Hand-cranked penny-dispenser allows anyone to work for minimum wage | Hacker News Reader

Hand-cranked penny-dispenser allows anyone to work for minimum wage

blakefallconroy.com

88 pointsFlemlord38 comments

This 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?

Or, 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?

Depends 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.

Some 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.

Not just possible, probable. There's a reason why most of them are called starving artists.

Finally, a way for politicians to actually make jobs!

Seriously, I got a very eerie feeling as I understood this machine. Good art.

The original, non-linkjacked page is strangely barren compared to the Boing Boing attention-a-palooza. http://blakefallconroy.com/18.html

I 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/

A printing calculator rigged up with looped receipt tape:

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

How 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.

Worse 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.

It 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.

Why pay anyone, in essence, purely to suffer?

(see: 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?

Ever 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.

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I should add, before anyone yells "off topic," that this is probably the sort of discussion that the artist would welcome.

Why pay anyone, in essence, purely to suffer?

Because that way, they are not out on the street annoying The Rich People.

I 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.

Would the crank-turners necessarily be suffering? What if they were told that their crank-turning was of vital importance? Is it possible that they might then enjoy turning the crank?

That 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.

If you think that was the idea of the New Deal you don't really understand the economics behind it. The idea is infrastructure improvement such that money is put back into circulation but improvement of concrete (and greater) value is actually produced.

As well as production of valued concrete.

I 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.

In 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.)

It would be interesting to see somewhere try this, because I'm sure it would generate very different incentives than regular welfare. Some people will definitely walk out of work permanently and just live off the freebie. Others will use it for a few months to rest between jobs.

This would make the ramen-eating phase of doing a startup much easier, and the same for any creative endeavour that can be done cheaply but takes time. I wonder if there would be an explosion of art?

Unlike with regular welfare, there's a clear feedback loop between the amount of freebie, the number of people "retiring", and the extra tax burden placed on the people still working. At some level of income, this freebie would make working unattractive enough the system would collapse for lack of taxpayers. So there is going to be a continuous fight to keep the level at a sufficient pain point, versus humanitarians who point to the suffering this will cause.

I always liked the idea with a slight twist. A flat ~10% tax that's split back to everyone in society. If you consider the cost of SS, welfare, and the long term effects of increasing automation. I would assume it's a fairly stable system until people start messing with the percentage. This would also make it reasonable to switch to a flat tax with zero tax breaks.

Yes, it should be stable, because when enough people go voluntarily out of work, the pie gets smaller and so get the 10%.

There's an interesting suggestion by some landreformers of the late 19th / early 20th century. They say that the rent from land comes ultimately from the population density, so all land should be owned by community, but leased out to the highest bidder. The proceeds would be distributed equally to all. (Alternatively you can just have a high tax on real estate, that gets redistributed. Make it say, 10% of the value of the land anually. Owners get to announce the value of their land themself, but will have to sell their land at this value to any party, to avoid them setting too low a price. Of course the value of the land will be changed by the tax.)

I heard about this, too. There's also a discussion in Germany going on. Though the level should be closer to around 800 Euros here. That's close to what you get in welfare. Finland seemed more expensive too me when I went there a few years ago. I wonder whether you could live off the 300-400 Euros. Perhaps if your flat was paid for by some other scheme?

Finnish college students get 400 euros per month, and many are able to complete their education with no other income or parents' savings (college education is free once you're accepted). Besides students, the most basic level of welfare for those who get no unemployment benefits is also about 400 euros.

So it's not impossible to live with that kind of money in Finland, even though it's not enough to rent an apartment in the center of Helsinki. You're probably going to be eating a lot of potatoes or pasta...

The political reasoning is not really that "citizen wage" should be good enough for most people, but rather that it would be unaffected by any additional income. Currently there's really no incentive to get a job that only pays 1000 eur/month: you can get that much by pretending that you're looking for work, and those benefits would be lost if you started working. With citizen wage, you could reach that 1000 eur/month income by getting a 600 eur/month job.

Finland has a major problem with persistent unemployment. It's hoped that these low-skilled workers would become more employable under the citizen wage scheme as they would have the financial motivation to seek low-wage and part-time jobs.

I found even groceries in Oulu expensive compared to German levels. In Germany you get around 650 Euro for studying, if your parents and you have not enough income. (This includes ca 150 Euro child benefit, that students are eligble to get (until they are 26 or so).)

In the east you can live a comfortable student's live on this. Though you would be hard pressed to afford rent in Frankfurt or Munich, I guess. (Perhaps you can make it work by sharing a flat with 4 people, or living far out of town.)

I am all for citizen's wage. (Or basic income. Whatever you call it.) We decided to have these levels of welfare in western Europe anyway. So we can get rid of a lot of administrative overhead and breaks of privacy. Of course average earner will have to pay exactly that basic income back in taxes. (Plus other expenses of the state that don't go into basic income.)

The Citizen's Dividend is an idea with a long and respectable history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_dividend

300-400 euros replace welfare?

Think back to Keynes' analogy of the government burying bags of money in a mine shaft. His point was that meaningless make-work is no different than what happens under the gold standard with no government intervention. As the value of gold rises relative to the dollar more effort is devoted to digging it out of the ground.

The absurdity of the example is intended to illustrate the absurdity of doing nothing. The point of the analogy is to recognize that creating money to accomplish socially useful tasks is better than either burying money in mine shafts or expecting the private market to deflate or dig up more gold. This is what monetarism is supposed to accomplish by lowering interest rates and why Milton Friedman famously stated that "we are all Keynesians now."

If it were a practical objection with the pennies I suppose one could answer it by adding another slot that converted 95 pennies into single dollar bills every five minutes. :)

Nitpick - I'm pretty sure Friedman never said "we are all Keynesians now," I think it was Nixon who said it (much to Friedman's dismay).

"In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, no one is a Keynesian any longer.... we all use the Keynesian language and apparatus; none of us any longer accepts the initial Keynesian conclusions" (Friedman 1968).

Reference: http://www.auburn.edu/~garriro/fm2friedman.htm

Nixon also said something like this, but he was paraphrasing Friedman.

It's not meant as an actual job. It's to prove a point.

One could hook up an electric motor to that crank handle. But I suspect the overseeing bureaucrat would disapprove.

From 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.

I'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.

Imagine 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.

does it give out less pennies for foreign students?

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