This Week in Our Dumb World
Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class
This is a crazy thing that I never thought about because I was bad at math and generally did not rise to the levels of math that required these kinds of calculators.
This is a terrific example of the kind of subtle discrimination that’s baked into our educational system. How are schools in low-income areas supposed to hand every kid a $100 calculator? What do you think it does the achievement gap that only kids who can afford their own calculator can do their math homework at home?
Similarly, it’s insane that the onus is on the teachers to shell out for these calculators for their classes. It is one example of the myriad ways that we shove things off on to teachers and expect them to just deal with it.
This profit margin is likely a conservative estimate, a former employee in Texas Instruments’ calculator division told me. “As a former teacher, I was appalled at the pricing, not only for educators but for the families who were forced to pay inflated prices for the damn things,” she told me. “The margin is incredible. I can’t verify the exact numbers, but the margin was like 85% 90%.” In comparison, PC manufacturers like HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, and Acer have profit margins below 3%. (Texas Instruments did not return a request for comment for this story.)
Texas Instruments was not the first to go to market with its commercially viable graphing calculators — Casio preceded it. But Texas Instruments was able to capitalize on its relationship with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to ensure its calculators ended up in classrooms across the country. In 1980, the council recommended that “mathematics programs [should] take full advantage of calculators… at all grade levels.” Throughout the decade, Texas Instruments worked closely with the council to develop its first calculator in hopes of becoming the educational standard.
It started with Connecticut. In 1986, the state became the first to require a graphing calculator on state-mandated exams. The Connecticut School Board argued that calculators would let students solve more challenging problems. In 1988, Chicago Public Schools gave a free calculator to every student, beginning in the fourth grade. New York followed suit in 1991 when he state first allowed calculators for its Regents exams; by 1992, it required them. Then the College Board let students use calculators on Advanced Placement exams, specifically calculus, in 1983, then reversed its policy a year later, explaining that it was banning calculators because it wasn’t fair to students who didn’t have them. But a decade later, it mandated calculators on the tests. In 1994, it allowed calculators to be used for the SAT as well. Teachers I spoke to said that some major textbooks feature illustrations of Texas Instruments–series calculators alongside the text, so students can use their Texas Instruments calculator with the lesson plan, emphasizing how deeply interwoven Texas Instruments remains with the educational hegemony.
The Smartest Guys in the Clubhouse
I used to love baseball.
LOVE baseball. I used to buy the annual stat books and just devour all the numbers held within. There was a red book for the American League and a green book for the National League. I absolutely had to have them both every single year. I would force my parents to take me to multiple book stores to find the red book and the green book every year. I had so many baseball cards, and none of them were ever in plastic sleeves. They were all to be handled and ordered and organized in ways that optimized lineups and created perfect teams.
As I got older, this love only deepened as I discovered sabermetrics and advanced stats, and whole new worlds opened up to me. I spent forever learning how those stats were calculated and comparing them to the far fetched ideas I’d had when I was a kid. As I mentioned above, I was a profoundly disinterested math student, so I went to the damn trouble of learning more math to understand what was happening.
I wrote about baseball. For a tiny bit of money, I wrote about fantasy baseball, and in my spare time, I wrote whole lengthy essays about baseball and baseball history. God, I love baseball history. My bookshelf is still full of baseball history.
When I was little, my swim team would go to a Tigers game every year. That day was easily my third favorite day of every year behind my birthday and Christmas. If push comes to shove, there were definitely years that I would have preferred the baseball game to my birthday. I can remember seeing Lou Whitaker hit a game-winning home run out of old Tiger stadium. I saw Cecil Fielder hit home run numbers 40 and 41 off of Dave Stewart. I knew all that from memory.
But I don’t watch baseball anymore. Not really. I watch the playoffs if a team I like is in it or if twitter tells me that something interesting happened. Now, part of that is just life and growing up. You get older. You don’t have as much free time, so some hobbies fade away. Of course, some of that disinterest is due to the game devolving into something uniform and monotonous. A game of home runs and strikeouts. I acknowledge all of this, but if you ask me what really killed my interest in baseball, it is the relentless shift of the game from being about the players to being about the executives.
So much coverage of baseball is from the perspective of ownership that it’s just not fun anymore. Every contract that pays a player is a bad contract. Every team that isn’t perfectly placed to win a title tears it all down in the name of “efficiency” and other corporate buzzwords. I loved the romance of baseball and the romance of baseball numbers. They tell such amazing stories and now those numbers are just being used to grind up teams and spit out profits. I just don’t enjoy it anymore. The reality is that none of that efficiency is necessary. It’s just a way for rich people to make more money and call it smart.
I’m not sure that the Astros are that much worse than any other team in baseball. I don’t know that their organizational culture is worse or their cheating more rampant than any other team in the league. But I’m glad that we are finally talking about how the suits stole baseball from the players. I don’t know that it will fix anything, but I’m hopefull a little sunshine will help.
But then I’m (still) a Tigers fan and they just lost 114 games, so maybe optimism can wait till next year.
What emerged after those years of meticulous and intentional awfulness was something like the perfect contemporary baseball roster—deep and talented and anchored by veteran stars who stubbornly refused to decline, but primarily built around and upon young players the team drafted during its years at the bottom. Those players would for years continue to be wildly underpaid relative to their production, thanks to the way MLB’s salary structure works. That last cost-saving data point is the sort of thing that baseball fans have been conditioned during the arbitrage-obsessed Moneyball era to regard as an objective good; executives and owners tend to use words like “flexibility” or “sustainability” to describe this approach, and many fans have come to adopt the same market-savvy argot. Prioritizing that sort of thing and using that sort of language were things that Luhnow did very well.
Luhnow was a true McKinsey consultant’s consultant, which is to say that he was secretive and a little smug. He reliably kept outsiders—a group that included, for years of his tenure, even the players in his employ—on a need-to-know basis when it came to the work that he and a “decision sciences” team were doing as they collected and parsed every available bead of data that the game could provide. He was so devoted to efficiency that he engaged consultants from McKinsey to audit the organization (and, inevitably, to disrupt the org chart) every year. The collective mission was to ensure that the Astros brand of Moneyball would stay artfully (yet efficiently!) poised on the bleeding edge of managerially minded innovation.
All perfectly bloodless in the management consulting way, then, but not without some carnage. There were stories that the front office culture Luhnow had created in Houston was not just cutthroat and paranoid, but increasingly high-handed and stridently amoral. Luhnow overruled junior staffers and acquired a talented young closer at a discount while that pitcher served a 75-game suspension for domestic violence; he pushed unsuccessfully to sign Luke Heimlich, a college pitcher whose prospect status evaporated when it was revealed that he was a convicted sex offender who preyed on minors. But the results spoke for themselves.
ADDITIONAL READING: Joe Posnanski writing about how we need to rethink what a “bad contract” means is a must-read. (Requires subscription to The Athletic)
Why Are So Many Gen Z Kids Becoming Furries?
Yes, this is weird. But it’s also pretty fun to read about people finding their weirdness. Finding their own weird home.
Also, if you’re growing up in a world filled with social media that pressures kids to lead Instagram worthy lives, who wouldn’t want to put on a mask and be someone else for a while?
“A lot of kids will be on TikTok because it’s very catered toward a young [demographic] and the content is short and kids have a very short attention span,” he says. “A lot of times they’ll see a furry and they’ll want to see what it’s about, and they’ll join the fandom that way.” (Indeed, Emily, the nine-year-old deer, found the fandom on Tiktok when she was eight; at the time we spoke, she was waiting to see Tequila Shepherd, a British German Shepherd with 178,000 followers.)
In most respects, furry Tiktok isn’t that much different from normie Tiktok, with furries doing dances or comedy videos to various popular audios. But simply by virtue of its time constraints and its hyper-addicting algorithm, it’s less personality-driven than, say, YouTube, which is also what draws furries concerned about protecting their identities to the platform. “Kids love Thor and Iron Man and Marvel and all that stuff. But they never wanna know who the actors are. They just care about the characters,” says Doppio, a 21-year-old furry Tiktok user. “They just know what they like.”
Many furry content creators on Tiktok also make the fandom seem less threatening to parents, who may be concerned about the sexualized aspects of the fandom. “Before TikTok got big, parents [were] scared to bring their kids to a furry convention,” says Barry, 25, a yellow-and-black dragon, and former U.S. Air Force field technician. “If one parents sees a TikTok and they say, ‘this isn’t too bad,’ then they tell another parent too.”
“You’re My Present This Year”: An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad
This is a wonderful example of the best part of the internet. When something silly happens and everyone comes together to mock it relentlessly.
Also, it may be a sign that the internet has made us all irretrievably cynical weirdos, but I prefer to focus on the former idea.
“Coming Home” opens with a taxi dropping a young man off outside a snow-covered house bedecked in Christmas decorations early one morning. A young woman excitedly opens the door and establishes that she’s his sister by pointing at herself and saying “sister!” He’s weary, having just returned from volunteering in “West Africa,” and the two share a cup of freshly-brewed Folgers coffee while their parents are still asleep. (In some versions he even says "ah, real coffee," as if he didn't just come from where some of the best coffee in the world is produced.) He hands her a small present, but instead of opening it, she peels off the red bow and sticks it on his shirt. “What are you doing?” he asks. “You’re my present this year,” she responds. The camera zooms in on her shy glance, then cuts to his furtive, flirty smile. Those three seconds sealed its fate forever.
When I first saw the ad, I thought: wait, are they fucking? (Then, every time after that: okay, they’re definitely fucking.) As I would come to learn, I was hardly alone. The reaction to the ad was an example of the internet at its most fun—the phenomenon of collectively realizing that the specific thing that you believed you’ve singularly noticed is actually a widely-held opinion. Memes, articles, and parody videos abounded. It even inspired a genre of vividly-rendered fan fiction known as “Folgerscest.”
Pedro Rodrigues Filho
Pedro Rodrigues Filho, a Brazilian serial killer who killed other criminals. He even killed his father, as payback for him having murdered his mother. After 34 years in jail, he was released. He was imprisoned again but is now a YouTuber who advises young people away from crime.
So basically Dexter but instead of having a terrible show ending, he got a youtube channel.