Rat Race Rebellion Articles Index

Home-Based Careers / Work from Home

How to Start a Freelance Career: "Imagine being able to work from your own home, doing a job you love, and getting paid handsomely for doing it. Wouldn't that be great?" - by Freelance Work Exchange
More Data Entry Jobs to Move Offshore -- So Expect Scams to Rise: "Most people looking for data entry jobs don’t need an article in Business Week to tell them the work is hard to find. But there it is anyway -- and the jobs are predicted to become even scarcer, particularly in certain regions of the US." - by Michael Haaren

How to Find Work at Home Job Listings on CraigsList: "When we were planning the Rat Race Rebellion site content, we made the decision to NOT post CraigsList job listings to our work at home job leads page. Our reasons were two-fold:..." - by Chris Durst

Virtual Call Center LiveOps Receives $28M In Funding -- The Homeshoring Movement Continues To Grow: "Call center leader LiveOps, which employs some 10K home-based freelance agents (independent contractors), just announced an additional $28M in expansion funding. Former eBay COO Maynard Webb has also joined the company as CEO." - by Michael Haaren [02/13/07]

Finding Legitimate Home-Based Work Online: "If like millions of others you too would like to work from home, don’t worry, there are many legitimate job leads online. But with a 42-to-1 “scam ratio” among the leads generally, the trick is to find that needle in the haystack without getting stuck!" - by Chris Durst & Michael Haaren

Spotting scams among home-based work ads - "There is a 42-to-1 scam ratio among "work from home" ads on the Internet, and that is not counting the ones that arrive as spam in your inbox. In other words, for every 43 you find on the Internet, 42 will be either outright scams or downright suspicious - one will be legitimate. The following information is provided to help you sort through the ads you find on the Internet, and avoid scams." - by Chris Durst & Michael Haaren

Making Money From Videos, Photos and Blog Entries - "Could an amateur video of Mentos being dropped in Coke bottles earn thousands of dollars for its makers? Strange but true." - by Michael Haaren
Earn $60K Annually, Selling Virtual Clothes? - "The Internet is creating some unpredictable and interesting ways of making a primary or secondary income. Most recently, in the Washington Post, we read of Veronica Brown, a 44-year-old who earns about $60K annually designing and selling clothes in the popular virtual world, Second Life." - by Michael Haaren

Entrepreneurship

Interview with Michael Fox, Co-Founder of SwiftCity.com - "Swift City, a new, travel-oriented site which features insider reviews of “the best places” in various cities internationally, came to our attention a few weeks ago when we found their lead for Freelance Travel Writers."- by Michael Haaren

Lessons On Entrepreneurship From the Picasso Museum - "What always struck me about Picasso was his willingness to pour his creativity into ever-changing forms, like Edison performing “10,296 experiments” in his quest for one of his inventions. Both Picasso and Edison are of a type with the “serial entrepreneurs” we occasionally meet or read of, who are driven to launch businesses, again and again." - by Michael Haaren

Staci Wood: “By week, a virtual freelancer. By weekend, an eBay seller.” - "I met Staci Wood while interviewing for Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends Radio Show and found her diverse approach to work noteworthy enough to request an interview. Among other entrepreneurial hats, as we’ll get to in a moment, Staci is the show’s virtual Program Manager. Like many of the people who listen to the show, Staci is also a “rat race opt-out.” I’ll let her tell her story in her own words." - by Michael Haaren

Family & Children

Are We Drugging Our Children to Fit “Rat Race” Demands? - "We were alarmed and saddened at a recent report that up to 25% of children in summer camps across the US are on drugs for “behavioral issues” – “mood disorders,” “ADD / ADHD,” and assorted similar maladies. Could it be that our Rat Race lifestyles have something to do with this?" - by Chris Durst & Michael Haaren

Skits At the Bus Stop - A Great Dad Story - "In the fall of 2006, we were sent a story about a Dad, Mark Blasetti, who makes the time every morning to put on a goofy skit for his daughters on their bus route to school. (Mark has done some great skits, it seems. One scene was a “cowboy campfire, complete with a stuffed horse, a log and tissue paper fire, a guitar, a sleeping bag and roasting marshmallows.”)" - by Michael Haaren

Where Are Your Kids Hanging Out On the Web? - "Parents who don’t get to know the Web better may be in for some discomfiting surprises. Many of us may think that sites like Facebook, MySpace or YouTube are the cool hang-out sites for kids, and that the ultimate thrill for the young is watching a Google video of someone exploding from a mix of Mentos and Coke. But as a recent New York Times article points out, there’s more going on than that." - by Michael Haaren

Lifestyle & Society

Living (or Leaving) the “DISTINCTIVE” Lifestyle: "...after some thought on the trade-offs – pollution, hyper-materialism (and the debt that goes with it), the waves of transitory people ebbing and flowing around us and our children – you might well decide that the "distinctive suburban way of life" everyone is chasing is actually what we here have come to call the DISTINCTIVE way of life: Dual Income Striving to Impress Neighbors and Co-workers, yet Tormented by Increasing Vexation and Emptiness." - by Chris Durst & Michael Haaren

Of Mothers & Multi-Tasking: "Today’s typical mom is a consummate multi-tasker – sweeping the kitchen, making lunches, paying bills, checking homework, and kissing boo-boos, all on her way out the door to go to work. As productive as we are, I worry that we’re so convinced that the best way to “do it all” is to do many things at once, that we risk losing sight of the beautiful moments from which we draw our energy and our 'purpose'." - by Chris Durst

"Rat Grams" (mini morsels of Rat Race-related material)

Obesity Surgery Mounts Among Teens - A "Rat Race" Tragedy - "All the data point toward US children developing more and more pathologies from Rat Race living. The latest? A tripling of obesity surgery among teens." - by Michael Haaren

Book Reviews