Brad Barrish

Zappos has apparently decided it is no longer good enough to be a qualified hire who is interested in the job. An interested applicant must also spend unremunerated time pretending to engage in virtual social relationships with existing employees. The American economy has become so warped that it now appears reasonable to a subsidiary of a leading public company to require people who may never be hired to spent large amounts of time pretending to be friends with people with whom they may never work.

This represents the convergence of at least three disturbing trends in the current American economy: the long-term unemployment of large numbers of people and the consequent power given to any company which is hiring; the technology industry’s revival of old prejudices under catchy new names; and the way that technology increasingly erodes any sense that our work selves are merely a component of our lives, rather than the entirety of our existence.

Friends without Benefits | Blog | The Baffler (via buzz)

That’s some creepy, fucked up shit right there.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou (via bijan)
More than 1,500 people have pledged over $100,000 to bring Upcoming back. It’s hard to articulate what that means to me. To me, it represents a chance to make things right. I miss Upcoming. I miss the community that made it great. And I won’t sell out again.
Diary of a Corporate Sellout — The Message — Medium (via gregcohn)

Happy to be one of those people and even happier about Upcoming coming back.

Here’s what happened in America between April 14 and 17. In the state of Washington, a 6-hour downtime of the 911 emergency phone system was caused by a third-party vendor’s router failure, resulting in 4,500 missed emergency calls. Police responding to an unrelated incident at the home of a New Jersey man found three containers of radioactive material he had stolen from a military arsenal. A bomb threat was made against a Verizon call center in Tennessee. Copper thieves stole cabling, causing internet and phone outages in New Mexico, and then again in Hawaii. A routine police traffic stop found four people with over 100 counterfeit Walmart gift cards, $32,000 in blank money orders, and a credit card coding device. And a new piece of malware was discovered that compromises Android devices and makes them mine for the cryptocurrency Litecoin, among other things. This is only a sampling of the 90-plus events that were reported over a three-day period, but it is more than enough for the plot of a cyberpunk novel.
Adam Rothstein, on DHS’s Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report, which compiles a list of news stories about threats and calamities affecting United States infrastructure on a daily basis (via mikerugnetta)