Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Outsourcing schlep!

One of the biggest hassles over the years has been getting small things done that build up over time. After work, friends, family, and any type of social life, there's no time to take care of your own home. Fortunately, some amazing companies are coming up and out of San Francisco and spreading up this way.

One of them I've been using lately is check maid to clean this pile of rust up! Although if you play around with the pricing it gets pretty expensive, for my little apartment like mine, $119 is a fair price for a clean home. I spend hundreds on silly stuff all the time, so it seems only natural that I should be spending something on living in a clean environment. Dust is constantly building up from the highway in any case, and it takes awhile to clean.

And house cleaning isn't the only thing I've been getting done using cool new services. I've been using amazon's turk to help with data entry work. The amount you pay per task is mind blowing. You can outsource anything today. A quick Google search shows just how much you can accomplish with Amazon's new tool, and that's not considering the plethora of other services for everything else (Fiverr, oDesk, etc.)

Although there was a business that used to delivery groceries that was large and died, Safeway picked up where they left off and is now offering grocery delivery. Since they have the infrastructure already in place, it's working wonderfully. I've ordered almost everything I could think of right to my door. The only fee is $5 for delivery. Unfortunately they aren't always able to get everything you ordered, depending on the store they came from, but they do allow substitutes. Depending on them for fruits, vegetables, and other basics, works perfectly.

I've even had friends outsourcing their clothes shopping! One friend has a dog groomer come by as well. It's incredibly how fast everything is changing. In another decade you'll never need to leave the house, I suspect. You already really don't!

As long as I have my Macbook Pro and a solid internet connection, I suppose I'm OK with the latter! :)

Saturday, October 26, 2013

More of the same

The Seattle Times reports another failed attempt to take care of it's underclass. They say they may expand plan to help the homeless.

Right.

$1.5m isn't going to make a change. What a PR stunt. The rich get richer, and the poor get trashed. These people don't want this, they simply see no way out, and a government unwilling to acknowledge their existence. This cycle of nonsense is never going to change without an aggressive movement.

It's coming eventually. I think Russel Brand summed it up nicely.