Latest From Second Life Creator: Crowdsourcing Small Jobs 74
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.'"
Important figures from article (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Congratulations, you've invented virtual day labor (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
I hate this argument (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I hate this argument (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason the average job is $12 is because thats what the people doing the work are willing to accept.
There is also little correlation between "Average job is $12" Average time for a job is 4 hours". A lot of 10 minute $10 jobs and a few 100 hour $6000 jobs would be enough to get those two averages - except the average $/hr is $60, not $3. I'm sorry you failed at maths.
ps: I'm a white collar IT worker. I don't accept contracts that pay $3/hr. Hell I don't even accept $NZ60/hr.
Tax (Score:5, Insightful)
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.