ELITE, pills
8/3 - What's Next
Hey there, happy Monday. It’s already August! Hope you (and your families) are doing well.
Enjoy the newsletter.
Articles to Read.
All manner of people take all manner of issue with elite universities. Chief among the usual qualms is the observation that places like Harvard pump out more financial analysts and consultants than appropriate for a university that purports to educate the transformative citizen-leaders of tomorrow. Is this really what all these kids came here to do, and why does the mission seem to fall so short? As I reach the tail end of my time here, I’m thinking about the distinct ways I’ve seen this environment – with all its trappings, narratives, and institutions – shape student paths. Sometimes I joke that Harvard is gaslighting all of us.
You get into Harvard by wanting to change the world, by having pie-in-the-sky ambitions. You don’t get in by limiting your goals simply to college admission - or, at least, you render that ulterior aim of yours undetectable. On the whole, it has been my experience that Harvard does manage to admit a lot of amazing, well-intentioned, bright people. But it changes them.
People get there, and realise that they’re not the best, the smartest, or the most hard-working anymore. So they say, okay, my role is not to change the world. That’s the role of him, or her, or them, because they’re all smarter and more hard-working than I am. The kid who just patented an invention, the other one who wrote two books, and the countless NGO founders who have collectively raised millions of dollars as teenagers. The real innovators, with destiny. Although these are largely illusory narratives and impressions, psychologically, their place in the world shifts. People become much less ambitious.
They start to think smaller, safer. I’m not good enough for magnificent dreams. Hell, I can’t even get into any clubs. (Exclusivity is a bit of an issue on this campus.) Anyway, how do I even ‘change the world’ as I’d promised everyone upon entry to this place? I’m here now and I need to start fulfilling that mission, but man, people don’t talk about the logistics. The scope of their dreams tighten, from can-do-anything to yikes-I’m-not-THAT-exceptional-let’s-just-climb-the-ladder-that’s-meant-for-me. There is that guaranteed, successful thing that still impresses people and satisfies parents, but doesn’t change anything of substance. As luck would have it, that’s exactly the sort of path that career offices tend to be talented at finding and providing – the stable and prestigious opportunities at firms willing to pay up to $18,000 to recruit at career fairs.
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Tech Journalism is Less Diverse than Tech. Here Are The Numbers.
982 People. 14 Outlets. 80% White. 2% Black. 18% Other.
Since Big Tech Media hasn’t published an official diversity report of their organizations, the study was done using publicly available information on Twitter and cross-checked with Twitter lists of tech journalists. It uses a few different methods for data collection, and a few different methods to determine race and gender, and gets similar results each time. The data set is open source, so if there are any errors please submit a correction. However, the best bet would be for each tech media corporation to follow the lead of tech companies and release a public diversity report.
Highlight of the results: Big Tech Media is ~ 80% White, Big Tech is ~51% White
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Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) would improve everyone’s lives, increase our free time, empower workers, and ensure everyone has food and a roof over their head. These are noble goals, but obviously there’s a downside or it would already be implemented, right?
There are multiple ways to increase capital at the bottom of the wealth pyramid. Most of them involve attempting to revert to some past state of society. Only one of them fully embraces capitalism and all its strengths and extends it into the future.
The first solution is some form of nationalism, where countries enact tariffs and attempt to bring all production back to the country instead of producing it overseas. This will create higher paying jobs for those whose work was previously outsourced to cheaper countries. However, this creates less wealth overall as work is no longer given to where it’s done most efficiently. This breaks the primary component of capitalism.
The second solution is some sort of socialism, where the government introduces new laws and systems to redirect money to attempt to balance the system manually. This will help, but creates less wealth overall as the government must make many decisions with limited information. There is no way the government can make spending decisions for millions of people, and have those decisions be better than what those people could make on their own. Thus this is less efficient and goes against the second core component of capitalism.
The third solution is a Universal Basic Income, where countries distribute some wealth to all residents equally. This keeps both the first and second core components of capitalism intact. Jobs are done in the most efficient locations and those deciding where money should be spent are the ones with the most information. As jobs are displaced no one is left without an income source and the bottom of the income pyramid has enough to keep consuming.
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Here’s Why Credit Card Fraud is Still a Thing
Most of the civilized world years ago shifted to requiring computer chips in payment cards that make it far more expensive and difficult for thieves to clone and use them for fraud. One notable exception is the United States, which is still lurching toward this goal. Here’s a look at the havoc that lag has wrought, as seen through the purchasing patterns at one of the underground’s biggest stolen card shops that was hacked last year.
In October 2019, someone hacked BriansClub, a popular stolen card bazaar that uses this author’s likeness and name in its marketing. Whoever compromised the shop siphoned data on millions of card accounts that were acquired over four years through various illicit means from legitimate, hacked businesses around the globe — but mostly from U.S. merchants. That database was leaked to KrebsOnSecurity, which in turn shared it with multiple sources that help fight payment card fraud.
Among the recipients was Damon McCoy, an associate professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering [full disclosure: NYU has been a longtime advertiser on this blog]. McCoy’s work in probing the credit card systems used by some of the world’s biggest purveyors of junk email greatly enriched the data that informed my 2014 book Spam Nation, and I wanted to make sure he and his colleagues had a crack at the BriansClub data as well.
McCoy and fellow NYU researchers found BriansClub earned close to $104 million in gross revenue from 2015 to early 2019, and listed over 19 million unique card numbers for sale. Around 97% of the inventory was stolen magnetic stripe data, commonly used to produce counterfeit cards for in-person payments.
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When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
I think telling someone’s manager they’re doing great work is a pretty common practice and it can be really helpful, but it’s easy to forget to do and I wish someone had suggested it to me earlier. So let’s talk about it!
One thing that at least 6 different people brought up was the importance of asking first. It might not be obvious why this is important at first — you’re saying something positive! What’s the problem?
Giving someone a compliment that’s not in line with their current goals. For example, if your coworker is trying to focus on becoming a technical expert in their domain and you’re impressed with their project management skills, they might not want their project management highlighted (or vice versa!).
Giving someone the wrong “level” of compliment. For example, if they’re a very senior engineer and you say something like “PERSON did SIMPLE_ROUTINE_TASK really well!” — that doesn’t reflect well on them and feels condescending. This can happen if you don’t know the person’s position or don’t understand the expectations for their role.
If your coworker was supposed to be focusing on a specific project, and you’re complimenting them for helping with something totally unrelated, their manager might think that they’re not focusing on their “real” work. One person mentioned that they got reprimanded by their manager for getting a spot peer bonus for helping someone on another team.
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The opioid crisis has claimed the lives of more than 400,000 Americans. The scale of this epidemic is hard to grasp, exceeding by multiples the number of Americans who have died to date in the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2018, the most recent year for which data are available, one in five Americans had an opioid prescription filled. An investigation by NPR last week found that, according to a CDC report released in May, doctors commonly ignored federal guidelines and were still prescribing powerful opioid medications instead of other, better treatment options. In some rural counties, enough prescriptions are written each year for every single inhabitant, including children, to have one.
Fatal overdoses now exceed deaths from car accidents or gun violence; overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans under fifty, lowering the life expectancy of Americans for the first time in decades. Tennessee, where I live and work, is one of the hardest-hit states, ranking third in the nation for prescribing rates.
As the opioid crisis evolved, many states passed laws to deter and punish dangerous prescribing. But medical licensing boards, which have the final say in whether a doctor will be allowed to continue to practice and prescribe, are treating cases of unethical prescribing with a leniency that’s at odds with the scope of the crisis.
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Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business
So about a month or so ago, Tailwind cracked 10 million total installs, which given its humble beginnings, completely blows my mind. We're also about to cross $2 million in revenue from Tailwind UI, our first commercial Tailwind CSS product which was released about 5 months ago — a bit under two years after the very first Tailwind CSS release.
Here’s the story from the beginning, while it’s still fresh enough to remember…
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More to Check Out:
- Lies are free, but the truth is paywalled
- What I Learned from Doing 60+ Technical Interviews in 30 Days
- How Best Buy Saved Itself
- Is Your Chip Card Secure? Much Depends on Where You Bank
- Laws of UX
My Update:
I got shoulder surgery last week on a long-time injury. I had been procrastinating this decision for over a year and finally go it done. It feels good (though currently sore) to know that I will no longer have to worry about it (pending hours of PT). Meanwhile, I’m not able to run or do many outdoor activities—spending more time reading and writing.
Doing a new thing where I write essays with friends. I aspire to become a much better writer—figure this is one good “exercise.”
Still in SD until end of August. Deciding where to move next.