I thought of this in 2002 when we launched textamerica.com with the application of additional home security since burglars aren’t normally concerned about cats as witnesses. Experts said it would be impossible to engineer such a thing. Of course.
They terminated my “independent contractor” status as a shopper after I dropped three assignments on different days just minutes after I accepted them (and found out they were in office buildings carrying up cases of water (not exactly what the service was designed for but certainly what it is used for by some).
They also nearly insist that you wear their green company logo T-shirt while shopping. The service is a great idea. I use it as a customer all the time. But I’d say the shoppers are definitely much more employees than they are contractors.
OSI Group, a privately held U.S. meatpacking company, had been outsourcing some of its meat production to plants in China (Jesus, we don’t even kill our own cows and chickens anymore?!) — one of which was found to have employees working without gloves, reusing meat that had fallen on the floor, and mixing expired meat with fresh meat. Perhaps more alarmingly, they had no qualms about doing all of this in plain view of a local TV crew in 2014.
Naturally, when this came to light, many of OSI’s customers (like KFC and Starbucks) ran for the hills. But not McDonald’s. The Golden Arches decided to keep working with OSI, even after OSI was caught deliberately lying to them about the freshness of the meat, leading to recalls in a number of McDonald’s stores. Why stay with them, then? Because it’s way less expensive than getting meat somewhere less gross, which is the same reason anyone goes to McDonald’s.
Truesec researcher Emil Kvarnhammar says he discovered a way to get past the user controls on Apple’s terminal shell, to gain access to a shell with root privileges. The vulnerability subverts the password requirements for someone to run sudo – that is, to access the shell as a superuser.
Seven short years ago, I used to drive by The State Theatre. After a four year “startup” learning experience with Textamerica.com, I got into the habit of snapping a camera phone picture when I’d drive by.
This kind of random camera phone activity had some “TA” users calling me a hipster in 2002. I didn’t even know what that was. The name callers, not knowing me well enough to know that skinny jeans and me could never be a thing, had fallen victim to the actual “thing” that happens online all the time
After the long and dismal learning experience (and failure) of “TA” and in my return to a Fortune 100 J.O.B., I pointed shawnblog.com here to Tumblr and have rarely looked back. In the early times on Tumblr, this site somehow got permanently featured on their main page for some time and I was one of those cool kids. Almost a hipster even!
So, this picture was one of those very random drive by shots. I guess it’s not bad. I recall so for a few seconds before posting it to everyone over at exTAmerica on Flickr which was, at the time, set to auto post here on Shawn Blog.
In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?
