Franklin Faraday Insights Roundup for March 27, 2021
Technology + Common Sense + Free Donuts!
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Welcome to our Weekly Roundup of Actionable and Interesting Things!
In this issue:
— If you leave your keys in your Ferrari, someone might take it for a drive
— The cyber security mistake that launched a career
— More on that dramatic February engine failure in Colorado
— How to get free donuts!
— The Part Time Creator Manifesto
— Fix the leaks… and get sued
— Another startup down the toilet
— An FDA heroine
— Why does the floor… move…?
— You may hate your job, but your boss is thriving
— Pasta innovation!
— A whale of a catch
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Criminal Minds
We don’t have a Ferrari, but if we did, we wouldn’t leave our keys in it.
Apparently quite a few people do, though… with predictable results.
Video surveillance… showed a man hopping out of a sedan that pulled up alongside Cosentino’s home, jumping into the Ferrari and backing it out of the driveway within seconds. Like many others, Cosentino had left the car’s key fob inside the center console.
“It’s a bad habit,” he said, then stopping to correct himself. “It was a bad habit.”
The oversight — and the rising thefts — might be a byproduct of automotive convenience. Key fobs were designed to make it simple to turn cars on with a button and without a key. But many drivers set fobs down inside the car and then forget them, making the job of a thief extremely simple.
How do thieves know that the keys are in the cars? Easy — they just look at the mirrors!
In most high-end cars, the mirrors automatically tuck in once the car is locked. Untucked mirrors often means unlocked doors and a quick score on the black market.
And just because you are really rich, it doesn’t mean you learn fast, or at all:
But a few days after Cosentino’s Ferrari was retrieved in January, his wife’s $150,000 Mercedes G-wagon was snatched from the very same driveway.
Like her husband, Cosentino’s wife made the mistake of leaving the key fob inside the car while running into the home for a quick errand
Cybersecurity
We are sure that China hacked someone this week and did serious damage, but that kind of story is getting tiresome.
Instead, we’ll highlight our favorite quote of the week regarding a human factors, cybersecurity-related error, at New Horizons, an IT training company:
And then they made a mistake and said, "Hey, every time you get certified in a new IT certification and you teach it and you get rated with a high score, we're gonna give you a $2,000 raise." So I have 42 certifications now.
This came from Robert Vaughn of NPower, which provides technology training to military veterans and young adults from underserved communities. NPower received a $300,000 grant from the Gula Tech Foundation, and you can watch the interview with Robert, his colleague Kendra Parlock, and cyber security entrepreneurs Ron (@RonGula) and Cyndi Gula here (there’s also a transcript.) You may recall we posted Ron’s presentation on how to start a cyber security company last week.
Dangerous Machines
Following February’s dramatic Boeing 777 engine failure over Colorado, the WSJ reported (paywall) that investigators and engineers are quietly focusing on design changes to Boeing aircraft engine covers.
As noted in our earlier discussion on this subject, fan blade failures are an old problem, and aircraft engines are designed and tested to contain fragments. However, in recent years fan blade fragments have been ejected forward into the engine inlet cover instead of sideways into the stronger protective cover around the engines. The most dramatic example—and worst case scenario short of total aircraft loss—was an August 2016 Southwest flight where pieces of the engine cover damaged the fuselage, wing, and horizontal stabilizer of the aircraft, resulting in one fatality.
The WSJ reported that Southwest Chief Executive Gary Kelly pushed Boeing for design changes after this incident, which was the only fatality in the history of the company. Several years later, regulators and Boeing were still working on the problem, though sufficient improvements were not made in time to prevent the incident in Colorado and another in December 2020.
In March 2020, FAA Administrator Steve Dickson told the NTSB the agency was working with [Boeing] to strengthen the 737 engine covers, according to the NTSB’s recommendations. He said the agency would eventually mandate a new design change… In August 2020, Boeing provided an update to the FAA on its work to also strengthen 777 engine covers. The manufacturer told regulators it had decided to redesign and make replacement covers with which airlines could retrofit their fleets
Donuts
In the only good news you will ever hear about COVID-19 (except when it is gone): bring your vaccination card to Krispy Kreme for a free donut — every day—through the end of 2021!
Entrepreneurship
Our favorite entrepreneurship piece this week comes from Shawn Wang (@swyx) in “The Part Time Creator Manifesto.”
Because I don't derive all my self worth from my employer, I stand a little taller. Dream a little bigger. Negotiate a little harder.
There are a lot of great quotable sections in this article. We’ll highlight the conclusion, because if any of this resonates with you, then you should just read the whole article. We’re going to link to some of Shawn’s other work in future newsletters because he has a lot of great insights.
I think there's a LOT of folks that want a middle way between being a "My Company is My Life" salaryman and "Stick it to The Man" ronin. We indulge the social media escapism, but we kind of like our normie careers.
Yet, the days of spending 45 years with one company and retiring on a pension, like our parents' parents were promised, are long gone. We need to establish independent value because our employers simply do not have our long term interests at heart.
I'm hopeful for growing acceptance of Part Time Creators from employers, but ultimately, I think more people can already be Part Time Creators in their existing situations. This is not only viable today, but sorely needed. We are all fed up with over-SEO-ed content and generic lowest-common-denominator products. Part Time Creators can offer far more diversity, creativity, and unique expertise to fulfil every niche need of humanity. And they can make money, share valuable knowledge, and have more dignity doing so.
This is my utopian dream for a thriving Creator Middle Class. There's already dozens of us doing it. Join us!
Environment
Although you probably heard about one big canal problem this week, another one is brewing in Nevada, where the government wants to spend $148 million to stop a 115 year old canal from flooding and leaking. In response, local residents filed a lawsuit.
In 2008, the earthen Truckee Canal burst and flooded nearly 600 homes. To prevent another disaster, the U.S. government wants to line the canal with concrete.
The problem is that nearby towns depend on seepage from the canal—which may leak up to one third of its water—to supply local wells and aquifers. Fernley, Nevada, for example, spent $40 million on a water treatment plant based on this supply. According to experts, 13% of the wells in Fernley would dry up within one year, and 71% would stop working within 40 years if the canal stopped leaking.
ABC News note that the problem could be widespread—one in five U.S. farmers in 17 states use water delivered by federal canals to irrigate an area three times the size of Connecticut.
[The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation] hasn’t responded to the lawsuit filed March 10 in federal court in Reno but its final environmental impact statement said in September that Fernley “has no legal entitlement to the continued existence of seepage water from the Truckee Canal.”
“The city’s claim of right to seepage water is not valid under Nevada law,” the agency said. “The city’s use of canal seepage is not a valid project water delivery.”
#FAIL
Founders of a startup company determined to disrupt the medical testing industry were indicted last week on federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud, and money laundering — and no, this was not Theranos!
Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman started “San Francisco Poop-Testing Startup” (yes, that was the headline) Ubiome in 2012 as a “direct to consumer” service called “gut explorer” that… well, you don’t really want to know what they did. They raised a bunch of money, were worth up to $600 million at one point, and earned more than $35 million for tests that according to prosecutors were “not validated and not medically necessary.” Richman also lied about her age to land on a “30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech” list.
To this, we say:
Health
There’s been a lot of debate about how long it took to get the COVID-19 vaccines approved and distributed for use. So, we’d thought we’d point you to this Smithsonian Magazine article about Frances Oldham Kelsey, a reviewer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who is credited with blocking the drug thalidomide in the United States and preventing thousands of birth defects. For this work, in 1962, Kelsey became the second woman to receive the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service.
The most troubling deficiency in the process was the 60 day window for approving or rejecting drugs: If the 60th day passed, the drug would automatically go to market. She recalls that this happened at least once.
Fortunately, drug manufacturer Richardson-Merrell’s NDA for Kevadon—the U.S. trade name for thalidomide—was only the second NDA Kelsey received, meaning she didn’t yet have a backlog of reviews to get through. For Kelsey and the other reviewers, thalidomide did not pass muster. Not only were there pharmacological problems, but Kelsey found the clinical trials to be woefully insufficient in that the physician reports were too few and they were based largely on physician testimonials rather than sound scientific study. She rejected the application.
Kelsey became the director of the FDA’s Office of Scientific Investigation in 1967, and stayed in this job for 40 years, retiring at the age of 90.
***
This story goes beyond Kelsey’s outstanding work. Instead, we have to assume that every person working at the FDA knows this story, it’s probably in all the training classes, and it’s likely part of the FDA culture. In our opinion, that is how it should be: a mistake by the FDA will kill and maim people. Is the FDA too slow or too conservative? Maybe. But it’s a good bet that when someone puts pressure on the FDA, then FDA examiners reply, “Remember Frances Oldham Kelsey.”
Horror
Just in case you sleep too well, here’s a story about what happened during the recent floods in Australia.
A carpet of brown greeted Matt Lovenfosse as he pulled up to his home on Monday morning. “So I went out to have a look and it was millions of spiders,” he says.
Management
A Microsoft study released this week found that business leaders were significantly out of touch with employees in the current environment.
— 61% of business leaders said they were “thriving” compared to only 38% percent of workers who did not have decision-making authority.
— Business leaders also reported significantly higher survey results when asked about building relationships, earning higher incomes, and taking vacation days.
The study found that 41% of people were contemplating leaving their jobs, with 54% reporting that they were overworked, 39% saying they were exhausted, and 37% saying their companies were asking too much of them at the current time.
— 60% of Gen Z (18-25) reported they were either “merely surviving” or “flat-out struggling”
Microsoft also reported that remote job postings on LinkedIn had increased by a factor of five, and 70% of workers want flexible remote options to continue. 46% of remote workers were planning to move to a new location because of this increased flexibility.
An analysis of the LinkedIn Economic Graph shows women, Gen Z, and those without a graduate degree as the groups most likely to apply for those jobs. And, in the U.S., our survey found that Black and U.S. Latino workers are more likely than white workers and men to say they prefer remote work.
Interestingly, Microsoft also reported that the in the switch to remote work had increased interactions with close networks and diminished interactions with distant networks. Yet, work also “became more human.”
One in five have met their colleagues’ pets or families virtually, and as we clung to each other to get through the year, one in six (17 percent) have cried with a colleague this year. This number was even higher for those in industries hit hardest during this time, like education (20 percent), travel and tourism (21 percent), and healthcare (23 percent).
Bloomberg reported some highlights from the study, but the full report is worth reading given the additional context that was lost in most press articles. Microsoft’s conclusions were drawn from survey data as well as anonymized analysis of usage from Microsoft products such as LinkedIn, Teams, and Office. (Yes, Microsoft is watching you.)
— The analytics resulted in a series of other potentially interesting stats such as a 45% increase in chats (and 42% more after hours) and 40 billion more emails sent in February 2021 compared to February 2020.
Pasta
Our highlight a few weeks ago about the great Bucatini shortage (and the solution to the mystery) received a shockingly high level of interest. So we thought readers would be interested to know about a new pasta shape based on 3 years of R&D. We like to think it looks a little like a footbridge in Italy. But in any case, the article gets points for completely made up pasta criteria that sound good anyway.
Cascatelli is designed to maximize the three qualities by which Dan believes all pasta shapes should be judged:
Sauceability: How readily sauce adheres to the shape
Forkability: How easy it is to get the shape on your fork and keep it there
Toothsinkability: How satisfying it is to sink your teeth into it
Random
As if last year couldn’t have been any weirder, on November 2, 2020, a train in Spijkenisse, Netherlands (near Rotterdam) burst through the stop on the end of the tracks — and was caught by a giant whale sculpture.
Our new lawyer ran off to get the key fob out of his Ferrari. He left a sticky note with this:
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