In This Blog: Claudia Plugs Amazon Mechanical Turk
Ahoy again, faithful readers! (Who probably won’t see this until June when I finally post the damn thing…)
So there’s a site called Mechanical Turk that is run by Amazon. Basically, you can sign up as a worker and do tasks for requesters. Usually the requester’s tasks are things like answering survey questions or other things for companies/universities/etc. If you qualify and complete a task, you get paid by the requester.
So far this totally sounds like a “make money quick” website that’s in actuality a scam, but it’s not! It’s legitimately run through Amazon and you actually do get paid (without giving away your personal information or anything like that). I’ve been using it since mid-2014 (and I actually don’t know why I’ve never blogged about it before) and haven’t had a single issue with it being any sort of scam.
And while you do earn legit money, you definitely don’t earn a lot very quickly, especially if you just do the tasks in your spare time. For example, since the middle of last year when I started using it, I’ve earned a total of $171. The biggest payment for a task that I’ve ever done is $4.00, but most of the ones I do are worth a dollar or 80 cents or something like that. If you take a qualifying test you can be allowed to work on the audio transcription tasks, which are usually worth a lot more ($40+), but I haven’t done that yet because I’m too lazy to do transcriptions, haha.
But yeah, $171 is better than nothing, and it gives you something to do if you have a spare few minutes every night or something like that. And like I said, it’s actually legitimate, and a good way to earn a bit of spare money if you wanted to.
WOO!
Monay
So since the last time I’ve been to Canada (not counting Vancouver in May), they’ve upgraded their currency to not only get rid of the penny, but to produce polymer bills that are super freaking durable, colorful, and awesome. Check it out!
Also, they have unique quarters for each province, like we did for our states, but I can’t find any good pics of the whole set, so you get NOTHING!
Take a look at this ad:
Does this make anyone else laugh like crazy?
RUNNING GROOM LINCOLN!
“Running Groom Lincoln” would be a fantastic alt band.
It would also be a good name for a webcomic.
Or we could just make Lincoln appear randomly in everything.
My Photoshop skills are damn horrible.
Oh, and there’s this ad, too.
HELL YEAH HICKEYS!
That dude on the far right looks waaaaaaay uncomfortable.
Yes, I had some free time tonight. This is why such a thing is dangerous.
All About the Bordens
WOO, I got my Canadian tax return money!
Spend, save, or 50/50?
Spend:
– I need another Hume shirt. I use the one I have now for exercising.
– The Brave Little Toaster: Book Form!
– Perchance some Pokemon cards? I miss my Pokemon cards.
– The cutest thing eeeeeever.
– I was a fool and sold back my textbook from my nonparametric stats class way back when. So, the textbook from my nonparametric stats class.
(side note: why is Amazon recommending wedding rings to me? I don’t even have a boyfriend. I don’t even have a guy who I would consider for a possible future boyfriend. I don’t even have any friends.*)
Save:
– I might be going back to UI for MOAR DEGREEZ. Saving for that is quite important.
– As would be saving for moving anywhere across the country for a stats job.
I might just leave it all in my Canadian bank account. Emergency Canuck funds and whatnot. Plus it makes me feel like some ridiculously rich fool holding bank accounts in two countries.
*down here in Arizona, at least.
Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs? More like Loonie for…uh…um…just read the blog.
I had no idea about this until I watched a DVR’ed episode of The Colbert Report tonight, but Iceland is looking to adopt the Canadian dollar as their currency.
WHAT.
Apparently when Iceland’s economy bit it in 2008, their krona lost about 60% of its value. It has yet to recover, causing the country to fall in favor as far as foreign investors go.
To solve this, Iceland is looking outside its borders for solutions; namely, replacing the broken krona with a more stable foreign currency. The currency of choice? Canada’s!
First of all, there are way too many currency-related puns that can come out of this.
I mean, I’ll be Franc…is Iceland’s Yen for Canadian currency Loonie, or do they just have a Nakfa creating close relationships with other northern countries? Even if that’s the case, adopting another country’s currency could present a Rial problem. But assuming that Iceland goes into this with all their heart and Sol, perhaps there won’t be any major issues.
Second of all…another country with a Loonie? But Loonies are so…Canadian! What’s next, geyser-adjacent Tim Hortons? Shark-infused poutine? Rapid acquisition of excess “eh”’s in Icelandic speech?
Interesting stuff. We’ll have to stay updated to see if Canada allows its Loonie to migrate to Iceland.
Canada’s Common Cents
(HA, get it?)
So it turns out Canada’s smarter than us and is going to start phasing out their penny. According to Time, the Canadian government released its 2012 budget without any money allotted for penny creation. Which is a smart thing to do, seeing as how a single Canadian penny costs 1.6 cents to produce (a US penny costs even more—2.4 cents).
Canada is slated to stop producing pennies this month, and while products will still be charged to the cent when debit or credit cards are used, the government is suggesting that retailers round their prices to the nearest nickel (which could have interesting consequences…imagine the guides that’ll pop up telling people what things are cheaper to buy using debit/credit and which are cheaper using cash).
Anyway, I thought this was pretty interesting news. It makes me think about Canada’s switch from paper $1 and $2 to coin versions. Are the coins cheaper to produce than the bills? Also, were the bills called loonies and toonies, or is that just the coins? I don’t remember if the bills had loons on them. SO MANY QUESTIONS, CANADA, JEEZ.
Does the Powerball Qualify as a “Lotto” Money?
Today I drove a car for the first time since summer 2010.
Also, since today was Friday the 13th, my mom and I went to Safeway to buy lotto tickets, as neither of us was feeling particularly unlucky and hey—slight possibility for big bucks. On the way home, we theorized what we’d do with $66 million (that’s what the Powerball is up to as of tonight, I think).
Here’s what I’d do with $66 million:
- Pay my parents back for all their monetary help over the past year (moving to/back from London, plus various other expenses).
- Provide each of my good friends with a substantial sum of money with which they can do what they wish.
- Go back to school! Forever! I’d get all the undergraduate degrees I could, then write about them in a book I’d call Degrees of Freedom. Because I’m awesome like that.
- Donate to The Humane Society. Or adopt a metric crap ton of cats and just live on a giant cat farm.
- Give my mom a large enough amount of money so that she could retire.
- Start a foundation/program to help with homelessness, as described in this blog.
- Get a car. Preferably of this variety.
- Acquire tons of clay, tons of clay tools, a pottery wheel, a kiln, and a bunch of glaze. Sculpt to my heart’s content.
- Get a new iPod, haha.
- Get a ticket to Burning Man.
- Donate to the Vandal Marching Band.
- Donate to the Moscow High School Band.
Probably a bunch of other stuff, too. $66 million is a LOT of money.
What would you do with it?
Working for the weekend? Not yet, but soon.
I have a job! Well, I WILL have a job in a few weeks (have to wait for the January Council of Counsilness to meet to get my approval). I need to start acquiring money ‘cause once I get my brain under control again, I totally want to go back to school.
It’s not a stats-related job, but it pays well, I can pretty much decide when during the day/week I want to work, and it will afford me the flexibility to take classes once the brain issues get resolved (which they BETTER) and I can concentrate.
And it’s a job that will directly help people, so that’s a good thing. I might also get the opportunity to learn Braille and/or ASL.
In the meantime, I must be frugal (even though I may have ~$3,000 in my Canadian account), try to remain relatively sane, and not have another day like Sunday.
Yeah. Right.
A Random $1,900 Appears!
As I said on Facebook, random large sums of money appearing in one’s checking account are awesome, except when one does not know the origin of said random large sums.
Yeah, I decided to randomly check my RBC account up in Canada (I’d left exactly $2.90 in there just to keep the account open until tax time) and discovered that that amount had been supplemented an additional $1,900 or so. The record says the money came from UWO, but that’s all the more info I can get.
It was deposited at the end of November; I think I’ll wait until the first of the year to see if another deposit is made at the end of this month and if so, I guess I’ll email somebody there and ask what’s going on. It might all be an error, who knows.
But that would be pretty freaking sweet if it weren’t.
There are some good paying jobs down here that I qualify for, but until I’m hired somewhere, money = nonexistent.
And I want that DNA test thingy; it was supposed to be my present to myself for finishing my Master’s but I never ordered it ‘cause shipping to Canada was like $50 extra.
So we’ll see!
US-CANADIAN RELATIONS: Y U NO MORE INTUITIVE AND SIMPLE FOR SUCH FRIENDLY COUNTRIES?!
Things that are surprisingly easy to do:
– Withdraw from a Canadian university for medical reasons.
– Hire a company to pack all your apartment’s crap and haul it across the country for you.
– Love Coldplay’s new song Paradise. OH MY GOODNESS SO MUCH LOVE FIVE STARS FIVE STARS FIVE STARS.
Things that are surprisingly difficult to do:
– Cancel your Canadian credit card.
– Transfer Canadian funds to a US account.
– Terminate a Canadian cell phone contract.
– Send medical info from the US to Canada.
– Figure out how much money you’re getting for being a TA for part of a month.
– Doing all of the above in the exact appropriate order so that it all works out in the end.
Hooray stress! Perhaps today’s meme entry will alleviate anxiety.
30-Day Meme – Day 22: Your deepest fear.
Haha, nope, no stress relief. I’m afraid of failure. Failure defined on my own terms. I’d go into more detail but I’m getting really
distracted by the slot machines behind me (I’m stuck in the Las Vegas International Airport for four more hours) and I’m super tired of traveling, so I’m just going to leave things off here.
Sorry.
Let me find the regression line that best fits our love
I want to make a lot of money. I want to do something good with it.
One of the main things I’d like to do is set up some sort of program/shelter for homeless people who really want to get back into the workforce and get things back on track again. I would bet that there’s a fairly large proportion of people out there who honestly would just like to get working and earning money, but are unable to due to various circumstances (being homeless and thus not having a permanent address, not having the resources to acquire appropriate clothing for a job interview, not having a resume or not being able to construct one, stuff like that).
I would like to open up some sort of clinic thing that would provide services to homeless people who want to get working again and eventually have a place of their own. It would provide a permanent address (required for a lot of jobs), “work appropriate clothing” (at least for awhile), and any other useful services, like counseling (emotional, financial, etc.), and possible medical assistance.
Of course, there would have to be a lot of checks in place to make sure things weren’t being abused, but something like this has been something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time. And obviously something like this would be ridiculously expensive (unless I could acquire donations and/or other support), but if I ever have enough money, I’m totally doing it.
Anyway.
Just felt like putting that out there, ‘cause I think the only person I’ve ever told about this was Matt when he was up here.
Today’s song: Telephone by Lady Gaga (damn, she is addictive)
Bloggity McBlog
Check it:
“You have been awarded a 1-year UBC Graduate Entrance Scholarship (GES), valued at $17,500, in support of your graduate studies. These fellowships are only awarded to the top students, so you are to be congratulated on your academic success.”
Pretty cool, huh? Put the TA money on top of that, and I’m getting $27,500 for my first year at UBC.
Snazzy.
The Pitcher in the Sourdough
Hello people! Guess what I’m doing today with some money from my first paycheck? I’m starting an Antarctica fund. That’s right, I’m saving up to get my butt down to Terra Incognita.
Haha, yeah. Just thought you’d like to know. Plus, it’s late, I’m tired, and I don’t have anything else to write about. More tomorrow. Promise.
Kudos if you got the reference of the title…or rather, what the title is making fun of.
Put that in your hickory-smoked sausage and exploit it!
I’m not one to post song lyrics very often—I think it’s pretty pointless unless you explain why you’re doing it.
So here’s my explanation for this: possibly the coolest free song iTunes has ever offered. I love the rhythm and the lyrics.
“Philosophia” – the Guggenheim Grotto
When we’re young we set our hearts upon some beautiful idea
Maybe something from a holy book or French philosophia
Upon the thoughts of better men than us we swear by and decree a
Perfect way to end the war of ways the only way to be a…
Work of art, oh to be a work of art
But in time a thought comes tugging on the sleeve edge of our minds
Perhaps no perfect way exists at all, just many different kinds
Oh but if it’s just a thing of taste then everything unwinds
For without an absolute how can the absolute define…
A work of art, oh to be a work of art.
I just think it’s cool.
Oh, and this:
“Federal endorsement of a deity violates the U.S. Constitution.” My change for the day.
Eigenblogger 
