the RSS info is weird, but click through for the BEST SKETCH THIS SEASON. This is the first and last sketch on the first and every Best of Kate McKinnon DVD. Cherv and I have been gchatting about it all day.
NASA's New Horizons probe has sent back the first of the sharpest images of Pluto it took during its July flyby of the planet.1
These latest images form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide on a world 3 billion miles away. The pictures trend from Pluto's jagged horizon about 500 miles (800 kilometers) northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains.
The Great British Bake Off is on Netflix and I'm OBSESSED. Can I talked about the Baked Alaska episode with anyone?!?!?!!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????????????????????
Volvo took a real dump truck, hooked it up to a remote control, handed it to a 4-year-old girl, and she proceeds to DEMOLISH a closed course with it. Man, I really needed this video today. Wonderful. (via @joeljohnson)
These transcripts were made available last year, but the audio was just released recently. If you haven't heard administration officials laugh at the death of thousands, you really need to hear this. It's so sobering and infuriating.
On Billy Eichner’s TruTV show Billy on the Street, Billy got Academy Award-winning actress Julianne Moore to go with him to New York’s Times Square and rain on the parade of celebrity impersonators by offering tourists live versions of Moore’s performances from any of her hit movies for only a dollar.
“What’s the dollar going to?” one person asked. “Julianne Moore’s bank account,” Eichner shouted back.
Moore gave pitch perfect readings from The Kids Are All Right, Magnolia, and The Big Lebowski. She also proved she can (convincingly) cry on cue.
Eichner got in plenty of jabs at the celebrity / costumed character impersonators, targeting Elmo in particular with his hilarious barbs: “Elmo, take a hard look at a natural red head!”
The original kernel was that I was listening to Flo Rida or something, and I thought, it’s such a shame that Coldplay could never have one of those late-night club songs, like “Turn Down for What.” What would we call it if we had one? I thought I’d like to have a song called “Drinks on Me” where you sit on the side of a club and buy everyone drinks because you’re so f—ing cool. I was chuckling about that, when this melody came—“drinks on me, drinks on me”—then the rest of the song came out. I presented it to the rest of the band and they said, “We love this song, but there’s no way you can sing ‘drinks on me.’” So that changed into “drink from me” and the idea of having an angelic person in your life. Then that turned into asking Beyoncé to sing on it.
Listen to the track and an interview with bassist Guy Berryman talking about it:
Things get pretty dramatic on this week’s episode of Billy on the Street when Eichner makes special guest Julianne Moore work the tourists of Times Square for tips by performing super serious and sometimes tearful monologues from The Kids Are All Right, Magnolia, and The Big Lebowski: “Yes, yes exactly! Yes! It’s Julianne Moore and […]
This makes me wish that The Man in The High Tower were real
just a little bit
not in a problematic way, just in a Hot Take jokey way
The Leopard 2 battle tank was developed for the West German army in the 70s and has a fully stabilized main gun. What does that mean? It means that even if you're flying along at 30 mph on bumpy ground, your gun remains steadily pointed on-target (like an owl or chicken head). It also means you can balance a full mug of beer on the gun without spilling a drop, making the Leopard the world's best and most expensive waiter. (via @MachinePix)
Update: Here's a longer video featuring the same tank. The commentary is in German, but the visuals aren't that difficult to follow.
In addition to covering how the stabilizing gun works, they show how the tank stays level over uneven terrain and how the gun can stay locked on a target even when the tank is moving from side to side...the video of which is unnerving. (via @le_barte)
Charles Haggerty is a promising candidate for the best and most chill dad of all time. In the late 1950s, in a much less progressive era, he had a talk with his son, who would come to realize later in life that he (the son) was gay, about the responsibility you have to your true self.
Don't sneak. Because if you sneak like you did today, it means you think you doing the wrong thing. And if you run around spending your whole life thinking that you're doing the wrong thing, then you'll ruin your immortal soul.
Reader, I don't often say things like "that stopped me dead in my tracks" because life doesn't work like that most of the time, but that last bit, about ruining your soul, did just that. A fantastic reminder of to thine own self be true. (via cup of jo)
David Bowie dropped an intense, nearly 10-minute film for his new track “Blackstar”, which is the latest chapter in his Major Tom saga and has fans eagerly anticipating his new album.
The video begins on a distant planet, where a young woman discovers a decomposed astronaut while Bowie chants over the top in a haunting Middle Eastern scale.
“This completes the trilogy: Space Oddity (introduction of Major Tom), Ashes to Ashes (the resurrection of Major Tom), BLACKSTAR (the god status of Major Tom). Well done Dave!” wrote commenter Tony Martin.
Packed with religious imagery, artistic references and nods to the past, the disturbing tension of both the song and video is only briefly released with a section of pure pop midway through.
The album “Blackstar” will be launched on January 8, 2016 — the artist’s 69th birthday — and follows 2013’s “The Next Day”, one of more than 20 albums Bowie has released over a career spanning more than four decades.
The Data & Society Research Institute, with a researcher from NYU, conducted an extensive study of Uber’s labor issues though “sustained monitoring of online driver forums and interviewing Uber drivers.” It’s a surprisingly breezy document, given what it is, and bears out the types of things any frequent Uber passenger will eventually hear if she bothers to ask. It’s a survey, in a way, of a sort of on-demand labor version of a workplace culture developing among Uber drivers. And it isn’t an especially happy one.
Our findings coalesced around the dynamics of Uber’s system of surveillance and control over workers’ behavior. Our conclusions are two-fold: first, that the information asymmetries produced by Uber’s system are fundamental to its ability to structure indirect control over its workers; and second, that Uber relies heavily on the evolving rhetoric of the algorithm to justify these information asymmetries to drivers, riders, as well as regulators and outlets of public opinion.
Each section is fascinating. On Uber’s use of the language of entrepreneurship:
Drivers risk “deactivation” (being suspended or removed permanently from the system) for cancelling unprofitable fares. The Uber system requires drivers to maintain a low cancellation rate, such as 5% in San Francisco (as of July 2015), and a high acceptance rate, such as 80%
or 90%. Drivers absorb the risk of unknown fares, even though Uber promotes the idea that they are entrepreneurs who are knowingly investing in such risk. This discourse of entrepreneurship in the tech sector is the legacy of a Silicon Valley environment where highly skilled and mobile workers could take on risks and trade-offs to be part of the start-up world, but this rhetoric of risk has effectively been retooled to suit a contingent of lower-income workers who are recruited to perform service labor, not highly-skilled technical work.
On drivers’ contempt for Uber’s “driver-partner” characterization of their non-employment employment:
Drivers in this study generally treated the language as either a formality, hypocrisy, as irrelevant, or as a lever to press negotiations for more autonomy. However, the terms “partner” or “sharing economy” both work to express engagement and commitment to similar goals – in this instance, to align the driver’s goals and motives with that of the company through the articulation of social bonds – even when they are distinctly out of alignment Uber has full power to control and change the base rates its drivers charge. Uber’s agreement with its “Partners” (drivers) permits drivers to negotiate a lower fare, but not a higher one (Uber Partner Agreement Section 4.1, 2014). Some drivers report strategically ending a trip early, and thus lowering the fare for
the passenger, in the hopes of getting a higher rating. Rates, as well as minimum fares, vary across cities3; while Uber implies that drivers have the “freedom” to charge less, Uber still asserts almost total control over their drivers’ remuneration. At their lowest, these rates are discussed in forums as a net-loss for drivers after factoring in overhead costs. Uber also perennially and unilaterally changes the commission it takes from each ride, ranging generally from 20-30% for uberX drivers.
On drivers’ points of contact with the company, Community Support Representatives, who are themselves independent contractors held to driver-like performance standards and subject to driver-like indirect management.
[Their] responses often lack a nuanced understanding of the context or challenges of their work, and drivers have to be persistent to get the answers they seek to questions without a template response. Some perceive that software is creating initial responses based on the keywords in their text, and they refer to CSRs as “Uber’s robots.” The responses drivers receive often resemble generic FAQs, and some drivers write “escalate to manager” in the body of their text in the hopes of flagging a human supervisor more quickly. The role of the CSR more closely resembles customer service than management.
(This bears repeating: Uber doesn’t just outsource driving—it outsources its communication and conflict with those outsourced drivers.)
On Uber’s requests for drivers to help them preempt the same surge-pricing conditions that might allow them to make more money:
For drivers, the most tangible evidence of Uber’s data collection and analysis emerges through predictive scheduling communications that Uber sends to its drivers regarding surge pricing and high demand. Some drivers view this attempt at predictive scheduling as undermining their ability to make more money, and describe how they resist Uber’s attempts to predict and plan for “supply and demand”, such as by refusing to submit information about their intended working hours to Uber when that information is solicited. For example, Uber sent drivers in Atlanta notices that demand would be “off the charts” on Labor Day weekend, and surveyed drivers to “help us [Uber] plan supply and demand.”
On Uber’s ability to act with all the authority of an employer—making specific demands about how all its contractors must conduct their work—while maintaining their status as contractors.
Uber also exerts significant control over driver behaviors through its driver rating system: in it, passengers are empowered to act as middle managers over drivers, whose ratings directly impact their employment eligibility. This redistribution of managerial oversight and power away from formalized middle management and towards consumers is part of a broader trend in flexible labor: companies or platforms can create expectations about their service that workers must fulfill through the mediating power of the rating system.
(By setting specific consumer expectations for driver behavior; by giving customers the ability to rate their rides according to deviations from those expectations; by assigning the blame for those ratings, the true importance of which is concealed from the riders, entirely to the driver.)
Consider this line on Uber’s website regarding lost items: “Visit riders.uber.com/lost to retrieve a phone number to contact your driver and arrange the return of your item.” Then consider, as included in the study, this response given to a driver asking about item returns:
But perhaps the most interesting part of this study, and one that should be interesting even to ideological opponents who might be tempted to dismiss this research outright, is the outline it draws of Uber contractors’ attempts to take back power, either through crude organization or individual data collection. It surveys driver experiences as gathered from interviews but also from the numerous Uber driver forums, which together have thousands of members and display, in general, an oppositional attitude toward the company. This is labor organization refracted through forum culture: there are calls for collective action next to flamewars; there are trolls and apparent astroturfers; there are political battles in which drivers mockingly tell other drivers “it’s a job, not a career.” There are memes! There is, in the absence of any sort of physical interaction or official means of driver communication, a work culture. Here is a post from a few weeks ago called “The Natural Stage Progressions of an Uber Driver.”
New Driver:
“You mean tell me I can make $1500/wk just by driving people around?! That’s not hard at all. Sign me up! I’m going to be the best Uber driver ever!”
3 Month Driver:
Uhhh….why are my ratings still dropping? Am I doing something wrong? I gave out water, and snacks like Uber told me to. Guess I’ll just have to try harder next time.
6 Month Driver:
“WOW another rate cut?! Man f$%# Uber! How are we supposed to make money with all these new drivers on the road? And they’re raising SRF too? Man….these Pax are really starting to get on my last nerve. Oh look…another water bottle/candy wrapper left on the floor!”
Veteran Driver:
“F$#& this s$#*! My only job is to get the Pax from point A to point B. To hell with Uber and their stupid Pax! And why the hell do they keep calling my damn phone? Learn how to drop a freaking pin people! I’m going to start giving more priority to Lyft from now on.”
Ex Driver:
“Just found a job as a pizza delivery guy. Uber can suck it! I’m out!”
(Sample response: “Correct down to the Dominos job…..”)
The study also mentions ways in which drivers attempt to combat the information asymmetry that defines their relationship with Uber. Hidden cameras!
A fare is “guaranteed” through the credit card a customer has on file, but Uber sometimes retracts it from a driver’s earnings if the company decides that the driver has erred. For example, a passenger may complain about an “inefficient” route. However, there may be physical obstacles invisible to the navigation system; passengers also sometimes instruct drivers to deviate from the GPS-suggested route, or ask for multiple drop-off points for a group of passengers. Some drivers have begun to self-monitor by acquiring dash-cams that face the passenger, so they can use their own surveillant “data” to produce a counter-narrative to the one that Uber presents. Others track their rides manually or through another app in order to verify their pay records. In lieu of other forms of empowerment, dash-cams and alternative logs enable drivers to resist Uber’s power to interpret events unilaterally.
This seems, however, more like last-resort recourse. It’s hard to imagine a situation in which a company that will kick you out of its system for dropping below a 4.6 rating would be supportive, in the long term, of a driver that presented unofficial passenger surveillance footage to contradict a fare claim. But, then again, such a driver might be less inclined to enthusiastically carry out the emotional labor required to maintain such a high rating, or might become bitter over time, in which case the ratings system, with the help of passengers, will sort things out on Uber’s behalf.
Anyway, this is how attempts to regain leverage seem to be starting, with anonymous communication in public and private and with individual attempts at data collection outside of the Uber app. It’s network versus network. It’s app versus app! What will companies like Uber do if these things blossom? A sufficiently massive public forum of disgruntled drivers could become a real problem in Uber’s attempts to find and retain drivers. A larger shadow-network of Uber drivers talking to each other and comparing their experiences could make attempts to manage and contain driver complaints through an email tree less tenable—perhaps more effectively than some Uber drivers’ explicit attempts at labor action. Likewise, Uber might be motivated to discourage drivers from monitoring passengers or making any types of recordings, or from banding together to collect alternate data—about pay, rides, etc—using other apps, because such a thing could be legitimately empowering.
New forms of labor communications are needed to address the inconsistencies of work that is characterized by algorithmic dynamism and ambiguous information flows to improve labor-platform relations. In a bricks- and-mortar workplace, the physical infrastructure is relatively reliable and unchanging. In a semi-digital workplace, small technical changes to the app’s interface, or built-in features that support a dynamic workplace, such as surge pricing and heat maps, can create ambiguity and confusion about worker (and passenger) expectations.
When people in the startup world talk about “algorithmic labor unions,” or a “right to an API,” they might want to look at what people are already doing, and what they’re trying to achieve. (Also worth considering in this context: Airbnb’s effort to mobilize its own users for political gain).
What do they want?
The same data Uber has, at least!
When do they want it?
Before they’re replaced by machines and herded to the next app? Idk actually!!
The Acro-Cats stopped by to perform some of their amazing tricks and educate everyone on the importance of rescuing animals. Support the Acro-Cats by donatin...
Following a brief tease yesterday on the UK’s 60 Minutes, Adele has released a full version of her track “When We Were Young”, recorded in a session at The Church Studios, London. The track was written with Canadian musician Tobias Jesso Jr.
“It’s impossible to question why she’s where she is once you sit down with her to write a song. She was the first introduction I had to somebody who could sing words on the spot that were actually great.”
Her favorite track is the Elton John-ish ballad “When We Were Young,” co-written with singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., which shares a tiny bit of DNA with “The Way We Were,” a song that brought her to tears when she saw Barbra Streisand perform it in person at the Oscars.
And it’s absolutely the lift that your Tuesday morning needs. Listen now!
Am I aware of a hierarchy? I'm aware that Radiohead have never had a fucking bad review. I reckon if Thom Yorke fucking shit into a light bulb and started blowing it like an empty beer bottle it'd probably get 9 out of 10 in fucking Mojo. I'm aware of that.
I used to put us at number seven. It went The Beatles, the Stones, the Sex Pistols, The Who, The Kinks... who came in at six? I don't know. We were at seven. The Smiths were in there, The Specials. Where would I put us now? I guess I'd probably put us in the top 10. We weren't as great as the greats but we were the best of the rest. We did more than The Stone Roses could fucking even fathom. We're better than The Verve: couldn't fucking keep it together for more than six months at a time. If all the greats are in the top four, we're in the bottom of the top four, we're kind of constantly fighting for fifth, just missing out. Just missing out on the top four, I'd say.
He just has opinions on everything and everyone and says them on the record:
I fucking hate whingeing rock stars. And I hate pop stars who are just... neh. Just nothing, you know? "Oh, yeah, my last selfie got 47-thousand-million likes on Instagram." Yeah, why don't you go fuck off and get a drug habit, you penis?
This one just made me laugh:
My fragrance? Oh it's coming, it's coming. Toe-Rag it's going to be called. And the bottle's going to be a massive toe.
Ahhhhhhh, I can't stop quoting:
I guaran-fucking-tee you this: The Stone Roses never mentioned "career" in any band meetings. Ever. Or Primal Scream, or The Verve. Oasis certainly never mentioned it. I bet it's mentioned a lot by managers and agents now: "Don't do that, it's bad for your career." "What? Fuck off!" Like when we went to the Brits and we'd won all those awards and we didn't play. The head of the Brits said, "This'll ruin your career." Fucking, wow. I say to the guy, "Do you know how high I am? You know who's going to ruin my career? Me, not you. Bell-end. More Champagne. Fuck off."
Weekend Update: Jill Davenport
Nespresso
Weekend Update: 12-5-15, Part 2 of 2
Weekend Update: 12-5-15, Part 1 of 2
Settl
The Wiz
The Data & Society Research Institute, with a researcher from NYU, conducted an extensive study of Uber’s labor issues though “sustained monitoring of online driver forums and interviewing Uber drivers.” It’s a surprisingly breezy document, given what it is, and bears out the types of things any frequent Uber passenger will eventually hear if she bothers to ask. It’s a survey, in a way, of a sort of on-demand labor version of a workplace culture developing among Uber drivers. And it isn’t an especially happy one.
This is labor organization refracted through forum culture: there are calls for collective action next to flamewars; there are trolls and apparent astroturfers; there are political battles in which drivers mockingly tell other drivers “it’s a job, not a career.” There are memes! There is, in the absence of any sort of physical interaction or official means of driver communication, a work culture. Here is a post from a few weeks ago called “The Natural Stage Progressions of an Uber Driver.”
