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.
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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.
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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!
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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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11.27.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China at 3:01 pm by George Smith
Bigger.
The mightiest military in world history didn’t waste an instant, immediately flying B-52s over a couple worthless islands after China announced it was claiming the airspace over them.
Who is the Pentagon fooling? Itself.
War with China? Laughable. Not even the exchange of spitballs, Apple wouldn’t have it.
Who would make all the iStuff?
Keywords: General Jack Ripper, Lionel Mandrake, B-52s, Diaoyu, Senkaku, IOU.
The New York Times:
Defying China, two long-range American bombers flew through contested airspace over the East China Sea, days after the Chinese announced they were claiming the right to police the sky above a vast area that includes islands at the center of a simmering dispute with Japan.
Pentagon officials said Tuesday that the B-52s were on a routine training mission planned long in advance of the Chinese announcement on Saturday that it was establishing an “air defense identification zone??? over the area. But the message was clear.
And what message was that?
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11.26.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 10:24 am by George Smith
“The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current,” in a transcript from PBS, a longer news piece on the impact recent cuts to the food stamp program have imposed on the needy:
MARY JO BROOKS: Most Republicans don’t dispute statistics which show two-thirds of recipients are children, the elderly or disabled. But they say more than three million Americans are able-bodied and could work. Cutting benefits for those people would save the program $2 billion a year.
Representative Tim Huelskamp is a Republican from Kansas.
REP. TIM HUELSKAMP, R-Kan.: We believe in work. We require productivity. We think it’s good for the taxpayers. But, most importantly, I think it’s better for these adults and families. Now, the vast majority of folks receiving food stamps wouldn’t be in this category of able-bodied adults.
But there are 3.5 million Americans and — that fit this category and we’re just expecting them to actually look for a job, because, in my area, if you look for a job, you’re going to find one.
MARY JO BROOKS: Huelskamp says tightening restrictions, including eligibility, will help reduce long-term dependency on the entitlement program.
These are the daily lies of our time, the orthodoxy of a political party, of a world view — WhiteManistan’s — driving the nation into collective insanity. It is the nullification of human beings. A world-leading country wouldn’t tolerate it. The vengeance practiced on the weak forbidden, the political party and its ideology put down. But America isn’t capable of it.
The majority of food stamp recipients already have a job. And in the last week it was impossible to overlook news about workers in America’s sweat shops, Walmart and McDonalds, living in food insecurity, on food stamps and — in one most incredible instance — working in a Walmart operation where the employer organized a drive among others in need to gather and distribute food for Thanksgiving.
Kathy Underhill, of Food Bank Colorado, tells PBS what the Republican cuts to SNAP would mean, if enacted:
It would really change the entire landscape of hunger in America if the $40 billion cuts went through. You would be looking at the prevalence of hunger and malnutrition spiking incredibly. But you also have an economic impact. Talk to grocers, and you find out. They will tell you, it means they need fewer employees. They need to purchase fewer products.
That’s means there’s future — fewer trucks moving that product. I mean, it has this whole rippling effect that would be quite profound.
“The lawmakers on Capitol Hill who will determine the size of the next round of cuts will resume their work after the Thanksgiving break,” concludes PBS.
Thanks, America. You’re all heart. Ruining Thursday and the holiday season for millions, an accomplishment worth savoring.
Spam this into the comments sections of news and debates on the food stamp program and the poor!
Get your MP3 from Dirpy.
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11.25.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 1:53 pm by George Smith
From a book by a man named Henry Giroux, who was interviewed by Bill Moyers recently:
“The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current…”
He adds: “Yeah, it sure does. I mean, to see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth.”
Giroux gets directly at the American belief system that poverty is a matter of personal inferiority and that it is proper to victimize the poor because they deserve it.
“Young people are seen as disposable,” he says.
It made me want to get his book, “Zombie Politics,” which is where this is from. And I’d buy it. But you can’t afford such things when all you can make is what comes from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk digital sweat shop.
The interview is here and it’s long but there is also a transcript.
Giroux has quite a lot to say, much of it which will be familiar to readers of Escape from WhiteManistan.
Some more excerpts:
So what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social– that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests. No society can survive under those conditions.
I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, “No, this has to stop.” We can’t allow ourselves to be driven by those lies anymore. We can’t allow those who are rich, who are privileged, who are entitled, who accumulate wealth to simply engage in a flight from social and moral and political responsibility by blaming the people who are victimized by those policies as the source of those problems.
It believes that social bonds not driven by market values are basically bonds that we should find despicable …
What does it mean when you turn on the television in the United States and you see young kids, peaceful protesters, lying down with their hands locked and you got a guy with, you know, spraying them with pepper spray as if there’s something normal about that, as if that’s all it takes, that’s how we solve problems? I mean, I guess the question here is what is it in a culture that would allow the public to believe that with almost any problem that arises, force is the first way to address it.
Giroux asserts America is not a democracy. I’ve agreed for a long time. We live, or more accurately — survive, in a corporate fascist state.
And when it comes for you and it will, eventually, you’ll get to see what Mechanical Turk, or something even worse, is like, too.
On the bright seam of malevolence in American society, or as Giroux puts it — the ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current — a description of Tea Party philosophy, the same as the ideology of the old John Birch Society:
[Today’s] tea party is the modern-day rebirth of the John Birch Society. They share a world view …The same paranoid distrust of government. The same desire to protect the rich. The same cruel streak that blames the poor for their poverty and seeks to deny government help on that basis.
Hat tip to Frank at Pine View Farm.
Two faces of malevolence in America.
Want an MP3 for your devices? Click here.
And if you don’t think this is folk music or that it doesn’t efficiently use art to accurately describe the American condition, there’s something wrong with your head, a condition no one can fix.
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11.22.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 11:29 am by George Smith
Another great piece from the Culture of Lickspittle and its raging inequality, the “50’s Telecaster,” American made by Fender’s master builders from something originally made, in today’s terms, from not more than 200 dollars in wood, finish and parts.
Seven times the cost of the made in Mexico Beggars Banquet Telecaster, shown yesterday, for American street fighting men.
But this one is for: Please let me introduce you to them … men of wealth and taste. Woo-woo.
Unfortunately, not evidence of a thriving middle class economy, as say — perhaps — in 1959 or ’60.
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