The most odious story of the day, a feature at the LA Times on the use of smartphone apps and the social bazaar micro-job bidding businesses in southern California.
Mentioned the companies that are always mentioned, those that cater to the 1 percent and their high-button servants who run their lives off their smartphones. That means Uber and TaskRabbit, the latter company whose innovation is to make personal assistant work pay even less.
The technology is always the same. It’s merely a collection point where the haves can leverage an extremely lousy labor situation in the US, offering a bazaar in which people can bid against each other for the privilege of driving a snob to the airport, or picking up toothbrushes and toilet paper at the grocery store.
The Times story has Aaron and Adora Cheung of Homejoy who get the newspaper to swallow the idea that housecleaning services are too expensive in Los Angeles. They claim 40 dollars an hour, with their business slashing it to 20.
My experience living in southern California is a bit different. House cleaning isn’t expensive and much of the work is done by illegals, often at less than minimum wage.
So, again, the tech industry of business model of using digital collection to pit those who earn the least against each other in bidding wars to serve the upper middle class and above.
In addition, with many, you have the added joy of passing competence tests and background checks. Later, you can have the snobs pile up bad reviews on you for not working sufficiently well for minor sums.
“[Dawn McCoy, an actress and writer in the Wilshire district] has hired people to give her rides, hang photos and install kitchen cabinet knobs in her home, design her website, wait on guests at a party, put up and take down Christmas decorations and pick up food,” reads the piece. Because, you know, the handymen putting up ads on Craig’s List or still too damn expensive.
“Such start-ups are catching on with busy, tech-savvy consumers who want things done efficiently and cheaply,” it continues.
Yes, everyone knows — or they should, that well over half of the innovation coming out of the tech industry is in making use of the web to disempower and cheapen those who already make the least.
Think of these app labor operations as digital harpies, ripping off shreds of flesh from those who basically can’t leverage anything to keep the value of their labor from being undermined.
And if you’re do errand work for less than minimum there’s this pleasure: “For those worried about hiring a stranger they met on the Internet, the start-ups conduct background checks on hosts and task completers and strongly urge both sides to review each other after every transaction.”
The only good news is that the Los Angeles City Department of Transportation went after Uber and two similar app services, “accusing the ‘rogue taxi apps’ of illegally operating in the city without the proper permits and licenses and ordering them to stop picking up passengers.”
Do you know any traditional cab drivers who earn to much money and have it too easy?
Of course you do, hundreds. They deserve destruction at the hands of trivial job app programming. Don’t fear detest creative destruction, it’s making the place a better place to live (for the haves) at everyone else’s expense.
If you read the entire piece, which is here, you’ll notice there is not one instance in which the reporter mentions what the pricing for a specific “task” is other than 20/hr for “homecleaning,” of which the business takes an unspecified slice.
There is also not one instance of a “taskrabbit” — or job doer from any other of the services — interviewed, or an instance of anyone who might have found the services wanting.
Better editors wouldn’t have let it fly until it was more complete and not just a p.r. piece on the wonder of smartphone summoned cheap labor.
Note the crap re-branding name for these things — concierge apps.
Except these concierges get paid much much less than the old ones.
Courtesy of Steven Aftergood at Secrecy blog, we can look at an excerpt from the recent Congressional Research Service report, “Science and Technology Issues in the 113th Congress,” here.
WhiteManistan has no use for science on most any subject because it always tends to be inconvenient to its crabbed world view.
And since WhiteManistan has paralyzed Congress by understanding how to stifle all change from a minority position, the Congressional Research Service is left in an odd position for this report.
Bluntly stated, there can be no legislation on climate change in the 113th Congress. There can be no debate in Congress any more than a person can have an intelligent conversation with the bottom of their shoe.
Nevertheless, the report diplomatically attempts to summarize what is known about climate change and how inharmonious opinion from WhiteManistan means for the legislative body.
“Debate on appropriate federal policies is fueled by differing levels of confidence among Members and the public … Few scientists dispute that the climate is changing … Over the long run, not addressing human contribution to the causes of climate fluctuations and their consequences could set up costly, even catastrophic risks and challenges,” it reads. “Most experts conclude from evidence and computer modeling that human activities have driven most of the global warming observed since the 1970s …”
This is as close as we could ever hope to get to a CRS report stating:
“The GOP is an extremist collection of anti-science douche-bags whose group actions prevent the country from moving forward on the problem of global warming.”
The President knows this, too. And this is why he signaled that he intended to undertake unilateral action on the issue this week.
WhiteManistan immediately reacted with cries on job destruction and government tyranny.
Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy blog, along with other recent CRS reports, is here.
This has been another in a now frequent series of postings discussing the security threat WhiteManistan poses to the future of Americans.
Shannon Richardson was just indicted on three charges of mailing threatening letters, the most famous of which went to the President. If guilty, it’s five years per charge.
“(I will) make sure you wont be runnin this country in the ground any further,” the letter to the Prez said, which along with the other two, were intended to frame her husband.
Richardson’s lawyer requested a mental exam for her a week or so ago & the court granted it. Such a shame that a taste of Hollywood took her down this dark path of ruin.
Goofball quote of the last two weeks, from a national lab research doing rent-seeking on the bank of the ricin case cluster:
There is an urgency to the [Pacific Northwest National Laboratory] work, because for many would-be terrorists, the ease of access and relatively simple production method has made ricin the “weapon of choice,??? David Wunschel said.
Whatever the three involved in the ricin cluster are, “would-be terrorists” doesn’t describe them.
“Ricin Mama,” however, does describe one.
Trivia note: That’s Steve Cropper, best known as guitarist for Booker T. & the MG’s and the Blues Brothers Band, beside southern strategy Boogie Man Lee Atwater in the video.
A retired four-star Marine Corps general who served as the nation’s second-ranking military officer is a target of a Justice Department investigation into a leak of information about a covert U.S.-Israeli cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program, a senior Obama administration official said.
Retired Gen. James E. “Hoss??? Cartwright served as deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was part of President Obama’s inner circle on a range of critical national security issues before he retired in 2011.
The administration official said that Cartwright is suspected of revealing information about a highly classified effort to use a computer virus later dubbed Stuxnet to sabotage equipment in Iranian nuclear enrichment plants.
Stuxnet was part of a broader cyber campaign called Olympic Games that was disclosed by the New York Times last year as one of the first major efforts by the United States to use computer code as a destructive weapon against a key adversary.
Cartwright, who helped launch that campaign under President Bush and pushed for its escalation under Obama, was recently informed that he was a “target??? of a wide-ranging Justice Department probe into the leak …
The campaign is believed to have destroyed as many as 1,000 of Iran’s 6,000 centrifuges at the time. But the virus also escaped those closed systems and was subsequently discovered on the Internet, raising concern about the potential that government-sponsored viruses could cause widespread and unintentional harm.
Stuxnet and Olympic Games unleashed a global state-sponsored race to develop malware. As part of secret war against Iran it also triggered retaliations against the US and other nations in the Middle East.
The short [tourist] film, “A New Birth of Freedom,??? shown in the adjacent theaters every 15 minutes, lays out the origins of the war, the debate over slavery’s expansion to the new territories and the battle’s legacy, immortalized by Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, as a defense of democratic ideals.
Once the party of Lincoln, now the party of southern white hate and fear.
A tour of Gettysburg was a common public school excursion when I was growing up. It was not particularly thrilling.
However, today it takes on a bit more meaning, and not in a good way, on progress and the ongoing battle plans of the New Confederacy.
Matthew Buquet, 37, entered not-guilty pleas during an appearance before U.S. Magistrate Cynthia Imbrogno.
He is charged with producing and transferring a biological toxin called ricin; mailing a threatening communication to the president of the United States; and mailing a threatening communication to a federal judge. He faces up to life in prison if convicted.
No motive has been offered for the mailings, and the federal government has sealed most of the court documents in the case.
Last week, a case of rent-seeking behavior on the hazard of ricin from a laboratory funded by Homeland Security, by reporter Tom Sowa of the Spokesman Review newspaper:
As federal prosecutors build a case against a Spokane man charged with sending ricin-laced letters to the president, the CIA, a federal judge and Fairchild Air Force Base, one of the legal challenges they’ll face is proving that the substance is indeed ricin, a lethal poison derived from ground seeds of the castor plant.
[Note: This is untrue. There straightforward lab procedures used to test for active ricin. Typically, the FBI sends suspect samples, be they castor seeds, castor powder, or both, to the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC). NBACC, which was built for the war on terror, then outsources the lab work to a firm like American International Biotechnology Services (AIBiotech) in Richmond, VA. Why does the NBACC, one of the most well-funded science installations in the country, outsource this work? Interesting question, one perhaps to be answered in the future.]
[Investigators] also can use tests to figure out how the ricin was made, which can help link a suspect with the chemicals used in the process or determine how much advance planning took place. New versions of those analytic tests are being developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, at the Chemical and Biological Signature Sciences Laboratory.
[Although the documents in the Buquet case are sealed, the FBI reporting agent will already have a very good idea of how the tainted letters were made. This is again not really accurate news, shaped to make the work at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory appear more valuable.]
Among the lab’s goals is developing better tools to identify the exact methods used to make ricin or other toxic substances, said David Wunschel, a biochemical researcher at PNNL.
There is an urgency to the lab’s work, because for many would-be terrorists, the ease of access and relatively simple production method has made ricin the “weapon of choice,??? Wunschel said.
[But ricin is not a weapon of choice of terrorists. This is, again, untrue and the researcher must know it. The alleged perpetrators in the cluster of three ricin cases — J. Everett Dutschke, Matthew Buquet, and Shannon Richardson — are not “terrorists” in the sense of the war on terror. A look at their pictures and what is known of their lives shows everyone that this is the case.
The choice to make ricin mail, in these cases, appears to be trivial. One case, that of Shannon Richardson, looks like it could have been a partial copy-cat of the J. Everett Dutschke incident, one where the primary aim is to draw attention and frame another person.
It is not difficult to understand this. However, rent-seeking behavior, that is the justification of continued work, or research on a matter that is of little value to average Americans, requires that a different story be told — that ricin is a “weapon of choice” of terrorists.
During the war on terror, zero people have been killed by ricin.]
Ricin is a “one-to-one??? attack that relies on getting a potential victim to breathe or swallow the toxin. Unlike poisonous gases or viruses, ricin isn’t absorbed easily through the skin.
Even so, the bioterror scenarios include the possible distribution of dozens of ricin-laced packages to a government office, causing a lot of disruption and requiring extensive cleanup, Wunschel said
Wunschel joined the PNNL staff in 2000. Following 9/11, the new Department of Homeland Security started funding projects to give law enforcement better tools in dealing with bioterrorism. The ricin study has been underway in Richland since 2005.
Scientists say extracting ricin from castor seeds may be relatively simple if someone follows a series of steps deliberately and carefully. But if someone uses a less-complex method with fewer steps, the result is a less pure and less lethal product, Wunschel said.
Ricin accounts for roughly 1 percent of the weight of the dry castor seed.
Ricin isn’t a contact poison. It’s not absorbed through skin anymore than a piece of lunch meat is, period.
But there you have it, once again. Ricin is simple to make. The purification of ricin is beyond the people being arrested in the US on ricin-making charges.
Ricin just does not make a very good weapon. One of the reasons is that there isn’t much of it in a castor bean. A bean is generally mostly oil and 1 percent as ricin is only a start point. Any protein purification must, by definition, result in less because that is the nature of the work.
Currently, war on terror rent-seeking in the national security complex has funded the development of two research ricin vaccines.
One is being pursued by a company mentioned infrequently here — Soligenix. The other is in development at USAMRIID, once known as Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD., that national lab facility on bioterror defense that, in turn, spawned the idea for the NBACC.
Two other ricin-making machines, one human and the other a seed grinder that spews castor hulls and powder into the air.
The rest of the world does not care about the bullshit on castor beans, terrorism and ricin peddled by the American national security complex.
This is an excerpt explaining the southern sentiment, taken from Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.
Boogie Man shows how Atwater motivated the white vote through use of the Nixonian southern strategy of fear of the black man. It put the first Bush in the White House, later providing the framework to unleash GWB on the US.
With WhiteManistan in demographic decline, this week’s SCOTUS decision crippling the Voting Rights Act unleashed the worst of the Deep Southern sentiment on the non-white and poor in every state currently under GOP and Tea Party control since the 2010 elections.
The GOP viscerally understands it can enact predatory laws targeting its enemies faster than US “democracy” can undo them.
One can look at it as being able to wage Civil War 2 without instigating the casus belli of firing on Fort Sumter or assaulting African Americans on Pettus Bridge.
In the United States, the Republican Party threatens the security of many average Americans, daily. In the south, no time was wasted after the Supreme Court ruling into getting to it.
I recommend Boogie Man because it so well illustrates how the grinding bigot animosity of the South made true political power all over the country.
And while it’s people are slowly running out of their time, it has not gone away, still posing a very clear threat to progress and a genuinely civilized nation.
Trivia note: Yes, that’s the Boogie Man in “Ricin Mama.
Chronic stupidity is killing our republic. The gravest problem our republic faces: Stupid people vote …
The Founding Fathers surely must have forgotten to include a provision in our Constitution to prohibit stupid people from voting, or maybe people back then were more informed and responsible and not as stupid as they are today.
So now, a gaggle of stupid senators from both parties is trying to push some stupid immigration reform bill that, if signed into law, will ultimately make tens of millions of non-American criminals U.S. citizens …
The Republicans who support making criminals citizens want cheap criminal labor. The Democrats want the criminal votes. Meanwhile, those Americans addicted to common sense will be strangled and drowned with insurmountable new debt due to the crushing demand by these “new??? Americans on our social welfare system, which is already broke and unsustainable.
The bigot’s bigot puts his best foot forward, as usual.
The politicians of the New Confederacy don’t let the grass grow under their feet.
No sooner had they blown the vote on law to make abortion virtually impossible in Texas, they came right back with the expressed intent of ramming it through in another special session of the Texas legislature.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp said he will file a constitutional amendment later this week to restore DOMA.
The Kansas Republican said he will be joined by other conservatives in supporting that effort.
“My response to this will be later this week to file a federal marriage amendment,??? he said at a Conversation with Conservatives lunch on Wednesday morning.
When Hell freezes over.
However, everyone knows now that the extremists are never stopped, not in 2013 divided America. WhiteManistan wants no part of the future.
Its politicians have deduced they can enact unconstitutional law much faster than it can be undone, in effect bringing on the Cold Civil War riddling the country.
Thought question:
What happens when, before the 2014 elections, WhiteManistan has legislation in place to disenfranchise its enemies at the voting booth? When the people who have voted for years come out in force because they know they’ve been targeted and they are told their papers are not in order by someone who has different color skin, do you think they’ll go home?
From Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy , published in 2006:
Within [WhiteManistan’s] most loyal denominations — Southern Baptists, Mormons and Missouri Synod Lutherans — overall theology accords women secondary status. The essential female role is biblical and familial …
In a related vein conservative publications emphasized the importance in the 2004 election of the “baby gap” — the data showing the pro-Bush [white] voters have more children than do Democratic voters. The states where white fertility rates were high went conservative … Conversely, the states were abortion rates were highest supported Kerry.
To religious traditionalists, homosexuality threatened institutions of family and marriage. Eleven states held November 2004 referendums to ban gay marriage. In the seven states where conservative denominations are strong, the propositions carried by huge majorities: 86 percent in Mississippi, 77 percent in Georgia, 76 percent in Oklahoma, 75 percent in Kentucky and Arkansas, and 66 percent in Utah and Montana. Church-going black voters, principally Baptists and Pentecostals, supported the curbs by lopsided margins, increasing the antigay margins in the Deep South (and accounting for much of the small 2004 Republican increase in black support.)
Time moved on, shifting the sands of race demographics undermined the status quo of the Bush years. The country is more polarized now but WhiteManistan is in numerical decline.
Outsized Mormon bankrolling of Proposition 8 gave sleeping California a ban on gay marriage during the 2008 state elections. It won narrowly with a 52 percent majority. It put the state in the awkward position of having gay marriages enacted legally prior to its stand-up with the rest of the polity left to awkwardly look on. Socially, it was always a bad fit, rigged by money. One could perceive it would eventually be undone, somehow.
This was another factor, but not the major one, in the destruction of the GOP within the state. Its strategy of legislatively attacking enemies doesn’t work here anymore. In the intervening years the GOP was driven out of power, its end coming in 2012.
The rest of the country waits. But the neo-Confederates are never idle. They won a big one early in the week. They lost one today.
It’s not a coincidence that the win for the forces of good started in the Golden State and evil’s win in Shelby County, Alabama. The two regions — here and there in the Deep South — could not be farther apart.
Cold Civil War 2 just got hotter, courtesy of SCOTUS. The new disenfranchisement laws are already being written up in WhiteManistan. Is there anyone left who thinks this isn’t going to happen?
Goodness, how delicious! Eating goober peas! Wait for the yellow lettering.
Now it’s time to shoot all the liberals down
And take everyone else we hate and run them out of town
— Goober Peas, 2013
WhiteManistan, naturally, is not just location or the south. It’s an
outlook, a bleak philosophy that imagines a country that never existed, a demographic of bigots who never see themselves that way. The neo-Confederate sentiment is not just the old Confederacy.
From the New York Times:
Echoing the views of many on both sides of the debate, Mr. Coleman said that with voter ID laws in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania, and with problems with Hispanic access to the polls, maybe the South was not the center of the fight anymore. “I’m not so sure that there aren’t other jurisdictions in the country that are equally, if not more, in need of this than the South,??? he said.
Jerry Wilson, a lawyer in central Georgia who has worked in Voting Rights Act litigation for 25 years, was not so sure.
“I think we’re in big trouble,??? he said, reeling off a list of counties in the region that have up to now been hemmed in by the Voting Rights Act from making what he says were discriminatory voting changes.
Potential for discussion: What would a hot Civil War 2 look like in today’s United States? What would happen if the President mobilized the National Guard and deployed it to guarantee non-interference with voting in districts, cities or states where new legislation threatened to decrease and or render illegitimate specific voter participation for the 2014 mid-term elections?
What effect will today’s SC decision have on the frequency of domestic terror actions by the violent right in the US, keeping in mind a recent West Point study that posited increases in such terrorism when the political climate was viewed as growing more sympathetic to the beliefs of those with the potential to commit it?
