The Pittsburgh edition of Craigslist recently featured an employment ad, reported by the Puffington Host:

[S]eeking someone to attend Harvard University for four years in another’s stead. The poster offers $40,000 a year, plus a $10,000 bonus after graduation. The ad, which appeared under Writing Gigs in Pittsburg’s Craigslist has some high-level requirements: The chosen “student” must have a 4.0 GPA in high school or a 3.5 GPA in a university, must be male and must pass all tests once attending Harvard.

Apart from the disgrace, and having to breathe the air of Boston, this wouldn’t be such a bad gig. I wonder if one’s major would be prescribed, and do you get a bonus if you achieve election to a good final club?

Craigslist:

1997 Jeep Cherokee (XJ)
220K Miles
4.0 L in-line 6
4WD
AUTOMATIC Transmission
Bright Red
Straight Stock
Crank Windows, no cruise, no tilt, no delay wiper, no nonsense
POWER MIRRORS! Woo Hoo!

$1750

Here’s the deal, kids:
This is a Jeep Cherokee. This is not a luxury SUV, or a maintenance-free disposable import. It has solid front axles, wind noise, and character.
It’s a Jeep. It rides like a Jeep. It drives like a Jeep. All of these are GOOD things.
It is not new, it is not pristine, it is used. This will be apparent in the pictures.

If you do not own a toolbox, have never changed your own oil, and are scared of firearms: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you have been posting on facebook all about how excited you are for pumpkin latte season: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you get offended easy and often, whine to your co-workers, and bitch a lot: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you feel you are owed anything in the world & have a bullshit job where you fail to produce: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you own a bieber album, white oakleys, affliction t-shirts, or those candy-assed stitched-pocket jeans: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you consider the 2nd Amendment an anachronistic relic and have never owned a firearm: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.

If, however, you have BALLS OF STEEL and consider adverse weather an excuse to do stupid shit: THIS IS YOUR JEEP.
Do you laugh at danger, and tempt fate?
Have you ever uttered the words, “Hold my beer and watch this …”?
While bored at work do you pick targets at random and think, “I could hit that from here with the .22 …”?
Have any of your friends quit hanging out because you were too much fun?
Do you have the number of a friend with cash memorized for bail?
When you pass an abandoned flatbed farm truck along a fenceline do you consider taking on another project?
Is your ol’ lady really sick of the random piles of parts, greasy footprints, and empty beer bottles in the garage?
-could you not care less?
Do you have Jalopnik saved on your laptop AND smartphone?
Do you own a service manual for every vehicle you ever owned?
Do you still miss your first ride?
Can you carry on a two hour conversation discussing tools, scars, and hi-lift jacks?
Remember when tool companies had the balls to put half-naked beauty queens on their calendars?
Do you consider the Prius an abominable affront to the Gods of displacement, torque, and All Mighty Internal Combustion?

If you answered in the affirmative to the preceding: THIS IS YOUR JEEP.

Read the whole thing (while it’s still there).

Hat tip to Matt MacLean.

Author identified by the Village Voice.

Missed Connection Posting ID: 3985247459 Posted: 2013-08-06, 6:50PM EDT

Evidently originally from the Chicago edition of Craigslist, republished at UPROXX, Gawker, Democratic Underground , and so on.

Me: Blue hair, silver tube top, fishnets, Knee high black biker boots.
You: Red mohawk, black pentagram gauges, viper piercings.

I was grinding on you in the pit, then we went to the bathroom, and got f***ed up. You had a nice c**k and I was wasted so I let [you] raw dog it in the stall. You were really good and you had to gag me so I would make too much noise.

Anyway I’m pregnant. It’s yours. contact me if you want to be part of your child’s life.”

Sample:

link

Hat tip to Emmy Chang.

Saturn’s 6th moon Titan

I missed it at the time, but about a month ago (September 14), the Calgary, Alberta edition of Craigslist ran an ad (since removed) under Transportation Jobs, titled ASTRONAUT NEEDED (NORTHERN ALBERTA).

I’ve found a picture of the actual ad. Click on it again to enlarge.

The advertisement’s author said that he required someone “no taller than 5 feet 10 inches,” “relatively slim,” and “mentally sound” for an “experimental flight to Titan.”

This experimental flight represented “the result of my professional experience and imagination while serving the U.S. military in advanced aeronautics as a scientist working on this project for near 40 years.”

The spacecraft, he promised, featured “a revolutionary propulsion system and its fuselage is fabricated with the most advanced material.”

The job pays $25,000, and the successful applicant will get to see the solar system. There is a catch, though, and a big one. The proposed flight to Saturn’s moon is a one-way trip.

The advertisement’s author wrote: “I am certain you will make it safely to Titan but there will not be enough fuel to get home. This is for someone unique that has always wanted to see the universe first-hand and has perhaps a terminal view on life here at home. Here’s your shot at romantic history.”

No news yet on whether anyone volunteered, or on whether the alleged project actually exists in a remotely practicable form.

Stories: CNET and Wired.

John Murrell admires the fellow’s ingenuity.

Taking inspiration from similar ploys seen in the movies and adding a Web 2.0 twist, an armored-car robber in Monroe, Wash., escaped Tuesday with the unwitting help of a dozen or so decoys responding to a Craigslist job ad.

According to reports, the suspect — wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask — approached the truck in a Bank of America parking lot, gave the guard a face full of pepper spray, grabbed the cash bag, sprinted about 100 yards to a creek, hopped into a waiting inner tube and floated off to freedom. The getaway vehicle was later found about 200 yards downstream, sans passenger. At the bank, meanwhile, there was no shortage of people matching the robber’s description. A dozen or so men dressed in identical gear were wandering around wondering if their potential employer had stood them up. Each had responded to a Craigslist ad purportedly seeking to hire road maintenance workers for $28.50 an hour, and each had gotten e-mail instructions to show up at 11 a.m. Tuesday near the bank wearing certain work clothing — “yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask … and, if possible, a blue shirt,” said one. The FBI is on the case, hoping the offender was less clever in covering his digital tracks.

Seattle Times

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Originally Posted: Wed, 9 Jul 11:00 CDT

Autographed Copy of Plato’s Republic

PostingID: 748263604

———————————-

Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
–Adam Smith

Brian Carney interviews Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, and finds a man operating a sensationally successful business operation based on an atypical, casting one’s bread upon the waters, model of customer service.

I put the question to Mr. Buckmaster: Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?

“In the big Internet boom, thousands of companies were set up,” explains Mr. Buckmaster, who also counts himself as CFO and COO of the company. “With the exception of us, pretty much all of them were set up with the primary objective being to make a lot of money.” And yet, he continues, “Almost all of those businesses went under and never made any money. Even businesses like Amazon still haven’t made any money. They are still, over their entire lifetime, net negative. Here we are, we’ve been in the black since 1999 — six or seven years.”…

Mr. Buckmaster figures that Craigslist employs 21 people, and starts to count them on his fingers. It never brought in venture capitalists with their grand designs and exit strategies. “We didn’t want to have those voices at the table,” he says. So Craigslist has remained beholden to no one — except, as Mr. Buckmaster constantly intones, its “users,” who pay nothing for the privilege of posting or searching the millions of pages of apartment listings, moving sales and personal ads that make up the Craigslist ecosystem. “If it’s not something that users are asking for,” he says, “we don’t consider it.” The money that does come in comes from businesses posting in just two categories of classifieds in three cities — job listings in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and, this week for the first time, brokered apartment rentals in New York…

We’re much more comfortable charging companies than charging individuals,” Mr. Buckmaster says. “Businesses are better equipped to afford a small fee and businesses can pay for fees out of pre-tax dollars where on average users are less able to pay a fee and they have to pay in post-tax dollars.” Giving users something free and denying money to the government at the same time? This man is no commie. What’s more, he runs a lean outfit. “There are big advantages to focusing exclusively on user wants and needs as we do, and blocking out everything else. That’s one of the ways we keep our staff small and our operations simple.”

As for the banner ads, “It’s not something our users have asked us for,” Mr. Buckmaster deadpans, his 6-foot-8-inch frame slumped in a leather chair in his living room and his eyes fixed on some distant point out the window. It turns out this is something of a mantra for Mr. Buckmaster; what Craigslist’s users want, they tend to get. No more and no less…

When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but — imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company” — more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too.

Buckmaster’s approach to capitalism as an exercise in serendipity clearly works for Craigslist. It could be argued that this sort of business model in which adversarial friction is minimized, and the delivery of value is maximixed, is closer to the original free market ideal than today’s more commonly encountered vastly regimented and hierarchical bean-counting organizations.