12.01.13

Thanksgiving with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

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 […]

12.09.13

Some Mechanical Turk job numbers

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 […]

12.05.13

FDA OKs Mechanical Turk digital sweat-shopping

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 […]

12.04.13

Mechanical Turk’s Zero Cent Pay Jobs

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 […]

09.13.12

I don’t do business with Amazon

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:10 am by George Smith

Most fawning and pretentious quote this year, easy: “[Jeff Bezos] thinks on a planetary level,??? said David Risher, a former Amazon senior executive … It comes from an article on Amazon Web Services, an operation that sells cloud computing worldwide. Recently the subject of a puff piece in the New York Times, it was essentially […]

03.23.15

Poorcore

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:38 am by George Smith

Another blighted week begins in the fossilized superpower of capitalism and casual cruelty we call home. From the WaPo’s EJ Dionne (no link): “I’d respect these folks a lot more if they said what they clearly believe: They think more inequality would be good for us. It almost makes you nostalgic for the candor of […]

02.09.15

The sharing economy and “inclusive capitalism”

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:41 pm by George Smith

Many, many people fully understand the sharing economy is a racket, one in which tech industry start-ups depend upon the desperation of labor in an economy that’s stagnant. Searching for any income, even miniscule amounts of compensation, millions take whatever can be had in service piece work jobs administered by owners who operate networks that […]

12.06.14

The Scamming Economy: Red hot tech innovation

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 1:39 pm by George Smith

Tech industry start-ups love the operation of the sharing scamming economy. At its base is a smartphone driven global network that reduces people to pieceworkers. That is poverty level pay work akin to jobs from the 18th and 19th century, only made new through the smartphone and the desktop for the 21st. Old piecework slavery […]

07.16.14

The FDA’s Open Digital Sweatshop Initiative

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:40 pm by George Smith

Marvel at the promotional video uploaded by the Empire of Bezos to showcase “Amazon Web Services.” It’s awesome in that it has the FDA’s Chief Health Informatics Officer, Taha Kass-Hout, going on for four minutes about the miracle of “turning manual submissions from the public into machine-readable information with 99.7% accuracy” without once mentioning Mechanical […]

02.12.14

Empire of Bezos: GI Joe s— as lit

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 4:04 pm by George Smith

Since Jeff Bezos’ attempts to become a physical book publisher have been fought well at the retail level, Amazon has expanded its imprints to publishing only for the digital world. You can see much of it at apub dot com. 47North, for example, is a digital Kindle imprint devoted to horror and science-fiction. A look […]

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