

Hand-cranked penny-dispenser allows anyone to work for minimum wage - Flemlord
http://blakefallconroy.com/18.html

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peakpg
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?

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teuobk
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?

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RevRal
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.

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Retric
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.

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noonespecial
Finally, a way for politicians to _actually make jobs_!

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

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

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NathanKP
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>

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bioweek
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.

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asciilifeform
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.

~~~
RevRal
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.

~~~
asciilifeform
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?

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RevRal
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.

\----

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

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JulianMorrison
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.

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Locke1689
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.

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BigDamnDeal
As well as production of valued concrete.

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

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Kadin
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.

~~~
RevRal
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.

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redact207
does it give out less pennies for foreign students?

