... and found out that the person I was paying was working on the side while they were supposed to be watching my child, I would be very, very annoyed. I only hope that the parents wise up before someone gets hurt. Otherwise - I guess if people want to work for pennies, we can't stop them. But I suspect this is going to get bigger. I wonder how many years it will be before we are complaining of the loss of jobs to websourcing.

If you have a child in a child care situation and you haven't thoroughly checked references and discussed appropriate behavior and "lines which shall not be crossed" with your own offspring, then you don't deserve to be a parent in the first place. Listen to you bitching about the babysitter to whom you're outsourced the most important years of your child's development.

If you pay $200 for a 40-hour week of child care, you're saying to the trained professional that your child's development is worth $5 hour. That's probably what you pay the babysitter. Let's pray your child doesn't grow up just like you, penny wise and pound foolish.

Anyone ever heard of the opportunity cost? If you've been through basic economics, I'm sure you have. Consider a little basic math that will show that, minute for minute, it makes sense to do online work for pennies a task, assuming that your internet time is not being spent more productively:

Suppose that you pay $39.95 a month for internet service; that translates to $0.000925/minute. The electricity that you use to run your computer is perhaps 900W for monitor and tower, and assume that your computer runs all the time; this translates (at $0.075/kilowatt-hour) to $0.0011/min. Assuming that you are paid $0.05/task, and you can complete 60 tasks/hour, you could pay for both the electricity and the cost of your ISP for a day by turking for 60 minutes (the two would cost roughly $2.91/day), with $0.09 left over.

Now, if you were not using your internet connection for something else more profitable (posting on eBay, perhaps?), it would make (economic) sense to engage in this kind of activity. That said, there are obviously other activities that would earn you more money with that 60 minutes, but compared to only surfing the net, the choice is obvious.

I encourage others to check my math, because these were quick calculations and mistakes may have been made.

Or we could invest that hour a day doing something useful for humanity, let alone an hour of overtime at a real job. Even masturbating feels better than clicking "pink or blue" hour after hour.

"Look, honey! I ignored our relationship and the children but I just made a nickel!"

Remember his routine that went something like: If I can get a million people to pay a dollar to see me...hey, If I can get one person to pay a million dollars to see me!

Well, it eventually worked for him. Maybe the Turks (rhymes with "jerks") will strike it rich, too.

On the surface it sounds innocuous enough-- but aren't there lots of people who are disabled who are nevertheless willing to work and want to work, and could do this stuff? I mean as bona fide employees, making at least 7 or 8 bucks an hour instead of these "hobbyists" who say they're doing it out of boredom rather than need.

First, let me say that I was only introduced to the verb "to turk" today, and already I hate it. That said, I can't think of a good synonym, and it appears below multiple times, so if you share that feeling, I apologize.

I indicated that it made sense economically, assuming that there isn't something else more profitable that you could be doing online. When it comes down to just the math, you'll make more money turking than doing most other online activities (and since many of the tasks are mindless, anyway, they needn't replace whatever else you would be doing at the time). Let's also remember that decisions of this kind are modelled using Homo economicus, who chooses to do things rationally to maximize his utility, and not Homo sapiens, who obviously applies different criteria. If H. economicus would be most happy masturbating for that hour, or going on a date, that's what he does. To suggest that you should spend that hour doing something useful runs afoul of the admittedly unstated assumption underlying the earlier post--that making money while online is your goal.

I suspect a great number of them will be people goofing off from work trying to make a second salary...

and then that's it. What I meant in the original post was this: turking makes sense along economic lines if your goal is to maximize your wealth. In the same way as clipping coupons, buying cheap clothes, or saving your change, working for cheap like this saves money at the margin (in my first example, the marginal charge per minute of internet service). If that's not your thing, and instead you prefer to donate your time to something else--or if you prefer to have your internet surfing uninterrupted by commerce--then by all means that is obviously what you should do. Of course, even if you do like to save money, turking may not be for you--we all have limits to what we will do to earn money, and this form of work may be too much for many people.

My opinion? The whole thing is pretty dumb. If you really want to help on a massive distributed computing project, download SETI@Home or Folding@Home. They use the extra computational space on your computer to process radio astronomy data/protein folding data; you don't earn any money, but you do contribute to scientific research, and that, in my mind, is a more noble goal than earning pennies by clicking on blue or pink slippers.

Does anyone else but me wonder what actual present or past residents of the nation of Turkey think about this? Calling it the "mechanical Turk" was cool back in the fun-to-be-racist 19th Century, but nowadays, it seems a little....wrong? Morally offensive? Is there some reason Amazon doesn't call this The Virtual Nigger?

As a job, well, the internet is full of ways to earn a buck an hour. You know all those "earn money on the internet" signs you used to see on telephone poles out in the meth-lab parts of the county? Those were mostly for spam-for-hire or pay-to-click sites, where you could sit and click mindlessly on ads for up to $0.04 per hour. This is a job? OK, then.