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 […]

07.09.14

Today’s Culture of Lickspittle moment: Wisdom from Larry Page

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:31 am by George Smith

From one of the computer industry mags: In the future, we will work less and enjoy more leisure time, while being shuttled around in self-driving cars, attended by artificial intelligence that makes better decisions than we do … “I totally believe we should be living in a time of abundance, like Peter Diamandis’s book,” said […]

02.11.14

Jeff’s World and welcome to it

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:02 pm by George Smith

Seen on Craigslist today while looking for a job in Los Angeles County: We are a literary marketing company that helps authors/publishers increase book sales. We are looking for individuals who can boost the positive “Amazon book review” postings on selected titles. You will be given the reviews. No need to do any writing. The […]

12.31.13

End of year roll call of the intelligence insulting / stupid

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, WhiteManistan at 10:47 am by George Smith

60 Minutes, infamously: John Miller: Could a foreign country tomorrow topple our financial system? Gen. Keith Alexander: I believe that a foreign nation could impact and destroy major portions of our financial system, yes. John Miller: How much of it could we stop? Gen. Keith Alexander: Well, right now it would be difficult to stop […]

12.20.13

They spend it all on liquor

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:42 pm by George Smith

“The poor don’t pay enough/They spend it all on liquor.” I just can’t understand why all the big explainers now examining the hardness of the American heart and economic inequality don’t have a Dick Destiny record. Not played on NPR, I guess. From the New York Times: As the year ends, this argument is playing […]

12.11.13

Blessed are the job creators …

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:06 am by George Smith

At 2:11 — Blessed are the job creators, they can always hire way more waiters… From economic tax expert and Pulitzer winner David Cay Johnston at al Jazeera: Prosperous American families have adopted the same approach to wages for servants as big successful companies, hiring freelance outside contractors for all sorts of functions — from […]

12.10.13

Digital sweat shop labor and your PC’s need for electrons

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:33 pm by George Smith

Resurrected from “Comments” here, the profits from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk sweat shop work scaled against the cost in electrons: The average PC will consume about 150 – 200 watts. I have no idea what the prices per kWh are in the US, but i assume it’s pretty hard to just break even when doing these […]

12.09.13

National Pain Gods

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:58 pm by George Smith

Krugman in “The Punishment Cure:” “[It’s] part of a general pattern of afflicting the afflicted while comforting the comfortable … So the odds, I’m sorry to say, are that the long-term unemployed will be cut off, thanks to a perfect marriage of callousness — a complete lack of empathy for the unfortunate and bad economics.” […]

The digital sweatshop letter the LA Times didn’t print

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:29 pm by George Smith

Hello: Your interesting Column One — Mappers Spot all the Pools in LA Basin — informed that 43,123 pools in the Los Angeles basin were counted by the digital sweatshop house, Mechanical Turk. And it cost researchers Benedikt Gross and Joseph Lee $350. I thought you might like to know what that came out to […]

12.06.13

Rumble from ‘They Live’

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 […]

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