The record of vastly overstated and false claims of innovation around Apple has become ridiculous. Nobody doubts they have innovated in many areas, but largely they are excellent at integration and polish (which is worthy of praise in its own right). And being a full-stack company they often match their sails to the wind before anyone else, but it doesn't mean they made the wind. It's not all Apple themselves doing this, much of it is bad journalism and fans saying things that the company has no reason to correct. But it's gotten so bad now that I approach any new claim of innovation from Apple or their cheer squads as probably false.

I can't see why Apple enthusiasts can't be like luxury car enthusiasts. Most of the time new luxury cars don't have much innovation in them, but it's the fit and finish, attention to detail and integration which make them great. You don't need to claim some divine spark of innovation to say that something is better, or that you prefer it. To make another analogy a well done dish at a nice restaurant isn't usually innovative, it just takes the best of breed components and presents them well in a good atmosphere with good service. Nothing wrong with that, just don't claim the chef is making vast strides in chemistry or forget that the chef is drawing on tons of home cooking going back a long time which some people have had in their homes well before it appeared on your menu. It's pretty sad that as I click "add comment" I expect this to get vigorously downvoted (even on HN).

What this article is effectively advocating, but can't or won't say outright, is that America needs the ability to pay people less than the minimum wage.

Someone working all day at mechanical turk, is likely to fall below the federal minimum wage rate in terms of what they're pulling down per hour. Is it ok for companies to utilize mass scale labor at what becomes in reality a sub minimum wage rate? Particularly if mechanical turk stations were to become wide spread.

Obviously mechanical turk is a per unit pay system, not a job with an hourly pay rate. However, if you're doing it full time, I call bullshit on that difference. If you had 100,000 people working on mechanical turk 40 hours per week, making $6 per hour, those are very much jobs paying sub minimum wage.

It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility.

One solution to this legal boundary, would be to require that mechanical turk style tasks pay at least equivalent to minimum wage based on the time they take. I expect in any large scale adoption of mechanical turk, this issue will jump to the forefront.