The free coffee test, or Lefkowitz’s Law of Corporate Financial Health HT @DMarti

Why is it that removing small perks for employees like free soda tends to lead to an exodus of talent? After all, a can of soda costs what, fifty cents? Maybe a dollar? And yet when management decides to stop bearing that small expense, people have a habit of packing up and leaving, which seems like a big move to make over the price of a can of soda. Jason LEfkowitz has a theory

The financial health of a company can be inferred from the quality, variety and cost to the employee of the snacks and beverages it offers its employees.

How Technology is destroying jobs [article]

MIT Sloan School of Management’s Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfree predict that impressive advances in technology have ominous consequences for jobs:

 They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries.

Stephen Cave: Anti-death behaviour [Interview]

Philosopher Stephen Cave in conversation with Susie Neilson:

Thinking less about yourself, more about other people and other causes, so your own death doesn’t seem as important to you, because these other causes and people will live on. Those other things will help you come to terms with death.

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Charlie Stross on Syria [Article]

Sane voices are rather hard to find when everyone wants vengeance – whether warranted or not. Charles Stross explains.

proposals in the UK and USA to carry out bombing strikes against the Assad regime in Syria are not only criminal (in the absence of a firm UN Security Council ruling on the matter), they’re stupid. One such imperial adventure might be an accident, two might be a coincidence, but embarking on a third one within a decade of the blood-spattered fiasco that was Iraq and the traumatic counter-insurgency occupation that was Afghanistan should be grounds for incarcerating any western politician proposing it in an institution for the criminally insane.

“An opera of breasts”: But I really did love putting the stories in Playboy! [Article]

Amy Grace Loyd was hired to be the literary editor of Playboy magazine – ” Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ursula Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates – all were repeat contributors to Playboy” (no I didn’t know that either!). She writes about her experience in this neatly written article.

Hefner may be an anachronism to many, but he’s also an iconoclast of a distinctly American variety.  My time there made me a better editor, probably a better and certainly a more resilient person; and even when I knew I had no place there anymore, as the editorial direction changed and the New York offices and then, only a few years later, the Chicago offices closed, I didn’t regret a day of it. I still don’t. I was able to do things there as an editor that I’ll never be able to do anywhere else.