The Butler Didn’t Do It: Hello Alfred and the On-Demand Economy’s Limits | Hacker News Reader

The Butler Didn’t Do It: Hello Alfred and the On-Demand Economy’s Limits

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70 pointspavornyoh41 comments

Am I the only one who is extremely uncomfortable with wasting so much human potential to generate frills for people who already have enough frills?

It isn't just getting people fresh out of college to be my butler, I'm uncomfortable with Uber/Lyft too: I've had multiple cabbies with Masters degrees, and even an admitted literature PhD. These people could be building us a new Great Society where learning and creativity are cornerstones, but instead, we look down on such people and in fact despise them for their lack of premeditated profit-seeking behavior during education.

They are stuck driving cabs or butlering for someone who got a few lucky breaks instead of making use of their finer abilities, and it's frustrating to see them flounder in the precariat.

I go back and forth on whether I think Uber's model for paying its drivers is exploitative or liberating. When I've had drivers who work 16 hour days to put food on their family's table, I feel bad that Uber is taking advantage of them. But then I'll have a driver who is a student who decided to drive for 3 hours that night to make a little extra money while he's feeling uninspired to write a paper for his college course. I would've loved to have that opportunity when I was in school.

Both types of driver are paid under the same rules and yet one of them makes me feel a lot guiltier about using the service.

I view apps like this as a transition helper, eventually automated cars will replace uber drivers, etc. However until that tech is fully ready people have to do the jobs. These apps are like creating the interface before the back-end is ready. The real interesting financial possibilities in my opinion about the "gig economy" is the long term potential for when it's not people who are doing the "gigs".

Of course people should be a lot more friendly to the people who unfortunately have to rely on these "gigs" to get by.

So the TLDR is massive underemployment of some of our most expensively educated youth isn't a problem because soon they'll be unemployed?

I'd hope that every Uber driver out there is well aware of their intent to replace them all with automated cars the second that becomes feasible. Lord knows it has been telegraphed enough.

Doesn't necessarily mean there's an obvious solution for employing those people in the future, but I just hope they are all informed about the fact that Uber's future is basically dependent on eliminating all of their human drivers from the cost equation.

One would hope that in a world where automated cars and advanced AI make unskilled employment especially difficult, unemployment wouldn't be a terrible thing.

That would require a complete overhaul of the social order... Unlike AI, however, nobody seems to be making any headway on that.

Is your discomfort stemming from the mistaken belief that your opinion of how this undifferentiated mass of "potential" should be squandered?

This seems to me like the US becoming a lot like Brazil, where income inequality allows the middle class to have maids. Except, of course, americans would do it more efficiently and with a positive attitude.

Servants of some sort have been a staple of the historic middle class for a long time. The thing we often overlook is that the consumer technologies of the 1950's and forward meant that we could use machines (like washers and dryers) instead of people, and as a result our perception of middle class changed: if you had a car, a washer and dryer, a refrigerator, and a phone, you were middle class.

As someone said on HN a while ago, a lot of these gig economy apps of publicly sourced private service seem to be there just to make the 1% feel like the .01%

I think you mean the 10% - the 1% in the US is a household income of >=$380k/year or so.

Thanks for the data, but it is worth mentioning that in a major metro area having services like private drivers, chefs, maids, butlers etc is unheard of at a mere $400k.

But if you can call it with an app, then welcome to the new upper-upper middle class.

I lived in New York for a long time and have friends who make around 400k annually and they live very large on it. Maybe not personal drivers but the hedge funds they work for will send a car for them at any moment. Maybe not live in chefs but luxurious catered meals at the office every day couple with a generous budget for offsite company lunches. And they all have maids.

And even if high income urban (in particular) individuals don't have all those company perks, they avail themselves of many services that historically meant having a cook, driver, etc. Today, it often makes sense to contract out to companies rather than have dedicated staff, which is indeed expensive and often not justified outside of a business context.

They have an account with a black car service and use Uber. They have groceries and prepared food delivered--and/or eat out a lot if that's their preference. They probably do have a maid who comes in periodically. If they have a young child, some sort of help is not uncommon. They may well have some sort of laundry/dry cleaning service.

Yes. America has progressed from the Levittown dream of a middle-class life for everyone to the favelas of Brazil which surround a small city of the rich.

I notice that Google, in response to complaints from Brazilian authorities, has changed the maps of Rio to not show the favelas. When Google was more honest, Rio's named slums were properly marked on the main map.

Does OpenStreetMap properly display this data?

There are some slums mapped in OpenStreetMap. And often much better than Google Maps. e.g.: Kiberia in Nairobi http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#16/-1.3116/36.7905&num=2&mt0=m...

Sort of.

Here's a overlay of the favelas of Rio.[1]

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zuw5NU9HNh_k.krdIMl...

In peruvian, and I find this very insightful.

We used to just say that there was no middle class though.

Not so much the 'middle class', more like top ~15% of people.

Historically speaking, the so called "middle class" does not imply the median of population, but the people in the range from 80% to 96% of wealth/income.

Paraphrasing a comment I read earlier today: "[Middle class] is someone with the power to fire you, [Rulling class] is someone with the power to fire everyone, close the plant and outsource the operation abroad".

You're on Hacker News. Plenty of people here are programmers pulling in six-figure incomes (more than most managers in this nation) but only some of them have the power to fire anyone. If you say we can't call these people "middle class" (or better) we're choosing language which is either at odds with reality or at odds with communicating effectively (pick one).

Historically speaking, there's no such thing as Hacker News. One could draw parallels and say that programmers are managers that control not fellow human workers but machines. But we would be splitting hairs.

The point of the argument is that middle class is a social layer between a much larger underclass and a much smaller elite class. And yes, many of those in the middle class make it there by virtue of their specialized knowledge and not the number of warm bodies they oversee. Though there is much room for variation.

Two examples come to mind. In the guilds of the middle ages, master craftsmen were undoubtly middle class. They were typically self employed and had firing power over their apprentices or waged journeyman working under them. Also, in the classical world, there were such things as highly specilized slaves. They were treated fairly well compared to the grunts chopping wood or carring water from the wells, but they were slaves nonetheless. AFAIK, they did not have firing power (or life-or-dead power) over other slaves, though it was legal for them to receive monetary compensation and eventually buy their own freedom.

I think crpatino is looking at it based on (social) class rather than on income. To the degree that you can separate them, whether one is a manager or not puts one in a higher social class. But as non-managers start making large incomes, and as demand outstrips supply for some technical fields, that distinction doesn't seem to reflect reality very well...

I am almost afraid to ask, but what do you mean by "more efficiently" and "with a positive attitude"?

I confess what I imagine out of those frases is roughly: "for less money/with no strings attached" and "in blissful ignorance of the economic violence that entails".

I don't pretend to know the commentor's intentions but, for reference, there's something in Brazil called the Stray dog/Mongrel complex which was thought up by a famous Brazilian writer, and which may explain it for you. Of his phrase, this writer said it's “the inferiority with which the Brazilian positions himself, voluntarily, in front of the rest of the world”.

From a NYT piece written by author Larry Rohter in 2004:

"Writing in the 1950's, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues saw his countrymen as afflicted with a sense of inferiority, and he coined a phrase that Brazilians now use to describe it: "the mongrel complex." Brazil has always aspired to be taken seriously as a world power by the heavyweights, and so it pains Brazilians that world leaders could confuse their country with Bolivia, as Ronald Reagan once did, or dismiss a nation so large -- it has 180 million people -- as "not a serious country," as Charles de Gaulle did."

I meant that in the US you could do this through an app and never even have to meet the people doing your chores. In a developing nation, you would have to interview this person and you would definitely have to oversee their work.

I took it as "they'd better be grateful to have this shitty service industry job, or else"

income inequality allows the middle class to have maids

That's an interesting way to phrase it. From the perspective of the maids and people being forced into poorly paid labor jobs to get by, the view is decidedly different.

I wonder what the role of "errands" plays in the development of a person. These types of responsibilities must be beneficial to our every day existence, right? And if you can outsource all these alleged time wasters, what would you replace that time with? The final paragraph of the piece tells the real story, IMO.

> Because, if I’m being honest, the real reason I never attend to all of these matters isn’t because I’m too busy. It’s because on Saturdays, when my dry cleaner is open, I’d rather sleep late and go to brunch.

Now try it while running a relationship, a family member with poor health, a full-time consulting business, and a startup.

Lots of people can benefit greatly from an extra hour or two per week.

It's absolutely fair that it's worth it for some people to pay to free up a few hours per week. However, it's equally true that it's not necessarily worth it for others, especially if the outsourcing becomes as much a headache as doing it yourself.

I know how this story ends: the app has basically arranged to introduce a service-provider to a client, and unlike Uber where you're getting services at different locations where different providers are needed every time, Alfred is providing the same service over and over again. This makes it trivial for the provider and the client to eliminate the middle-man. Service agencies of all kinds have been struggling with this problem since time immemorial, putting them on an app solves nothing.

I'd actually rather a "pay for recommendation" engine where I can pay the app to just put me in touch with a reputable service-provider for whatever - like HVAC or an electrician or a local housekeeper.

I tried the latter--Home Advisor (formerly ServiceMagic). Filled out my project details, but they ignored my explicit decision to NOT be immediately submitted/sold as a lead to contractors and instead chose to see their list to read reviews.

Unfortunately, they ignored that, and I got pestered by a contractor who was very push on the sales side without answering questions, etc. Very unpleasant experience.

It highlighted for me an issue which is that I'm not sure I can trust a provider like that if they are selling the leads. They might have an interest in selling me to whomever pays more, or to new contractors to get them hooked, when I just want to go with those that have the most happy customers at a fair price.

Still haven't found a solution to this that I'm happy with.

There is an app for that, its called Angie's list.

googles

Holy crap that's an ugly website. Also, doesn't realize it's US only because it lists my Canadian city like everything's kosher but only accepts a US zipcode.

There are so many tasks that, by the time I figure out what needs to be done and make decisions, I'm at least half-way there. I do have a housekeeper who comes by occasionally but, honestly, sorting my mail isn't high on my list of life's issues and, even if it were, you're talking private secretary not on-demand gig. If I look at my list of tasks on my whiteboard, there's nothing there I can just tell someone to "make it so" and it would be done--or I would have already done so. (Or it's trivial stuff that I'll take care of when I can batch it with some other things.)

Most of life's small tasks require knowledge and involvement, otherwise they'd be automated already.

Except spam mail. That is intentionally annoying. Fuck you US Postal Service (okay fine, this is their main source of income)

I tend to forget that I used to have to sit down, write out a bunch of checks, and post them in envelopes on a regular basis. Or the amount of telephone tag I used to have to play on a regular basis.

I fit some of the characteristics mentioned the article (NYC, Income, etc) and I honestly wonder why single people need this much help. Manhattan, unlike most of USA is densely packed with grocery stores, laundry and most of them are open close to 14 hours at least. In addition, there are umpteen on-demand grocery suppliers (like Freshdirect, Amazon, Google, etc).

Most apartment buildings have laundry machines to wash your clothes (not all of them do of course).

I cook most of my meals, wash my clothes and still have a good quality of life (in addition to working hard).

For some reason this cartoon comes to mind - http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/KanekoMo...

I looked up her servant's background... It takes four years at $65900/yr to get a degree to be a servant, where the average career is eight months long. Ouch. That indicates some severe structural economic problems.

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