12.09.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:39 pm by George Smith
If you spend any time suffering with Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing jobs, the first thing you realize is that you’re not qualified for the majority of them, even “human intelligence tasks” that only pay a penny.
Here’s a breakdown of the total jobs advertised on Mechanical Turk today and those available to me with a 98 percent job completion rating in my profile.
40 cents: 179 of 412,672 (.04 percent of total)
30 cents: 214 of 412,672 (.052 percent of total)
20 cents: 307 of 412,672 (.07 percent of total)
10 cents: 394 of 412,672 (.095 percent of total)
5 cents: 548 of 412,672 (.13 percent of total)
1 cent : 921 of 412,672 (.22 percent of total)
These are minute percentages of the advertised body of work on Mechanical Turk. And they indicate high obstacles for qualifications for even work that pays as low as a penny a job.
If one sets the bar at a nickel job, one could do one hundred of the jobs
for which you were qualified (a totally unreachable goal) and still earn only five dollars.
If one looks into the technical document Amazon makes available to its “requesters” on qualifications, it lists only a few. There is the Master Worker qualification, defined only by Amazon Mechanical Turk, criteria unknown, except that it is given only to workers who exhibit high acceptance rate over “thousands” of “human intelligence tasks.
To even get close to thousands of hits takes a very long investment in time on the service as there really are no “human intelligence tasks” on Mechanical Turk that don’t take at least five to ten minutes to just find, read and accept.
In fact, it’s difficult to ascribe an average time to finding hits because it varies for every one while also being affected by return rates (in which the job is either not doable because of requester error or unacceptable as work for any number of reasons) or failure rates determined by requester rejection of work or simple requester acceptance but non-payment for work, neither of which are uncommon.
Not really unbelievably, on Amazon Mechanical Turk there are many clients who accept work and simply never pay for it. There is very little one can do about them as Amazon’s system is set up entirely in favor of its employer requesters.
One can find high-paying human intelligence task on Mechanical Turk (that is relative to the service), like making “movie reviews” of specified titles or transcribing hour long office conversations for anywhere from eight to 12 dollars, sometimes more. However, these all come with completely opaque qualification requirements and the average worker on Mechanical Turk cannot take advantage of them.
What Jeff Bezos’ Mechanical Turk tells us that in the future of the networked gig/free-lance economy, most of us aren’t qualified for work that pays even a cent. This is what awaits in a globally networked world where there are zero labor protections, only digital mechanisms which pit all against all for the sake of corporate America.
The future of work: Unqualified for 99 percent of it. Don’t kept paid for the rest.
The Strip — on Jeff Bezos’ concept of work — at the New York Times.
Permalink
12.06.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 4:40 pm by George Smith
From the wire:
A guitar once owned by music legend Bob Dylan sold for $965,000 Friday at Christie’s, setting a new world auction record for any guitar, according to a statement from the auction house.
The 1964 Fender Stratocaster was purchased by an unidentified bidder, said a Christie’s spokesperson.
Dylan, now 72, played the electric guitar in his famous performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, during which he was backed by an electric band for the first time, according to the statement. He was 24 years [old]…
Wouldn’t it be great if it has been bought by one of the Koch brothers?
They don’t seem like guitar guys, though, even as investments. Who do you think it could be?
The answers, my friends, are not blowin’ in the wind, the answers are not blowin’ in the wind.
Permalink
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:50 pm by George Smith
John Carpenter’s They Live, from 1988, was the best art describing where we are in 2013. Just take the spotted aliens as the 1 percent and their servant class.
No remake could do justice to the original. But it would certainly be great for an enthusiastic revival on movie channels.
Would you like an MP3 for your devices? Sure you would. Click here!
It even includes the thuds and grunts from the longest fight scene.
You can even tip for it, if you like. Suggested — $1.25, more than twice what one is usually compensated on Mechanical Turk.
Permalink
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 11:27 am by George Smith
Fiore, perfectly, on material with which readers are dreadfully familiar. Drink deep of the phogiston and mentufactury [1].
As a side note, the Fiore cartoon illustrates the hype of the tech giants now occurring almost weekly. When anyone gets to do overdoing things so frequently, you know they’re your enemies.
Whatever world they’re in, it bears no relationship to yours.
Fiore:
Actually, it’s not the various technologies and innovations themselves, but the hype that accompanies each shiny new technology that really gets my cartoon gears turning. I’m a huge fan of 60 Minutes, but their piece on Jeff Bezos and his drones made the days of Mike Wallace selling cigarettes look dignified.
[1] mentufactury: A kind of pompous term for bullshitting, especially the variety associated with flacking for your information business, hardware, software or the Internet. — Crypt Newsletter, 1995
Permalink
12.05.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 4:47 pm by George Smith
How many swimming pools are in the Los Angeles basin? A UCLA/MIT student and a German graphic designer wanted to know. They employed digital sweat shop labor to find out.
From the Los Angeles Times:
German graphic designer Benedikt Gross was flying into Los Angeles for the first time when he gazed out the jetliner’s window and was mesmerized by the hundreds of shimmering blue swimming pools tiling the landscape below.
The image of all those backyard oases visible only from the sky stuck with him, but he didn’t make much of it until a few months later, when he bumped into Joseph Lee at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research lab that deals with urban dwellers’ relationship with technology.
“I wonder how many pools there are,” said Gross, 33, who was working at the Senseable City Lab as part of his master’s degree studies at London’s Royal College of Art.
Lee, a UCLA graduate who was at MIT as a research assistant, responded quickly:
“L.A. is endless from the air. The turquoise pools you see are beautiful.”
So they decided to count the pools using Google maps and digital sweat-shopping, first through a crowd-sourcing house in India and then Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to double-check the work.
The Times story prints the figure — 43,123 pools, although that might not have been all of them.
The duo spent $350 dollars on Mechanical Turk to do the final count check. And that comes to eight tenths of a penny a pool.
Theoretically, if you counted 1000 pools on the Amazon workplace, you earned $8.11. Could you count 1000 pools in an hour, two hours, 20 hours?
Or maybe you just wanted to count 50. In which case you made forty cents. That’s a lot less than what it cost to buy a copy of the LA Times newspaper, where you could read of their accomplishment, published in the paper’s Column One feature.
“When their analysis of the pools was complete, Lee and Gross spent $3,700 to publish the 74 volumes [of LA backyard pool research],” reads the times. “So far, only one complete set has been printed; Gross has it in London.”
That’s ten times what they paid Mechanical Turk workers to do part of the identification and counting task.
The work, Joseph Lee told the newspaper, showed how easy it was to look into masses of data covering people’s not-so-private backyards. Privacy is a growing concern, they conceded. Digital sweat shopping, maybe not so much.
Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of using human eyeball crowd-sourcing to count swimming pools. However, if you had to pay a more reasonable amount for it, much much more than the rate of 40 cents for 50 pools, would they have done it?
What would it have cost to pay a minimum wage to count 43 thousand swimming pools from digital mapping?
Maybe a task for a graduate student, a really smart one.
Permalink
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:20 pm by George Smith
At a time of great unemployment, poverty wages and increasing inequality, the Food and Drug Association has committed to employing Mechanical Turk digital sweat-shop labor through a private sector sub-contractor. Pure and simple, it is the use of taxpayer money in the nullification of people for the siphoning of the money to corporate America. Think of it as anti-stimulus. (What percentage of Mechanical Turk workers are in the food stamp program? Rhetorical. There are no statistics as the service and the businesses that use it are non-transparent.)
Plus human beings working for twenty or thirty cents a job are more reliable and so much cheaper than crappy optical character recognition software.
The pertinent details:
The Food And Drug Administration is trying something new to tackle a massive paper backlog: Amazon Mechanical Turk, a popular marketplace for low-cost freelance digital piecework. At the Amazon Web Services re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas, the FDA announced they’re partnering with OCR firm Captricity–which uses Mechanical Turk–to take care of months of unprocessed drug accident safety reports. Even before the government shutdown, the FDA publicly complained about “unforeseen issues in data entry operations” slowing the processing of drug safety reports …
According to Captricity, the company’s solution in proof of concept testing was just as accurate as manual data entry for the FDA, but eight times cheaper and 50 times faster.
Here’s the answer. At a time when the economy is not producing jobs or a living for many Americans, the government response should not be to fill a labor need by leveraging desperation digital sweat shop labor.
This is wrong. The US government, specifically the Food and Drug Association, should hire Americans and get the job done, not resort to machine-like digital chiseling through a third party because it is allegedly swamped by a work load. Alternatively, it can use tax dollars to buy more automation and keep the work within the agency.
There are many paper shuffling and data entry jobs in the US government, all performed by civil servants. And a lot of that work, without labor protections, could simply be turned over to digital crowd-sourcing in network sweat-shops.
The government must still pay workers according to some set of civilized standards. And in no cases can the federal government refuse to pay civil servants if it doesn’t like the cut or result of their work on any given day. Yet that is the model put in place when a federal agency transfers data transcription to labor on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. On Mechanical Turk, below subsistence pay workers can be denied mere dimes if their work is deemed sub-standard. And there are no appeals.
This isn’t where the government should be leading. And whoever came up with the idea at the FDA need some bad publicity and brush-back.
The dystopia that’s the Amazon Mechanical Turk digital sweat-shop.
Permalink
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 10:44 am by George Smith
WhiteManistan’s Minister of Best Practices in Fascism, Ted Nugent has the cure for ailing America.
He’ll use his NRA clout to make it law that everyone who buys a gun at a gun show go through a background check if the rest of us will campaign for and help enact law that takes the right to vote for presidential and congressional candidates in elections away from people who pay no income tax.
“The voting ‘loophole’ needs to be closed in order to restore fairness in federal elections,” reasons Nugent. It’s not necessarily permanent, he says. If you pay income tax for three consecutive years, your voting rights will be restored. “[Let’s] get it on. We have a country to save.”
(He could also have tied disenfranchisement to enrollment in the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. This would have had the added benefit of preserving some of the votes of poor white people in red states where Tea Party governors have refused to take government money for it.)
This isn’t new, only more formally codified. During December of 2012 he also campaigned for disenfranchising “welfare leeches.”
It seems that during the holiday season, one of the things on Ted Nugent’s cheery mind is taking away the vote from all the bloodsuckers, er — not white people, who don’t pay income tax.
No link, obviously.
Permalink
12.04.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China at 3:19 pm by George Smith
A fresh example today, an artistocrat’s Telecaster from the Fender Custom Shop, American-made — 4,000 dollars. The original electric guitar made for everyone, priced as a gem stone.
That’s an order of magnitude times about 2.3 more expensive than the offshored Telecaster I borrowed to do this tune.
You think it could have $3830 more twangy sound?
The 40-Year Slump, at the National Prospect, which explains how it got this way, among other things.
Excerpted:
The decimation of manufacturing wasn’t due to a sharp acceleration of manufacturing productivity—indeed, productivity increases were higher in the previous decade, which saw less job loss. What made the difference was trade policy. Economist Rob Scott has calculated that the United States lost 2.4 million jobs just to China in the eight years following the passage of normalized trade relations.
Offshoring has had an even broader effect on the jobs that have remained behind. Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1990s, has estimated that roughly 25 percent of all American jobs are potentially offshorable, from producing steel to writing software to drafting contracts. This has placed a ceiling on wages in these and myriad other occupations that can be sent overseas.
Permalink
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:56 pm by George Smith
While digital sweat-shopping at Amazon today — it’s the only way your host can earn a few dimes in the American economy these days — I spent a little extra time looking at the phenomenon of Mechanical Turk jobs, human intelligence tasks paying zero cents.
There are loads of them. Two sample screen shots, for your inspection.
Bigger.
Bigger.
Why do people do jobs that pay zero? (Can the “Because it’s something to do, just a hobby” crap.)
Well, Mechanical Turk has a system. If an employer, the infamous requester, rejects your work on a job it’s an indelible black mark. Accumulate too many black marks and your hit approval rate falls below 95 percent. Once you’re below 95 percent you’re persona non grata.
And the qualification ratings requirements posted on most of Mechanical Turk’s jobs forbid your participation.
The only way to get above the flunk mark of Cain, 95 percent, is to do a lot more hits and have them all accepted. Enter the zero cent “human intelligence task,” more use of employer leverage against the desperate.
Another use for zero cent jobs is fraud. You will notice that, remarkably, even many zero cent human intelligence tasks on Mechanical Turk require “qualifications” and “passwords” for entry.
There’s a reason for that.
Here’s an example, a zero cent job posted by enterprising “redditors” at Reddit.
Bigger.
This is a good example of a web circle jerk, one in which the requester is using Mechanical Turk to boost posts into their category at Reddit.
Bigger.
There’s no reason to use a category on Reddit, one called Hits Worth Turking For, to search Mechanical Turk. The search function on Mechanical Turk can do the same thing without leaving the service for an external site.
On the other hand, by getting a Mechanical Turker to post to your category, you have built-in run-itself astro-turfing of your little domain. One with a “donate” badge that leads people to believe they may be eligible for cash rewards for posting the most. And another badge, soliciting purchases through Hits Worth Turking For on Reddit so that the subcategory on Reddit gets a cut.
You can hold the standard libertarian idiocy: “Nobody has to do these jobs!”
Work from home. Don’t get paid. Grease someone else’s petty scam.
You could a couple weeks digging into zero cent jobs and presumably find they’re all predicated on the spirit of digital rip off, one tiny bit at a time.
Permalink
12.03.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:13 pm by George Smith
Get people to work in your warehouses for virtually nothing, at Christmas!
Tell them it’ll make cash for their favorite charity. But don’t really share much of the profit because this is the sharing economy, if you know what I mean and I think you do. Ho! Ho! Ho!
From Delaware Liberal:
Amazon.com Offers Holiday Gift-Wrapping Program for Kentucky Nonprofits
By Wrapping Amazon Holiday Gifts, Groups Can Earn $$
LEXINGTON, Ky.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nov. 5, 2007–As Amazon.com gets ready to delight millions of customers this holiday season, the company’s Lexington, KY, fulfillment center is offering nonprofit organizations the opportunity to earn extra money by having its volunteers gift-wrap products for Amazon customers.
The “Gift-Wrap Your Holidays with a Smile??? program will earn the nonprofit organization between $.60 and $.75 for each item gift-wrapped by a volunteer. In 2006, more than $137,000 was donated to non-profits that participated in the Lexington program.
The program, which is open to all 501(c)3-certified organizations, will run from November 19 through December 22, 2007. Shifts range from a minimum of four hours to a maximum of 10, and organizations can send 5-20 volunteers for each shift.
“We’re thrilled to be able to offer ‘Gift Wrap Your Holiday Programs with a Smile’ for the third year,??? said Michael Passales, General Manager, Lexington. “It’s a great way to put yourself in the holiday spirit and earn money for your charity at the same time.???
DL adds Amazon charges $3.99 to $5.99 for the gift-wrapping option.
Now let’s do some arithmetic!
$137,000 for the non-profits. Divided by 60 cents, for the contribution from each package, equals 228,333 gifts wrapped.
For Amazon’s gift-wrapping option, let’s choose the middle between the cost estimates for wrapping small and large packages, $4.99. Four dollars and ninety nine cents times 228,333 gifts equals $1,139,381.67.
You would think someone would have taken the diligence to do the figures and say, no thanks, we won’t be doing “volunteer??? work that grosses Jeff Bezos Incorporated ten times what we “get??? at Christmas time.
There are much better ways to show the holiday spirit than boosting the bottom line for the sweatshop and delivery drones tycoon while wrapping stuff for the haves and those who haven’t yet been sufficiently knee-capped by the economy.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon are just perfect for our time.
Says Frank at Pine View Farm:
You have to respect the con.
Get people to work for you for almost nothing while tricking them into feeling good about it.
The juggernaut of creative disruption rolls on.
The visage of holiday good spirit, with a special plan just for you!
Permalink
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
