I also think it is probably good. Similarly when I was born in 1980's in Poland my father's salary was roughly 0.1$/hrs. My first job in 1999 paid me less than 2$/hrs.
If any American company would be allowed to hire pepole in Poland in 1980 for 1$/hr people would pay bribes to get this job even if it was a humiliating, damaging, life-shortening physical labor.
Why Poland got richer after 1990 is partly that we allowed western companies to buy cheap polish labor. The labor was good enough that the companies started competing for it and long story short now the salaries aren't 5% of western but depending on the sector maybe 20%-50%.
I was a student in the former Soviet Union in early 1990s when the old system collapsed, taking with it stipends that were sufficient for school cafeteria food. After that I occasionally worked for 30 cents per hour doing somewhat-synchronous translation for preachers who came from the US to convert the masses.
While the money sounded laughable (the US minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr) and some employers got borderline uncomfortably weird, working 4-5 evenings for a week allowed me to feed myself for a couple of months and focus on my studies. I never considered myself to be taken advantage of. Just my 2c.
In early 1990s most of the population was declared atheists, but because atheism was one of the pillars of the rejected Soviet rule it was being reexamined by the people. So there was a lot of orgs of all kinds who flew in to preach and increase their denomination base.
The fact that to the outside Russia looks orthodox Christian today mostly reflects last 20 years of the state efforts to build an official religion, not some deep predisposition of the population. My 2c.
Yeah, in eastern EU salaries are not as low as they used to be, anyone with 3-4 years of experience now expects around 3.5-4k€ a month, which in my experience is not that far off of UK salaries.
Not so in Greece. Salaries are way lower than 3,5-4k per month. Doctors, for example, in public hospitals get around 2k per month and the consultants maybe around 2,5-3k.
I believe that when ricardobayes said "anyone with 3-4 years of experience" they really meant "anyone in our industry". In my part of Eastern Europe, 2.5k EUR is a very good salary, but software devs earn way more.
To me it looks like before. Translates to up to 2.6k€ take-home-pay provided you don't take advantage of any tax breaks and you're on a permanent employment contract.
That being said young people(less than 26yo) are either exempt from the first tax bracket(~20k €) or start off as contractors who pay lower taxes and contributions.
As soon as I started reading the article I realized that "SamaSource" in this case is the same company that was outsourced to help moderate content on Facebook. IMO the point of contention isn't that $2/hr isn't a livable wage in Kenya, is that $2/hr isn't enough when you're talking about looking at vile content for an entire shift. Granted this is ChatGPT so at worst you're tagging vile text rather than tagging vile images and videos.
This raises more of a modal/philosophical question for me which is: should we be outsourcing some of the most vile parts of social media? Is it fair to go to someone in a developing country and offer them a wage lightly above average in exchange for having to look at this content for hours? I have no answers to these questions myself but it's a question I ask when social media companies outsource the content moderation.
