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

[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?

[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?

[nym]

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

[noonespecial]

Finally, a way for politicians to actually make jobs!

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

[jws]

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

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[eru]

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.

[trevelyan]

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. :)

[wyday]

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

[tungstenfurnace]

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

[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.

[asciilifeform]

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.

[redact207]

does it give out less pennies for foreign students?