I saw this in action on a smaller scale. In a past job, my wife organized events for a decent sized company. After an event, she'd typically have a $300k+ balance on her corporate Amex. When she went on maternity leave, the person filling in for her job neglected to actually pay the bills, so when she returned there were quite a few emails and voicemails from Amex regarding the over $500k balance.
The messages started as polite and eventually started to get more desperate in tone. At no point were they threatening or adversarial.
My favorite recent example was submitting a resume for a job that was almost a word-for-word description of my current title and job at a similarly sized company. Within 24 hours, I got the rejection, and several days later, a recruiter reached out to let me know that my profile looked like a great match for the role and wanted to schedule an intro call.
I was VP Eng of a 40+ person team at a startup, and my workaholic CEO once asked me if it bothered me that other people on the team didn't work as hard as me. My answer was very tactful, but noted that in any decent exit, I would walk away with multiples of some of those people, so it made perfect sense that I'd work harder.
I'm in the northeastern US and it's very common for weather reporting to include the Heat Index (https://www.weather.gov/ama/heatindex) which takes temperature and humidity into account.
I fully experienced postnatal depression, starting around 12-15 months, and it wasn't until relatively recently (my kid is now 18 years old) that I realized it.
We were living in a 1 bedroom in the city when we had our kid, and moved to a house in a suburb when the kid was 9 months old. My wife and I both worked, but I had a longer commute and a job that frequently required later evenings. Between the job and keeping up the house, I had a few minutes in the morning, random holidays, and part of one weekend day to really spend time. I spiraled into depression and insomnia, overwhelmed by all the work required to keep up the house while also feeling like a terrible father and husband. I was withdrawn, had angry outbursts, and my daily work routine involved sitting in my car in the train station parking lot having a good cry before heading home.
Before our kid started kindergarten, we decided to sell the house and rent a place in the city. Our apartment was about a 30 minute walk from my office with my kid's school as the 1/2 way point. I was actually able to walk my kid to school every day, coach sports that started at 5pm, and have both weekend days available to go on adventures around the city.
>My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution.
This is the key, IMHO. I have not been able to access my Coinbase account for some time due to a login issue. (No error is displayed, but a successful login returns me to the login screen). The AI driven phone agent was actually very good at working through the problem, but there was no escalation to a human after that. When the agent couldn't solve my problem, it told me to mail a physical letter describing my issue to an address on 5th Ave in NYC.
IMHO, yes, but that'll depend on the kid, their friends, and all the parents involved. If everyone does line up and agree, than it might be possible, but I think the reality is that kids are remarkably clever and resourceful and will find a way to access what you don't want them to. They'll do it secretly and maybe you'll find out or you won't.
My child is 18, and from about 7th grade onwards, everything important with friends happened in one of the various "group chats" for the various friend circles, sports circles, etc. These are app-based, not SMS/RCS/iMessage based. In our family, we opted for "you can use devices" but with some limits around time of day and work completeness. Phone and apps were open to review by mom and dad on demand.
When reviewing, we weren't looking to micro manage or police the conversations, but to make sure that nothing alarming was happening with respect to addiction to the media, stranger conversations, etc. And yes, random phishing, spam, and inappropriate messages did occasionally come through and provide a great opportunity to talk about how to identify the scams, and how to report the inappropriate messages.
As the kid got older and demonstrated ability to manage things, restrictions loosened, but on-demand access is still allowed with random checks every now and then. Obviously we can't see everything, but it's a balance of protection and safety vs. releasing a fully functional and independent human in the wild that can handle these things on their own.
Again, this is going to depend on the situation, the kids, and the families. My sample size of raising a child is 1, so what worked for us may not work for anyone else.
As a child in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was FORCED outside by my parents. The same was true for other kids in the neighborhood. We were told that chilling indoors was not an option, so get outside and be back by the time streetlights come on or at least call to say where we were.
CS started as a major for "computer nerds" who were very into computers. Computers were a hobby for virtually every one of my CS classmates in the 90's. Studying computer science was an extension of that interest, so majoring in CS made sense.
Fast forward a decade or two, and it is like you said, people who don't have a strong interest in computers starting taking CS as a major as a path to jobs and income.
Now, as a manager of engineering teams, I'm constantly surprised by Software Engineers that don't even own their own computers and/or have very little knowledge about how they work.
> As long as the penalties for data breach are a slap on the wrist and buying everyone one year of credit monitoring, no one will.
And, of course, that one year is totally useless when one is subject to multiple breaches per year. Throw in the fact that so many breaches aren't even with a company that affected individuals have a direct relationship with, and it becomes virtually impossible to fix this.
At this point, I'd be in favor of making any company that handles personal data pay in advance for the monitoring, and get refunded when they prove that that OR THEIR PROVIDERS haven't had a data breach.
FWIW, that was the second time I interviewed at Google. The first time, which resulted in strong yes across the board at L7, the first system design was to design Youtube Video Upload. The second was a more practical problem about replacing a high-volume logging component where correctness was critical but environment was space-constrained (i.e. no ability to run old + new in parallel).
Those were my favorite system design rounds ever, thanks to the problems being interesting and the interviewers also being very dynamic. It was also pre-Covid, so it was just awesome whiteboard design sessions.
> He got the prompt, asked questions about throughput requirements (etc.), and said, “okay, I’d put it all in Postgres.” He was correct! Postgres could more than handle the load.
I had this happen in a Google interview. I did back of the envelope math on data size and request volume and everything (4 million daily events, spread across a similar number of buckets) and very little was required beyond that to meet performance, reliability, and time/space complexity requirements. Most of the interview was the interviewer asking "what about" questions, me explaining how the simple design handled that, and the interviewer agreeing. I passed, but with "leans" vs. "strong" feedback.
I worked at a no longer extant networking equipment manufacturer as an intern in college in the late 1990's. My role was to work on software for an in-development 45Gb network switch, and a bunch of the software I wrote ran on prototype boards.
Since fabricating new boards took time and was expensive, a lot of work was done to make in situ modifications that involved an insane amount of wirewrapping. One member of the team did that all day, every day as their full time job, and I was always amazed by their ability to focus consistently at that level for so long.
I don't know where my car keys are, but I still remember a significant portion of the "Our Father" that I had to memorize in Old English in the early 1990's.
> Also, _Discord_ deleting them is really only half the battle; random vendors deleting them remains an issue.
This really is the issue. Of the 5 or so data breach notifications I received last year, none are from an entity I have a direct relationship with. They're all from a vendor used directly or indirectly by these entities.
The real answer is more serious penalties for having data breaches. Having 6 concurrent "identity monitoring" services is of zero value to me.
>The wider implications of this are left to the reader.
IMHO, it's actually worse than we realize. The Medical Loss Ratio requirement is good because it requires insurance companies to spend 80% or 85% of premiums on health care. It's bad because one way for insurance companies to make more money is to have inflated health care prices to justify increasing premiums so they can get 80% of a bigger pie. It also gives them incentives to provide care themselves so they can capture some of that 80% spend.
> For the uninsured this sort of thing is actually really common. Had an online friend who had to get emergency treatment and they sent him a bill for $20k.
I experienced this personally with my own insurance. My bill was over $20k, and it took a year to convince the insurance company that removing a few feet of my intestines was actually emergency surgery. I ended up paying $800. My roommate in the hospital had no insurance and ended up not paying anything (which I did not begrudge them at all, since the reason for no insurance was debilitating back pain that led to unemployment)
The messages started as polite and eventually started to get more desperate in tone. At no point were they threatening or adversarial.