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Hand-cranked penny-dispenser allows anyone to work for minimum wage
- jws 17y agoThe original, non-linkjacked page is strangely barren compared to the Boing Boing attention-a-palooza. http://blakefallconroy.com/18.html http://blakefallconroy.com/18.html
- NathanKP 17y agoI guess there is nothing like packaging a short post in tons of advertising and brand name. Thanks for the link. Edit: There is some really interesting stuff on the rest of the original site as well, at http://blakefallconroy.com/ http://blakefallconroy.com/ A printing calculator rigged up with looped receipt tape: http://blakefallconroy.com/11.html http://blakefallconroy.com/11.html A box which records the date and time of everything that takes place in the vicinity: http://blakefallconroy.com/08.html http://blakefallconroy.com/08.html
- bioweek 17y agoHow about hooking this up to the power grid and paying you for how much power you generate into the grid? They already do this with solar panels. You'd make a lot less than minimum wage though. Say .5KWH in an hour, that's 5 cents.
- asciilifeform 17y agoWorse still: factor in the costs of building, installing, and maintaining the machines, and of renting the space where they stand. Humans simply aren't worth much as a source of energy. Something like a public Mechanical Turk console would be better.
- RevRal 17y agoIt is the new minimum-wage crank-machine economy. All those things are good things. It would help the homeless to boot-strap themselves. And every human can always say, "well, at least I can work the crank machine if I have to." It'll be like the new social security.
- asciilifeform 17y agoWhy pay anyone, in essence, purely to suffer? (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy) What would be wrong with a similar machine which dispenses, say, one dollar per retina scan pattern per day?
- RevRal 17y agoEver watch Metropolis? I was giving that movie a slight nod. Every worker in that movie is doing the most pointless work. It is amazing to watch the human workers file into the machinery, then to see them crank levers and move the hands of a clock-thing. They are meant to look like they are suffering, very badly. These energy comments are interesting since I have always thought that the city of Metropolis slowly got that way by giving the lower class people more and more menial work that was less and less meaningful. I mean, as long as we're living... right? We shouldn't complain. As someone who has worked fast food before, I can say that the work is probably only a few steps less painful than cranking a energy-machine box would be. ---- I should add, before anyone yells "off topic," that this is probably the sort of discussion that the artist would welcome.
- jrockway 17y agoWhy pay anyone, in essence, purely to suffer? Because that way, they are not out on the street annoying The Rich People.
- kiba 17y agoI prefer the dragon fallacy example. With all the money spent on welfare, minimum income, etc, we could have create a biological viable dragon with a dedicated dragon research government agency. Then we'll be the envy of the world for creating something as powerful and monstrous as a dragon! Muahahah! The dragon fallacy is there to illustrate the many ways you could have used the money, including the absurd dragon research project. It ask us to think about the opportunity cost. On a serious note, this fallacy is merely a fun version of the broken window fallacy.
- teuobk 17y ago
- JulianMorrison 17y agoThat isn't work. That's subsidized pseudo-work in the Roosevelt New Deal tradition. Some poor schmuck has to pour pennies in the top hopper, and gets nothing for his pains.
- wyday 17y agoIt's not meant as an actual job. It's to prove a point.
- eru 17y agoI agree. Though that machine does solve some real world problems with wellfare. (Or would solve them.) There does not have to be an administrative overhead to decide who's going to get benefits or not. Only people who can't get more than the minimum wage will show up to crank (modulo job satisfaction, danger boni etc). Also you can also decide to crank only part-time to secure a base salary and e.g. be a free-lancing developer in the rest of your time --- again without administrative overhead or strange incentives.
- pavlov 17y agoIn Finland (and probably some other countries with a similar welfare system), there is an ongoing discussion concerning a so-called citizen wage. The basic argument is very similar to yours: replacing the existing rat's nest of situation-dependent welfare benefits with a flat sum that's paid out to everyone would be possible within the same budget constraints because it would eliminate so much administrative overhead and incentives to game the system, while freeing people to do something more useful with their time than filling out unemployment forms. Of course the difference is that nobody would be required to crank a machine; everyone would simply get 300-400 euros from the government each month just for being alive. (Those who are employed would pay it back in taxes.)
- netcan 17y ago300-400 euros replace welfare?
- 17y ago
- peakpg 17y agoThis is a potentially off topic question, but what is the average wage that the typical sculptor makes, considering hours invested/sale price of the art? I have known at least a few former art student friends/family that have definitely worked for less than minimum wage. Is it possible for an artist to create a piece like this that is actually more profitable for the user of the art than it is for the artist who created it?
- nym 17y agoNot just possible, probable. There's a reason why most of them are called starving artists.
- teuobk 17y agoOr, to reframe the question for the startup crowd, what is the average wage that a typical high-tech entrepreneur makes, considering hours invested/sale price of the business?
- RevRal 17y agoDepends on where on the timeline, what exactly you mean by high-tech entrepreneur, and the experience of said entrepreneur. $1.50 per hour isn't uncommon.
- Retric 17y agoSome people go negative. However, the average is so heavily influenced by a few people making 100+$/h or 10,000+$/h. It's not really worth looking at. I would suggest consider looking for the bottom 10 percentile the middle 50 percentile and the top 10 percentile.
- tungstenfurnace 17y agoOne could hook up an electric motor to that crank handle. But I suspect the overseeing bureaucrat would disapprove.
- Kadin 17y agoFrom the sound of it, the rate at which you turn the handle isn't directly connected to the dispensing rate. I suspect the crank just turns a small generator that powers the rest of the mechanism, which dispenses pennies at fixed intervals. Attaching the crank to a motor might kill the electronics with an overvoltage, but probably wouldn't produce any additional payout.
- RevRal 17y agoI'm a little confused by your comment in relation to tungsten's. I think he was just saying "easy money." A way around the need to manually crank. Between your comment and tungsten's, I think I'm missing something.
- asciilifeform 17y agoImagine for the sake of argument that these cranks produced value and were installed widely. What would actually happen is that instead of motors, sweating wage slaves would be charged most of their crank's output merely for the privilege of being permitted to stand near it and turn it. Queues would form. Men with guns would watch and ensure that "their" crank's pennies are not "misappropriated." If you find this scenario outlandish, realize that I have just described the history of land (and all other natural resource) ownership.
- noonespecial 17y agoFinally, a way for politicians to actually make jobs! Seriously, I got a very eerie feeling as I understood this machine. Good art.
- redact207 17y agodoes it give out less pennies for foreign students?