Month: February 2014

“Crowdworking” is the future of much human labor. Unless we do something about it.

The Nation has a great article on the somewhat creepy and viciously exploitative practice of “crowdworking.” It’s too long to even distill properly in a quote, but here’s a brief bit to explain:

Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold. As many as 500,000 “crowdworkers” power the Mechanical Turk machine, while millions more (no one knows how many exactly) fuel competitor sites like CrowdFlower, Clickworker, CloudCrowd and dozens of smaller ones. On any given day, at any given minute, these workers perform millions of tiny tasks for companies both vast (think Twitter) and humble. Though few of these people have any sense of their finished work product, what they’re doing is helping to power the parts of the Internet that most of us take for granted.

Currently, computers are very good at certain sorts of tasks, such as identifying spelling errors, processing raw data and calculating financial figures. However, they are less able to perform others, such as detecting a positive or negative bias in an article, recognizing irony, accurately reading the text off a photograph of a building, determining if something is NSFW (not safe for work) or discerning among ambiguous search results. This is where the “crowd” comes in. In the current iteration of crowdworking, individuals are tasked with those parts of a job that a computer cannot perform. This work is used both to fill in the blanks and to train the computer algorithm to do a better job in the future.

Crowdworking is often hailed by its boosters as ushering in a new age of work. With the zeal of high-tech preachers, they cast it as a space in which individualism, choice and self-determination flourish. “CrowdFlower, and others in the crowdsourcing industry, are bringing opportunities to people who never would have had them before, and we operate in a truly egalitarian fashion, where anyone who wants to can do microtasks, no matter their gender, nationality, or socio-economic status, and can do so in a way that is entirely of their choosing and unique to them,” asserts Lukas Biewald, the CEO of CrowdFlower, in an e-mail exchange. (CrowdFlower claims to have “among the largest, if not the largest, crowd” available, with roughly 100,000 workers completing tasks on any given day.)

But if you happen to be a low-end worker doing the Internet’s grunt work, a different vision arises. According to critics, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk may have created the most unregulated labor marketplace that has ever existed. Inside the machine, there is an overabundance of labor, extreme competition among workers, monotonous and repetitive work, exceedingly low pay and a great deal of scamming. In this virtual world, the disparities of power in employment relationships are magnified many times over, and the New Deal may as well have never happened.

As Miriam Cherry, one of the few legal scholars focusing on labor and employment law in the virtual world, has explained: “These technologies are not enabling people to meet their potential; they’re instead exploiting people.” Or, as CrowdFlower’s Biewald told an audience of young tech types in 2010, in a moment of unchecked bluntness: “Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore.”

Outside of direct personal services like nursing or exploitative rent-seeking jobs in finance, this sort of small-scale machine assistance job is where the labor market will increasingly trend over the next couple of decades.

And it’s a completely unregulated mess. Just another sign of a broken, 19th-century economic system utterly inappropriate for a 21st-century world of globalization, mechanization, flattening and deskilling.

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Saviors of the lost art: The Monuments Men

Black Book/The Good German

Nuremberg: It’s Lesson for Today

Vincere

Talent on loan from Michele Bachman

by digby

This is likely the stupidest thing Rush Limbaugh said all week … and Fox News is pimping it.

RUSH: Remember what we talked about yesterday: How is it that the mainstream media get everything wrong. Not just slightly wrong, but major, profound wrong? How is this possible to be this stupid, this ignorant? How is it possible to not know instinctively that men and women are different?

Why is that such shocking news that Gayle King says, “Why didn’t we know this before?” Norah O’Donnell, who is a CBS infobabe, and Lesley Stahl wrapped it up with this exchange…

O’DONNELL: Lesley, if we metabolize Ambien differently, do we metabolize statins differently? I mean, the list could go on and on, because men and women are taking the same amount when it comes to Lipitor and other pills.

STAHL: We. Don’t. Know.

RUSH: We don’t know! No, no! You mean we don’t know? Oh, no, you mean we could be dying? Oh-ho noooo! We don’t know! (Gasp!) Folks, this is simply… I don’t know how to describe it. This is just… We’re in trouble. We’re in big trouble. Because these people are the primary source of news for most people the country. We’re in big trouble.

Evidently Rush “instinctively knew” that women had different lungs than men and that “everybody” should “instinctively know” that men and women’s basic human physiology is different in spite of the fact that it looks exactly the same. Maybe Rush can tell a female liver from a male liver but I doubt it.

We know what he’s really saying, in any case. He’s saying that Lesley Stahl, Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell (“info-babes”) are all stupid bimbos who think that men and women should be equal when “everyone knows” that women are inferior. All his “differences are obvious” bullshit is quite clear.

But setting that aside, he simply ignores the fact that these women were referring to pharmaceutical companies and medical researchers who have not been testing these drugs on both women and men — and that doctors are prescribing drugs to both sexes the same way. Talk about missing the point.

And yet he’s the one calling other people stupid.

Personally, I think he must be back on the little blue babies. He sounds positively insane in that clip.

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America the beautiful

by digby

“We came here not just to lift ourselves up economically but to enrich the community.”

Despite all the attempts to stop it over the years, the immigrant experience constantly enriching our culture is the one thing that actually makes America exceptional. This is the best of us.

North Carolina seems to be where the action is. Check this out from today’s Moral March:

We have an amazing crowd here. Thousands marching for justice. Equality. #MoralMarch pic.twitter.com/rLPK4OPtgM
— NC NAACP (@ncnaacp) February 8, 2014

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Making the terrorists’ day

by digby

This is why I will never go to a major event again:

Snohomish, Wash.: I’m not a writer, but I’ll try my best.

New York City: Thank you for your hospitality. You and your fantastic police department did a great job welcoming us to your wonderful city for the Super Bowl and keeping us all safe.

New Jersey: Chris Christie and NJTransit, I know you’re having a great time patting yourselves on the back, but you blew it! You ruined the Super Bowl experience for thousands of people.

You had months to plan, analyze and plan some more. You told everyone to take trains and buses — and knew how many people suffered through the first disaster of the day in Secaucus.

Not a single NJT official, police officer or media person was in the mass of humanity in 100-plus degree heat waiting to go through your six “security” stations. Six stations for tens of thousands of people? What a great plan. I know you deny this happened, but you are lying or just plain stupid.

The second debacle was as bad as the first, but much more dangerous. You’re lucky someone didn’t get seriously hurt or killed. After waiting for two hours in the train line, about 30 minutes after it began to dump rain, we were told they were bringing in buses to help with the evacuation from what had become a living hell for 30,000 people.

They crammed thousands of people into Pavilion 5, a tent. We were all forced to squeeze through one small door.

Young, old and infirm were all subjected to the same disgusting treatment. After a couple hours, it was my turn to squeeze throught the door. When the two dozen state troopers who were comfortably standing on the other side of the mass of humanity heard my thoughts on the situation, they all looked to the ground in disgust at what they were forced to be part of by Christie and New Jersey Transit officials.

I’m a cattle rancher. All I could think about is that I would never treat my cattle the way I was being treated. Never.

Todd Kirby

Presumably this was done because of security concerns. And I don’t know if it could have been done any better, to tell you the truth.  Every major event is fraught with such extreme security measures these days.

So, are we “winning”?

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The progressive partisan strategy can work after all

by digby

So it appears that President Obama has turned the tide in the US Senate against the daft attempt to impose more sanctions during these Iran nuclear negotiations. National Journal examines how that happened:

Obama’s in-person, all-hands-on-deck advocacy campaign with the Senate appears to have advanced his cause, but it’s not that simple.

The president combined tangible developments abroad with fervent support from the Left, and used it to win out over a fracturing Israel lobby. In the process, he won—at least for now—a foreign policy victory just as his critics were insisting Obama’s age of influence was over.

“It’s a combination of one side not doing that much and the other side doing a lot. The AIPAC guys have not been calling us and usually we would be hearing from them,” a Democratic Senate aide said. AIPAC is shorthand for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Washington’s best-known pro-Israel lobby group.

Obama started by reaching out to Congress in their house and his: He sent envoys, including Secretary of State John Kerry, to Capitol Hill, and he invited key players to a White House meeting to make a case that independent Sen. Angus King of Maine labeled “incredibly powerful.”

But outreach on Iran is nothing new. What is different this time is that, unlike with past rounds of sanctions against Iran where the interplay has been more theoretical, the Islamic republic is actually at the negotiating table, at least going through the motions of entertaining the dismantling of its nuclear-weapons capabilities. Tremendous skepticism remains that the talks will ultimately work—including from inside the administration—but the ongoing talks at least give concerned senators an alternative.

And then there was the resurgent progressive movement that capitalized on a war-weary public to push Democrats in Obama’s direction. MoveOn.org, Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and other liberal media outlets have mobilized against Democrats who supported sanctions, accusing them of undermining Obama with warmongering and asking, “Where’s the antiwar Left?”

Finally, Obama was the beneficiary of weakened opposition. The Israel lobby has succeeded in influencing Iran policy for decades, but it’s currently in a state of upheaval. AIPAC has not been beating down doors canvassing Capitol Hill in a concerted campaign as it has in the past, and J Street—AIPAC’s younger, rising counterweight—is making the case against sanctions.

“The bottom line is that more and more members want to give the administration the space they are asking for to try to negotiate a deal with Iran. If it doesn’t work they’ll begin to ratchet up the sanctions more,” a former senior Democratic Senate aide said. “I believe the administration now has the space they are looking for.”

Another Senate aide agreed that outside forces are making a difference.

“The president’s base has gone all-in with his party, cashed in every chit possible, applied every possible pressure point on Democrats, used messaging and rhetoric that fires up the liberal base, and activated grass roots to target Democrats and make them afraid of this bill from the left,” said the aide. “Unfortunately it’s turned it partisan, and we’ll see if Republicans will take the next step.”

The administration has often cited the fact that they are unable to accomplish more progressive priorities due to certain Senate Democrats who fail to cooperate. You cannot help but wonder if they might have more success if they’d deployed this strategy before. Certainly, the outside groups wanted nothing more than to organize with the White House to put pressure on recalcitrant centrist and conservative Democrats. They just weren’t given much of an opportunity. If it could be effective against the most powerful bipartisan lobby in the country, just think what it might have done on other issues.

Snarky grapes aside, I couldn’t be more relived that this worked on this issue. If there’s one very dangerous foreign policy issue it’s Iran and if the president is able to make progress on that front it’s vitally important to support him. The fact that some of these people reacted in knee-jerk fashion is a mark against them.

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It’s always something

by digby

The Republicans are on the verge of convincing the Village scribes that the reason they can’t pass immigration reform is because they can’t “trust” President Obama to follow the law. That’s a very convenient story, particularly since back in 2006, they had a different excuse:

As they prepare for a critical pre-election legislative stretch, Congressional Republican leaders have all but abandoned a broad overhaul of immigration laws and instead will concentrate on national security issues they believe play to their political strength.

With Congress reconvening Tuesday after an August break, Republicans in the House and Senate say they will focus on Pentagon and domestic security spending bills, port security legislation and measures that would authorize the administration’s terror surveillance program and create military tribunals to try terror suspects.

“We Republicans believe that we have no choice in the war against terror and the only way to do it is to continue to take them head-on whether it is in Iraq or elsewhere,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the majority leader.

A final decision on what do about immigration policy awaits a meeting this week of senior Republicans. But key lawmakers and aides who set the Congressional agenda say they now believe it would be politically risky to try to advance an immigration measure that would showcase party divisions and need to be completed in the 19 days Congress is scheduled to meet before breaking for the election.

Republicans always seem to have a good reason to discriminate against minorities, don’t they?

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An introduction to Anna Netrebko

by David Atkins

Those of you who watched the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics were treated to one of the world’s greatest singers, Anna Netrebko, performing an unfortunately not-so-great song. Since it’s Saturday morning, I figured I would introduce unfamiliar readers to her with some of her best arias available on Youtube.

Let’s start with “Quando M’En Vo” from Puccini’s La Boheme:

Some readers may be more familiar musically with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu:

There are so many more worth listening to and watching as well, including Un Bel Di, Meine Lippen Sie Kussen So Heiss, the Flower Duet from Lakme and so many others. But my personal favorite performance is probably her heartbreaking rendition of Addio Del Passato from La Traviata:

Enjoy your Saturday!

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Friday baby elephant blogging

by digby

Yay!

The Houston Zoo welcomed a new baby boy elephant into the fold early Friday morning, according to zoo director Rick Barongi.

The 385-pound Asian elephant newborn, named Duncan, was born at just after 2 a.m. and is currently resting with his mother Shanti, who carried Duncan for nearly 23 months.

Shanti’s labor process was very quick, Barongi said.

“Duncan was out of womb in three minutes from the contraction,” he said. The whole nine-member elephant staff was on hand to help Shanti. Zoo staff had been on birth watch since before Thanksgiving with Shanti.

Duncan was born in one of the “bedrooms” inside the Houston Zoo’s McNair Asian Elephant Habitat. He was examined by zoo staff just after his birth and looks fine. The keepers came up with the name Duncan for the newborn, says Barongi.

“Right now he’s very mellow and he’s been nursing a lot. When he was first born he was vocalizing a lot and very active,” Barongi said.

He’s still working on walking, no small feat for someone that weighs nearly 400 pounds and is less than a day old.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with him,” he says. “They are just so special to us.”

Shanti is an experienced mother, so this is nothing new for her. This is her fourth child, and she gives birth about every four years.

“She’s just a great, perfect mom. Very attentive,” said Barongi.

He anticipates that Duncan will be in the barn for a few days before he can be seen by the public.

Next month, he could be on exhibit for all to see.

Four rings and … something else

by digby

From the Sochi opening ceremonies. You be the judge of what that 5th thing looks like:

And the 1 Percenters of America mourn that they don’t have the same opportunity to be job creating engines of the economy as their Russian counterparts:

Now that’s what I call real crony capitalism, baby!

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