12.02.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 8:51 am by George Smith
Classic Culture of Lickspittle. When the bad press starts piling up about digital sweat-shopping, underpaying and overworking labor in the fulfillment warehouses until they drop, air out some absurd thing, yell “innovation,” and hope it will distract everyone from all the crap reality.
On 60 Minutes, which I don’t watch, but you couldn’t miss the spillover — Bezos Delivery Drones for Amazon!
An “image of ingenuity,” a journalist who’s recently published a book about the E of B, calls it:
Dispatching an aerial vehicle for each individual order does not seem very efficient, particularly in high-density urban areas or during peak shopping seasons … Many customers this holiday season are considering the character of the companies where they spend their hard-earned dollars. Amazon would rather customers consider the new products and inventions coming down the pipeline and not the ramifications of its ever-accelerating, increasingly disruptive business model.
Put less diplomatically, it’s bullshit.
Disruptive. I’ll tell you what’s disruptive. Mass mechanizing work for dimes and then authorizing the employers to pay slow, or not pay at all, if they don’t like the cut of it.
Just think how well the Christmas season would work if retailers unilaterally turned off some checks for staff if they didn’t like how shopping was going during the season?
And I still haven’t been paid for my four hours of Thanksgiving weekend work (averaging 45 cents a job, 90 cents — or a third of what it should be — 2 of 6 — in the bag on Mechanical Turk which doesn’t authorize any cash transfers until over a dollar, one big dollar, is accumulated). The employers, er — the “requestors” — all took the holiday off.
Bothersome to do that one-click micro-payment stuff.
Hilarious! Excuse me, I gotta tell someone who earns seven figures a year a good story.
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12.01.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:34 pm by George Smith
Thanskgiving weekend earnings on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Helped along by a comment from TP:
On the Guardian Ladies Field Hockey team, the left back, Lucy Mangan, has noticed vile Bezos, the Mechanical Turk & TaskRabbit, but then fails to attack with any great vigour.
Mangan’s bit is short but includes the now familiar Dickensian descriptions of digital sweat shops, the miracles of the new sharing economy in which the only sharing that happens is the total liquidation of the life and possessions of the worker:
The lurking, many-tentacled monster is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This enables people (“Requesters”) looking to outsource small personal or corporate tasks that can’t be done by computers, and that would be too inefficiently time-consuming to perform themselves or to employ extra staff (what with their bleatings about sick pay, holiday allowance and blah-di-everlasting-blah). Requesters post descriptions of their needs (“Human Intelligence Tasks”), and how much they are willing to pay, to a waiting army of workers dispersed across the world, who will, for an average of $2, or £1.25ish, to meet them. This would mean that, to make minimum wage (depending on which country you and your labour laws are in), you would have to complete just over five tasks an hour (and not be stiffed on payment by any of the Requesters). In one of those (un)happy confluences of colloquialism and subtext, accepting one of mturk.com’s jobs is known as “taking the hit”.
In short, this – and its smaller, but often more nimbly sophisticated and potentially effective competitors such as Fancy Hands and Task Rabbit – is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with the whimpering of hundreds of thousands of digital serfs unwillingly but desperately racing each other to the bottom in an unregulated labour market, while their – by which I mean, our – overlords’ individual or corporate coffers swell …
Mangan overestimates the average “pay” on Mechanical Turk. It’s considerably less than two dollars a job. My pay snapshot is for two jobs. That’s an average of 45 cents. But also in the lot are five others done during the same time, unpaid, because the “employers,” Amazon’s infamous “requesters,” took their time off over the holiday and did not approve payment.
Because quickly approving a few dimes for people would be work.
Anyone with a little bit of skill at arithmetic can figure out how the Mechanical Turk model boils down even 45 cent jobs to, practically speaking, even less.
It takes time to sift through the MTurk listings. Add it to all time spent on a job actually accepted. And then there are jobs, often quite a few, which the worker will “return” halfway through, for any number of reasons. Such reasons include, but are not limited to, the incompetence of the employer (the task for has a bug, or bugs in it, making it difficult if not impossible to complete without giving bad information), the lousy or duplicitous description of the “requester” (you find a task advertised as taking “eight minutes” for 30 cents eating up fifteen minutes of your time and it’s not even close to being complete), or jobs which the worker may not want to complete because they are odious. (How likely would you be to visit and use a website that allows your “friends” to anonymously assess your character? How many e-mails from “friends” recommending the site would it take to get you to visit it? As part of this “task” you will now visit the site.)
On Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, none of the work is actually easy, although it’s always pawned off that way. Every “hit” or job takes time, time to read and follow the instructions, time to look for and answer correctly trick questions designed to catch the inattentive worker, time to find even jobs for which you are “qualified.”
Because here’s the big nasty surprise nobody writing articles about crowd-sourcing on Mechanical Turk tells you.
Even at the very bottom of the economic food chain, where you’re nothing more than chum for Jeff Bezos’ infernal machine and those using it to leverage desperation, you’re not qualified for most of the work.
The worker will see hundreds of thousands of jobs listed. But when he uses the search function to boil the list down to those he or she is personally qualified for (let’s say, anything down to 30 cents and you have a job rating of 98 percent of 100 (!), you’ll get a return of, say, 120, maybe as many as 170 jobs to pick from.
A reader can do the quick math to find out what even a near perfect worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk is qualified for and post the percentage in comments.
Alms? Alms for the poor?
The empire of Bezos.
Chomsky: America hates its poor:
If you care about other people, that’s now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, but you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, that’s called “libertarian??? for some wild reason. I mean, it’s actually highly authoritarian …
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