Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago, a friend of mine, in her 20s, worked full-time as a technician in a university-affiliated research lab, she managed to find a steal of a studio apartment (half the price of a bottom-end one-bedroom in the neighborhood), and she bought awful cheap bulk food... but money was still so tight that, in the evening, when she was too tired to do anything else, she did these online "gigs" that paid only $1-$2 an hour.

Since she could write, she mostly did writing assignments (which I suspected were for SEO Web sites), in which they tell you a topic and how many words to write, you research and write the article, and you get paid a pittance. But $2 will buy steel-cut oats for the day.

Her time should've been worth more than $1-$2/hour, and I don't like the idea of companies arguably exploiting desperate people this way. Though it's not just companies: university researchers sometimes use Mechanical Turk workers to process data, and as research subjects.

For what it's worth, in my experience tasks from university researchers tend to be more fair. The last few studies I did, we paid an equivalent of $8-10/hour while estimating generously on time (e.g. we did $4/30min, but actual time ranged from 15-20min). People in my lab and another lab I was affiliated with seemed to pay similarly fair wages for both studies and data labeling. We also usually accept everyone's submission, even obviously junk answers. It could be that the people I've worked with are more ethical on this than other researchers, but I don't think that's true.

I don't think the IRB actually enforces a minimum wage, but the feeling of oversight seems to discourage super exploitative behavior. The downside is that high payments means higher requirements - something like 98% acceptance, 500 HITs, Master's qualification, and US location is what I generally see used, and we still get junk answers sometimes (in my last study one person somehow submitted a bunch of HTML forms with empty answers despite required fields, still not sure how they pulled that one off without intentionally doing some sketchy stuff...). This makes the fairly paid tasks inaccessible to most new Turkers, leaving them to pick up the scraps of the $1/hour HITs.

Every time I hear these stories, I don't know if they've done the math.

Let's say I live in Toronto (an expensive city to live in) and make 10$/h after taxes working at Starbucks.

40h/week, 4.5 weeks/mo = 1800$

Bedroom in apartment = 700$

Metropass = 150$

Phone = 50$

Internet = 50$

Food = 350$

Total = 1300$

That's 500$ left for things like going out, clothes, etc.

Nobody is exploiting your friends - it sounds like she complained to you, you took her words at face value and concluded that those other people are at fault.

I live in Toronto, those numbers are hilarious. You cannot live in this city on a yearly wage of 21600. Not only are your numbers wrong individually, but they're also woefully under representative because your fake individual isn't buying toiletries, isn't paying for dental, doesn't purchase clothing, doesn't have any medical consumables to purchase, only eats a meal per day or so, etc.

I've done the math. I've lived here. I've financed years of study in the city on loans and been on Ontario Works at times at the start of my career. Your model is poorly constructed.

Honestly wondering because I've fortunately not needed to budget this closely before: OP said $350 for food and "500$ left for things like going out, clothes, etc.". Does that not cover what you bring up? ~$11.60 per day for food seems enough for a healthy three meals a day for one person - a quick google shows numbers like $250/month on a "moderate budget" for food. I feel if you're eating one $11 meal every day that's probably a good place to start cutting down on the spending. Is $500 not enough for toiletries, dental, clothes, etc.? Looking at the past month of my own spending, I bought a couple rolls of toilet paper, a tube of toothpaste, body soap, no new clothes, some skincare stuff, and probably $150 worth of insurance. Maybe I forgot a ton of things but I don't think I spent close to $500 on the "extra necessities", as I would call them.

Just to be clear, I don't disagree with you that $21600 is too little to live on. But I mostly buy OP's numbers, which makes me wonder what I'm missing. Debt payments, maybe?

$11 per day for meals is low, most people who live alone will spend roughly $15 a day (a single meal from McDonald's for instance is $10.95). The cheapest 'eat out' option is roughly $6 for a single meal at Costco/Ikea. Even peanut butter + jelly for every meal, and water for a drink is over $3 a day. Also, for rent, it's more like $800 for a single room in a shared unit, a bachelor is closer to $1500.

Maybe Toronto is way more expensive than Houston, but a cheese burger from McDonalds is $1 and 300 calories.

Pre-made Tasty Bites are like 2.40 and you can throwthem on a bed of rice and eat 3 meals for $10 a day.

And if you cook yourself and eat mostly vegetarian or cheap meats you can easily get your per meal costs into the $2 range.

https://www.budgetbytes.com/

I know the rent is more expensive, in Houston you can easily get a ~800 sq ft 1 br 8 minutes from downtown in a nice neighborhood for $850. If you live in a 2 br with roommates or an efficiency you can get that down to $400-$500.

>Maybe Toronto is way more expensive than Houston

It is.

>~800 sq ft 1 br 8 minutes from downtown in a nice neighborhood for $850

Lol.

> I know the rent is more expensive

Yes, the roughly equivalent 1br in Toronto is going to be about $2500 these days.

Also keep in mind Texas has no sales tax, Ontario does. And we are talking CDN not USD (hard to directly compare some things). It's in general a bit more expensive in Toronto, across the board (except health care, obviously).

Houston is one of the cheapest "proper" metros in USA and Canada.

I like the quotes around proper .

Yeah we're proper in the sense we have a good food/cocktail/bar scene, and a great classical music/art scene.

But we have no public transportation and the density doesn't even get close to other metros.

In Walmart for $11 you can buy 1 pound of chicken breast ($2/lb), 1 pound of rice ($.50/lb), 1 pound of tomato sauce ($.50), 1 pound of carrots ($1/lb), 1 pound of bread ($.88/20 oz), half pound of butter ($3/lb), half pound of cheese ($2/8 oz), and still have $4 left after tax. You can literally feed a family of four with this. Of course, most nominally poor people will spend much more, because they're not actually all that short on money.

If you take 1860s unskilled worker wage and spend it all on food, you'll get about as much as you could with SNAP benefits (~$130/month) today. The UBI is already here, it's just our standards have rose significantly.

I concur with your experience. Spouse is a great shopper. We probably spend a little more than this daily, but we frequently get 2-3 meals each out of it. Dinner for 2, 2 days lunches. We eat out 2 nights per week, one being take-out pizza and a salad. The salad always gives us enough for part of a 2nd meal. We shop carefully, cook at home. Buy soft drinks, bottled water in bulk, make iced tea, buy big bags of ground coffee, etc. We do this by choice and eat better foods than most people we know. We can afford to spend quite a bit more, but this suits our lifestyle.

This has been my experience when I was growing up, and when I was a student. Food these days is insanely cheap if you aren't going for specific tastes, or if you're good at cooking.

I'm much wealthier now, so I spend much more on food because I can, but if you're really frugal, you can keep your expenses extremely low by simply avoiding expensive ingredients. For example, a single red bell pepper costs $1.50, which is insanely expensive compared to chicken, beans, rice, or carrots, based on the nutritional value. Of course, fresh vegetables are nice, but fresh vegetables any time of the year are very modern invention, thus expensive, and you can easily do without them.

Maybe where you're from but: [1] chicken breast 5.86/lb [2] rice $.94/lb [3] tomato sauce $.63/lb [4] carrots $.99/lb [5] bread $1.38/20oz [6] butter $2.95/lb [7] cheese $3.05/8oz

Which shows that it's multiples more expensive in Canada.

[1]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/boneless-skinless-fillet-remove... [2]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/rose-jasmine-white-scented-rice... [3]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/great-value-tomato-sauce/600015... [4]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/carrots/6000191271746 [5]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/great-value-100-whole-wheat-bre... [6]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/natrel-salted-butter/6000199418... [7]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/great-value-cheddar-cheese-marb...

It's laughably not close. I wrote a full reply with figures, but it took up a ton of space. The short version is that neither of your models are accurate as to the actual costs in this city, and you've also just flat out ignored a ton of cost verticals.

Quick sanity check: there's zero medical costs. Zero clothing costs. Zero furniture costs. Zero moving expenses. Zero allowance for costs associated with sharing your place with 2 other people. Zero education or progression related investments. Zero capital expenditures on your computer (better hope it never fails, right?).

And that's just a taste. The model is SO wrong as to be laughable.

You are missing at a minimum: debt payments, retirement savings, regular savings (e.g. emergency fund), any sort of vacation or holiday travel budget, insurance, basic dental care or things like eyeglasses if you need them. A realistic clothes budget. Realistic meals outside the home. Any entertainment. Any travel outside the metropass. Any household stuff.

$350/food isn't bad estimate for Toronto - it would be hard to get below $250, even being very careful. So there is maybe a little to claw back there, but you'll want at least $100 for food outside the home too.

Also the rent number is too low for Toronto, assuming you don't add a commute beyond your metropass.

So yeah, $500 doesn't look that practical.

This isn't a budget for sustainable living, it's a best an emergency budget you can survive on for a bit.

Just to add some context, as others are suggesting $11.60 is not enough for food:

I used to live, fairly recently, on a hard limit of $10 per day for food - I did not eat out (almost never). It was enough to bulk up on (over 4000 calories), was balanced, and even included the prices of some basic supplements I took. This was in an expensive area of the US, that per a quick search is roughly on par with Toronto.

$11.60 seems like it could cover a days food in most, if not all, North American cities. You have to be diligent about budgeting, where you shop, what you buy, etc. But it can be done.

Shoot, it's not even Toronto. I live in a 2nd tier Canadian city and those numbers wouldn't fly.

You might be able to swing it for a few months and not die, but that's not really any way to live.

They said $2 per hour not 10. A quick search will pop up a number of gigs paying that much.

> Nobody is exploiting your friends - it sounds like she complained to you, you took her words at face value and concluded that those other people are at fault.

You're contradicting me by stating (false) assumptions about my friend, and stating (false) conclusions predicated on those.

Your analysis also neglects American Millennial debt service and healthcare costs.

I used a personal example of my friend because it was close to home for me, and I thought that by mentioning it (as connected to an HNer), along with an age range, it would be somewhat closer to home to some other HN people. When people mention a potentially upsetting personal example, we should try to be delicate in wording things.

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