Tech basketball is becoming quite the hotbed for transfer talent. After picking up the sensational transfer from Texas, James Banks III, earlier this year, Josh Pastner landed another impact transfer this month in the form of Jordan Usher, a 6’ 3” forward from USC. Pastner has recruited like a madman thus far, bringing in four-star talent in the form of ESPN Top 100 recruit Michael Devoe in addition to Kristian Sjolund and Khalid Moore, but in terms of players who can immediately make an impact, Banks has arguably been Pastner’s most significant acquisition this year and Usher may yet provide similar immediate impact after becoming eligible.

It is hard to overstate the impact Banks has provided this season. After spending two seasons on the bench at Texas, showing off solid efficiency in limited time, Banks transferred to Tech and was granted a hardship waiver by the NCAA, allowing him to play immediately. The waiver processed literal hours before Tech’s second game of the season against No. 5 Tennessee, and after rushing to the game, Banks picked up five points and seven boards off the bench, kicking off a breakout season for the 6’9” forward. Banks has been instrumental in Tech’s frontcourt, anchoring Tech’s stellar defense and providing an intimidating rim presence. While an excellent scorer in the paint, Banks has shined at the other end of the floor, ranking No. 2 in the ACC in offensive rebound percentage and No. 1 in block percentage and defensive box plus/minus. By Player Efficiency Rating, Banks has been Tech’s best starting player, and Banks ranks just second behind Evan Cole in effective field goal percentage. Under Banks, Tech’s defense has evolved into a force to be reckoned with — the Jackets rate as the No. 10 team in the country defensively according to KenPom.com, behind only Virginia and Duke in the ACC. 

Jordan Usher promises a similar impact. Having been similarly relegated to bench duty on a strong USC team, the former four-star recruit has averaged 14.3 points and 6.1 rebounds per 40 minutes in limited time at USC this season. Usher has displayed excellent sharpshooting skills while at USC — the forward has shot 37 percent from beyond the arc in his collegiate career and 73 percent from the free throw line. Turnovers have been an issue for Usher this year — he has just a 1:1 assist to turnover ratio — but he still promises to provide an extra offensive boost for a team that needs more scoring threats.

Usher and Banks are impact players, to be sure, but why Tech? For both players, the answer hits close to home, quite literally. Banks was born in Decatur, and Usher was a standout at Wheeler High in Marietta, leading his high school team to the state GHSA 7-A semifinals. Both players were former top prospects from the state; according to ESPN, Banks was the fourth best recruit from Georgia and ranked No. 57 nationally in the class of 2016, and Usher was the No. 12 recruit in the state for the class of 2017. Both players found themselves locked out from significant playing time at their previous schools.

 Returning to their home state and going to college in Atlanta at a program where they can be offered serious minutes yields benefits to both Tech and the players. Banks has blossomed into one of the best defensive players in the country while anchoring one of the best defenses in the country, and Usher can similarly develop at the other end of the floor and provide the Jackets with another deep ball threat.

Pastner’s success with Josh Okogie and Ben Lammers in his first two seasons accelerated the clock of his rebuild significantly — Tech’s surprising success in Pastner’s first two seasons thanks in no small part to these impact players proved a significant demand among students and alumni for good basketball at Tech, and Pastner has some pressure to provide a little faster than expected. Bringing in top tier transfer talent gives Pastner an immediate impact for the team — after all, Tech’s success in the ACC thus far is in no small part thanks to Banks’ emergence as one of the best players on the team — while allowing him the time to further develop his own raw recruits out of high school, players like Devoe and Sjolund who display promise but require further refinement. 

Players like Banks and Usher provide Tech with the opportunity to win now and win later — a victory for Pastner’s program, both in the short run and in ensuring that he will have seasoned players as the years go on.

In hiring Alabama offensive line coach Brent Key to serve in largely the same role in Atlanta, Tech football accomplished last week what seemed wildly improbable: convincing a top recruiter from a powerhouse school to leave perennial championship contention behind in favor of a program in need of revitalization. There are a number of reasons why that might have happened.

Perhaps it was the allure of working with his old colleague Geoff Collins, who put together Tech’s vaunted 2007 recruiting class, that won him over. That class, which brought in Morgan Burnett, Jonathan Dwyer, Derrick Morgan, Josh Nesbitt and Roddy Jones, among others, remains arguably the best in the school’s modern history. 

Perhaps Key had been pining to return to his alma mater, which favored triple-option offensive assistants under Paul Johnson and left little place for the big, burly offensive linemen Key has coached at his latest stop.

Or maybe Key realized that his career would advance no further in Tuscaloosa and figured he would be next in line to assume the mantle of offensive coordinator if Collins hire Dave Patenaude flamed out. 

At any rate, Tech has added a coach whose resume, at least from a layperson’s view, outshines that of any position coach to patrol the home sideline at Bobby Dodd Stadium during the Johnson era.

The Key hire was not without some minor drama. After both the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Rivals.com reported that Key had all but inked his contract to join Collins’ staff, Key denied rumors that he had spoken to Tech about a new job in the run-up to the national championship game. 

“I don’t know where it came from,” Key demurred in reference to the rumors when local media questioned him about his plans.

While it seemed like the sort of boilerplate denial made by a coach whose mind was ostensibly on the game immediately ahead, it also left open the possibility that Nick Saban had convinced Key to stay. But when Key signed his contract in Atlanta a few days later, that doubt was officially quashed.

Key ranked as the No. 5 recruiter in the country for the Class of 2019 by 247Sports — he has secured nine commits and ranks better than any recruiter in the ACC. 

For reference, Andy McCollum, Tech’s best recruiter last year, was good for only No. 11 in the conference. It is fair to expect Key to drop in the rankings this year, perhaps significantly so. After all, Key has gone from recruiting players to a school that has contended for national championships on an annual basis to a school that has not made a New Year’s Six bowl since the 2014 season. 

And as those who follow the program have recognized time and time again, Tech is a difficult school at which to recruit. The academics are rigorous, the culture is far from laid-back and while Atlanta is a bustling city, it is hard to paint a picture of stardom at a school that does not even dominate its own city in terms of fanbase. But if anyone can succeed in this environment, it is the tandem of Collins and Key.

A concern brought forth by some fans is the rumor that while at Central Florida, where Key coached before his stint in Tuscaloosa, Key recruited negatively against Tech, discouraging athletes from attending his alma mater. This evidently did not worry Collins enough to prevent him from hiring his old colleague, and for good reason. Key’s job at Central Florida was to convince athletes to pick his school over Tech, and like it or not, negative recruiting is part and parcel of the job of a college football coach. And those afraid of the hypocrisy that would ensue if Key now espouses the virtues of his Tech degree and experience ought to remember that the 18-year-olds Key is targeting now are not the same 18-year-olds he targeted at UCF. It is highly unlikely that they will make college decisions based on message-board rumors.

Tech football is undergoing a similar transition to that which men’s basketball started nearly three years ago by hiring a young, upstart coach with a great recruiting record. 

On the hardwood, the results have been mixed. Josh Pastner seems to be a better in-game coach than most expected ­— the book on his Memphis tenure was that he was capable of bringing in elite talent but could not do anything with it ­— but the five-star prospects are yet to come knocking. Perhaps Tech will find the same result when it comes to football; maybe Collins, Key and the rest of the coaching staff will have to rely on good halftime adjustments and player development to get wins.

But if the program’s new identity as an aspirant thanks to recruiting powerhouse works out, it will be largely thanks to Brent Key, home at his alma mater at last.

On Sunday, National Geographic released the two-part premiere of its new miniseries about the early days of the dot-com bubble, “Valley of the Boom.”

The Matthew Carnahan directed miniseries combines dramatizations of historical events with interviews with many of the figures who play prominently in those events, creating a collage effect which somehow evokes both a history museum and Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” at the same time.

The series is a powerful juxtaposition between a subject which is at least mostly historical and a style which is completely detached from reality. There are tales of stabbings and DIY oral surgery, plenty of fourth wall breaking and even an interpretive dance.

While the surrealism of “Valley of the Boom” is jarring in a series which presents actual historical events, the style is a strong artistic choice for presenting the mood and the people of Silicon Valley during the dot-com bubble. The series is strange because the times were strange.

“Valley of the Boom” follows three distinct — though concurrent and interrelated — storylines. The most well known of these is that of Netscape, an early web browser, and its groundbreaking initial public offering.

The main players in the Netscape story are co-founder Marc Andreessen, portrayed by John Karna (“Scream”), CEO James Barksdale (Bradley Whitford, “Get Out”) and co-founder Jim Clark (John Murphy, “Loudermilk”). Barksdale and Clark also give interviews, while the real Andreessen declined to participate in the project.

The series details Netscape’s dramatic IPO, one of the first such offerings for an internet-based company, as well as its subsequent battle with Microsoft for internet supremacy — dubbed by the press as the “browser wars.”

The series premiere and the historical facts of the case set Netscape’s story up as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris, avarice and complacency. The story comes together convincingly thanks to Carnahan’s creative use of a variety of visual and narrative effects and Karna’s effective portrayal of Andreessen in all of his calculating arrogance.

The Netscape portions are the most entertaining part of the premiere. For those who are unfamiliar with the story of Netscape, the series will likely be dramatic and original, while for those who have historical knowledge of the browser company’s role in the dot-com bubble, much of “Valley of the Boom” will feel like an insightful documentary.

The second storyline which “Valley of the Boom” introduces follows theglobe.com, an early innovator in social media. Viewers are much less likely to be familiar with this tale, but the premiere foreshadows heavily that the site will not live up to its potential. Beyond the show’s intentional foreshadowing, it is difficult as a viewer not to expect a negative outcome in every storyline when the series is about a famous economic collapse. 

Oliver Cooper (“Project X”) and Dakota Shapiro (“The First Month”) portray Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot, the founders of theglobe.com. Both deliver solid performances as young, capital-seeking innovators struggling with hesitant investors.

Krizelman and Paternot have much more success securing investment after the success of Netscape’s IPO, a plot point which the series uses to demonstrate how the success of a few companies paved the way for riskier projects with weaker business models to become overvalued, thus creating an investment bubble which was waiting to burst. 

The most bizarre of the three stories told by “Valley of the Boom” is unquestionably that of Michael Fenne. Played by Steven Zahn (“War for the Planet of the Apes”), Fenne is an eccentric, charismatic businessman who helps tech innovators to secure investment by capitalizing on the general excitement around the internet — a technology which few of his investors even know anything about.

Fenne is the most surreal of all the characters in the show; Zahn wears an extremely unnatural-looking fat-suit while portraying him, causing him to carry himself in a strange, almost inhuman way. Additionally, Zahn is often framed in front of bright light sources, giving his character a heroically glowing, halo-wrapped appearance which is illustrative of the illusions of grandeur which the historical Michael Fenne was said to have held.

“Valley of the Boom” is a show which sets out to accomplish a lot. It seeks to tell the story of how an entire industry ballooned and subsequently collapsed in just a few short years, while also portraying the unique culture and mindset of Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s. It is both a documentary and a drama series. It looks to tell three different yet deeply intertwined stories all at once.

If the show is to succeed, it will be due to this ambition. If it fails, that too will be due to this ambition. Based only on the premiere, the series is fascinating, entertaining and interesting. The characters are compelling, the writing is good, and the direction is thoughtful and effective. Still, one could see how after a few episodes, things could go wrong — especially if the plot becomes much more complicated or if new characters are introduced.

At the moment, “Valley of the Boom” is in the sweet spot — it has the perfect level of plot complexity, and the perfect number of deep, interesting characters. Viewers can only hope that the bubble does not burst before the end of the six-episode run.

2018 saw the completion of multiple large construction projects across campus, including the Crosland Tower and Interdisciplinary Design Commons — but several more projects will see work in 2019.

Now that Crosland Tower is complete, Price Gilbert will go through a two year renovation and will be occupied beginning in spring 2020.

Two separate construction projects are scheduled to begin in late spring. The first of them, the renovation of the Student Center, doubling its size and rebranding it as a Campus Center, is scheduled to begin Phase I of its construction in May or June 2019. 

Phase I construction of the Campus Center will not affect current Student Center operations and consists of all new construction that includes an Exhibition Hall and three other buildings that comprise the Pavilions. The Pavilions will function as space for Paper & Clay, Healthy Initiatives, the Intake Space and a cafe.

Phase II of Campus Center construction, which will replace the current Student Center building, will not begin until summer 2020. The entire project is expected be completed in winter 2022.

The second development beginning in 2019 is the overhaul of a nondescript building beside the McCamish Pavilion into the ACC Network Production Center, which will serve to help with the video broadcast capabilities of sports programs across Tech.

Other projects are nearing completion. Coda, which held its topping-off ceremony in the fall, is under the final stages of construction and will be occupied beginning sometime in March 2019.

On the north end of campus, three separate projects are all expected to finish in the spring and summer of 2019.

The Campus Safety Building,  located in the southeast corner of 10th Street and Hemphill Avenue, will open in March 2019 and serve as the new headquarters of the Georgia Tech Police Department.

The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, which hopes to become certified under the Living Building Challenge, will be completed in June 2019. The Kendeda Building is located in the northwest corner of Ferst Drive and State Street. After opening in June, Kendeda  will enter a year-long process where performance will be monitored and systems tweaked to attempt a Living Building Challenge certification in June 2020.

The Dalney Building “combines three seemingly unrelated program elements — a parking structure, an office building, and a biological wastewater reclamation facility,” according to the website of the architects, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple.

Dalney will help to expand parking resources on campus.

Construction in the northwest corner of campus will continue to cause significant disruptions on multiple streets through spring. 

On Monday, Jan. 14, the Georgia gubernatorial race came to an end with the swearing in of Governor Brian Kemp.

Thousands of Kemp supporters from all over the state of Georgia flocked to Tech’s McCamish Pavilion for the newly appointed governor’s inauguration. Along with Kemp, several other officials were also sworn in, including Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, Attorney General Christopher M. Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

David Ralston, a Republican member of the Georgia House of Representatives, addressed the issues brought up by this year’s elections in his introductory speech, stating that “the right to vote is a very cherished right; it is one which we should never take for granted,” prior to the seal of office being handed to Kemp. 

After taking his oath of office, Lieutenant Governor Duncan’s inaugural address focused heavily on technological progress and proclaimed his goal was for Georgia to become “the technological capital of the South East, creating an ecosystem of talent that leads a global economy.” 

Duncan addressed the audience with optimism, commenting on his “[excitement] about the bright future of Georgia” and “belief that our best days are in front of us.” 

Duncan promised to provide “21st century solutions for 21st century problems,” as well as to “start to lean into the talents and resources of what I like to call the Four C’s: churches, charities, corporations and citizens.” 

Kemp’s speech set a hopeful tone for his term in office, claiming that “with unprecedented growth and unmatched opportunity, it is a great time to be a Georgian.”

He promised to work on a wide range of issues, from small businesses struggle to third grade education and rural living conditions, and promised to keep Georgia “moving in the right direction.” His comments were received with a standing ovation. 

“Some think that we have reached our peak,” Kemp said. “I disagree.” 

Kemp’s vision includes seeing Georgia become the “Southern capital of the world” through fully funded education, a business friendly government and increased protection for farmers. 

Despite the earnest support offered by those in the audience to Kemp’s words about a “state united,” the panorama outside of McCamish painted a different picture, where dozens of Tech students gathered in peaceful protest. 

More specifically, they challenged how “Kemp’s office has been changing the electorate of Georgia to suit their needs.” 

Kemp briefly addressed the polarizing election in this speech, commenting that “our state appears divided: metro versus rural, black versus white, Republican versus Democrat.” 

Despite a run which was defined by partisan politics, Kemp’s inauguration focused on non divisive politics and attempting to bridge the gap the election created between the two major parties.  

“We have so much in common, and as governor I will fight for all Georgians, not just the ones who voted for me,” Kemp said in closing his speech, promising to work towards uniting the state once again.

When driving down Augusta’s busiest road, motorists will often pass the ruins of an important historical monument. The vacant building is still in good condition, and the blue awning that stretches the length of its facade still glows in the night. Though no signage remains, the shape of a giant torn movie ticket tells travelers that this building bears the same significance as the Roman Colosseum or the Pyramids of Giza. They’re driving past an abandoned Blockbuster Video.

I pity the people that never knew the unbridled joy of choosing a movie from Blockbuster’s seemingly endless shelves. Thanks to Blockbuster, boring Friday nights were easily remedied by a short trip in mom’s Honda Odyssey. Once I got my hands on a Playstation 2, I learned that I could even rent video games from Blockbuster and avoid the steep $60 price tag for games I wasn’t completely sold on. Blockbuster Video was a cultural staple of the early 2000’s, and even earlier I’d imagine.

Before my neighborhood rental place became the historical site that it is today, Blockbuster CEO John Antioco made one of the biggest gaffes in business history. Antioco was given the chance to purchase Netflix for $50 million dollars in 2000, back when Netflix was mailing DVDs. Blockbuster turned down the deal. I’m sure you can figure out the rest — hint: nobody has ever asked Suzie in Cloudman to come Blockbuster and chill.

Today, Netflix has a market cap of over $150 billion. It helped usher in digital streaming technology, which has largely overtaken physical media as our viewing platform of choice. Rather than pay for each individual movie or TV show, we can pay a flat monthly rate to watch whatever we want, whenever we want. And if Netflix doesn’t have what we want, we can still rent digital copies from services like Amazon, Apple or YouTube.

Then Hulu threw its hat in the ring. And Amazon. And YouTube. And Facebook, for some reason. Disney is considering its own streaming service. Warner Media just announced its own streaming service. It’s no surprise that companies would want to ride the coattails of Netflix’s success, but it’s important to look at how that affects consumers.

For the sake of this example, let’s assume each service charges a flat monthly rate of $10. Three years ago, most people were satisfied with using Netflix as their sole streaming platform. But with Hulu jumping in and providing a different set of content — some that was taken off of Netflix, like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — many people chose to double up. That’s $20 a month. Then Amazon came along, and although a Prime subscription gives you several benefits outside of streaming, it is further stratifying the content that’s available. Now we are at $30 a month. Did you like being able to watch Thor: Ragnarok and Infinity War on Netflix? Well prepare to start dishing out $40 a month, because Disney — who owns Marvel, Fox and several other major content producers — will almost certainly follow suit and create its own service, removing its content from sites like Netflix in the process. 

Droves of people have decided to cancel their cable subscription for the cheaper, more flexible world of online streaming. An irony of this, however, is that once more and more companies start their own paid streaming services, it will begin looking like a more expensive and convoluted version of a cable subscription, only modular, decentralized and on-demand.

With the increasing saturation of the streaming market, it’s hard to be certain whether or not your favorite content will always be available to you. Sure, Netflix Originals like Bird Box aren’t going anywhere, but outside content could go away at a moment’s notice. Unless you’re willing to dish out $40+ dollars a month on streaming services, chances are you won’t see it again. In the case of TV, this may be a necessary evil; It’s probably too expensive to go out and buy physical versions of your favorite shows.

But with movies, the streaming model may soon become problematic. I shouldn’t need to pay a monthly tithe just to watch movies. With film, consumers are at the mercy of whichever service pays to have the rights. There’s no way to consistently know where you can stream a movie. And once every production and distribution company has its own streaming service to pay for, we will all be in trouble.

I can find a Blu-Ray or DVD copy of virtually any movie I want for less than $10. I’ve made it a habit to splurge on a physical copy of every movie I want to watch as a way of future-proofing against the inevitable streaming bubble bursting. This means I watch less movies — I’m not going to pay for a $5 copy of Hotel Transylvania — but it gives me the peace of mind that my favorite content will always be at my fingertips. If my internet goes down, I can still watch Baby Driver. No matter who Warner Brothers sells the rights to, I can still watch Blade Runner.

My argument is definitely not without flaws, especially when it comes to streaming television. There is also no way to purchase and store anywhere close to the amount of movies available to stream. But my reasoning holds weight: the digital streaming landscape is about to become a battleground, and consumers will ultimately make up the bulk of the casualties. The age of Blockbuster may be gone, but physical media still holds a value that digital streaming will never be able to emulate. 

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Those aren’t the words of a blustering guest on Alex Jones’ Infowars podcast or an online commenter masked by his Reddit account. They’re the words of sitting United States congressman Steve King. In two short sentences, King not only demonstrated his profound level of bigotry but also reminded Americans that fifty years after the passage of a set of civil rights acts and the deaths of countless men and women killed in the fight for racial equality, we have not yet moved past open racism, not even in our nation’s legislature.

How did we get to this point? Any congressional candidate who has a robust section of his Wikipedia page entitled “Racist comments, controversies and far-right politics” shouldn’t be in a position to declare victory on election night. Yet King won his ninth term in Congress last November, defeating Democrat J.D. Scholten by a little over three percentage points. But each and every one of King’s previous comments was swept under the rug without real consequences. He claimed that terrorists would “dance in the street” if Barack Obama, their “savior”, was elected president. He described racial profiling as “an important component of legitimate law enforcement.” He claimed that white men were the most productive subgroup in human history and then said he meant not to refer to white people but to “Western civilization”, a convenient dog-whistle. 

King’s racism has gotten clearer and louder as the years have gone on. “[Dutch political candidate Geert] Wilders understands that demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies,” he said in a 2017 tweet, which was then liked by none other than former KKK leader David Duke. And prior to his idiotic, frankly flimsy, defense of white nationalism, this was the comment that stung me the most.

I’m the son of Indian immigrants. I was born in the United States and I’ve lived my entire life here. As difficult as people like King try to make it, I love this country. What about Steve King’s “demographics” makes him any worthier a parent of good American children than my mother or father? And is this civilization he’d like to restore made entirely of Mayflower passengers and Native Americans? The beauty of the United States, when it’s not in one of its nasty bouts of nativism, is that no one who wants to make a life for himself in this country and play by the rules is “someone else’s baby.” 

Who knows why Republican leadership finally decided to act on King’s blatant racism by stripping him of his committee assignments. Maybe overtly defending white nationalism instead of making heavy allusions to it was a bridge too far. Maybe in the wake of their drubbing in the 2018 midterms, the party realizes that aligning with racists is not the way to go. 

At any rate, I’m not angry about Steve King’s comments. I’m glad he made them, because they show everyone, once and for all, what’s on his mind. King claims that “[white supremacy] never shows up in my head [so] I don’t know how it could possibly come out of my mouth.” After years of consorting with white supremacists, attending their conferences, praising their virtues and supporting their candidacies, I find that story hard to believe. 

“Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?” If King’s conclusion after years of education is that white human beings are inherently superior, then I, too, wonder why King sat in those classes. He’s missed the messages of tolerance and diversity that are fundamental to the American experience. 

King might be the only congressman stupid enough to openly defend the sullied name of white nationalism and white supremacism, but chances are good that he isn’t the only one who feels that way. We should treat congressmen who defend King — like his colleague Louie Gohmert — with the same withering stares and political consequences he’s earned.

When I was growing up, my family never really went to the doctor. We had all our shots and occasionally would go to an urgent care when we got strep throat or the flu, but we didn’t have a primary care doctor and never went in for check ups. We were just always busy with work, school and sports, and we were always pretty healthy. I never liked going to the doctor anyway. I’m not afraid of doctors. I’m just prideful. I didn’t want to be a hypochondriac who was constantly going to the doctor when there was nothing wrong. I didn’t think doctors were important unless you were sick, and I always thought that medical issues would never happen to me.

At the beginning of winter break I woke up with such bad pain in my lower left side that even I couldn’t deny I needed to go to see a doctor. I ended up in the ER getting ultrasounds and CT scans with doctors constantly streaming in and out, poking and prodding. I had multiple IVs set, blood drawn, several shots and doses of pain medication. Nurses were constantly asking what my pain levels were as if that was something quantifiable and easy to articulate, and doctors would come in and push my abdomen looking worried. I was scared, but I had to trust the people presumably taking care of me.

Finally, an official looking doctor in a white lab coat came to the room. He said they had found a large mass that was likely attached to my left ovary. He told us it could be cancerous, that I would likely need surgery and referred me to a gynecologist who was affiliated with the hospital.

I went in for the appointment, and when the gynecologist came in, I knew right away I hated him. He was coarse and rude. He was condescending and didn’t believe I was in pain. He told me I needed surgery right away and insisted that the incision couldn’t be laparoscopic because they needed to remove the mass in one piece. I couldn’t stand him, but I didn’t have time to look for another doctor. I was stuck trusting him.

I went in for surgery the next day, and after the procedure the doctor debriefed my parents about what they found. When they made the incision to remove the mass, the doctors were shocked to discover that the tumor was attached to my fallopian tube instead of my ovary, which is extremely unusual. It was also much larger than they anticipated. The tumor turned out to be 15 centimeters, meaning the incision was the same size. They told us over and over how they had never seen anything like this before. It was unheard of. These aren’t exactly comforting words when used to describe a mass that was removed from your torso. They sent the mass and the tube to pathology to examine it, and it was found to be completely benign.

A week after the operation, I looked up reviews of my surgeon to see how other people felt about him. His rating was three stars. Many people complained about his bedside manner, saying he was cross, irritable and rude. One person noted that he pushed more invasive procedures because he was unqualified to perform less invasive ones. I was kicking myself for not having a gynecologist or primary care doctor before this ordeal. I began to regret never going to the doctor.

Having regular doctor visits wouldn’t have prevented this surgery. It probably wouldn’t have even found the tumor sooner, given the sudden onset of the pain. What it would have done is ensured that the doctor performing surgery and overseeing my recovery was one that I knew and trusted.

When you’re already sick it’s too late to shop for doctors. You’re left with no options because the situation is urgent, meaning you settle for doctors that you would normally never see. There’s no time to get second opinions or build relationships with staff. When you inevitably get sick, the peace of mind you get from already knowing your doctor is worth the time it takes to go once a year.

As we draw closer to the 2020 election, more Democrats are announcing their interest in running for president. Elizabeth Warren has thrown her hat in the ring and Joe Biden, Beto O’Rourke and Bernie Sanders are also considering the possibility of fighting for the party’s nomination. Because President Trump is the Republican incumbent, it’s almost assured that he will run against the Democratic nominee.

In 2016 many thought that a Trump presidency was an impossibility, but in the upcoming election cycle Democrats will not be as passive as they were the first time around. They know beating him is not inevitable, so the contenders will be scrutinized even more because they need an ideal candidate to guarantee a win against Trump, something that seemed like a slam dunk just two years ago. This candidate must have unimpeachable morals, a clean track record and a complete disregard for the truth while maintaining integrity.

Democrats showed in the last election that they care more about the morals and ideals of their candidates than Republicans do. People still brought up the Lewinsky Scandal during Hillary Clinton’s campaign twenty years after her husband left office.

Republicans let Trump’s genital-grabbing comments slip by, but both sides held tight to Clinton’s past transgressions even after Bernie was out of the race. Whoever wins the Democrat’s nomination has to be a model in their personal and public lives.

Any entrenched politician will have some policy or history that will draw criticism, which is why Trump did well as an outsider. Experienced politicians are inherently disliked. They are viewed as lying and manipulative, which is why Trump’s blatant lies are all the more surprising.

Trump has redefined politics by denying reality and all evidence contrary to his current opinion. To say we live in a post-truth era is an understatement. People trust him because they think he “tells it like it is,” even when there is photographic proof that he is simply telling it how he wishes it was, truth be damned.

Whoever runs against him cannot get caught up in fact checking or telling the truth. Perception has always mattered more than reality, but it is more important than ever. Hillary seemed less trustworthy and her statements, factual or otherwise, were taken as such.

This candidate will need to rally people and unite a party that is out of touch with their biggest demographic: millennials. Recently elected younger Democrats are butting heads with their more experienced party members because they want more change. The presidential nominee will have to connect with older, centrist Democrats and younger liberals who are demanding progress and filling voting booths in record numbers.

The electoral college will not be changed anytime soon so the main goal for Democrats in 2020 will be winning back the swing states that were lost to Trump. Drawing people to the polls will depend on the nominee’s personality in addition to their policies. Democrats cannot afford for moderates to abstain in this election.

Essentially, the candidate has to do the impossible by satisfying a divided party and debating someone who is not bothered by facts. They must show strong morals and have an ideal track record. Liberals should not assume that they are going to win against the current president, even with a lowered approval rating, so they either need to lower their standards or come up with a better option.

Thanks to favorable media accounts portraying him as some sort of swashbuckling savior of mankind through daring entrepreneurship, Elon Musk has become a larger than life figure. Musk’s social media musings are subject to intense media coverage over even the most mundane of things, his opinions are dissected by analysts and fanboys alike and his enterprises present themselves as changing the faces of their respective industries. It is no wonder, then, that Musk maintains a popular social media presence and a devoted following — a fanbase akin to that of a pop-star rather than a tech CEO. And given Musk’s influence in industries related to popular areas of study at Tech, it would make sense to think that Musk would be as popular — if not more — on Tech’s campus. If you — yes you, person reading this editorial — consider yourself a fan of Musk, I have one simple plea for you: don’t be.

Write-ups of Musk are intoxicating in their breathless descriptions of his hard work and fantastical dreams of humanities future, dreams that Musk is attempting to create reality. What these editorials rarely highlight, however, is Musk’s exploitation of the labor of hardworking engineers and designers essentially for personal gain. Musk did not become as rich as he is without attempting to maximize profits while minimizing costs, and a key part of his success in this endeavor has been creating a culture where employees willingly undervalue their own labor. A former SpaceX employee, Josh Boehm, described frequently working 12+ hours a day and needling employees who had only worked 50-60 hours in a week, joking that they were part-timers. That same ex-employee summed up the culture with a phrase evidently used around SpaceX: “You are your own slave driver.” Boehm claims that no-one at SpaceX is forced to work these long hours — rather, the culture of the job encourages it. Musk himself openly advocates for working long hours, tweeting recently, “… nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”

The problem with this culture is that Musk is essentially spearheading a large-scale movement against one of the foundations of labor rights and is turning his fanboys, defenders and employees into soldiers against laws that are designed to protect them and the value of the labor that they provide for personal benefit. Musk and other venture capitalists frequently emphasize the importance of working long hours — as they claim to do themselves. But the reality is that as a laborer — no matter if you are flipping burgers at McDonald’s or designing spacecrafts — so long as the focus of your job is not managing labor, you are a laborer. You have no incentive to devalue yourself in such a manner.

Engineers who work sixty hours a week consistently under Musk and other tech-bros are putting their own physical and mental health on the line while underselling the true value of their labor simply because they feel that such effort is necessary to reach some pie-in-the-sky goal for some greater purpose. In reality, it is all because it is far more cost effective for Musk to create a culture where instead of having three engineers working 40 hours a week, he can have two engineers working 60 hours a week. This way, Musk receives the same amount of labor at two-thirds the cost.

Again, the three engineers working forty hours a week accomplish just as much work while facing significantly lower health risks — but Musk — who, according to Business Insider, is worth $23 billion — appears far more concerned with profit margin as opposed to taking a safer route towards obtaining his supposed goals.

Keep in mind that the typical salary for an engineer at SpaceX — $90k according to Glassdoor.com — is just $2k more than the average salary for the same position at Boeing, a rival aerospace firm without reports of such an exploitative culture and with employees that are expected to work only forty hours a week, so it is not the case that Musk’s employees are rewarded handsomely for sacrificing so much.

These workers should feel no obligation to provide surplus value just to line Musk’s pockets, but because Musk has created this charismatic culture of “work hard towards some moral goal,” his employees evidently feel completely comfortable undervaluing themselves and undermining labor relations, even though this undervaluing does not help accomplish these “bigger purpose” goals. Rather, it only serves to augment Musk’s considerable wealth through cutting costs.

And are these supposed “bigger purpose” goals truly altruistic, deserving of sacrifice? To be sure, Musk claims to have his own vision of abandoning Earth for Mars and populating the solar system. But all his work has thus far been put towards reducing cost measures — reusable spacecraft, technology for which SpaceX is at the forefront, simply serves to lower the cost of spaceflight to Musk and others, but it does not truly advance humanity’s place in the solar system — it just makes it cheaper. Perhaps Musk truly believes in himself as a charitable person, making humanity a space-faring race through his efforts. But thus far, the short-term prognosis for Musk’s work has essentially been reducing costs and making money.

Musk is a charlatan. He is every bit the ruthless venture capitalist his history says he is, but his fans take him at face value when he claims to be a “socialist” and not opposed to unions when his entire culture seeks to undermine these ideologies and institutions, institutions that protect the laborers he deliberately exploits through his enterprises. There is more to Musk than his jokes on social media, the media profiles proclaiming him as some sort of savior, or the lavish lifestyle he lives. Musk is a capitalist instrument of disruption, and with popular support — especially from those not on his payroll — he is truly dangerous.