Maybe I am wrong, but this seems like a pretty good idea:
An “experiment” which involved using homeless people as mobile wi-fi hotspots has attracted criticism, forcing the advertising agency behind it to defend itself.
A division of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) equipped 13 homeless people with 4G mifi devices in Austin, Texas.
It suggested the public pay $2 (£1.30) for 15 minutes access to the net.
Comments posted to the BBH’s site accused the project of being “unseemly” and “wrong”.
Members of Twitter asked “what has this world come to?” and accused the project of being a “gimmick”.
However, others praised the idea as being “inspirational” and a chance to create a “positive interaction between the public” and homeless people.
How is paying someone to distribute wifi access any different than paying someone to work in your food stand at SXSW for a week? I don’t see anything unseemly or wrong about it at all- they are providing a service and making some money, and I fail to see how it is different from a vendor selling t-shirts or bottled water.
And the fact that they are using homeless people seems to be better than what normally happens any time a big conference comes to a big city, which is basically they are cleared off the streets and penned up out of sight and out of mind. Again, maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t get what is so awful about this.
namekarB
OMG ! Who are they going to use if they run out of homeless people? The unemployed?
Oh the horror.
wrb
Very cool.
If the homeless were paid by the number of people accessing through them, they would compete to fill in any gasps or deficiencies in coverage.
TenguPhule
It robs cable companies of the chance to overcharge for access. SATSQ
SiubhanDuinne
I was just hearing about this on NPR. It was the headline story on Marketplace. I think it’s a good idea too, and the guy who runs the program (interviewed for the segment) handled all the questions about “optics” and “perception of condescension” very well.
taylormattd
I think it’s because it sounds like they are treating them like a telephone pole; like they are going to install a satellite dish on them, as if they were equipment.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@TenguPhule:
. Ok that makes sense; it wrecks the American dream of a rich man getting richer off another man’s labor.
300baud
I’m pretty sure the awful part is that it’s forcing the general public to pay attention to the existence of homeless people. With a side order of perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good from the sort of homeless advocate that prefers outrage to improvement.
Gex
Not enough cruelty or shaming involved. Face it. All our social policy revolves around these concepts.
taylormattd
Also, I think 300baud has a point. Frankly, people will be sitting at some local coffee shop surfing the web, but they will feel guilty if they know they have service only because some guy is sleeping under a bridge a few feet away.
Quaker in a Basement
It’s a bit dehumanizing to pay someone to do the job of an object. It’s kind of like paying someone to stand in line for you. It’s not an outrage, but it does seem a little exploitative.
cathyx
If they’re paying them, I’d do it too. I could use the extra cash. Where does the device go? Could I go about my normal activities wearing it?
Midnight Marauder
I would say this is a major problem:
There isn’t even a flat wage that the homeless individual can earn, but rather, it’s based on the discretion of customers.
Yeah, sounds like a real winning recipe.
BGinCHI
I was going to check my email from under a bridge after Santorum got elected anyway, so at least now I know there will be service.
gelfling545
Oddly enough I am currently doing some work for an organization that serves homeless people in another area. My guess is that if you asked the guys they would mostly say “Hell, yes” to the offer to earn a few bucks for doing mainly what they were going to do anyway. I’m guessing that those reacting in horror may be feeling that someone should just grab the homeless off the street and rehabilitate them by force while, actually, feeling like one can still make a contribution to society of some type can generate feelings that perhaps it would be possible to engage with “respectable” society in other ways as well.
Keith
Thanks for the bandwidth goes out to Big Mike ‘n The Boys.
Boxer Beater
Are the homeless guys actually getting paid? Would the money be enough to get them out of homelessness?
Baud
Probably violates the EULA of the MiFi provider.
ruemara
The terrible parts are in using the homeless to do something, as opposed to hiding them in a less desirable part of town, allowing the unwashed masses to have technology and… something will come to people, I’m sure. With regard to the using people as objects, you do know that people have been paid to stand in line for others. I, personally, once went on a hunt for a button for my modestly millionaire employer. 4 hours tramping around the upper east side, because he wanted a very specific button for his cuffs. How fucking demeaning is that, that I can get paid $9 per hour (in ’87), to look for a $5 pack of buttons? And fruit picking can be done by machines, yet the people of Alabama or whatever, sure found out that people who know how to pick the fruit actually have a skill. Why the hell not? Throw in some socialized mental health care, showers and storage space and you have a new way to get the disenfranchised into the workspace.
dedc79
A co-worker likened it to a scene in the Simpsons episode where Homer moves the family to this kind of utopian development (actually run by a global terrorist). In the video they show a slum and then show what the same neighborhood looks like in the utopian development. The homeless person in the slum becomes a mailbox in the development.
Djur
“It’s a bit dehumanizing to pay someone to do the job of an object…”
Well, a lot of people are paid every day to wear sandwich boards or wave signs or dress up as mascots or otherwise perform as human billboards. As far as late capitalist degradation goes, I don’t see hiring the homeless to provide a highly in-demand service as particularly dehumanizing. Aside from that, there’s an obvious benefit to having a person carry around a hotspot — they can and will gravitate to underserved areas using the advanced technology called “legs”, as opposed to someone having to go around and relocate hotspots constantly as crowds move.
Hell, it looks like in this case you’re expected to pay the person providing the hotspot directly, which seems to me to be much less dehumanizing than sitting around with a sign saying “Eat at Joe’s” or whatever. This is more akin to busking, hawking, roadside vending… simple commerce that the more marginalized members of society have engaged in for thousands of years.
TK-421
My God, John, you really don’t see the problem here?
Either:
A) the homeless person is objectified as a telephone pole. After all, there is an expectation that the homeless person will be in a convenient location. You said that yourself. These are humans, not fucking wireless modems. But okay, you want to explain that it’s not dehumanizing because hey, they’re getting paid! You want to go there? Because then you run into the second issue which is…
B) if homeless people are being asked to do a job, then they should at least be paid minimum wage. $2 is well short of that. Employing people for less than minimum wage is a form of slavery.
I suppose one could make the argument that the homeless person is neither obligated nor expected to stay in a given geographical area, and that the $2 is just a form of charity. In which case, why not just give these homeless people $2 each, as a form of charity?
The fact that there is an exchange involved with this money is what puts this project in the “insulting” or “degrading” or “enslaving” territory.
There’s just no way around the fact that something was asked for and/or expected from the $2. And that is what’s offensive.
FridayNext
It’s a lot better idea than dressing up black men in prison jump suits and having them walk around town handing out passes to a museum of crime and punishment.
Only IMHO of course.
I don’t know why, but this story just reminded me of this other story.
TK-421
@Djur:
$2 is less than the minimum wage. Just FYI.
Egg Berry
@TK-421:
and
Apparently, you can’t read.
I don’t know if more than one person can use a mifi at a time, but that could be well more than $2.
cathyx
I think cleaning public bathrooms is dehumanizing. Should that be outlawed?
scav
@TK-421: This may not the perfect implementation of the idea but the other basic parts still hold. It could be an easy part time / flex hour job for people that need additional work. Hell, go read in a public place for a few hours (do your homework) and maybe bring in some cash — could be worse.
FridayNext
@TK-421:
Where do you get $2 an hour? I see in the article each person pays $2 for 15 minutes which is $8 an hour and I assume each mifi dooflickey can accommodate more than one person at a time.
Not that it is all about money, but if the person involved (homeless or not) gets paid a fair wage and they enter into the contract fully informed, what’s the problem? People don’t lose agency and right of contract just because they are homeless. They can decide on their own whether they are want to do this.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
Fortunately, once everyone (homeless or otherwise) has a small wifi transmitter installed inside their skulls, this will no longer be a social justice issue.
Nutella
If they were paid at least minimum wage plus the tips I wouldn’t see anything wrong with it either but providing a valuable service from a large corporation to prosperous customers for tips only is tacky.
Xecky Gilchrist
$2/15min = $8/hr.
Which is not great, but over minimum wage, isn’t it?
ETA: FridayNext said it better.
MCA1
@300baud: Ding ding ding! Winner. Also, too, it would appear that those desiring this wifi access have to actually, like, interact with those very same homeless folk. Can’t have that.
Calouste
@TK-421:
$2/15 minutes, which works out at $8/hour, which is more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour.
Mnemosyne
@TK-421:
I think this is the more important point. As others have pointed out, I don’t think that having someone sit and sell access to a wireless hotspot is any more demeaning than waving a giant sign saying “LIQUIDATION SALE!” or dressing up as a giant sandwich to get people to stop at Subway.
But not paying them at least minimum wage is pretty outrageous.
Djur
@TK-421: $2 for 15 minutes = $8 for 1 hour. That’s over minimum wage in Texas. Furthermore, more than one person can purchase access at a time, I’m assuming. Finally, these people are not being paid an hourly wage — they’re being paid directly by customers. Nobody stresses out over whether street newspaper vendors, orange sellers, or buskers are making minimum wage.
As regards your other point: people are constantly paying other people to be in a place that is convenient for them and provide a service. Taxi drivers, for instance. That’s fundamental to capitalism. Unless these people are being impressed into service by the hotspot overlords, I’m not seeing how this is unusually exploitative. The homeless aren’t hothouse orchids who need special insulation from commerce.
Old Dan and Little Ann
This sounds like a lost Seinfeld episode.
FridayNext
@Egg Berry:
My friend’s card can do up to 4 at a time. I don’t know what their technology is, but one person at a time doesn’t seem cost effective to me.
Martin
@Calouste: That assumes the guy is billing continuously. It puts the risk on the employee. Now, if the guy is keeping the entire $2/15 min, that’s not unreasonable if they have no outlay in cost.
But the real problem with this isn’t the economics of it, it’s the morality of it. This creates a negative incentive to address homelessness. If you like mobile roaming data, you have an incentive to keep these people homeless. That’s the problem.
Mnemosyne
@TK-421:
Couldn’t you say that about any job? I get paid an hourly wage to answer phones, schedule appointments, etc. Isn’t it “degrading” that I’m exchanging my time and energy for money?
David Koch
This is a BIG waste of money.
Instead of using the bums at telephone poles we should be harvesting their organs for real americans.
Litlebritdifrnt
I see this a absolutely no different from someone dressing up in a green dress as lady liberty and waving a tax preparing sign on the sidewalk. I see this ALL the time around here and so long as the person is paid minimum wage this actually involves LESS work than the lady liberty gig does. $2.00 per 15 mins, as noted above means $8.00 per hour for the homeless person, assuming that the device can give multiple people access we are talking big bucks for sitting there wearing a wi fi device. For the sake of argument I think if I was homeless and I got the chance to make $32.00 an hour or more for a couple of days I would be over the fucking moon.
Calouste
@Martin:
You can walk around the streets of the city without being homeless, it’s not a crime. I sometimes do it on my days off. I also see people do it on a regular basis, wandering around seemingly aimlessly. But they wear nice blue uniforms and they don’t look homeless.
Djur
@Mnemosyne: But the homeless are special precious babies we need to coddle and protect. Paying them money in exchange for services robs us of the chance to show the virtue of charity.
@Martin: It creates a negative incentive to address homelessness by giving the homeless money? Which they can then use, if they so choose, to further their interests? The homeless don’t need liberal paternalists to speak for them. They have their own voices.
And “the risk [is] on the employee” in every commission sales job ever. Again: part of capitalism. Liberals have no reasonable critique here. You can’t have your capitalist cake and eat it too.
scav
How do taxi-drivers and those services manage the risk, etc? Might be a model there to milk for things that work and don’t work.
FridayNext
And just to keep poking at this:
Poor people do not lose their ability or right to make their own decisions because they are poor or accept charity or government assistance. They are still people and possess all rights civil and human. Assuming people are legally sane and able to make their own legal decisions (a bigger if among the homeless than among the homed, granted) they should be able to make their own decisions on whether to participate in this program. I don’t see this as any less paternalistic as telling food stamp recipients they can only buy food the dominant culture defines as healthier. In fact it is MORE paternalistic since these homeless are deciding on their own to form their own contracts and not asking for handouts, at least in this instance.
I find that under the right circumstances the left can be as paternalist and demeaning to the poor as the right.
Let them decide for themselves and let them unionize!
TK-421
@Egg Berry:
I can read just fine, and what you don’t see anywhere is any kind of detail on how these
“hotspot managers”homeless people are going to get paid, and on what terms.I keep looking at that article, and I think it’s even worse than it seems.
The company was going to collect $2 via PayPal for every 15 mins of access, and then the homeless person was going to get that money…how? Did they need their own PayPal accounts before they were
hired“asked” to perform this service?And again, if this is a job, then pay for it. I’ve got no problem hiring a homeless person at minimum wage to hold an antenna and stay within a geographical radius. A job is a job, and good for hiring the homeless.
But do we honestly think that’s what happened here? I don’t. IMO it’s absolutely NOT a coincidence that this company was going to use homeless people and not, say, college or high school students looking to make some extra money. Because…why?
That doesn’t look like a coincidence to me, and you have to wonder about the mindset of a person who intentionally uses the homeless for this job.
Sly
Because homelessness is supposed to be invisible. That sacred covenant is kept in situations where a homeless man or woman is selling bottled water or t-shirts because the consumer is not generally made aware of homelessness of the seller.
Here you are buying from a homeless person a service that is contingent on their homelessness, and that makes people feel all icky.
Shawn in ShowMe
You know it isn’t going to stop here. How long before we have new web startups providing custom homeless wi-fi solutions, with different pricing plans for different levels of service? And of course there’s an incentive for companies to control the movements of the homeless if the end user runs into technical difficulties. If Brad is having trouble uploading his Power Point presentation to the home office, it’s only right that his provider round up the great unwashed to troubleshoot the issue, right? After all, he’s paying $19.95 a month!
Steve
@TK-421:
Ouch. No.
@Martin:
Usually it’s the libertarians who place undue importance on “incentives.” The disease may be catching. There is already, by definition, an inadequate incentive for society to solve the homelessness problem; I dislike the idea that we need to keep these people from making a buck lest society become even more disincentivized. And I honestly doubt very many people are going to be like, “No, wait, vote down that homeless shelter bill! I don’t want to lose my convenient wi-fi!”
maya
“It’s a bit dehumanizing to pay someone to do the job of an object…”
Now that’s funny seeing as quite a few people walk around wearing Swooshes, Alligators, and Team names on their jackets, tee-shirts, golf shirts and caps freely advertizing big corporations for no pay at all. In fact, they pay those corporations for the ‘privilege’ to do so. Ain’t that a kick.
Egg Berry
@TK-421:
Again, maybe you should have read the article. They never claimed it was coincidental.
Andrey
@TK-421:
Wanting to give jobs to the people who need them most? Yeah, a terrible mindset.
The article explicitly notes that “each of the “hotspot managers” would keep the money that they earned.” So yes, all of that $2/15m is supposed to be going to the person carrying the hotspot. I’m not sure why you think it’s difficult for them to actually get that money without a Paypal account. Cash, check, etc. would work perfectly fine.
Edited to add:
“It’s a bit dehumanizing to pay someone to do the job of an object…”
Considering how many jobs can currently be done by objects, that’s a rather broad categorization.
Djur
@scav: If you’re talking about liability, taxi companies/co-ops use pooled insurance and strict policies to mitigate risk. I’ve been in a car accident in a taxi, and the first thing they do is send out someone else to actually deal with the insurance and collect information. The driver goes and sits in her car [or to the hospital, etc.] and waits for things to be finished.
If you’re talking about what happens if you don’t make enough money on fares on a given day, well: you scrape by, you save during good days, you ask favors from friends, and sometimes you can’t afford to pay for your cab anymore. It can be a marginal life. Lots of people live marginal lives hand-to-mouth under capitalism.
TK-421
Reading through the comments, I see what everybody is saying: that because it’s $2 for just 15 minutes, then that’s above minimum wage.
Eh, maybe that could be right, but the payment terms (or lack thereof) is what’s kind of got my bulls–t/a–hole detector up. The most charitable interpretation is that people could individually and directly pay a homeless person $2 for 15 min of access, and therefore yay.
Except then the whole mention of PayPal makes no sense. That only makes sense if payment happens via online and/or credit. In which case then some middle layer (i.e. the company in question) has inserted itself unnecessarily into the transaction, and most likely at the homeless person’s expense.
I still don’t see this company as being any kind of hero here, and I strongly suspect they tried to exploit the homeless. I bet in a few days we’ll find out.
Laertes
@TK-421:
I think you’re right to be suspicious. Because the homeless are especially vulnerable in lots of ways, you might suspect that a business model that specifically employs them might somehow be an attempt to leverage that vulnerability to make a buck at their expense.
Still, given my half-assed reading of the situation, it’s not obvious that this is any more exploitive than any number of other menial jobs that don’t produce any controversy.
Apart from the now-thoroughly-debunked idea that the workers are being paid only $2 an hour, is there any good reason to suppose that this arrangement is exploitive even by the shabby standards of the low end of the US labor market?
scav
@Shawn in ShowMe: Excuse me, my home-office homeless wi-fi solution won’t make his bed and is spilling coffee every morning. Oh, and there seems to be some sort of intermittent interference of some sort when I run hi-def. Could I possibly have an upgrade? I’d prefer a vegan.
Martin
@Calouste: They didn’t solicit the general public – they focused specifically on the homeless. Presumably this doesn’t pay well enough to attract anyone but the homeless.
@Djur:
It creates a negative incentive to not give the homeless enough money to not be homeless. Think about the business – if it provided an adequate wage, it’d immediately destroy itself by taking the individual out of the setting that they rely on for the business to work. The only way it works is if the individual remains homeless. If they pay too well, the business collapses. They need to pay just little enough to keep the employee destitute and just enough to entice them to do it.
No commission job operates without giving the employee reasonable means to be successful. Are they providing these individuals with the means to be successful? Not so clear from what I can tell. And a commission job has to provide enough upside potential to attract people away from a fixed wage job. I don’t see that here. I doubt very much that you could attract so much business under this model to earn $65/day on average, which is about what 8 hours a minimum wage pays. Now, if they can prove that’s reasonable, and that more than $65/day is possible, then you’d have a point. I don’t think they’ve proven that.
Capitalism doesn’t provide unimpeded ability to exploit people. Only libertarians believe that.
Egg Berry
@Martin:
Just so we’re clear here, South by Southwest is only a week long.
Laertes
@Martin:
That’s one reasonable presumption. Another reasonable presumption is that they specifically employ homeless people because they’re specifically trying to help homeless people. There used to be (and may still be, for all I know) at least one newspaper in Chicago that operated this way.
That second one is their story, and it’s at least plausible. Is there any good reason to suppose that the first is more likely?
Martin
@Steve:
No, that’s certainly a valid point, and I don’t disagree. It’s not like we’ve provided adequate alternatives to being a walking radio station. I’m just pointing out that on first blush this strikes me as improper and largely unviable. And the Mifi isn’t free – so there’s an opportunity cost here going unaddressed. Could that money be better utilized if helping the homeless is indeed the goal?
Djur
@TK-421: Unless they’re straight-up lying about not taking a cut, they’re not taking a cut, and they’re not profiting from this other than from exposure. If they’re lying about not profiting from this, sure, fuck them for being lying fraudsters. Otherwise, why condemn them for nebulous suspicions?
@Martin: The moment someone is actually operating a profit-generating business on this model and is still operating on a pay-what-you-like-but-maybe-$2 model, yes, I will agree with you that it’s exploitative, regardless of whether it employs the homeless or anyone else. As this goes at the moment, this is a nonprofit operation. I’d also like to get an idea of what the actual average payment has been before assuming that $2/hr. is what people are getting.
As it is, I seriously doubt this could ever be a profitable model for a business. The combined income that the hotspot carrier and the business employing them would require to make it profitable would price them out of the market. Nobody’s going to pay $10+ for 15 minutes of Internet from a for-profit service.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Here’s a partial transcript of the Marketplace interview:
Radia: The short version is what we’re doing is we’re trying reinvent the street newspaper model. When we looked into it, we realized that actually they do a lot more than just provide money for the homeless. They give them a social interaction that’s actually quite critical to their success. And so we thought that reinventing it would give us the opportunity to bring the homeless out of kind of invisibility as we’ve seen them treated at big conferences and such.
Ryssdal: Let’s remind people what street newspapers are. They are newspapers sold by homeless people, sometimes content-generated by homeless people, and then they get to keep the proceeds.
Radia: That is exactly right. The goal is to go make you introduce yourself. So there is no way to hop on their 4G network without going and speaking to them. That’s that social interaction point. These aren’t just people that are antennas — that’s somehow been implied in this kind of hardware application that looks bad. They have a service that they offer, which is to get you online. And they generally tell you their story. Once they tell you their story, you get the code, you text in, and then you can join their network and then the money goes directly to them for the access you just got.
Ryssdal: Not to put too fine a point on it, but did you think about how it looks? ‘Cause it just looks not great.
Radia: Absolutely. I think that’s a very fair question. What’s interesting about it, though, is everyone who has dug below the surface has left with a very different perspective. I wish that anyone who knows someone in Austin or is in Austin currently goes and speaks to one of these people. There is no way to engage with one of these people without feeling quite warm-hearted about it. So I hear the point about if you got a 140 character update from Twitter, that looks bad. That said, look at any of the original source information and you realize this is actually a program with an exceptional amount of integrity trying to help people.
Ryssdal: I’m going to try this again, perhaps less delicately. It sounds almost condescending. It sounds, look at these homeless people, we’re trying to do this nice thing for them, wouldn’t that be nice?
Radia: Yeah, and I apologize to anyone that’s offended by that. Many of the street newspapers that we’ve been speaking to realize it’s actually not condescending. What we’re doing is we’re taking a model that exists already — street newspapers. It’s really that social interaction point, the ability for them to express themselves, to be a bit entrepreneurial. Again, if you really get into the experience, it is the opposite of condescending. It’s very empowering, actually.
Ryssdal: When you guys were brainstorming this, did you anticipate the blowback? Did you think about this?
Radia: Certainly we did think about it. It would be naive not to think that this is going to be debated. By putting this model out there, and letting people debate — this is what worked in their program and this is what didn’t work — we’re actually uniquely qualified to say, we can take our licks for whatever we got wrong. What we’re motivated by what the people who adopt it get right as a result.
aimai
I guess I’m concerned because of the lack of bargaining power between the worker (homeless person) and the corporation hiring them. I’m not sure that its that different from, on the one hand, child labor and on the other hand prison labor. OK, they aren’t being compelled to partcipate in the scheme and maybe its actually going to work in a way that sort of makes their situation a positive feature for the job. But by definition the jobs are temporary, don’t come with any kind of benefits, and won’t amount to anything more than a few days of walking around money–will they? So they seem on the borderline of exploitative. In addition they draw money away from the official economy and from government services since presumably this is designed to fly under/around unionized labor, tax paying and social security/ unemployment insurance. Isn’t it really just another form of scabbing?
aimai
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Martin:
I don’t think this creates any negative incentive to address homelessness. This country already has enough negative incentive. (When I was in college, we slept in cardboard boxes over Spring Break just to feel what it was like, and were confronted by other college students with knives.)
Heck, I think a capitalist solution may be the only way this country will accept doing anything about the homeless.
aimai
OK, I cross posted with the interview posted above. I see that I was not understanding the business model. I retract my post. This looks worth looking into.
aimai
lamh35
OT, but try NOT to laugh as you read this headline:
Mitt Romney told Fox News that he would not pick Rick Santorum as his running mate because he’s not conservative enough.
lol
@300baud:
ding ding ding ding ding ding
SiubhanDuinne
@aimai:
I really wish that interview had been longer and more detailed — that Kai Risdall had asked some of the questions posited in this thread. But I too was struck by the explicit parallels with the “street papers” business model. I’m not buying in fully yet, but I also think it’s premature and shortsighted to be dismissing this out of hand as some here are doing. Would be very interested in an update — successes AND lessons learned — when the experiment ends.
JerryN
Here’s a somewhat skeptical perspective: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_in_a_nutshell_homeless_people_as_hotspots.php
Let’s just say that the slogan “I am a 4G hotspot” comes off as a little tone-deaf coming from what’s supposed to be a cutting edge marketing company.
Maude
@SiubhanDuinne:
It helps someone who has no money earn some. It also helps that the person has a job. It makes it easier to get a better job if the person is working. No money is awful.
It’s a start.
Shawn in ShowMe
@aimai:
It ain’t this particular company I’m concerned about. It’s the inevitable “refinement” of their business model by other companies that concerns me.
Hob
@Midnight Marauder:
That’s what makes this terrible, and I don’t get why only one commenter noticed it. It’s not $2 for 15 minutes, it’s PAY WHAT YOU WANT. How many people do you think are going to choose to pay $8/hour or more, compared to the ones who just go “oh cool, free wi-fi”?
Selling Street News is a shit job, but at least you’re guaranteed to make more money if you sell more papers.
SiubhanDuinne
@Maude:
Yes, exactly. I’ve never been homeless, and today I am very fortunate, but I sure have had stretches in my life when something like this might have made that sliver of difference between hope and despair.
Djur
@JerryN: Yeah, I read that. I totally agree on the wording, but I think the other concerns are classic liberal hand-wringing.
Maude
@SiubhanDuinne:
It’s a temp job and one thing can lead to another. It is better than a program where the person has to prove this that and the other thing to qualify.
Dignity of having a job is nothing to sneeze at.
The Other Chuck
If it’s a marketing stunt, then it’s pretty damn crass. As an actual business, hard to say. Street Sheet is nonprofit, the content is about the homeless, and people who buy it are pretty much doing it for charity. There’s a lot of differences.
Remove the reliance on charity and it’s far more humanizing. Remove the nonprofit aspect and it’s back to being an exploitative gimmick … but probably one that pays better than the average “human signpost” job.
Djur
@Shawn in ShowMe: It’s not soup kitchens that concern me. It’s the inevitable “refinement” of their business model (by putting MIND CONTROL DRUGS in the SOUP to produce an army of HOMELESS FUCK-SLAVES to PIMP OUT to WEALTHY DOWAGERS in the HAMPTONS) that concerns me.
Every slope is slippery if you piss your pants over it.
different-church-lady
You know what I see here?
I see a whole lot of people drawing conclusions based on their hypothetical understanding of the program.
gwangung
@different-church-lady: Yup. Pretty much.
Lots of ways this can be dehumanizing. BUt I see more than a few ways that this can be empowering. Might be worth it to try it out.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Djur:
What’s the business model for soup kitchens?
Litlebritdifrnt
As someone mentioned above there is a program in the UK where homeless people sell newspapers on the street and get to pocket the profit. There is really no difference in that scenario than this scenario, if the homeless person gets to pocket some cash other than what a caring person throws at his or her feet then what is the problem? IIRC the selling newspapers deal worked really well for a bunch of homeless people in the UK.
alien_radio
Bastards nicked my idea. I had thought of giving tramps loads of branded gear and turning them into mobile adverts and selling the advertising to the kind of companies that would get into the spirit of the thing. Like rockstar games and suchlike. I was going to call it trampvertising. These guys have gone one better by bolting on WiFi hotspots. ‘Nuff respect.
Laertes
@Hob:
…lots? Pay-what-you-want models can be pretty successful. (cf. Humble Bundle.) Since this model involves face-to-face interaction with the vendor, who’s also homeless, it’ll work okay, probably a lot better on average than $2 per 15:00.
If you think that absolutely no one will take the wi-fi for free, you have an innocent child’s view of human nature. If you think that a significant fraction of people will take the wi-fi for free, you have an angry adolescent’s view of human nature. Cheer up! Sociopaths are a pretty small fraction of the population.
Cassidy
Good question. Ask Louis CK or Radiohead. Or even better, how much do you tip on average? You don’t have to, but you do anyway, right? The demographic of SXSW isn’t prone to being stingy bastards unless there is a libertarian/conservative element I’m missing.
Some perspective: Bumfights was exploitive. Poor people, especially the destitute don’t really think in terms of being exploited. It’s more like “am I going to eat tonight and can I find somewhere to sleep where I won’t freeze my ass off”.
RobertB
This is a publicity stunt by this ad agency, pure and simple. $8/hr isn’t a sustainable rate to charge for 4G data, given Verizon’s current pricing structure.
4G hotspot data costs $10/GB once you get past their monthly allowance, which is 10GB for $80/month. You can use up a gigabyte on LTE in about 15-20 minutes, and that’s a conservative bandwidth estimate. Put another way, that $2 pays for 200 MB of data, which isn’t much when you count streaming or downloading.
Maybe Verizon is cutting them a sweet volume deal, but I didn’t think they worked that way. So if the ad agency is taking a known loss on this, then it’s charity. And since it’s charity, why give it out _this_ way? For the publicity.
Hob
Could someone please tell me if I and Midnight Marauder are just crazy, or if this program provides no guarantee of ANY income from carrying the wi-fi around? It sure looks like the description (not just in the quoted article, but on their official site) is that users can pay what they want– optionally.
If so, then this is NOT the equivalent of selling street papers, or being paid to stand around with a sandwich board. It’s the equivalent of carrying a stack of papers around all day and giving them to anyone who wants one, and then maybe getting some tips, based on the whims of the customers… and making only the tips. And you can’t even tell whether you’re making anything while you’re doing it, you find that out later when you try to cash out your Paypal account.
Steve
@Hob: I don’t think it’s “pay what you want.” I think there’s an hourly rate, and you pay what you want based upon how much time you want. Ambiguities should be resolved in favor of the more sensible interpretation.
jwb
OT, Numbers in the NY Times/CBS poll suck almost as bad as those in the ABC/WaPo poll. Results on the contraception issue are particularly alarming.
Anne Laurie
@300baud:
Quoted for truth. Why, “everybody knows” that there were no homeless people in Austin, until this dreadful marketing guy showed up with his highly visible sattelite backpacks!
And this being Austin, no doubt the crunchy-vegan subset of the city council reminded every media ear they could bend that the proper term is not homeless, but voluntarily unhoused. Because if “we” can’t keep the damaged/addicted/feckless out of the weather, we can at least offer them — or us — the faux-dignity of pretending it’s a choice.
Cassidy
People on liberal blogs across the great interons are discussing homelessness. Seems like it worked to me.
Waldo
This is why the homeless can’t have anything nice. Darn do-gooders come along and wreck everything. First they outlawed blood selling, then they protested Howard Stern’s “Homeless Jeopardy” show. Now this. Screw it — I’m going back to Goldman Sachs.
Hob
@Laertes:
It doesn’t involve face-to-face interaction every time you use the service. You just have to see them on the street and write down their name. Later you sit down in a cafe and start using your laptop, and maybe you think “Oh yeah, I should Paypal that guy some money.” Then maybe you even get around to doing that. Much less likely that you do so again three hours later, or the next day, or the next day, or the next day.
In fact, since these don’t seem to be password-protected hotspots, I don’t see any reason anyone would even need to see the guy at all. You just open your laptop and see “oh, there’s a hotspot nearby” and you use it.
PIGL
@Quaker in a Basement: what do you think labour is, for 95% of overyone who ever lived? They are being paid to be an object, a transducer of energy under the boss’s i.e. capitals direction.
Lojasmo
@TK-421:
$2 for 15 minutes is $8/hour. Most hotspots can distribute to 5 devices at a time, which means potentially $40/hour.
Hob
@Steve:
Ambiguities? “We suggest $2 per 15 minutes.” That’s not ambiguous at all.
And there’s no mechanism for actually preventing access to the hotspot if you didn’t donate money (how are you supposed to use Paypal if you’re not already online?).
Choosing to believe the “more sensible” interpretation is all well and good if you’re the one assuming the risk, but in this case it’s just self-serving and, frankly, naive. You’re saying basically that since it wouldn’t be “sensible” for a business to promote itself as helping homeless people while actually giving those people a really terrible deal, then you choose to believe that that’s not what they’re doing.
Anne Laurie
@David Koch:
Tragically, most bums just don’t keep their organs in good enough shape to make surgical harvest profitable. That’s why Our Global Overlords prefer to buy their fresh kidneys and liver sections from the bodies of third-world peasants who haven’t had the average trailer-trash/ghetto American’s access to cheap HFCS and a wide range of chemical mood-changers. (/snark)
Djur
@Shawn in ShowMe: Same business model as these hotspots: charity. To make a profit from a service like this you’d have to:
(a) Set a fixed price, not pay-what-you-like. Pay-what-you-like only works if people feel good about themselves for paying more than the average (see: Humble Bundle, pay-what-you-like experiments by beloved musicians like Radiohead and comedians like Louis CK).
(b) Give the workers a fixed cut of that price. If they’re making an average of $2 per person per 15-minute session now, let’s say that’s their cut.
(c) Find and train workers who can be relied on to be friendly to customers, to stay in the same places frequently, to not run off and try to hock the hotspot devices. You can shrug off the alternative when it’s a charity, but not when you’re trying to make a profit. You’ll end up having pressure to increase the cut you give the workers or pay a wage in order to keep your best earners. Note that for many of these requirements, the homeless are not a great worker pool — there’s a reason canvassing organizations target college students, not the homeless, and it’s not because they’re paragons of virtue.
(d) Weather the substantial PR damage from employing the homeless for this purpose. If you can’t claim to be selflessly giving the downtrodden a hand up, people are going to wonder why you’re making them deal with smelly poors rather than a cheerfully stoned college freshman.
(e) Charge way, way more than $2 for 15 minutes if you have any remote hope of recouping your own expenses. This is where any hope of making a profit on this venture collapses. The kind of people who are willing to pay $10 or $15 for 15 minutes of Internet already own their own 4G hotspots.
One of the things that tires me the most about liberals (and many leftists, unfortunately) is their dogged willingness to see the fingers of Evil Corporations in everything.
TK-421
@Laertes:
Pointed out already and discovered when I read it for a third time, but: the $2 for 15 min is a suggestion. There’s actually no minimum wage guarantee here.
The whole “street newspaper” analogy is interesting, granted. I just feel like in both the street newspaper and this hotspot management, there should be a guarantee of payment in exchange for this service. Otherwise, this strikes me as exploitative, or at least potentially exploitative.
Don’t “suggest” a $2 for 15 min price, demand it on behalf of the worker who’s offering the access. And if you’re not willing to demand it from potential customers, then you implicitly admit the service isn’t worth that much. In which case…what precisely are you doing here?
Djur
@Hob:
Networking devices can provide fairly sophisticated “walled garden” access to the Internet to facilitate payment. Ever used the wifi at a chain hotel? They can steer you to their website and credit card processor to sign up for whatever awful businessman’s package they want you to get in order to use their crappy wifi, no problem.
Even free muni wifi usually has at least a terms and conditions gateway before giving you full Internet access.
jon
My girlfriend makes $2/hour when on call. And $16/hour during calls. I don’t know the legalities of it, but the reality is that she doesn’t do rape survivor work to get rich.
Djur
@RobertB:
Maybe you could read the linked article, or any of the ones linked in the comment thread, or the interview quoted at length above, before gracing us with your insights, perhaps?
Hill Dweller
@jwb: The twitter machine is telling me both polls drastically changed their weighting in favor of republicans. I don’t know if that is true, but a drop from 50% to 41% in such a short period of time is hard to believe, especially with nothing significant happening.
FWIW, Gallup has Obama at 49% today.
ruemara
I hate to blunt a talking point, but we already allow people to be hired at below minimum wage. Waitresses and waiters and anyone who collects tips, can be paid below minimum wage because of said tips. That being said, as pointed out, it is $2 per subscriber, per set brick of minutes. Saying that a SRP = free wifi, well, that’s a stretch. Not sure if that is so, because I was not at SXSW. Either way, that sum does not work out to below minimum wage. Except if you count time without subscribers as work time because the homeless person is transmitting a signal.
The bigger, better issues that make this a piss poor idea are ones of interaction (if homeless person is nuts, isn’t having a bunch of strangers come up and ask for stuff a bit silly?), security (what’s to prevent people not on the list from stealing the wi-fi equipment and either faking who they are or outright selling it?), mental acuity (homelessness sucks. even sane people get a bit off, it’s damned hard on the mind, how do they deal with tech support issues and remembering who is on and who is off?) and payment disbursement (are you paying for real supplies or furthering their addictions? I’d have a real problem coughing up dough for a homeless person who promptly heads off to a bar. I’ve done it but I’d much rather give food than money). This is…intriguing if it could work, but even though I’d like to support it, I can find a number of good reasons not to do it.
PTirebiter
There’s some good arguments for and against. I imagine there are some problems on both sides that aren’t readily apparent.
My objection is it gives an air of normalcy to a problem that is, in my opinion, an unforgivably inadequate response from our gov’t. It would further push into the shadows the homeless children and the mentally ill. I’m all for work, it’s importance goes beyond making a few bucks but there is no good reason we can’t provide “make work” jobs along with safe shelter, food and sanitation facilities. This crap started in CA when Gov Reagan began shutting down mental health facilities because the taxes in Hancock Park were too high. IMHO
Hob
@ruemara: No, it is not “$2 per subscriber, per set brick of minutes.” That’s a “suggestion.” It’s explicitly described as being pay-what-you-want, if anything. I don’t know how this could be any clearer.
@Djur: I’m aware of that. But they didn’t set up their own payment page, they’re telling people to do it separately through Paypal. It’s possible that they at least redirect you to an informational page with a Paypal link the first time you log into the hotspot, but if this is pay-what-you-want, then it can’t be a walled garden– you can just ignore that page.
Jager
@ruemara: You think that’s demeaning, A guy I know is the VP of a company making 300k plus and he shops for golf clothes for the owner of his company. Why? Because the owner doesn’t like “the golf gear” available in his area. Probably spends 3 weekend days a year shopping, pays for it on his AM EX, then expenses it back to the company and waits 60 days for payment. I bought a new car for a guy I worked for, handled the paperwork and hassle. He flew in, I handed him the keys and he drove home. Took me a Saturday or two and an entire evening for delivery, I should have asked for a commission from the dealership. I don’t think the human wifi antennas are being demeaned at all. We all eat shit sandwiches from time to time…least they are getting paid for it.
jwb
@Hill Dweller: That’s interesting about the change of weighting. What does the Twittermachine say is the cause: thumb on the scale, belief in the greater “enthusiasm” of GOP voters, something else?
Keith G
Even as gimmicky as this is, I’m glad to be a chance for some folks earn some money. nonetheless it is a very temporary event and I am afraid much the money will be spent on things that are not helpful.
I guess the quality of the outcome depends on who exactly these homeless people are and what are the underlying conditions creating the homelessness.
I would feel better if there was a commitment to get more long term resources to the homeless.
juicetard(aka liberty60)
This thing sounds like a Swiftian satire for good reason.
Swifts satire wasn’t biting because of the premise- (let’s eat Irish children)- it was because of the punchline ( we fucking already treat them like animals).
If I rounded up a bunch of middle class teenagers to hang out like sloths at the mall with wifi thingys in their backpacks most would consider that 5 different kinds of bootstraps.
Using homeless the same way gets undedr our skin for its punchline-
They are being treated like furniture already.
Hill Dweller
@jwb: I don’t know the reason. I have a couple conspiracy theories, but I’ll save them for later.
TuiMel
@taylormattd:
This was my reaction without knowing any further details.
Djur
@Hob: Just to be clear, I’m not saying I think this is a particularly effective model as currently implemented. Not being at SXSW right now (if only) I haven’t had a chance to experience it myself. So I don’t know — this could be exceptionally inept.
What I’m objecting to is: (a) the implicit claim that it is exploitative/dehumanizing to employ the homeless to provide a fee for service, (b) the specific claim that this organization is exploiting the homeless for profit, and (c) the slippery-slope argument that this is just the FIRST STEP in building an army of hobo slaves.
I mean, FYI: we already have an army of slaves. We call them prisoners.
PIGL
@Hob: people are also assuming that each “carrier” so to speak can only support one connection at a time, which is silly.
different-church-lady
Have any of you internet sluths figured out whether the access is allowed if no PayPal contribution at all is offered?
Mnemosyne
@jwb:
The problem may be that they seem to be polling fucking morons:
Hob
Well, I’m wrong about at least one thing. Some other news reports had a picture of the T-shirts, which say that you have to send a text to a certain number first. So you can’t just happen upon the network, you have to have seen the person one time (or know someone who did).
It’s still a horrible plan. Sorry, in my book it’s just not right to ask people to perform a useful service in hopes of making some money if there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll be paid– or to solicit donations when the donors have no way to verify that any of it was paid out a stated.
Steve
@Hob: Okay, congratulations on convincing yourself that payment is optional. Make sure you post that a few dozen more times so everyone will know how convinced you are.
JerryN
@Djur: I think the other valid argument from that blog post was that if the goal of the effort was to test out a replacement model for the street newspapers, the design of the campaign had some major flaws. In particular, there’s nothing in the model that provides for participation (and therefore extended employment opportunities) by the homeless in any other area of the program. There’s also nothing in the trial that addresses another common feature of street papers, which are support services that the publishers are able to offer based on the revenue that are generated through sales and advertising.
Of course, all that has nothing to do with the discussion raging on here :-)
FlipYrWhig
Two birds, one stone. Make Bradley Manning a Wi-Fi hotspot. Hey, he loves technology AND he’s used to not ranging very far over the course of a day!
Djur
Liberal paternalism BINGO! What’s my prize?
Ruckus
@Hob:
I have owned 2 business, one mfg and one service and every day I would do things for people and sell things to people in the hope of making money. It didn’t always work out that way. In fact it didn’t work out that way, way too often. But that is the nature of risk in the job market. Not everyone gets a study paycheck, X amount for X amount of time and effort.
So now an effort to help people who may have no other way of making any money and having some dignity and say it’s wrong because there is no guarantee of success? They get nothing? What the fuck color is the sky in your world?
gwangung
Sorry, but this simply isn’t a very good argument.
What you call not right is what you can also call salesman on commission. It’s something where they, the homeless, have more control than in other types of employment.
Hob
@Steve: Dude, I would really love to be wrong. But I’ve read three different articles about this, and the official website of the program, and it sure looks like they’re saying it’s pay-what-you-can.
I haven’t seen anyone on this thread make a case for why it’s not, except you, and your case was that you don’t think it would be sensible for the company to do that– as if poorly-thought-out/unethical charities are really uncommon. So I’m asking for a better explanation. I really want to hear why I’m wrong.
Sorry for posting several times, but it’s a little frustrating to see people continue posting the same exact statement of “it’s a flat rate of $8/hour” again and again when there’s no sign that they read either my comment or Midnight Marauder’s comment or the damn article. But I’ll give it a rest now.
Suffern ACE
Well if you’re concerned that the homeless will get screwed you can always offer to pay $50 per hour to make up for your cheap stake friends.
Hob
@gwangung: The difference is that if you’re selling on commission, then you make some money if you manage to sell the thing– and if you don’t manage to sell the thing, then you don’t make money, but also no one gets the thing. They don’t get to take the thing from you and pay some optional unknown amount of money to your employer at some later date.
(This really is my last comment, I promise. Thanks for responding.)
EJ
@gwangung:
Or anyone who operates a franchised business. Subway doesn’t guarantee that the guy who owns your local sandwich shop will make one dime.
gwangung
You mean like being a waiter?
ETA: It’s just that I think you’re overly locked into the wage slave type of employment and aren’t being sufficiently flexible in thinking about this.
Scamp Dog
@Litlebritdifrnt: It’s being done in Denver too. I make it a point to buy one of those newspapers when I run into someone selling them. I suppose it may seem condescending to some people out there, but the guys seem to be grateful for the business, and they are selling something, not just accepting a handout.
Here’s a link to an article on the program: Denver Voice.
TK-421
I applaud either giving jobs or giving charity to the homeless.
If it’s a job, then pay for it. Even waiters and salesman and taxi drivers get a minimum, regardless of their commissions or tips on top of that, and they get a minimum amount of opportunity (e.g. hours) to earn those commissions or tips. I don’t see a guarantee of payment in exchange for work here.
If it’s charity, then it should be unconditional (at least in terms of work). Asking for work as a condition of the charity is exploitative, because you’re trying to get that work on the cheap from people who you think can’t or won’t protest.
This appears to be some sort of hybrid not-quite-work-not-quite-charity effort (or publicity stunt), and there isn’t a good explanation for why it needs to be this way. So yeah, I can understand why this is a bad thing.
(And BTW you need a landline for PayPal. I know, right? Anyway, take that FWIW in relation to the ‘how do they get paid?’ issue.)
PLH in NYC
Any one thought about the health effects?
TG Chicago
“And the fact that they are using homeless people…”
Err… if they’re “using” homeless people, that’s a bad thing. If they’re “employing” homeless people, it’s not. Both you and the article you quote choose the verb “use” though.
Just Some Fuckhead
Hey kids, good news and bad news: The bad news is we’re losing the house. The good news is free wifi!
Keith G
@Djur:
You are your own prize, and what a prize you are.
I live in one of our largest cities. My neighborhood is where the CBD morphs into residential district built out in the 1920s. It is easy to know the homeless here by name as well as by handicap. In places like this, the homeless are not some diamond in the rough just one charity make over a way from a full time job. these are humans with serious health issues who are dying one day at a time and whom are quite good at self medicating their way to whatever peace of mind they can achieve.
I do not say this to disparaging them, as I care much for them. So much in fact that I volunteer at a local charity run hospice where many of them eventually end up – where my job is to help them achieve the dignity as they die that never comes from the type of smug certitude you just displayed.
The plain truth is that we must fight these brutal realities with systemic action and not ad hoc mad money. If feeling that way when I hold the hand of a 47 yr old 80 pound female meth abuser as she dies makes me paternalistic, so be it. I have cried more tears over them than you are likely to.
Joel
@TG Chicago: That’s basically it.
If they want to drop the outcry, make it a job, with pay.
Of course then it would be subject to labor laws.
Jimbo316
Yeah, I have no problem with this if it is a pay as you go or even better part of a program (though probably typical homeless wouldn’t want to be part of a program).
amk
wtf does it mean ? They carry these transmitters in their backpack ? What does it to do to their health ?
Does it mean they have stay rooted to a spot where hoipoloi can “network” ? If that is the case, why can’t the company just put up a pole there ?
JoyfulA
PayPal takes their cut, too, before the recipient gets any money, and sometimes PayPal is not very quick in paying the recipient.
Dave
FUCK YOU GIVE HOMELESS PEOPLE HOMES AND MONEY
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
i think all the exploitation and crass commercialdom makes people forget to appreciate the true spirit of homelessness.
we need to stop the war on homelessness.
Djur
@Keith G: Well, good for you. Seriously. You’re a better man than I. I just don’t see how liberals can complain about the homeless being involved in the capitalist system if they’re unwilling to challenge that system.
You’re not going to eliminate homelessness by paying the homeless $2 a pop for wifi. But you’re not going to eliminate it by paying them minimum wage, either. We fix the problems or we don’t, but in the meantime I think we owe people the basic decency of not fretting over what they’re going to do with the money they earn.
RobertB
@Djur: I read the articles. Nowhere do they say _where_ they’re getting their bandwidth. Verizon, Sprint, ATT, and Clear are your basic 4G choices, and three of those are capped, with costs similar to each other at about $10 per GB once you hit the cap. Clear is $50/month flat, so they could make that back _relatively_ quickly.
This is 4G. Those hotspots aren’t WiFi, and are pretty far from free. So what happens when BBH decides they’re tired of ponying up the $1000 a month to keep those hotspots connected?
noabsolutes
“Couldn’t you say that about any job? I get paid an hourly wage to answer phones, schedule appointments, etc. Isn’t it ‘degrading’ that I’m exchanging my time and energy for money?”
Yes.
Comrade Mary
I found more information:
Comrade Mary
Another article, which includes video of an interview with Jonathan, one of the vendors mentioned in my last comment.
Auldblackjack
From what I’ve read here the only thing missing from the transvaginal probe issue is they weren’t offering the women $2 per 15 minutes…
TK-421
@Comrade Mary:
Thanks for the research. The $20/day stipend does make a difference (to me at least), although I still wonder if it’s complying with minimum wage requirements. How per diem payments and commissions are calculated in relation to minimum wage is beyond me, but for now I’ll assume they’re in compliance.
In that article the ad company intends to study the financial results to see if they can scale it up to other cities. My one suggestion is to do WiFi and not 4G- I don’t think you can scale up when you’re relying on proprietary for-profit access bandwidth.
Phoebe
@Djur: “The homeless aren’t hothouse orchids who need special insulation from commerce.”
I know! That attitude is the condescending/patronizing one.
fidelio
I note that in the NPR piece the person interviewed indicated the access was password-controlled; you had to talk to the person with the transmitter to get the password after you paid. I don’t know if you had to get a new password with every use or if you could get away with re-use without paying or not. At the scale of 13 people or so with these devices in the area, you aren’t going to be overwhelming the carrier with your bandwidth demands; attempts to scale this are what would cause a problem there.
Pococurante
The real question is how much Colt 45 can I buy after hocking the equipment.
SectarianSofa
@Anne Laurie:
WTF are you talking about? I go to Austin about once a month, and I’m from there, and I really don’t know what you’re trying to say, or what your attempted snarkery is meant to convey.
The homeless *are* actually very visible in Austin. They have been for a very long time. Pretty congenial environment for homeless travelers and panhandlers, and this being Texas, it’s the de facto housing for those who can’t afford or don’t desire consistent mental health care.
Your comment about the city council stuff is lost on me as well.
Meh. The partial Marketplace transcript that SiubhanDuinne posted covers most of what needs to be covered.
truthdogg
@lamh35:
I think it’s going to be the other way around.