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Latest From Second Life Creator: Crowdsourcing Small Jobs
waderoush writes "At Linden Lab, Philip Rosedale led the creation of Second Life, a virtual world with a complex internal economy. Now he's applying some of the same ideas to the real world at Coffee & Power, a hybrid workclub and crowdsourcing marketplace for small jobs. The C&P site (which was itself crowdsourced via another Rosedale project called Worklist) matches sellers and buyers of services from personal shopping to software tutoring. Payments are handled using a virtual currency, and members can meet up to collaborate or deliver services at the C&P offices in San Francisco and Santa Monica. 'Coffee & Power is a tool that asks the question, 'If you had an extra three hours today, how many things could you do?'' Rosedale says. 'We all have a lot of skills that we don't use in our day jobs.'"
Average length of job: Half a day
Average pay of job: $12
So if you live in China, India, Nigeria, etc. and would love to work for $24 a day, great news! And for those you who live in the first world, well, enjoy the continued outsourcing that's going to have us all living in a goddamned Mad Max dystopia by the end of the century. Buy your Chinese-made shouldpads and dune buggies now.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How is this, in any fashion, different than a landscaping contractor rolling up to a street corner and spot-hiring half a dozen undocumented workers for an enjoyable day of grass-mowing and leaf-blowing at 7 bucks an hour?
What could possibly go wrong?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Rent-a-Coder, Mechanical Turk, Freelancer.com, and now this.
Manpower, Inc. is one of the US's largest "employers".
It's used by cheap labor conservatives to justify crap wages, especially for white collar IT workers. The argument goes it's OK to kill yourself making $3/hour because it's better than goofing off you lazy bastard. It's like when factory owners argued in the 19th century against the 40 hour work week because they lower classes would just spend it drinking anyway.
Hey, you know what? I like living in a world where there's more to life than endless toil. You think the rich bastards that shoved this crap down your throat in grade school work 70 hours a week? If you do, you haven't been paying attention. Here's an idea: Pay people enough to make a difference in their lives and see how much interest you get.
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This is why we need more of them and more workers rights. Freelancer / contractor also need more rights there is a lot of abuse. The cable industry is real bad with that. Also there is more stuff like change backs where you can have funds taken away from your after doing the job.
I believe the idea is that with the already existing services you're talking about, every time you get hooked up with a client via that service, the service takes a cut. With this "new" service, they hook you up free of charge. The client has to buy the currency with the 15% surcharge. Once you get your virtual money you can either save it, or pay it to someone else without having to pay the surcharge. So imagine you're really good at project management and finding clients. They pay you in virtual dollars, you get other people to do the different bits of the project for you from the same service and pay them in the virtual dollars without having to pay the 15% on what you pay them... then you take whats left over as you're pay. The better you are at working deals with people the more of the money you get to keep. None of the transactions are subject to any regulatory authority or taxes until you cash out. You could even wait to cash out until the tax climate is more favorable.
Don't get me wrong, it's a stupid idea. It's something that would work great if it was large scale, but getting people to buy in will be nearly impossible and by the time it gets anywhere near big enough to make a difference, the government is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks. Not to mention they are starting it in California, the worst state as far as taxes go and the only state to actually start squeezing sales taxes out of online retailers. That's before we even get to the likelihood that the administrators of this service decide to invest the money they're holding onto for you in the market, lose their pants, try to cover it up and this entire affair turns into a giant ponzy scheme. Which I think is fairly likely.
I wonder what the IRS, state tax boards, various employment/workplace regulatory bodies and such are going to have to say about this... they're going to want their cut of the action.
I also suspect the Treasury Department may have something to say about virtual currencies being used to pay for real-world goods and services. This ain't Second Life scripted wang-doodles we're talkin' about here. Scrip is a legal minefield.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
A retailer needs 500 handbags to sell to rich women...
/. for?
In the USA (and most traditional economies):
The retailer contacts a supplier who contacts a handbag company who contacts a factory in China who makes the bags and ships them to the retailer. For better or for worse, it's Capitalism in action where fancy bags come from big factories across the ocean.
In the slums of Mumbai:
The retailer contacts a supplier who goes into the slums and talks to poor women in their shacks and asks them to make him a couple bags each. He goes from shack to shack and picks up the two-three bags and gives the women a tiny payment. Then he goes to another neighborhood and distributes the bags to a dozen other ladies who stitch the patterns onto the bag. Someone else picks them all up or tells the ladies to bring the bags to another shack where they are counted and the women are paid a few cents each. The supplier ships the bags to the retailer. For better or for worse, it's crazy decentralized unregulated and unregulatable chaos Capitalism where fancy bags come from a hundred poor living rooms.
At least in the Chinese factories, workers are starting to demand better conditions and wages and there are standards and some regulations and standards in place. In India the workers get paid next to nothing because they are all working in their homes and don't have any idea who they are working for and aren't employees - work on contract only - and don't know any of their fellow workers so they can't unionize and demand better wages, and they work in their homes deep in slums so there is absolutely no regulation.
My point is that this kind of small crowdsourced job idea reminds me of the Indian model, and I don't like it.
Feel free to disagree though, what else is