that way, $2/hour is potentially the equivalent of $8/hour as supplemental income. And you can fit it in to otherwise useless scraps of time." No. $2/hr is potentially the same as freelancing at $8/hr under your comparison. That's completely different. Because no one freelances at $8/hr.
I made about $100/day at my corporate job and at least $20/day went towards costs involved in having the job. I don't have that kind of overhead with the work I do currently.
Freelancers don't charge $8/hour, but it's not at all hard to google up "client from hell" stories where they spent so many hours trying to get their pay that it was only like $2/hour by the time they were done or they didn't get paid at all etc.
I don't really want to argue this. Someone asked a question and I answered it based on first-hand experience making often nominally low hourly pay. And now people are nitpicking my reply, presumably because they've got relatively cushy lives and this type of assessment is alien to their experience.
If you make $100/hr at a salaried position, like a lot of programmers do, you probably don't need to think too hard about "But after my commute, etc, what's my real hourly wage?" If you make a lot less than that and want to survive, you absolutely need to think about "But what am I really making after x, y and z?" And the counterintuitive answer turns out to be that a nominally low hourly rate without a whole lot of unbillable time burden, like a commute or chasing your pay or looking for work, can be far better in real terms than a nominally higher hourly rate with a lot of hidden time burden or other costs.
Something I wrote a while back:
http://writepay.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-value-of-not-chasin...
If your life works just fine, good for you. But there are clearly many people willing to work for Mechanical Turk for nominally low wages. I'm sure every single one of them would love to have a higher hourly wage. I'm just trying to cast a little light on why people do this.
Everyone on HN can sneer at it all they want as stupid and not making sense etc. That doesn't change the fact that lots of people are working for nominally low pay via various online services. At best, it will just discourage me and others like me from bothering to answer questions here about it.
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I live in Toronto, those numbers are hilarious. You cannot live in this city on a yearly wage of 21600. Not only are your numbers wrong individually, but they're also woefully under representative because your fake individual isn't buying toiletries, isn't paying for dental, doesn't purchase clothing, doesn't have any medical consumables to purchase, only eats a meal per day or so, etc. I've done the math. I've lived…
Honestly wondering because I've fortunately not needed to budget this closely before: OP said $350 for food and "500$ left for things like going out, clothes, etc.". Does that not cover what you bring up? ~$11.60 per day for food seems enough for a healthy three meals a day for one person - a quick google shows numbers like $250/month on a "moderate budget" for food. I feel if you're eating one $11 meal every day tha…
Quick sanity check: there's zero medical costs. Zero clothing costs. Zero furniture costs. Zero moving expenses. Zero allowance for costs associated with sharing your place with 2 other people. Zero education or progression related investments. Zero capital expenditures on your computer (better hope it never fails, right?).
And that's just a taste. The model is SO wrong as to be laughable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly wondering because I've fortunately not needed to budget this closely before: OP said $350 for food and "500$ left for things like going out, clothes, etc.". Does that not cover what you bring up? ~$11.60 per day for food seems enough for a healthy three meals a day for one person - a quick google shows numbers like $250/month on a "moderate budget" for food. I feel if you're eating one $11 meal every day tha…
$11 per day for meals is low, most people who live alone will spend roughly $15 a day (a single meal from McDonald's for instance is $10.95). The cheapest 'eat out' option is roughly $6 for a single meal at Costco/Ikea. Even peanut butter + jelly for every meal, and water for a drink is over $3 a day. Also, for rent, it's more like $800 for a single room in a shared unit, a bachelor is closer to $1500.
Pre-made Tasty Bites are like 2.40 and you can throwthem on a bed of rice and eat 3 meals for $10 a day.
And if you cook yourself and eat mostly vegetarian or cheap meats you can easily get your per meal costs into the $2 range.
I know the rent is more expensive, in Houston you can easily get a ~800 sq ft 1 br 8 minutes from downtown in a nice neighborhood for $850. If you live in a 2 br with roommates or an efficiency you can get that down to $400-$500.
I had to do some digging into crowdsourcing for my PhD thesis, and these numbers are well reported in the literature. Our group made the calculations to ensure that our task would pay at least minimum wage. As a result, we had to throttle our participants because they would hit our servers pretty hard. That's not to say that the experience was easy - we had to implement every possible sanity check, and even then we e…
What do you mean by this? Do you mean purely requests per second or what?
The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…
I guess the article doesn't say it well, but this can be done in small scraps of time from wherever you currently are under circumstances where making money with a "regular job" would not be possible. If you make, say, an extra $5/day on what used to be your smoke breaks and lunch hour at work for an 8-5 job, you have an extra $180 or so a month without any additional overhead (for uniforms, whatever), scheduling con…
I could see how this could be different at lower hourly rates though. Clients are less likely to pay, they are less price sensitive to 16-32$/hr.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$11 per day for meals is low, most people who live alone will spend roughly $15 a day (a single meal from McDonald's for instance is $10.95). The cheapest 'eat out' option is roughly $6 for a single meal at Costco/Ikea. Even peanut butter + jelly for every meal, and water for a drink is over $3 a day. Also, for rent, it's more like $800 for a single room in a shared unit, a bachelor is closer to $1500.
Maybe Toronto is way more expensive than Houston, but a cheese burger from McDonalds is $1 and 300 calories. Pre-made Tasty Bites are like 2.40 and you can throwthem on a bed of rice and eat 3 meals for $10 a day. And if you cook yourself and eat mostly vegetarian or cheap meats you can easily get your per meal costs into the $2 range. https://www.budgetbytes.com/ I know the rent is more expensive, in Houston you can…
It is.
>~800 sq ft 1 br 8 minutes from downtown in a nice neighborhood for $850
Lol.
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I live in Toronto, those numbers are hilarious. You cannot live in this city on a yearly wage of 21600. Not only are your numbers wrong individually, but they're also woefully under representative because your fake individual isn't buying toiletries, isn't paying for dental, doesn't purchase clothing, doesn't have any medical consumables to purchase, only eats a meal per day or so, etc. I've done the math. I've lived…
Honestly wondering because I've fortunately not needed to budget this closely before: OP said $350 for food and "500$ left for things like going out, clothes, etc.". Does that not cover what you bring up? ~$11.60 per day for food seems enough for a healthy three meals a day for one person - a quick google shows numbers like $250/month on a "moderate budget" for food. I feel if you're eating one $11 meal every day tha…
$350/food isn't bad estimate for Toronto - it would be hard to get below $250, even being very careful. So there is maybe a little to claw back there, but you'll want at least $100 for food outside the home too.
Also the rent number is too low for Toronto, assuming you don't add a commute beyond your metropass.
So yeah, $500 doesn't look that practical.
This isn't a budget for sustainable living, it's a best an emergency budget you can survive on for a bit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$11 per day for meals is low, most people who live alone will spend roughly $15 a day (a single meal from McDonald's for instance is $10.95). The cheapest 'eat out' option is roughly $6 for a single meal at Costco/Ikea. Even peanut butter + jelly for every meal, and water for a drink is over $3 a day. Also, for rent, it's more like $800 for a single room in a shared unit, a bachelor is closer to $1500.
Maybe Toronto is way more expensive than Houston, but a cheese burger from McDonalds is $1 and 300 calories. Pre-made Tasty Bites are like 2.40 and you can throwthem on a bed of rice and eat 3 meals for $10 a day. And if you cook yourself and eat mostly vegetarian or cheap meats you can easily get your per meal costs into the $2 range. https://www.budgetbytes.com/ I know the rent is more expensive, in Houston you can…
Yes, the roughly equivalent 1br in Toronto is going to be about $2500 these days.
Also keep in mind Texas has no sales tax, Ontario does. And we are talking CDN not USD (hard to directly compare some things). It's in general a bit more expensive in Toronto, across the board (except health care, obviously).
Houston is one of the cheapest "proper" metros in USA and Canada.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly wondering because I've fortunately not needed to budget this closely before: OP said $350 for food and "500$ left for things like going out, clothes, etc.". Does that not cover what you bring up? ~$11.60 per day for food seems enough for a healthy three meals a day for one person - a quick google shows numbers like $250/month on a "moderate budget" for food. I feel if you're eating one $11 meal every day tha…
$11 per day for meals is low, most people who live alone will spend roughly $15 a day (a single meal from McDonald's for instance is $10.95). The cheapest 'eat out' option is roughly $6 for a single meal at Costco/Ikea. Even peanut butter + jelly for every meal, and water for a drink is over $3 a day. Also, for rent, it's more like $800 for a single room in a shared unit, a bachelor is closer to $1500.
If you take 1860s unskilled worker wage and spend it all on food, you'll get about as much as you could with SNAP benefits (~$130/month) today. The UBI is already here, it's just our standards have rose significantly.