Immigrant Money

The other day while we were stocking our pantries with bulk foods from a “local” (10 miles away from us) grocery store, and looking at all the prices of bulk foods I started asking myself:

“Why is white, bleached, enriched floor LESS expensive than its whole grain, unbleached floor cousin?
Also why is white sugar (bleached, refined crystallized sugar-cane juice) LESS expensive, than the less-processed turbinado / demerara sugar?”

The answer of course is simple – it’s all in the supply and demand for the products.

It is hard for me as a person trying to live a healthier live to not get angry over the complacency of people in general toward food, especially as they continued to be bombarded with research on topics of how much better whole-foods are for our health, compared to the “refined/bleached/processed/reconstructed” variants. What angers me most is that if all of us as societies realized the simple fact that whole foods are better for us – the long term effect would be a LOWER price for the whole-food products, as manufacturing costs are lower in most of the cases.

It takes less time, energy and equipment to produce a less refined product, than to have the product stripped from nutrients, then bleached and on occasion enriched with additives.

The only way I can see to change these costs and promote healthier foods is by REMOVING subsidies from the agricultural-industrial sector of the economy. This will at least leave small farmers on the same starting level as the big farms and give them a chance to promote a less processed (and cheaper to manufacture…) food, that is ALSO better for us in general.

I was thinking the other day why I have not bought into the hype of “enhanced” cellphones yet – read iPhones, Blackberry devices, Droid based cellphones, Windows Mobile-based “smart” phones, etc. and I came up to a simple answer – there is no device on the market that can do it all in the best way possible.

Some people like the features of the iPhone, only to find out they are “locked” in a controlled environment, where if Apple doesn’t want it – you can’t have it. There is the Apple Store of course, providing a myriad of apps from independent developers for that needy apple fan.
Others (sysadmins mostly) prefer the centralized administration capability, which a Blackberry device connected to a Blackberry Enterprise Server provides. The ability to centrally push software to managed devices, lock them up and wipe them out remotely if lost/stolen, etc. tickles their fancy big time.
Then again some IT folks, that thinks of themselves as “geeks” – like the openness and feature set of the Droid OS -based devices, with the promise of lots and lots of free apps, rivaling the Apple Store.

But what if you want to have it all? Or if you want to switch to a carrier that doesn’t carry the device you want, but provides you with better coverage in the area you now live?

The only solution is a best of breed hardware device, running a OS specifically designed for running virtual Cell Phone / Smart Phone Operating Systems – like the Apple’s iPhone OS, Google’s  Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Symbian OS and others etc. on demand.

You feel like you are in a mood for an iPhone-style design – boot up your phone and select iPhone. Continue launching your favorite apple apps.
If your wife wants to borrow your cell  phone she can just restart it and select her own Droid Profile, as she likes the way it works better than the iPhone.

And so long and so forth…

Looking how much the PC / Desktop business in the corporate world is moving towards virtualization it is clear to me that the phone market will inevitably follow. It will be much more restricted, mind you, but still it will all come to pass, that software goes ONLY with one and only handset which when broken has to reloaded. It has already moved in that direction with most of the service providers creating an “account” for you, which keeps track of your applications, music preferences, etc. etc. and one day (I hope…) a truly virtual experience will follow, where the hardware device you have is not as limiting you to what phone OS you are running on it, or when you decide to try a new one.

So yes – this is what I’ve been holding on – for such truly open device and Virtual Wireless Phone OS to come up on the market.

What is your reason for not getting that latest insert-device-model-here cellphone?

With all the hoopla around Toyota gas pedals sticking and causing accidents, could now be the time where the prices for used and new Toyota will finally get a hit and be more reasonable ? From what I heard they are talking about ten accidents with casualties in the last DECADE, caused by sticking gas pedal. If you ask me there is a bigger chance to win the lotto than dying from a Toyota car accident caused by this problem.

I’m looking to buy a new (for us…) car to replace my dying Honda SUV, but I’m not very happy with the cars I see on the used cars  market at this point in time. It is beyond me why would someone want to buy a 10 year old used car with 70 000 miles on it for $10 000 or more, where a brand new cars in the same category is available for $14000? I will see if the prices of Toyotas fall perceptibly, or if dealers are more willing to negotiate than in the past.

To me a car has only one main purpose – to transport you reliably and safely from point A to point B, hopefully without breaking the bank. Everything else is an add-on which in most cases you don’t need, but in case you DO want – you can buy and install at a later time. This includes GPS, CD player, satellite and HD radio, fancy car alarm, aluminum wheels etc. etc. etc.

In the spirit of a New Year Resolution I decided to try some new (for me…) websites for additional income streams to our family budget. The ones I found and have started using are www.swagbucks.com and www.mturk.com, the later being part of Amazon. The goal was to find such “work”, that will provide some easy money and ways to kill time when at home.
In short – I have been able to add about $15 for a month of “work” from both websites combined.
Here is a short description on what I do:

www.swagbucks.com

After signing up at the website (valid email required) all you need to do to earn some swagbucks (valued at approx $0.10 ea) is to use the SwagBucks Search engine (powered by Ask and Google). That’s it!
You get paid at RANDOM intervals, after clicking the Search button.
How do they make their money?
By including Sponsored links in the search results together with the usual links to webpages you would see if you searched Google for example. The Sponsored Links are made to look similar to the search results. One can still clearly make the distinction and click on the real search hits.

www.mturk.com

The Amazon Mechanical Turk website is a bit of a strange concept. It is an “Artificial Artificial Intelligence” website, at which “employers” (called Requesters) post simple “jobs” (called HITs) which almost anyone can do.  If a “worker” (called a Turker – that’s me/you, the human slave ) Accepts a HIT, they have a limited time to finish it – from 5 minutes to 60 and more, depending on the task. If the time expires before you finish your task – you don’t get paid, even if you did some work on it. The Turker needs to Submit a HIT they finished working on (in the allotted time frame) if they want to get paid.

I use the Amazon Mechanical Turk website primarily to work on legitimate Surveys, that pay anywhere from $0.10 to $1.50.  Most of these surveys are from Universities and other educational institutions and on a wide range of topics. Most of them are fun to do and the best part is – you can always “Return the HIT” before you finish it, if you find its boring or too long, etc. You don’t get paid of course in that case .

One thing I dislike about the Mechanical Turk is that there are a TON of “scammers” or requesters that are up to not good, which try to persuade you to subscribe to some junky new website, which will most likely sell out your email and real identity info (as such is “required” in these cases) and leave you wondering – “Did I just sell my soul to the devil for mere $0.30?”
It is harder to search for legitimate HITs than it should have been – the search capability is greatly lacking in my opinion, compared to a normal search engine. I end up following links to surveys primarily through Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey, which are 2 of the bigger survey engines used by legitimate requesters out there.  If the “survey” link goes to something like http://bit.ly/8vQ5Ye3 or http://tinyurl.com/ydpybex2 – better stay away from it!

What do you use to make some additional pocket change for the month?

Through the recent years we have been searching for an alternative to the US type of dish-washing/scrubbing sponge. We used to buy a pretty big pack of name brand US Style sponges at Costco – the last package we bought lasted for about a year – but they raised the price of this product.
The brands and stores we have used for this purchase since vary, but the quality and price for this product have been very similar.
The type of dish-washing sponge most sold in the stores (what I call the US style) is a Heavy duty sponge with a Non-Scratching plastic mesh on the opposite side, made with materials from companies like 3M. These little buggers have the peculiar tendency to waste a lot of dish-washing detergent, while providing a bad enough dish-washing experience. As the time goes such type of sponges become gunky with dirt, and although still quite usable because of the high-quality heavy duty material, they become unpleasant to work with and end up being thrown away or stashed under the kitchen sink till that bright day of oven cleaning comes (once in an year …).
The price for 3 Big sponges (which we cut in 2 to make a six pack regular size ones) is usually $2.75 or somewhere in that realm, depending on the exact brand and store purchased from.

While shopping recently at the Goodwill store in our area we noticed a Brand New 10-pack regular sized LIGHT duty sponges with HEAVY Duty Scratching plastic mesh on the back, which we decided to try. Read more…