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by timepiece 4098 days ago
Now you make $50/hour, wait till commoditization hit your profession and see your wage dwindle before your own eyes.
2 comments

If that day comes, who will be better prepared, those that cleaned their own toilets, or those that used that time for something more productive?
Don't underestimate the value in a multitude of skills. When Argentina's economy collapsed in 2001, I'd prefer to know how to write code, do laundry, and wash toilets than only knowing how to write code.
>Don't underestimate the value in a multitude of skills.

I'm sure pretty much everybody who hires a cleaning service knows how to clean a toilet.

I went to university with a girl who didn't know how to operate a dishwasher. At first, I assumed it was because her family had not been wealthy enough to own a dishwasher; later, I found out it was because they were so wealthy they had servants who loaded and ran their dishwasher for them.
The problem I have with people who say things like this is that these things are easily Googlable. I didn't "know" how to do laundry until I went to college (my sister and I had specific chores and laundry was one of hers). During a fight with my sister when I was still in high school, I recall her using that as an insult: "You don't even know how to do LAUNDRY".

I needed to do laundry my first week of school: I couldn't (and to this day can't) even fathom what the phrase "know how to do laundry" meant. Separate whites and colors (or don't), put the clothes in the machine, and press the button.......what kind of mental deficiency is required for someone to think there's an actual gap between "knowing how to do laundry" and "not knowing how".

Loading a dishwasher and cleaning a toilet would seem to be similar. The only gap between "knowing" and "not knowing" is perhaps three seconds of Googling (in case there's some pitfall about what you can and can't put in there).

The only gap between "knowing" and "not knowing" is perhaps three seconds of Googling

Have you ever worked tech support and had to help a lawyer or doctor set up their router?

It's not about mental deficiency.

I'm sure

I'm not.

Bits can move anywhere in the world. Our jobs could be done from anywhere labor is stupid cheap, as long as the workers have the knowledge.

Someone has to come in person to clean your toilet, and can't be outsourced to the cheapest locale.

Presumably the people delivering groceries or doing someone elses laundry weren't making $50/hour in the same profession at some earlier point in their career.
but at least they had a tad more job security and weren't being misclassified as contractors (so had less tax burden)
But these jobs just didn't exist(unless you count full time maids for example), so it doesn't make sense to talk about job security or whether they were contractors or not.
I'm not sure we have enough data yet to say whether the people doing these jobs previously did or didn't have better paying or more secure jobs. Anecdotally, there are many people whose income and job security have severely declined, and who been relegated to low payed variable-workforce service jobs. I don't know to what extent people like that are represented among the taskrabbit-type service workers.