Overcoming Inertia

I unexpectedly found myself without internet for a week, and the thought of getting reacquainted with the world was so daunting that I put it off for two weeks more. Inertia is a bitch. Bear with me as I liveblog items that Twitter tells me I missed.

In no particular order:

New York’s elite public high schools will stop using test scores as the sole admission criterion. Instead, they’ll take an even assortment of top students from every middle school in the city. Asian-American parents see this move as anti-Asian, because it undermines their efforts to raise children who excel at test taking.

(East) Asians have been allocating social rank via standardized tests for over 1500 years. Test prep is, like, part of our culture. And while I didn’t grow up in New York or attend an elite high school, I did spend my formative summers forcibly parked in front of SAT, PSAT, and AP prep books. Standardized tests were the bane of my childhood existence. I should have been taking unpaid internships, or raising goats for 4H, or playing lacrosse, or whatever it is white people do to develop positive personality traits. Won’t somebody please think of the children??

Also, Harvard is being sued for discriminating against Asian Americans. Look, the only way to achieve diversity is to apply different criteria to different applicants. If we really want the racial composition of our elite universities to match that of the rest of the country, let’s abolish the college admissions process altogether and have Harvard admit students based on a lottery. I went to this school, and readily admit that I only got in thanks to 17 years of tiger mothering. I now have a deep-seated fear that my future offspring won’t get into Harvard and will thus bring great shame to my dynasty. I need a way to blame the luck of the draw rather than lax parenting.

Elizabeth Holmes might go to jail. John Carreyrou calls her a sociopath, but that’s such a lazy slight. If a person goes through life being told that she’s a world-changing visionary and the next Steve Jobs, eventually she will believe that she’s a world-changing visionary and the next Steve Jobs. After a decade of being placed on a pedestal, of course she now feels like a martyr. See Also: millennials.

Amazon gets ripped a new one for poor working conditions at its Echo Factory. I’m reminded of my favorite Jeff Bezos quote: Your margin is my opportunity. Are you still offering your employees health insurance? Catered meals? Paid time-off for sick leave? Workers’ comp? Hahaha sucka! Your employees’ comfort is my opportunity!

Also, Seattle repeals a tax hike that was supposed to fund homeless services after opposition from Amazon. Well, yeah. Your civic responsibility is my opportunity. If you’re not exploiting your workers and pillaging your hometown, you’re leaving the door wide open for a competitor to undercut you.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

5 thoughts on “Overcoming Inertia

  1. Are you going to spend all your resource on those who study hard or are you going to spend resources on those with the highest potential. Once school is over the studying stops.

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