Or you can work for free on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Yeah, really, there are tons of “human intelligence tasks” on Amazon/MTurk that pay $0.00. Presumably, you’re encouraged to do them so you learn how to not fuck up and can build your HIT number so that your qualifications and experience are enough to get you into the rarefied environs of those that pay 2 – 17 cents per job.
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.
And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Last April, Annie Lowrey of Slate wrote about a start-up called “E la Carte” that is out to shrink the need for waiters and waitresses: The company “has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of M.I.T. engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon. … You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant’s preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists and photographs. You can make special requests, like ‘dressing on the side’ or ‘quintuple bacon.’ When you’re done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out. … Bored with your companions? Play games on the machine. When you’re through with your meal, you pay on the console, splitting the bill item by item if you wish and paying however you want. And you can have your receipt e-mailed to you. … Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.”
Since this was invented by boffins from MIT it’s already much better than the elimination of polio in the United States. I mean, creating an app to rid restaurants of people who already earn crap is a whole lot more cool than giving away a cure to save people from iron lungs and crutches.
Anyway, I can imagine tens of thousands of people who would really like this all the time. All with iKit.
None of whom I ever want to meet. Although I may have actually met a couple in the last ten years. But we knew how to avoid each other from then on.
Which just goes to show Friedman is absolutely right. Eating unencumbered by others with your face down in multiple computing devices is common in lotsa places now. More fool you if you find such people complete boors.
From Mitch Daniels, another of the GOP”s querulous old men, so white and wispy you could almost see through him, last night: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.”
From the New York Times, re the special on iKit manufacturing in China:
“Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas …Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.”
A few months before Jobs died he, along with Mark Zuckerberg — another potential God appointee — were invited to dinner with the President. To talk about how to make jobs.
Fresh off the news, President Obama is bowing before consulting the two smartest men in the world today, Nobel laureate/Pulitzer prize winner Mark Zuckerberg and King of All Music, Steve Jobs.
The goal: How to create more jobs.
Jobs, whose name is most appropriate because he has made many many jobs in China, will probably tell the President the problem is the large number of no-skill sitting around people in the US.
“Stop counting them, Mr. President!” he may advise. Future growth lies in more Harmonica or You’re Fired! apps and what not, particularly now that one of the rival cell phones brags it has 60,000 of them. Sixty thousand!
Nobel laureate/Pulitzer winner Mark Zuckerberg may tell the President that to create jobs … we must unleash the creative power of every American to make more social networking sites.
Neither of these guys are interested in making jobs for all these baggy and lumpy no-skill sitting around people.
I feel fine despising everything Apple. However, the urge to deify and mythologize those who don’t quite deserve it, anything that employs bad examples to further the culture of lickspittle, has always been strong in the American majority. Of which I’m distinctly not a part.
Mitch Daniels wasn’t alone last night.
The President invoked iGod iSteve, if in a slightly different context:
“It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.”
Hmmm, wanting to become the next person to take advantage of mass sweatshop-contracting for consumer electronics manufacturing in China, the next person to destroy an industry for the sake of purchasing a small piece of white plastic kit, the next person with an idea of progress that means writing millions of trivial software applications for instant gratification on hand-held networked computing devices …
George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, believes the judge’s ruling, although “commensurate with the times we live in,” not only infringes on people’s rights, but also sets a very dangerous precedent, one that extends government intrusion well into a person’s private life …
“There is now a long history of governments using and misusing private digital materials against citizens,” Smith told SecurityNewsDaily. “Because this is a small-time criminal case is not an even half decent reason to attempt to nullify that.”
Presented with the hypothesis that an ecrypted hard drive might be analogous to a wall safe containing incriminating documents, Smith dismissed it.
“You can keep a lot of your life, or at least a very good description of your years of personal communications, hobbies, work, loves, vices, likes, dislikes and activities from start to finish, etc., on your hard disk and removable drives these days,” he said. “You can’t keep your life in a wall safe.”
For clarification, some law-and-order desire for a conviction in what amounts to a trivial criminal case, the defendant is accused of being a small town mortgage scam artist, is no reason to take chip away everyone’s right to privacy as enforced by personal encryption.
The Mitt Romney Blues is the soundtrack and you had it here a couple weeks ago. And if it had been Jon Stewart who made it instead of me, you’d have told everyone you know to stick it in their iKit.
With a cynical little push from Newt Gingrich, the Republican voters who aren’t in the 1 percent are figuring out it’s easy to despise the vulture capitalist symbol-of-the-system who jokes about being unemployed, patronizingly insists corporations are people, likes firing people and hides his investment income in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland.
In comments from the last post tagged to the Made In China tab Chuck pointed to comprehensive National Science Foundation/National Science Board analyses of trends and statistics in US research and development as compared to the rest of the developed world.
The above plot, just one from many, clearly shows the US national research and development commitment to homeland security and bombing paupers worldwide as a result of the war on terror. It is the only area of research funding not particularly affected by the worldwide economic downturn. Although a leveling is seen in the last two years, the overall level of commitment to finding new applications in bombing and hounding others less fortunate outside national borders remains quite high. (The larger original version, if you don’t know how to use the browser magnifier, is here.)
Non-military research funding from the federal government shows a clear spike associated with Barack Obama’s stimulus package. When the stimulus abated, in comparison to allocations for bombing paupers, spending plunged.
By the time you read this, Mitt Romney may have released his tax returns. Let’s hope not.
The real reason Mr. Romney is being pressured to release his tax returns is because his fellow GOP presidential candidates, his hateful critics and crazy Demoncrats live to wage class warfare against him for being successful. This is so very wrong.
There is this toxic, anti-American idea that has surfaced that financial success is something that should be questioned, maligned and condemned and is somehow malicious. This is dangerous and dumb.
Nugent has been wrong every time he’s commented on GOP presidential contenders. Around a year ago he found Donald Trump intriguing. Months later he endorsed Rick Perry. These sallies went well.
If I were a betting man I’d almost tempted to take the position that you’ve no chance to be President when Ted Nugent attempts to ride to the rescue because a rival is winning by painting you as a corporate vulture.
If you’re a later-comer and don’t understand my references to Ted as “Howard,” it’s from the a character in The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.
[Nothing] like Foxconn City exists in the United States.
The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.
Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.
Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
Steve Jobs died poorly, exuding contempt for everything not his way or the highway until the bitter end as a withered but still mean husk, delivering the blunt message to President Obama that iKit manufacturing was never coming back to the US.
For the Times, that message is drawn out to indicate the same holds for much domestic manufacturing.
Corporate America de-industrialized the US. Now the infrastructure and everything else needed to be competitive is completely gone.
It exists in China and other countries and there is no way to rival it.
Weeks ago reader Chuck brought this up in the comments section of an earlier post. With the exception of arms the US can’t do manufacturing anymore.
The New York Times deals with the high end of manufacturing, describing the power Chinese industry can bring to bear on complicated things like iKit.
It goes without saying Steve Jobs was reprehensible when it came to labor. iKit is built under conditions which create despair, in a system which cannot be done in the US precisely because it’s the pinnacle of capitalist sweatshopping, government support and mass material resources.
We can rival despair. It’s the super-factories, resources and will to protect industry that’s gone for good.
There is much talk about the employment of Chinese “engineers” in the superfactories. But these “engineers” only have a bit more than a high school education. Certainly, Americans are capable of the same jobs. But the structure is gone, recreated much better there.
There’s one industry that didn’t fall to the great removal. You know it. Arms production.
In the US, it’s protected. Arms production doesn’t have to be efficient like the making of iKit.
Making Predator drones and their follow-ons is not subject to the fast turnarounds and tyrannical equipment modification demands of the consumer electronics industry. Arms manufacturers can do whatever they want and their employees don’t have Steve Jobs to worry about. They just have to worry about making sure Congress doesn’t slash the
budget too much.
There’s a short comedy movie in showing an alternative near future where an aggrandizing asshole scornful of everyone not like him, someone like Steve Jobs, insists all drones and guided missiles be insanely great at arms trade shows. He’s subsequently put in charge of defense procurement. And promptly sends it all to China, much to the delight of wealthy shareholders and petty toadies in the shit nations we sell the stuff to.
Might as well do the entire middle class on the spit. Why stop at just non-military?
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” economist Jared Bernstein told the newspaper. “If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
Made five or six years ago, this video, embedded last week, makes a joke about America not knowing how to “pull pipe.”
However, the middle class knows all about being forced to suck it.
That’s how I’ll always remember my friend Don Hunt’s voice. It had a slight Texas lilt to it whether picking up the phone or walking toward his car just before going on one of his guided walks in Pasadena.
In fact, I still find myself squelching the urge to call after reading something I thought he might be reading or seeing on tv only twelve days after his death. He’s gone and it brings a pang. But that was one of the patterns of friendship, the sudden brief chat to laugh and gossip about football or a political figure.
Of course, that’s not all we did.
Don Hunt showed me Pasadena in a way I’d never appreciated. In fifteen years here I’d never walked the neighborhood of the Rose Bowl and its playing fields. Don showed me the route from houses above, down into the ravine and back up as one of his favorite morning things.
There was the stroll of the Caltech campus, too, always ending at the turtle pond, regularly done at those times when the student body could be counted on to be away for the summer or on holiday. Perhaps we’d find a good taco truck, he’d say. We didn’t but that never stopped us from having a proper lunch afterward.
There were many trips into the Pasadena arroyo, my favorite being the time we went to a horse paddock for the swells, buried deep in it near the border of South Pasadena. I told him we needed to sneak in some sugar or carrots the next time.
One hot morning early last year Don decided we’d walk the upper-upper class district on Pasadena’s west edge. We somehow lost our bearings a little and wound up in Eagle Rock. At which point I asked if maybe we should take a taxi back so as not to wear him out or get to lunch too late.
Don laughed. A taxi was never a serious consideration although we had to ask for a directions from a lady jogger, one we’d seen an hour and a half earlier, thankfully spied circling back toward us. She laughed and told us what street to go up to get back where we belonged. This was after we’d seen peacocks at somebody’s mansion and been hailed by one of the local noblemen who was driving an old orange Volkswagen Thing.
The Thing-driving fellow had spied Don’s T-shirt, which advertised Brophy Brothers, a restaurant/bar on the Santa Barbara marina and come screeching to a halt. It was a place we’d been many times. Don liked it so much that, in addition to purchasing a T-shirt, he stole one of its menus so he had something to jog fond remembrances of fried clam and beer-boiled shrimp dishes past.
But at first I thought we were about to be questioned on what we were doing in the area. Interlopers! Pretenders! But no, the man only wanted to tell us how great it was to see another guy who loved Brophy Brothers and that he wished he was there that Saturday morning. He had judged the quality of character, and done rather well I might add, in eyeballing the nature of Don Hunt’s T-shirt.
Don Hunt liked food and drink with his friends. It was how you shared the day and fed the social animal. He convinced me I could grill anything and, as a consequence, for years — 9 months each, late afternoons on Monday or Sunday were reserved for cookouts in a backyard a few blocks north of Pasadena City College.
These do’s went on for a few hours with the grilling usually not taking place until just after sunset. Don always stood near the cooking meat. He loved being part of the action, smelling the smoke, and if a floodlamp had burned out and not yet been replaced he’d occasionally hold a flashlight so none of the beef was charred or went onto the ground. Important details!
In those months when cooking out wasn’t the best idea — believe me, it does occasionally get too cool for it in Pasadena — we’d be inside. At which point our friend Beth would take over most of the food preparation in the kitchen. And we’d stand around, in close proximity, just soaking in the bonhomie that comes from making a meal we’d enjoy together.
Don Hunt was born in Austin, TX, in 1944. He was over a decade older than me and apparently knew early on what he wanted in life, which was to be a journalist. He edited the high school newspaper, got an interview out of Carol Burnett through the Austin city newspapermen’s club and went on to the University of Texas.
From there, four years and he was off to West Palm Beach in Florida as a sportswriter. Then to Norfolk and the Virginia-Pilot and, finally, recruited to the Los Angeles Times.
I met Don late in his career. He was the weekend editor for Los Angeles city edition/front sections and was a friend of a friend who worked with him and whom I’d come to southern California with almost twenty years ago.
She invited Don to dinner. I have never made pals quickly or easily but I liked Don at once because of two things. Unlike many, he did not immediately talk too much. And he was never nosy. He was always a gentleman with a subtle and dry wit that flashed more as he got to know you.
Don was a veteran editor at the Los Angeles Times when I came to know him, very highly regarded by his colleagues. This was at the beginning of the newspaper’s long period of slow decline and an ever-changing cast of just bad and/or quixotic publishers from the world of corporate predation. Regular layoffs/mass firings and tricky acquisition ripoffs and divestiture business practices had become the rule.
Eventually, in 2008 he took a buyout and early retirement. It was time to leave the newspaper and get on with better matters. It left him free to enjoy travel and what everyone thought would be a great last long act. It was, almost.
You never really think about losing such a friend in a flash.
However, in August of last year Don had a sudden spell, first attributed to an adrenal insufficiency of some kind. There was testing. We thought the problem would eventually be solved, perhaps by a long regimen of supplemental pills.
But the testing went on, more scans were ordered. Suspicious-looking anomalies got more suspicious. Finally, one part of the disease — its origin in the esophagus — was photographed and biopsied.
It was a heavy blow. There had been no symptoms and Don was still quite strong.
But that’s how the disease presents. Too late to cure, spread throughout the body, the horses long gone from the barn.
That survival figures for Stage IV esophageal cancer are abominable. The choices one can make are few.
Don asked me to be his advocate, of sorts. I’d hear what the doctors said and ask questions and make requests for more information if he forgot important things to ask. Which happens when you’re getting a steady stream of bad news about your mortality.
I told Don that I figured he’d fight the disease, small battles and steps at a time. And when we got to a year we’d have a chance to reassess how it had gone.
Don didn’t have nearly that long. None of us knew it. Maybe the doctors did but they hadn’t quite plotted the entire slope of the life line in early September.
The important thing was to get into radiation therapy to get some tumors in the brain under control. The battle was joined and it was the only victory, for awhile. Don came through it. No neurological symptoms
showed. The cancer there was arrested leaving opportunity for the rest of it in the system to be hit with chemotherapy.
We still had time to enjoy some restaurants, to get to the Huntington with Beth on a sunny day, to think a little about a future when, maybe, the first rounds were behind him.
However, some cancers don’t respond to chemotherapy. In these cases your healthy bits are not at all spared from the poisons. And this was what happened.
Chemotherapy — platinum compounds, from the start, made Don way too ill. So sick, the coordinating doctor had to stop them after two rounds, the second greatly diminished in dose, just before Thanksgiving.
Well, wait, I’d say. Maybe some of your strength will come back and then they’ll give it another whack.
We could still make jokes.
Don had been losing weight at a constant rate, but not catastrophically, yet. He’d say, “My friends say I look good.” And “I could lose some, anyway.”
To which I replied: “You have my official permission to stop the diet.”
We laughed.
And there was the radiation doctor at the center. She had little or no patient skills. And if one didn’t actually have an appointment to see her she would not acknowledge your existence in the halls.
In fact, she’d quicken her step, perhaps to escape.
Don noticed and we’d smile as she scurried by. The woman was very short, too, and we starting saying, once out of earshot: “Next time we’ll ask ‘how’s the weather down there.’”
But the cancer advanced. Finally, there were no more treatments, no more tests. The bad effect from chemotherapy was a prognostic sign. The loss of five pounds a week, invariantly. The gradual diminution of appetite and always increasing weakness.
They were the mileage signposts, all bleak. There was nothing left to do except palliative care — hospice.
The cruelest thing was the taking of Don’s enjoyment of food.
This is common in cancer patients. Since social gatherings are linked by food and drink, not being able to do either, to be even sickened by it, is very depressing. As the amount of cancer increases the biochemistry of the body becomes deranged. Familiar tastes are suddenly nauseating. The person cannot eat because ill-defined neurochemical messages are giving the sensation of fullness, a deadly feeling which cannot be bypassed or ignored.
Doctors, the entire medical profession, know it happens to everyone. Great effort has been made to elucidate and treat this process, without any success.
Still, Don was very much himself. We could watch college and professional football (Texas beat the hated Aggies for the last time!), old movies and tv. Friends could be enjoyed and conversation had, even as the daily time in which he had strength grew shorter by increments.
This is how it would be, the doctors said.
Quality of the time left was important. There would be a period of slow decline but conditions would be stable. Eventually, though, there would be a dramatic change and the end would come.
And that is how it happened.
Don almost made it to the finish of the college football season. On the day of the Rose Bowl and parade, he was enthusiastic. It was glorious and sunny. Friends came by and we watched games together. He was even able to take in a little more nourishment than usual — awful liquid diet things called Ensures. (The refrigerator at his house in Sierra Madre is still full of them.)
The day after he needed a small refrigerator in the viewing room so he did not have to use the stairs. One was gotten in and set up. A fast fulfillment of a real need, a small win for control in the preservation of equilibrium, it was something that made everyone happy.
There were still a few more days of games. “You know, I’m really going to miss football,” Don told his friend, Carlos.
Technically, Don did make it to the end of the season.
He died on Tuesday, the tenth. The Alabama-LSU game had been Monday night. But he was so sick he missed it. It was lousy, anyway.
When it ended a few were there to bear witness and extend the heart, as much as each could in the final minutes. And it was OK.
Don Hunt didn’t beat the merciless statistics but he met them with courage. During the battles there was depression, great sorrow and lots of tears. But even through it there were times of joy and small happinesses. There were no regrets, no apparent anguish over a life not properly lived, of business left unfinished, of words left unsaid. Only the dismay that there wasn’t more time.
On Saturday, a memorial for Don was held at a friend’s house in South Pasadena. It had been raining in the morning but by the time I arrived the sun was shining brightly. At least fifty were there — brother and cousin in from Texas, close friends, career-long colleagues and neighbors. It was wonderful if frequently bittersweet.
We will all miss him so.
SoCal sunny days. Don Hunt, 1944-2012. Photo: Carlos Lozano
“If you ever worry about the future of America, there is no need: it is in good hands,” reads the lede of a piece from CBS News yesterday.
It’s the beginning of a particularly excessive and aggrandizing feel good “cancer cured” story.
These have always been a feature of the US newsmedia and the care and feeding of our culture of lickspittle. Evidence to the contrary, cancer definitely not being cured in tech-mighty western civilization, is not an antidote or harsh cold shower.
As a result, the sum of the journalistic work is simultaneously heartless, cruel and intelligence-insulting. And it always comes wrapped in shiny packaging, asking you to clap in awe and admire the wonder of something – in this case, the precocious child enrolled at an upper class school in Cupertino, CA. (Its presence in the story serves to underline only how stunning opportunities, spoil and resources are mostly only in those places now in the high end of our economic ecosystem.)
Born to Chinese immigrants, 17-year-old Angela Zhang of Cupertino, California is a typical American teenager. She’s really into shoes and is just learning how to drive.
But there is one thing that separates her from every other student at Monta Vista High School, something she first shared with her chemistry teacher, Kavita Gupta.
It’s a research paper Angela wrote in her spare time — and it is advanced, to say the least. Gupta says all she knows is its recipe — for curing cancer.
“Cure for cancer — a high school student,” said Gupta. “It’s just so mind-boggling. I just cannot even begin to comprehend how she even thought about it or did this.”
News of cancer cured, delivered in five to six hundred words, courtesy of the wealth and genius of the human DNA in the Silicon Valley.
Where humble or circumspect are not words found in the dictionary.
Of course, the young girl is cute as a button. There simply would be no other way to present it.
And it is certainly newsworthy that she has won a remarkable prize of $100,000 from the Siemens corporation for her science project.
“Angela’s idea was to mix cancer medicine in a polymer that would attach to nanoparticles — nanoparticles that would then attach to cancer cells and show up on an MRI so doctors could see exactly where the tumors are,” the piece informs.
“Then she thought shat if you aimed an infrared light at the tumors to melt the polymer and release the medicine, thus killing the cancer cells while leaving healthy cells completely unharmed.”
Attaching dyes, poisons and other reagents to malignant cells has been a vigorously pursued avenue of research since … I graduated from Lehigh University in the mid-Eighties.
However, while conceptually simple, the complexities of the genesis and biochemistry of cancer cells and how they spread in the human system remains unconquered.
Infrared light? And how does one get that and the chemotherapeutic agents into a place where there are multiple sites of malignancy, like deep inside the skull?
Or what if the particular cancer being treated just doesn’t care much if bathed in even the most toxic agents because, somehow, it’s aggressively self-repairing?
Well, one could write a book about such things and cancer would still not be finished. In fact, I recall walls of bookshelves upon walls of bookshelves on the matter in the library at the Penn State School of Medicine many years ago.
“It’ll take years to know if it works in humans — but in mice — the tumors almost completely disappeared,” adds the CBS newsman.
Going to my friend Don Hunt’s memorial in SoPas today.
In his last weeks Pasadena had a run of the sunniest and most beautiful days I’ve seen in late December and January in over a decade. New Year’s Day was spectacular. Today, finally, it’s raining.
