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Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've always wanted to do (and hopefully will) is to hire one of those cheap online assistants that can handle generic tasks for you, and both streamline what I have to do, and use them to keep me accountable.

Having someone confirm whether you've done certain things as their job seems like something that will help me, and even if it doesn't fully help they can reduce the amount of work I need to do to start on something which is helpful on its own.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone here is doing something like this?

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This idea is intriguing. How much is "cheap" and do you have any recommended providers?

You can find some online workers here: https://www.onlinejobs.ph/jobseekers/jobsearch/category/offi... I've used some of the them for data entry, their price is really cheap. You can get some for as low as $2 - $5/hour, depending on what you need.

This feels very exploitative.

Is all your clothing made solely in US?

Bangladesh minimum wage for garment workers (1000+ of whom died when a poorly maintained building collapsed) is 95 dollars per month.

Does this make it not exploitative?

Good point, better to keep exploiting than be a hypocrite!

You are not exploiting the person making the garments, you are exploiting the fact that the cost of living in Bangladesh is far below the cost of living in a Western nation.

The fact that the standard of living in Bangladesh is also lower does not mean that you are exploiting the worker. In fact, in many cases (especially employing them directly online as the GP is suggesting) you are helping to improve their standard of living.

And that makes this less exploitative, how, exactly?

Whataboutism is not useful.

Maybe they are just trying to provoke some thought. They did not make any grand claims regarding levels of exploitation... Not sure why there is always someone trying to get ahead of drama and signal how woke they are despite there being no drama at all.

While I don't entirely disagree I have friends who work for < $5/hr (Eastern Europe) who would love to have the option to do this instead.

I also have friends who work for only slightly more on Upwork projects who would hate it if those jobs disappear under the premise that 'they are getting exploited'.

I'm not going to say this isn't exploitative to some degree, but I will say that this is similar to sweatshop conditions: potentially an improvement over what they were previously doing. It's hard to jump from sustenance farming to a large income.

I highly recommend you take a trip to the Philippines. Go out to some of the villages. There are young children starving. That $2-$5 is huge for them. College graduates work in department stores because there are not enough jobs.

Tim Ferris has an entire chapter on this in The Four Hour Work Week.

It's very possible this is where I've gotten the idea from and simply forgotten - thanks.

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