08.05.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 8:05 pm by George Smith
One of the necessary jobs in the Culture of Lickspittle is the swank public explainer. Sometimes they have interesting things to say. And often they just have position in which to write things everyone else has already lived through or now knows implicitly.
Today, the New York Times posted a bit in its blog on inequality in the US by Robert D. Putnam of Harvard. Putnam went back to his hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio, using it as a personalized framing example for the destruction of the blue collar working class and disappearance of American industry in the last forty years.
What he describes in Port Clinton happened everywhere, nowhere more noticeably than in Bethlehem and Allentown in the Lehigh Valley. The destruction of the steel industry slowly wiped out the vitality of the area. Nothing could replace the middle class jobs that allowed people without college degrees to earn a good living, enough to send their kids on to school, to become home-owners and to, generally, make the place a nice one in which to live.
The disastrous American system wrecked all of it.
During the mid-Eighties the south side of Bethlehem slowly turned into a slum as did the center of Allentown.
Bethlehem recovered slightly by becoming a bedroom community for people commuting into the New Jersey/NYC metroplex.
Allentown never made it back. The good jobs were never replaced. About a decade ago an attempt was made to bring casinos to the site of the old Bethlehem Steel. I wrote about it on the old blog here.
Bethlehem was able to get Sands to open an operation there and then development foundered on the rocks of the Great Recession.
What jobs were created were no good:
Jobs in heavy manufacturing in the US used to pay $20/hour. And in Bethlehem, generations of workers could buy a house and send their kids to college, just by working at the steel mill straight from high school.
Jobs working at a casino pay much less in 2009. In the US, this is expected. It is important that you be screwed.
[A friend] informs a cage cashier’s slot at the Sands casino in Bethlehem pays 9-10 dollars/hour for work at night and on weekend. It’s a good rate if you’re enthusiastic about the economic benefits of 24/7 work in a banana republic.
As it turned out, there’s not really enough cash on hand in the middle class anymore to make a casino in Bethlehem particularly profitable. Bethlehem, obviously, is not Las Vegas. It’s not even Atlantic City.
In reading Putnam’s piece for the Times, just as in the Lehigh Valley, so it was in Port Clinton.
Excerpted:
My hometown — Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,050 — was in the 1950s a passable embodiment of the American dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and factory workers alike.
But a half-century later, wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the Port Clinton High School lot next to decrepit “junkers??? in which homeless classmates live. The American dream has morphed into a split-screen American nightmare. And the story of this small town, and the divergent destinies of its children, turns out to be sadly representative of America …
But the story of Port Clinton over the last half-century — like the history of America over these decades — is not simply about the collapse of the working class but also about the birth of a new upper class. In the last two decades, just as the traditional economy of Port Clinton was collapsing, wealthy professionals from major cities in the Midwest have flocked to Port Clinton, building elaborate mansions in gated communities along Lake Erie and filling lagoons with their yachts. By 2011, the child poverty rate along the shore in upscale Catawba was only 1 percent, a fraction of the 51 percent rate only a few hundred yards inland.
It’s not a bad piece. However, Putnam brings the story as a member of the privileged class of “wealthy professionals.” He knows as well as anyone else that the success some of his generation now enjoy came from the very process of enabling the cannibalization of everyone else. Some are not going to get above it, either. The national cauldron of all against all will assuredly take a number.
Maybe Robert Putnam never personally had any hand in where we are today. But he was part of the generation and middle class that put in place the system which has dismantled so many.
“Half a century later, my classmates, now mostly retired, have experienced astonishing upward mobility,” Putnam writes.
Do we need someone, the kindly scholar from Harvard to be the official explainer? You’ve experienced it, you can’t escape it.
One no longer lives in the United States, one survives the United States, and the highest inequality in the advanced nations.
I wrote a song back in ’86 that described it, “Ironwork Blues,” from my second album. There was no Internet, no sharing economy, and you could charge a small amount for it. And you could see the calamity unfolding.
So sing happy songs on the radio and watch as the world crumbles down … And it’s hard for me to stifle a yawn as the American dream hits the ground.
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08.04.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:23 pm by George Smith
From the Guardian, the aroma of digital sweatshop labor, the oxygen of the sharing economy, global crowd-sourcing software for grifting:
Dhaka-registered Shareyt.com, meanwhile, claims to act as a middleman to connect companies seeking to boost their profile on Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, LinkedIn and YouTube.
“We made it as simple as mouse-clicking,” the front page of the site says, claiming that it is “a crowd-sourcing platform to help you improve social media presence and search engine ranking FREE”.
It adds: “Whenever and wherever you need massive workforce to complete petty tasks, call for Shareyt and get it done like magic! You can’t imagine the potentials [sic] until you explore!” It claims to have generated 1.4m Facebook likes and to have 83,000 registered users.
The implication is that the site “crowdsources” clicks – that lots of people around the world mutually help each other to promote each others’ work.
But Sharaf al-Nomani, Shareyt’s owner, told Dispatches in an undercover meeting that “around 30% or 40% of the clicks will come from Bangladesh” – which implies about 25,000 people in Dhaka using computers laboriously and repetitively for hours on end to boost the visibility of specific products to order.
The article goes on to say it costs anywhere from fifteen to one US dollars for one thousand “likes.” Various large firms, US and British, are documented as using it to promote various things on the “social network.”
“Workers punching the keys might be on a three-shift system, and be paid as little as $120 a year,” it reads.
The Silicon Valley is deeply invested in a winner-take-all economy and the software it develops is sometimes solely generated for corporate business and expressly aimed at harnessing the cheapest global labor for purposes of outright fraud or of no actual value to society.
The winner-take-all Internet ecology absolutely guarantees relentless gaming and rigging because you only exist if you are in the top rank of results, whether it’s search, recommendations returned by algorithm, or any metrics involving counts.
Now recognized as fact: Perception of popularity generates popularity.
There’s a penalty for being total rigged crap but it’s not severe. People do not respond as enthusiastically if something with big pooched numbers is innately horrible, but many still respond in some way, anyway.
It wasn’t always like this. Internet search and rating didn’t just all boil down to who were biggest players with the most capital and whoever else could rig the game most efficiently.
“I suspect that a lot of the behavior we see in Silicon Valley is reminiscent of the behavior of the robber barons in the Gilded Age,” Frank of Pine View Farm told me and I certainly agree. “They also believed that their good fortune was the mark of destiny, rather than the mark of a few brains and a lot of luck and timing.”
You really wanna choke down a megaton of sharing economy fun?
Get a load of Sean Parker’s Big Sur wedding photos at Vanity Fair.
Parker, he of Napster, and Facebook, a fortune resting first on the optimization of the stealing of digital music, being paid ransom to acquire said technology, and continuing the spree with ownership of services like Spotify, which pay artists half a penny to for sharing a tune on the digital streaming service.
Vanity Fair blurb:
In a V.F. exclusive, social-media baron Sean Parker and singer-songwriter Alexandra Lenas traded vows amid towering redwoods. Photographed by Christian Oth and Mark Seliger, the must-be-seen-to-be-believed lush images—appearing here for the first time—show nuptials guests like Olivia Munn (holding a bunny!), Sean Lennon, Allison Williams, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. You can see the couple’s “performance-art??? vision for their wedding come to life—Parker, 33, oversaw all details, from the leather-bound keepsake volume for guests, to the nine-foot-tall wedding cake, to the fur-pelt-strewn beds in the lounge area. Dedicated to their love of old-growth forests, the celebration—which included Tolkien-ized costumes for all 364 guests by Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson—cost Parker $4.5 million for the wooded site alone.
Beware, a website of the infinite download.
The sharing economy — from the archives.
Rigging YouTube and Facebook.
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08.02.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 11:59 am by George Smith
Returning to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk global “human intelligence task” job market, I point to a company blog entry here, one in which a “master worker” claims 180,000 completed jobs in a period approximating three years. That’s some statistic. Why would you believe it?
So let’s do some math.
180,000 / 1095 days in three years = 164.4 “human intelligence tasks”/per day with no holidays.
Let’s assume an eight hour day with no breaks. You can eat at your Internet connection and hold it until you break off.
164.4 / 8 = 20.5 “human intelligence tasks” per hour, every day of the year, for three years.
Or about one every three minutes.
The “master worker” talks about work from “top academic institutions.”
This would be behavioral, psychology and social science studies and questionnaires. Most of them take well over five minutes. On average, my experience has been fifteen to half an hour, not counting the time spent parsing the listings for them.
“I enjoy [the] research surveys … which are often amongst the highest paying HITs in the marketplace,” the worker writes for Amazon’s blog.
Many Mechanical Turk jobs are audio transcriptions of corporate meetings crowd-sourced through another business that uses Mechanical Turk as a front-end. None of these transcriptions are under three minutes in length.
It is not humanly possible to transcribe an audio presentation, by hand, that’s more than three minutes in less than three minutes.
Many Mechanical Turk tasks ask for workers to provide original written articles, free of mistakes, anywhere in length from 150 to 700 words at an average compensation of a tenth of a penny a work, or less.
It is not humanly possible for even the best writers in the world to work at a pace that would produce such pieces tens of thousands of time in just over three minutes/copy. Not possible, without resorting to repetition and automation used by spammers.
You can, of course, read the Amazon blog post for yourself to get a feeling for the “truthiness” of it. The blog does not update frequently, perhaps an indication that even its masters don’t have particularly high regard for anything in it.
The concept of cooked statistics comes to mind.
A recent article on Amazon hiring more warehouse workers, stimulated by the President’s speech — this week — at one of it’s sweatshop order fulfillment centers in Chatanooga:
On Tuesday, President Obama gave a great speech on why good jobs are the foundation for his middle-out economic strategy… from a huge Amazon warehouse where the workers do not have good jobs …
But as The New York Times reported, “the White House came under fire because many Amazon jobs pay only $11 an hour, and the pace of the work in these warehouses has been described as exhausting.”
Amazon is a great example of how the new economy has created a crisis in good jobs, in which most of the jobs being created are low-wage: a highly profitable information technology firm that drives local stores out of business while paying low wages to its non-union workers.
Nothing new here. Jeff Bezos’ vision is straight from beggar thy neighbor, to out Wal-Mart Wal-Mart, in everything from making work not pay to laundering profits overseas to avoid paying taxes.
(At Huffington Post. No link, malicious web design tricks including the infinite download.)
Infamous Jeff Bezos quote, via sharing economy guru Tom Friedman:
I’VE spent the last week traveling to two of America’s greatest innovation hubs — Silicon Valley and Seattle — and the trip left me feeling a combination of exhilaration and dread. The excitement comes from not only seeing the stunning amount of innovation emerging from the ground up, but from seeing the new tools coming on stream that are, as Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, put it to me, “eliminating all the gatekeepers??? — making it easier and cheaper than ever to publish your own book, start your own company and chase your own dream. Never have individuals been more empowered, and we’re still just at the start of this trend.
“I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere,??? said Bezos …
Amount of money Amazon holds offshore to avoid taxation: $1500 million.
Number of Amazon tax haven subsidiaries: 2
Location of shell company/subsidiaries: Luxembourg
— Source, Offshore Shell Games, PIRG
Jeff Bezos, Amazon and the chiseling economy — from the archives.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 8:37 am by George Smith
Another end of the week, another report on corporate American offshore tax evasion/money laundering. $1.2 trillion hidden, 80-90 percent of the 100 largest firms doing it — Apple, Google, Band of America, GE — only a few days after the President offers them a “bargain” reduction of the corporate tax rate in return for something called “middle class jobs.”
Don’t people know that investigative reports about US corporate tax evasion over and over with the same result every time are the definition of insanity?
No links. Why? The Congressional Research Service published a report a year ago on US corporate “profit-shifting” through shell companies in small countries which have set up their economies exclusively for money-laundering.
And this song is now two years old.
And, from across the pond in the Daily Telegraph:
In the wake of the outcry over the tax-dodging schemes of Starbucks, Google and Amazon, the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs will today call for penalties for aggressive tax avoiders and more expertise at HM Revenue & Customs, so that it can stand up to powerful multinationals.
The committee, which is chaired by former education secretary Lord MacGregor and includes ex-Chancellor Lord Lawson, highlights how big international companies can “manipulate the system… to reduce or avoid corporation tax by shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions???.
The upshot is that UK corporation tax has become “largely voluntary??? for multinationals …
Bomb Ireland, then.
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08.01.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:23 pm by George Smith
In addition to running sweatshop fulfillment warehouses in the United States in a drive to out Wal-Mart Wal-Mart, Jeff Bezos — global thinker, also has the virtual sweatshop franchise perfected in Mechanical Turk.
I’ve discussed Mechanical Turk before but have looked in again to view its progress.
Mechanical Turk also acts as the front-end for other crowd-sourced chiseling services based in the US. They tend to have names with the word “Crowd” in them, their websites advertising their millions strong global labor force working from the “human cloud.”
US crowd-sourcing business relies on the permission and ability to reduce compensation for intellectual labor to virtually nothing. The lousy conditions in the US economy have made this easier.
On Mechanical Turk you can actually find “jobs” that pay 2 to eight cents for which you will not be qualified, somewhat unbelievably. Many of the crowd-sourcing firms have installed standards for even penny jobs, Mechanical Turk rating requirements which mandate the worker to have already done one hundred, two hundred, or more “human intelligence tasks.”
To put this in perspective, you can easily waste two hours on Mechanical Turk and have completed only a couple jobs worth less than or about a dollar. By scale, then, it can take continuous days of work to reach a standard whereby one is “qualified” for an eight cent job.
Really!
There is no world where it is moral to pay people for gigs at a labor rate that is only a minute sliver of the minimum wage just because technology empowers it.
Invariably, if you go the websites of the crowd-sourcing firms using Amazon’s front end, they all brag about their magnificent, expert labor forces. Much of it seems to be human automation of the production of thousands of virtually meaningless small articles for anonymous placement on the web in a form of astro-turfing that pays about a tenth-of-cent or less a word. The companies will boast of their self-correcting, intelligent workforce, or display business awards which claim the firm has been judged one of the best places to work in its region.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is not totally inhuman corporate American tech industry excrement. Academicians use it to recruit volunteers for behavioral, social science and psychology experiments. These always involve answering questions or being asked what one thinks of a series of statements designed to elicit some response. In contrast to crowd-sourcing industry work, they don’t take a lot of time, are never engaged in activity of a shaky or dodgy nature, and pay — on the average — much better than the “Crowd-name” businesses.
A couple weeks ago the Los Angeles Times ran a piece on the so-called concierge and sharing economy being built by the likes of TaskRabbit.
The article insinuated TaskRabbit was actually successful in Los Angeles County.
I had my doubts, just as with anything involving the new sharing economy, so I signed on to have a look.
Keep in mind now that Los Angeles County is, next to Manhattan, probably the most densely populated part of the United States at 9.9 million.
I signed up to see all the “Tasks” here that didn’t involve having to go out and buy something for someone which rely on the “job creators” paying you for actual goods, groceries or food later through the service.
Today, TaskRabbit advertised 65 jobs around Los Angeles, ranging from taking someone’s furniture from here to San Francisco to writing short articles for someone’s lousy business blog/website to making an audio presentation of someone’s terrible vanity published e-book.
Yes, that’s 65 jobs, none of the amounts of payment established, all waiting to be bid upon until the poster is satisfied, if ever.
Tom Friedman, famously, on the sharing economy last week:
[Ordinary] people … will now come clean your home, coordinate key exchanges, cook dinner for you … There is a whole generation of people that don’t want everything mass produced. They want things that are unique and personal.
There’s more. In a world where, as I’ve argued, average is over — the skills required for any good job keep rising — a lot of people who might not be able to acquire those skills can still earn a good living now by building their own branded reputations …
Jeff Bezos — from the archives.
The sharing economy.
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07.31.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 11:40 am by George Smith
Ask me how I know.
The sequester, the big process now imposing austerity measures across the federal government, is also having an impact on ricin trials in the US, a few of which are waiting to go forward.
Sequester has hit federal public defender offices, closing some of them one day a week, across the country, to keep the books balanced.
This includes public defenders tasked with defending the few number of Americans arrested and accused of making ricin.
Ricin cases have never moved quickly. Austerity makes the wheels of justice turn even more slowly.
And this slightly related news from AP:
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned Wednesday that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order additional sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress doesn’t act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014.
Speaking to Pentagon reporters, and indirectly to Congress, Hagel said that the full result of the sweeping budget cuts over the next 10 years could leave the nation with an ill-prepared, under-equipped military doomed to face more technologically advanced enemies.
More technologically advanced enemies. How do you even say or write this kind of horseshit with a straight face.
Who are these enemies and where might they be? Alpha Centauri?
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Posted in WhiteManistan at 11:33 am by George Smith
Somehow, we’re still here. There are a few exceptions — Baja Ranch markets, being one. If you don’t bring your own bag, you can pay a dime for a paper one. At BR, it’s a plastic bag. Not sure how that got worked.
I hadn’t really kept track of the opposition to plastic bag bans because it’s government tyranny movement, but — of course — it exists.
Banning plastic bags, you see, is not only stupid but increases shoplifting. And illness.
Commie liberals.
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07.30.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:49 pm by George Smith
The sharing economy: American tech industry euphemism for the creation of an economy in which the top 1 percent gets all the share.
From the web, statistics on the sharing economy and Pandora’s royalty payment schedule:
David Lowery, of bands like Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, is an outspoken critic of Pandora and other services that use so-called compulsory licenses to broadcast music over the Internet.
The idea of compulsory licenses is set out in U.S. copyright law, and it basically allows Pandora and similar services to stream just about any song they want so long as they pay a fixed royalty on each song. Pandora has argued that it is losing money because these royalties are too high, while songwriters like Lowery say they are only making a pittance from the royalties.
In an effort to demonstrate his side of the argument, Lowery has revealed his recent royalty payments for the 1994 Cracker hit “Low.???
Records show that in the last quarter, the song was streamed around 1.16 million times on Pandora, for which the band splits $42.25 in songwriting royalties. Lowery’s share is $16.89. So he earned about $.000015 per play of the song on Pandora.
The article goes on to mention that while one million plays is a lot, it is not similar to the model of traditional radio — which pays much higher royalties — where a single play can reach many, even millions, of listeners.
This is true. But virtually zero percent of any number, large or small, is still virtually zero. And this business model, at its rate of payment, constitutes theft.
Lowery argues that it’s not the artists’ fault that Pandora is not a profitable business.
Last week, here, I mentioned that Spotify, another streaming music service, pays half a cent a tune.
The repeated lesson from the sharing economy is now crystal clear:
The owners of capital make all the swag from the tools of digital distribution … The magic of the corporate technological revolution is that it does not result in progress. The software applications merely make the collection of monopoly rents on content production globally efficient. Simply by holding the distribution networks and applications, remuneration can be reduced to record low levels …
Google is already in the music-streaming business and Apple will follow.
None of these giant globe-spanning companies engage in artist discovery or development. That risk is pushed onto all those dragooned into furnishing musical content for them.
I share David Lowery’s contempt for the Internet economy of digital music. It’s one of the worst examples of how digital progress, used the wrong way, has made a winner-take-all society. I would applaud if Pandora (as well as Spotify et al) were destroyed.
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Posted in WhiteManistan at 1:14 pm by George Smith
The sound of someone’s brain crumbling, plus friends, you don’t have to listen to all 100 minutes.
Chief Kessler: “I don’t run with the mainstream … I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon shoved in my ass.”
Terry from Ohio: “Our mayor is in league with the Muslims, the Turks … they’re all over the place, they’re coming in like hordes.”
Chief Kessler: “I started a national movement nullifying all gun control laws.”
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07.29.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Shoeshine at 12:55 pm by George Smith
A couple select quotes from national security megaplex 1-percenters at the Aspen Security Forum:
NSA director Keith Alexander: “Make no mistake about it: These are great people who we’re slamming and tarnishing and it’s wrong. They’re the heroes, not this other and these leakers!???
“The bad guys…hide amongst us to kill our people. Our job is to stop them without impacting your civil liberties and privacy and these programs are set up to do that … The reason we use secrecy is not to hide it from the American people, but to hide it from the people who walk among you and are trying to kill you …”
Mike Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) and lawyer for Palantir, tech spying software contractor for the NSA: “Just seeing us here …that inspires confidence, because we’re not a bunch of ogres.???
When you’re protesting you’re “not a bunch of ogres,” it’s a tacit admission of self-consciousness over moral standing in the national security megaplex.
Army general and NSA director Keith Alexander is a special case. As someone who publicly tries to pass off the fiction that Chinese cyber-espionage is the “greatest transfer of wealth in history” at a time of great personal hardship for millions of Americans he is easy to portray as socially tone deaf on a grand scale, someone at the top of the national security pyramid pursuing and building things which are only of importance to the mandarins, corporate and government.
Alexander cannot even capitalize on the normal faux reverence Americans show for all things military. Despite the chest of decorations, he is colorless even in a corps of military men characterized by their appearance as government technocrats serving time until their tickets are punched in the private sector.
And he’s going to rightly have the “greatest transfer of wealth in history” quote hung on him until he’s retired.
As a refresher, from just this morning on the salient problems facing this country in 2013:
46.2 million people in poverty
“Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.”
“Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.”
From the census: “[People] ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.”
Comparative statistics, Keith Alexander’s salary: somewhere between 230,000 and 290,000/year.
Amount spent on the military and homeland security during the war on terror: $8 trillion.
The annual Aspen Security Forum, make no mistake, is for the privileged in American society, those who work as the peddlers and crafters of the national security megaplex. It has more in common with a summer festival for wealth in Monaco than anything the American citizenry might experience.
And therein lies a central dilemma in any attempt to restore prosperity, genuine security and fairness in the country. They’re a big part of the problem.
The A-list at the Aspen Security Rent-Seeker Forum — from Cryptome.
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