Hiring Yourself to Do Your Household Chores, Tax Free

I've been working on my house today, which is part fun, part tedious. It gets more fun when I consider what I’m saving financially by doing the work myself. I just make up a number of $40/hour, whch is less than it would probably cost me to hire many kinds of workers. I can’t in good conscience pick a higher number because I’m not as efficient as a specialist who has all the right tools ready.

Here’s my totals from today. I earned $80 (two hours) putting up two window blinds. What the heck . . . I also cooked, cleaned, configured some software, did some bookkeeping, laundry and a few other odds and ends. All in all, it was about 4 hours of work, so I just paid myself $160. PLUS, I’m writing this post rather than hiring a writing. And I’m going to read to myself tonight – otherwise I might have had to pay someone to read to me. And just before falling asleep, I will fluff my own pillow and operate my own dream theater.

Perhaps I’m getting too obsessed about saving money as a result of visiting the website of Mr. Money Mustache. That is a place where "Frugality is the New Fanciness."

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Will Your Job Be Lost to a Robot?

This article in MarketWatch, and this stunning graphic, should give many people concern, though not everyone:

Occupations that are expected to remain in demand for a live human are, not surprisingly, those that require compassion, understanding and moral judgment, such as nurses, teachers and police officers . . .

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Karl Marx was correct about these ill-affects of capitalism

Rolling Stone points out that, despite some huge problems with his proposed solutions, Marx was correct about these ill-effects of capitalism. 1. Capitalism's Chaotic Nature 2. Imaginary Appetites 3. The Globalization of Capitalism 4. Monopoly 5. The Reserve Army of Industrial Labor

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Should your job even exist?

I've often wondered how most of us in the United State would fare if we were forced to stand up and justify our jobs, one by one. We can do without most of the stuff in high-priced malls. We can do without casinos and all of the thousands of people they employ. Wall Street banks "make" only about the amount that they take in from federal government welfare, year after year. We could do away with all of these, and many many more. Should your job even exist? David Graeber explains that people with make-work jobs envy those with real jobs:

All my life, there’s people, you meet them at parties, you run into them, you ask them what they do, and they kind of look sheepish and don’t want to admit it, you know? They say, well, it’s not really very interesting. It’s like, well, I’m a human resource consultant; I work at a computer firm where I fill out forms of a certain kind to make it faster for somebody else to do this, or I’m a middle man among seven layers of middlemen in this sort of outsourcing… They’re always embarrassed; they don’t look like they do anything. All those people out there who have these jobs that you don’t think they’re really doing anything, they must be suffering, they must know that their jobs are essentially made up. Imagine going to work every day knowing you’re not really doing anything. What must that do to someone’s soul? Why America's favorite anarchist thinks most American workers are slaves How could you have dignity in labor if you secretly believe your job shouldn’t exist? But, of course, you’re not going to tell your boss that. So I thought, you know, there must be enormous moral and spiritual damage done to our society. And then I thought, well, maybe that explains some other things, like why is it there’s this deep, popular resentment against people who have real jobs? They can get people so angry at auto-workers, just because they make 30 bucks an hour, which is like nowhere near what corporate lawyers make, but nobody seems to resent them. They get angry at the auto-workers; they get angry at teachers. They don’t get angry at school administrators, who actually make more money. Most of the problems people blame on teachers, and I think on some level, that’s resentment: all these people with meaningless jobs are saying, but, you guys get to teach kids, you get to make cars; that’s real work. We don’t get to do real work; you want benefits, too? That’s not reasonable. . . . It’s envy of people who get to have meaningful jobs that actually produce something.

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How Google hires.

Excellent points made in this article describing how Google hires. The title is, "Why Google doesn’t care about hiring top college graduates." These approaches dovetail well with Paul Tough's book, "How Children Succeed." Here's an excerpt:

Google looks for the ability to step back and embrace other people’s ideas when they’re better. “It’s ‘intellectual humility.’ Without humility, you are unable to learn,” Bock says. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure.”

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