Who Makes Below Minimum Wage in the Mechanical Turk Sweatshop?

Seeing exactly what companies do in reaction to not being able to hire based on supply and demand is quite difficult to measure. For example it can hit the poorer people because companies can't economically provide products for them, hence causing the poorer people to have to spend more on alternatives. Sometimes surveys find that minimum wage increases made no difference, but that then turns out to be survivorship bias - you can't survey companies that went out of business or left to go elsewhere.

The real problem is that market distortions are used to sweep under the rug a social policy, and to pretend that it doesn't cost people anything when it certainly does, and the poor/unemployed the most. If in favour of the social policy then just do it directly.

The real reason for contracting is that the paperwork is much simpler. You don't need an HR department. And the guy gets automatically laid off after a few months without the incident reflecting on either you or him, so there's less risk.

There's another side to it where you can hire a "contractor" on an n-month term, but instead of paying the contractor directly you go through a middleman who hires the contractor as an employee and provides (shitty) benefits and takes care of taxes.

> A survey of workers on Mechanical Turk done by Panos Ipeirotis, an Associate Professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, found that the majority of American workers are young, have at least some college experience, and have household incomes between $25,000 and $60,000.

It sounds like the majority of workers are supplementing their incomes, not relying on it.

Assertion based on facts not found in evidence. Just because they take remote jobs that can be done at their whim whenever they want doesn't mean they can't find a viable alternative. In fact, there aren't many jobs where those qualifications are met.

At least with transcribing english text you have some advantage by being a native english speaker.

I am a avid gamer, but I gave up forever in going pro, because practice to reach pro level is tiring, VERY tiring...

One pro player lived unoficially with me (actually, he lived somewhere else but hated his roomates, so he hanged around my house instead), he would arrive from university, sit on the computer, and play until 4 in the morning, eat delivery McDonald every day, drop on the floor (yes, the floor, not a bed, or a cushion, or anything like this), sleep, wake up at 7 and go to university (without taking a bath...)

Sometimes he would get too smelly or clearly lacked decent food, then I and other roomates would kick him out back to his house, and let him return about 3 days later.

He is a player I still don't enjoy playing against (Because he wipe the floor with me), but even with all that amount of ridiculous practice, and winning championships, he still do not got sponsors... Now he went to do something else, and play for fun only (and his performance decreased accordingly actually... during his pro years, I would lose 100% of the matches against him, now I only lose about 70% of them, and I am sure I don't improved, since I did not play for 2 years in a row and since my return I had in total about 30 matches, while a pro player could pull 20 practice matches in a day)

From the text:

"To capture potential changes in hours worked in response to health reform, we also examined trends in full-time and part-time work over time."

> uninsurance was only reduced by a little over a third for all that change in policy.

this reduction occurred on top of a trend of great increases in uninsurance nationwide at the same time:

> Between 2008 and 2010, Massachusetts, the four comparison states, and the rest of the nation all experienced sharp drops in employer-sponsored coverage, reflecting the impacts of the recession. However, it would appear that health reform mitigated the effects of the recession in Massachusetts on employer-sponsored coverage to some extent, as the level of employer- sponsored coverage in Massachusetts, which was below that of the four comparison states prior to health reform, moved above the level in those states after health reform and has remained at a higher level.

> Although there are differences in the details, with penalties for firms that fail to comply higher under the ACA than in Massachusetts but fewer firms likely to be affected nationally, the broad similarities between the ACA and Massachusetts’ reform suggest that we can expect to see patterns in the response by employers under the ACA similar to those observed under health reform in Massachusetts.