Thinking on Job training and 'adequate pay'

So the jobs market is like a big game and so a subject for this blog, right? Well, not really - in most games you rarely, upon losing, end up living in a cardboard box (nod to the casinos, though...)

But anyway, I was thinking how people want to be paid the amount they are worth. Or atleast I think I've heard people say that? Have you ever said that.

But the thing is, if you've ever trained for that job, shouldn't you need to be paid more than your worth?

Assuming unpaid training. Let's say you do 1000 hours of training, unpaid. And the job that training gets you to is paid at a 'worth' of $20 an hour.

Doesn't it actually need to pay more than $20 an hour, until it's paid off those training hours you did for no pay at the time? I mean, what, were your hours worth nothing at all during training? Not even a dollar an hour?

"But I do the training to get the job!"

Well yes, but your essentially getting it by giving away thousands of hours of your finite lifespan to a business which will then just pay you 'what the jobs worth' and in these days of few permanent positions, might dump you at any given time. As an act of desperate effort to get a job, yes, that makes sense. But then why turn around latter an act as if your actually living in an equitable society who pays you what your worth? If did whatever it takes to get that job, your not in an equitable society. Not to mention my old post stating that you can't get a job, unless you have mind control powers. In the current system, you only ever beg.

I'll finish up paraphrasing an author I like, "If anyone says your lucky to have a job, they literally mean you are lucky to have absolutely no leverage at getting a job".

Collecting loot isn't about lore? But sans lore, isn't it collecting database entries?

Wrath of the fuzzy screenshot marked a downhill trend in expansions...

Over at Tesh's blog, a comment by Syl made me ponder...

WoW is goal-focused, or rather: loot-focused. it’s not about identity or lore as much as it’s about the means to get what you’d like to collect.

That prompts me to think - The weird thing about that is that isn’t the very idea of ‘loot’ lore based? I mean, it’s ascribing the lore of ‘this is ye old weapon’ to a set of database entries. Can someone say they aren’t about the lore, when they set about collecting ‘loot’?

Money and seriousness

Geez there were alot of comments on gamejolt along the lines of 'Oh, I love to make games, I don't care about the money' or 'They are FREEware games!'

And yet these people are accepting money - how can you say your doing something just for the love of it, yet accept money? Note that if they had an option of not accepting ad revenue from their game and took it, I'd say they are consistant with their own words.

I mean, what does it take to be inconsistant there - is it a certain amount? If you say you do it for love and accept $5.00 it's consistant? But if you say you do it for love and accept $5.01 your hypocritical? Is there some magic sum where it switches over to that?

No, there isn't. Accepting any amount and yet saying you just do it for the love of it is bullshit!

And same goes for freeware - is there a magic sum where if you accept I dunno, $5.00, it's still freeware, but $5.01....

They're bullshit responces. Yet they were more than enough justification to get snarky for these people, apparently.

There was this guy I knew who was a postie, and he had a million in superannuation and was at retirement age. He just worked for something to do, and called the money chicken feed.

But it wasn't chicken feed/nothing to everyone in that delivery centre - to most of them it was vital.

I think alot of the guys responding to me perhaps even live at home still, or come from a pretty well off background. They wouldn't pick up a five cent coin in the street.

But I'll tell you what, it's pretty common to be serious about even one cent.

Try going to a shop and paying for an item short by one cent. See how many shops don't take that seriously.

I doubt you'll find many.

Either do it entirely for free or get serious about money - but nah, they don't treat it seriously.

Risk #2, Transparency

Even more comments along from my last post and last time at mmocrunch.
I'll quote Inktom,

Unfortunately Hulkageddon 1 and 2 has made safe mining impossible even in empire space. Since Apocrypha and the introduction of wormhole space, you can get that 0.0 feel and profitablility without venturing past gatecamps getting to null or lowsec. They even have wormholes that lead to 0.0 and that enables the term: Stealth mining. But that requires a few hulks and an orca. HUGE RISK! But tremendous reward if you pull it off.

But EVE is not for everyone, but gets the risk/reward ratio right.

My responce

No, not a huge risk. It’s just the impression of a huge risk – what info do you have to prove it’s a risk?

For example, say someones in front of me, flips a coin and it’s my call, heads. They hand me hundreds of game coins and I go weee! Also I don’t lose my game coins.
Now imagine someone goes off into a black box, then comes back out and hands me a few hundred game coins?

Did I face a big risk? Did they flip a coin while they were in that black box? Or did they just decide to hand out game coins to me?

Should I go weeee! or would I just be fooling myself?

Without transparent risks or atleast some level of transparency, you don’t know.

Making money: Growing and selling vegies!

Spotted a great page on growing your own vegetables for profit and even as a main wage and this womans experience with that. Really informative!

I've been looking at the idea of growing and selling myself - just working on the growing at the moment mostly. It sounds like she has an awesome set up!

http://hubpages.com/_1yt6a3e3yrcm0/hub/Can-I-make-a-living-from-growing-vegetables-at-home

Pavlovs grind

The other day I was reading some post about gathering in runes of magic mmorpg. It's been a continual thorn as long as I've been playing or watching ROM. It's that you have to keep clicking to gather all the resources from a node.

Actually that's probably a subject in itself, since some people might say "But it's only a click, don't be so lazy!" to which I would say "Okay, if it's just a click, what if they made it that you have to click five times to get one resource out of a node? How about ten times? Is it starting to feel pointless to do that? Well, it was pointless at clicking once for each resource (it should be one click to gather everything from one node)"

BUT, what I wanted to get at is that some people actually find gathering soothing or calming. And I've heard similar things from people about grinding, before.

Now I'd lay into that, but I'll tell you one thing - if I was going to earn real life money from doing that gathering (or grinding), I would find it quite soothing and calming as well. I genuinely would.

What I'm proposing is that the mmorpg has managed to emulate, for some people, the same reasons they think their job is important - not because of the outcome, but because they think certain repeating actions and rituals matter or advance them somehow. It has the same sort of stimulus of doing an actual job...except it doesn't pay any actual money. But these people associate job == doing an important thing. Even though it isn't important and doesn't lead to making any money.

What do you think? Comments welcome, and sorry for the review before - that'll happen from time to time. As many people do, I would like more income in my life.

Make money online (suplemental income) review: Rewards Central

Okay, cutting straight to what's important (when considering a supplemental income)! How much money do you get each day with rewards central!?

3 points per quick survey per day (3 points is roughly 3 cents Australian)
2 points per advert web click from their site
2 points per bonus advert web click (there wasn't a bonus right when I started, but one came along shortly after)

So about 7 cents Australian a day. Think of it this way, if you had $1000 in the bank at 2.75% interest (which is what the commonwealth bank has at the moment on the netbank saver) gives you 7cents a day. Would you like to have $1000 more in your savings, giving interest? This is the equivalent of having interest from $1000, in terms of supplemental income.

http://www.rewardscentral.com.au/Join/Default.aspx?refer=scrollbreak

Now on top of that there have been around two reward e-mails per week from rewards central, which you get 5 points from (or you can choose to get entries into a $10,000 cash draw). So at around 10 points/cents a week it's more like a bit over 8 points/cents a day. And perhaps as we ride out the economic downturn, there will be more?

Also the adverts are nicely presented and kind of interesting (perhaps somewhat targeted, in other words). They also sometimes have a small treasure chest in them which has bonus rewards for the first 100 people to click it (top prize is $100 (not points, dollars!), second is $50, etc). Make sure you click on that first and foremost if you see one!! Otherwise you miss out! It's clearly their way of making you really look at e-mail, which seems a win/win way of doing it.

On top of that when you join you get 50 points/50 cents. If you fill out the whole profile, you get another 50 points/50 cents. Whether you want to give those details...well, even if you just join, it's 50 points!

And something that's important to me when I look up stuff; When can you cash out? At 3,300 points, which gives you $30. (and thats why I say each point is roughly worth a cent). You could also wait until you have 10,100 points for $100 dollars, which is a slightly better point conversion rate. Which might be worthwhile waiting for, if you see the details on their bank below.

http://www.rewardscentral.com.au/Join/Default.aspx?refer=scrollbreak

If your finding this info useful, please use the link above as it's a referal to my account :) Much obliged!

There's still more to it - there's an instant win game (you need to finish a quiz on the site to unlock this), where you can guess numbers each day and see if you win. With the best configuration (I think) you have a 1 in 2000 chance of winning 2000 points/$20 dollars! Not great odds, but it's free and a bit of a flutter, so it's a fun amusement!

What's quite interesting is the bank - you can deposit points in their bank for a month or up to six months, and it has returns that (as of this writing) start at 7.55 variable interest PA and go up from there based on time or points amount (600 points gets even better rates, 2000 even better). And the only way I've seen them vary is up (by .25 percent!)! So your not just sitting on points, waiting to get to 3,300, you can actually make them earn you even more per day on top of what your were earning before!! At rates which are better than what the banks are offering, too!

http://www.rewardscentral.com.au/Join/Default.aspx?refer=scrollbreak

And then there is, as far as I can tell, Rewards Centrals sister site, MyOpinions. Again you earn 50 points for signing up, 50 points for filling out the profile, and you can transfer these points to Rewards Central. I've gotten roughly two surveys every fortnight, which can earn you a bit over 100 points each AND around 10 competition entries - and even if you get screened out you get around 10 points and a competition entry. The competition is for $5000, which is drawn every three months or so, I think.

ALSO they have an instant win game you can play once per week. It lists your win history and I've gotten  about 50% five point/cent payouts and 50% ten point/cent payouts. You have a one in 49 chance of winning 500 points/roughly $5 with this game each week, which isn't bad odds given your not paying for a ticket to play (I think it's better odds than tattslotto, when I checked - it's certainly cheaper/free). Even if you don't win that, your winning five or ten cents, which might not sound like much but you are now five or ten cents ahead of where you were before! Even more supplemental income!

http://www.myopinions.com.au/join/default.aspx?refer=scrollbreak


So there's the referal, much obliged if you use it! :) I'm thinking of giving MyOpinions it's own review latter on, since it's tucked in at the end of the Rewards Central one here. But they link in together so well it needed to be mentioned right now!

So, those links again (oh yeah, this is a monetized post!) and have a good one! :)

http://www.rewardscentral.com.au/Join/Default.aspx?refer=scrollbreak

http://www.myopinions.com.au/join/default.aspx?refer=scrollbreak

Edit: After about a month and a bit I've made nearly 1,000 points, combining both rewards central and my opinion points.

And feel free to ask questions in the comments section!

Get a job! An examination of an impetus

Auspicious title for a first thread, eh?

There's often the phrase 'Get a job' and an impetus associated with that.

But look at the word 'get'. If you want, you can get a rock or twig off the ground. That is something you can do, because you can simply physically act upon it.

Can you just act upon another person, or do you need their consent? (and by need I mean a nod toward holding a perhaps a common pattern of morality)

So you can't just act upon an employer and make/force him in order to obtain a job, as he is a person and not a rock or twig.

So this person has a choice about giving you a job. It is up to their whim.

"No, they need employees otherwise their income will suffer so...", perhaps you say?

But wait, isn't he or she supposed to have a choice? A genuine choice? Take this, for example: If you wanted to sleep with someone, and they would suffer income loss if they don't sleep with you, does that seem right? Or wrong? If that seems wrong, why is this any different?

"But this is a job, it's different, it can be more..."

More cut throat? You can start leaning on other peoples choices more and applying pressure so they don't really have a genuine choice? Would you like that happening to you? Is it already happening to you and reducing your quality of life?

Perhaps you've believed you could get, in the same way as you can get a rock or a twig, a job. Perhaps you've implied other people are able to, and so should. Perhaps you feel empowered to be able to get a job.

But it's not really compatable with the idea of letting others make genuine choices about their lives, is it?