Over the past few years, advertisers have been increasingly looking to recruit all our senses in their quest of persuasion. As Dr. Ray Stantz once said, “Listen! Do you smell something?” Which could be something you’re muttering to yourself as you wander down the block. It’s nothing new–anyone remember when, in 2006, Goodby Silverstein & Partners made the bus shelters in San Francisco smell like freshly baked cookies for a Got Milk campaign? Now a new marketing study out of Brigham Young University and the University of Washington reports that even using the right words to trigger different senses can result in a different reaction.

The study found that ads highlighting more distal sensory experiences like sight and sound lead people to delay purchasing, while those that emphasize more proximal sensory experiences like touch or taste lead to earlier purchases.

Published last month in the Journal of Consumer Research, the report was conducted in four lab studies and a pilot study involving more than 1,100 people.

The authors also analyzed 31,889 Yelp reviews to look for connections between the sensory elements of a reviewer’s experience and the usefulness of a review. They found reviews from people who emphasized a more distal sense like sight were rated more useful when the review used the past tense (“We ate here last week and . . .”), while people emphasizing a proximal sense like touch had more useful reviews when they used the present tense (“I’m eating this right now and it is so good!”).

In an email, lead author Ryan Elder, associate professor of marketing at BYU, said the idea for the study came about when, as part of their research in multisensory marketing, they started looking at different sensory distances.

Elder says agencies, brand managers, CMOs, and other marketers want to start thinking about matching the right sensory distance with other dimensions of distance, such as physical distance, social distance (how close the relationship is between individuals), or even distance in time.

“For any product or experience that has multiple sensory characteristics, advertisers want to make sure that the distance of the senses they choose to highlight matches the other dimensions of distance,” says Elder. “This will lead to higher attitudes toward the brand, and can even affect how soon customers want to buy.”

Recently, we’ve reported on a variety of interview questions ranging from the most common to the most annoying, and even the toughest curveball queries.

But there’s a big difference between a hiring manager asking a candidate: “If a coworker had an annoying habit, and it hindered your quality of work, how would you resolve it?” and asking whether the candidate is a runner or hiker. The latter can land the company in legal hot water.

According to Michelle Lee Flores, a labor and employment attorney with the law firm Cozen O’Connor, “Some questions (that can be legally problematic) are not obvious and may be asked by the interviewer in an innocent effort to ‘get to know’ the candidate, like if they run or practice yoga.” Flores explains that could be dangerous as it may  identify an applicant’s general health, medical condition, or mental and physical disabilities.

The number of discrimination cases logged by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Last year, 91,503 charges were filed with the EEOC, as compared to 80,680 in 1997. 

One of the most common charges is age discrimination. Nearly a quarter (22%) of U.S. workers are over 55 years old. Yet almost two-thirds of those older workers reported that their age was a barrier to getting a job, according to a 2017 AARP survey. Another comprehensive study by researchers at Tulane University and the National Bureau of Economic Research Disability Research Center (NBER) using resumes for workers at various ages found significant discrimination in hiring for female applicants and the oldest applicants. A tech worker over 60 years of age recently sued Google for discrimination, setting off a class action suit to represent workers over 40 who didn’t get hired by the search giant. 

Settling these lawsuits is costly for the employer. A smaller study by insurance firm Hiscox of 446 closed claims reported by small- to-medium-sized businesses with fewer than 500 employees showed an average cost of $125,000 and 275 days to resolve.

Flores points out that avoiding some common pitfalls when hiring employees begins with not asking questions that reveal protected status or characteristics which include disability, marital status, religion, age, mental or physical disability, veteran status, or pregnancy status, unless it is legally relevant to a position. At that point it becomes a “bona fide occupational qualification” says Flores. For example, if a job requirement is lifting heavy objects or driving a vehicle, certain health conditions could prevent a worker from performing those tasks.

Here are some seemingly innocuous questions that actually tread in murky legal territory.

Don’t Ask When Someone Attended School

“Asking questions that tend to reveal protected information status are also off limits,” adds Flores, like asking someone when they graduated high school can reveal their age. This can then feed into the persistent bias among many hiring managers that older workers are overqualified and will cost too much both for salary and benefits.

Don’t Ask About Previous Pay

Speaking of salary, Massachusetts and New York recently passed legislation prohibiting employers from asking about salary and it soon may be illegal in all 50 states.

Don’t Ask About Pregnancy, Even When It’s Obvious

It’s even trickier when it comes to pregnancy. When you consider that women make up over 57% of the workforce, and Pew Research  indicates that 40% of working mothers are breadwinners, it’s not hard to imagine a hiring manager asking a woman who is visibly pregnant when she is due.

“Asking the question is not per se illegal,” notes Flores. However, she says it is illegal to consider pregnancy (which is a protected status) when making employment decisions, including hiring. “Asking the question could be used as evidence that the prospective employer considered the pregnancy in its hiring decision,” Flores says.

If the candidate is visibly and obviously pregnant, she can offer to discuss it, says Flores, but in no way is she required to mention anything. “Frankly, when a male candidate interviews, I have not heard of a regular inquiry if his spouse is pregnant or if he intends on having a child at some point in the next year,” Flores points out, “but certainly he may be entitled to time off to care for a pregnant wife or in light of a newborn or adopted child.”

In Fact, Don’t Ask About Their Families At All

It may seem like small talk, but discriminating based on marital status is illegal. So avoid asking about a candidate’s spouse or commenting on an engagement ring unless they bring it up first.

Don’t Ask Where They Learned To Speak Another Language

If a job candidate is proficient in another language and indicates it on their resume, it’s still risky to ask where they learned to speak it. According to an HR guide from the State University of New York at Albany, this question could lead to an applicant revealing they learned the language at home and therefore about their ethnic background that could later on be used as grounds for a discrimination complaint. 

Don’t Ask Where They Go To Church

Many interviewers ask questions to see if a candidate will be a cultural fit for the company. That could include where they attend church, but doing so could be interpreted as religious bias. “Unless the employer is a church or other religious institution (where arguably it may be relevant), a job seeker could politely decline,” Flores says. She suggests deflecting the question by saying something like “I always think it is best to keep religion and politics out if the workplace,” and then ask the interviewer a job-related question.

Be Careful When Asking About  Hobbies And Corporate Sports Teams

This also applies to hobbies and physical pursuits, especially at companies that encourage staff to exercise together and provide on-site facilities. Flores says answering such a question depends on the job seeker’s comfort level. “If they do not want to answer, I would answer with hobbies that do not reveal the disability,” she suggests. If the question is about being interested to play on the company’s softball team, she says one possible way to deflect would be, “I’ve never been much into playing softball, but I will be your #1 fan in the stands.”

Why This Matters and How To Avoid Unintentional Bias

Overall, Flores recommends that employers ensure they actually have a “bona fide occupational qualification” that would exclude some applicants by speaking to a seasoned employment lawyer to determine if it will qualify under federal and their respective state laws. Then, she says, they must convey that to every candidate and emphasize that they are an equal opportunity employer and will hire those that are capable of performing the essential duties of the job with reasonable accommodation.

But she also cautions hiring managers to consider how their own unconscious biases could be creeping into the decision-making process. This could come from uninformed interviewers, which is why she recommends that companies train all hiring managers on what kind of topics and questions should be avoided (anything related to marital status, age, or religion). Beware of subconsciously considering protected characteristics in weighing a candidate’s worthiness for a position or whether to recommend a call-back interview, she says.

No matter how good your intentions, Flores says that “all employers should be mindful of unlawful bias creeping into considerations and determinations of the “best” candidate.”

Few would deny that the iPhone was the most significant technological breakthrough of the past decade or that their iPhone (or similar smartphone) is their most important possession—but how much do you really know about the device?

That is the question Brian Merchant found himself wondering a few years ago. The technology reporter had accidentally forgotten his iPhone in a taxi, and immediately became painfully aware of just how much he relied on it.

“I would do anything to make sure I had this thing back in my pocket,” he tells Fast Company, recalling how he took time off work to report the phone missing and attempted to find it. “I thought about what else in the world I would even do that for, and then I realized that even though I was a technology reporter, I felt like my grasp of this device was very thin beyond just as a consumer product.”

Merchant spent the next year and a half seeking to track down the many untold stories behind the iPhone. His journey took him from the tin mines of Bolivia to assembly plants in China, from conversations with those Apple employees who were in the room during the product’s invention to the unsung designers and engineers who were equally as instrumental in bringing it to life.

The result is a book that publishes today, on the device’s 10th anniversary, titled The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. Merchant recently sat down with Fast Company to discuss some of the history, mythology, and untold stories behind the only device most people would miss work to retrieve from the backseat of a taxi.

(The following interview has been condescend and edited in the interest of space.)

Brian Merchant: The way we conceive of the iPhone is very reductive—it’s very simple, it’s very useful to Apple but not much else. It’s a mythology of a product that we’ve been sold. I was just as guilty of buying into it as anyone. The story as I knew it was Steve Jobs and some dudes at Apple invented this thing and bequeathed it to the world. The end.

The biggest revelation for me was that there’s this invisible city worth of people and history behind the iPhone that all worked together collectively to make this thing possible. It’s an incomprehensible feat of human collaboration and achievement that spans decades. It’s just full of hidden history, of laborers, of manufacturers, of miners, of inventors who never got credit for their slice of the iPhone pie, of innovators, of business geniuses, all these stories never get told because we were told that Steve Jobs said, “Let there be an iPhone.” My hope is that when people walk away and think about the iPhone their first thought isn’t Steve Jobs.

FC: You say the mythology you’re attempting to debunk has value to Apple, does that suggest they weren’t willing participants in this book?

BM: We had a series of polite conversations with Apple while writing the book. They were fully aware of what I was doing, but they never agreed to give me an interview or make an on-the-record comment.

FC: One of the assertions you make that flies in the face of the Steve Jobs’s mythology is that the iPhone’s success had a lot to do with fortuitous timing. How so? 

BM: The window was there for the iPhone in the sense that consumer-facing multitouch touchscreen technology had just been innovated to the point where it was highly usable, processors had gotten powerful and low energy-consuming enough for a mobile device—so many factors converged to make it possible. That doesn’t make it inevitable or make it easy, but it made this buffet line of technologies and ideas that were there for the picking. What Apple did was it took them and made some serious leaps in innovation, such as getting multitouch onto a glass screen and getting Mac OS to run on a tiny handheld device. The way they integrated it and designed it and wrote the software for the user interface, that was really unparalleled at the time.

BM: The iPod really elevated Apple’s status in a lot of ways, and not only that but it provided the impetus for them to do the iPhone in the first place. The reason why Steve Jobs was convinced to pursue an iPhone was because he was worried the increasingly smart cell phones would soon be able to load MP3s, and they would eat the iPod’s lunch. That was the business case that caused Jobs to pull the trigger on the iPhone, even though the technology for it had been available inside of Apple for a little while. Without the iPod, there’s no iPhone. It really gave Apple the confidence to pursue a consumer product outside of laptops and desktops.

FC: In the book you grapple with the question of whether the invention was ultimately a net positive or negative for society. Where do you land on that now?

BM: Any technology with mass adoption comes with a double-edged sword, with detrimental effects and societal boons. You’ll always have this tension between the benefits of constant connectivity and being able to network and stay in touch and organize a protest and call your loved ones from anywhere at anytime, with the constant distractions and concerns of addiction and the growth of the 24/7 work ethic.

What I found interesting is that I thought the iPhone inventors would be straightforwardly optimistic about their creation because they sacrificed so much of their lives to make it happen, but almost without fail they were all ambivalent.

FC: When you look at your phone, what do you see now that you didn’t before you began working on the book?

BM: Once you speak to these Chinese line workers who quit out of desperation after a year in the Foxconn factory, you see people working in these giant factory blocks that are unfathomably huge, you hear those stories about those sleepless nights to get the device ready, the divorces and personal relationships that were shattered, the cost of the innovations and the human costs, that’s un-ignorable.

When I have a second and I look at it, parts of it now remind me of that whole giant supply chain and this iPhone infrastructure that I traced in The One Device. But such is the power and ubiquity of this device that once I’m back to my routine and my day-to-day, it’s back to being just another tool.

On Friday, June 29, 2007, I got up extra-early and headed to the Stonestown Galleria shopping center in San Francisco. By 7:20 a.m., there was already a sizable line of people waiting to buy the first iPhone, which wouldn’t go on sale until 6 p.m. that night at the Apple Store inside the mall.

I queued up–which actually involved sitting on the pavement near the entrance–but later left to join the far longer line at the flagship Apple Store in downtown San Francisco, where the mood was part block party, part circus, and part Event of Historical Significance. (TV reporters were pulling individuals out of line for interviews.) After hours more waiting, I reached the front, entered the store, and climbed its glass staircase to the checkout area on the second floor, as Apple employees in commemorative T-shirts cheered the first people to purchase iPhones. It felt like I was ascending to some sort of heavenly kingdom of eternal consumerism.

And then, after I’d left, I learned that the line had petered out and it was possible to saunter into the store and be a day-one iPhone buyer with hardly any effort at all.

I did all this as a reporter for my employer at the time, PC World, and blogged about the experience. (I bought and expensed the iPhone so we could review it; I didn’t purchase one for myself until a year later, when the first 3G model came along.) I knew I was experiencing something odd and remarkable. I did not, however, realize that it would set a standard for irrationally exuberant excitement over a consumer product that would seem untoppable a decade later.

(I continued to cover the “iLines” for Apple product launches for several years after the first iPhone’s debut–when I arrived at the Stonestown Galleria at 5:30 a.m. to buy an iPad in 2010, I met a man who had been there since 4 a.m.–but by 2011 I was struck by the uneventfulness of the much-awaited Verizon iPhone’s arrival at retail.)

2007’s iPhone mania certainly had its precedents. Cabbage Patch Kids and Tickle Me Elmo instigated shopping frenzies that seem even more inexplicable in retrospect than they did at the time; people really did show up at CompUSA at midnight in 1995 to buy Windows 95. But no previous such phenomenon was as artfully manufactured as what Apple created. And any company that aspires to pull off something similar today would need to recreate an alchemy whose formula may have been lost to time.

Here’s why:

It would have to be an obviously epoch-shifting product. The first iPhone was clearly a great leap forward in a category–cell phones–that vast numbers of people already knew they were interested in. That’s a surprisingly rare occurrence in gadget history. It’s tough to imagine any new phone being as big a departure from what came before as the 2007 iPhone was–and even harder to think of new types of gadgets that could equal the hypnotic effect of the first iPhone.

It would need an iPhone-like build-up. Nearly six months elapsed between Steve Jobs’s unveiling of the iPhone on January 9, 2007 and the moment you and I could buy one. It’s a tribute to the device’s allure and Apple’s marketing prowess that the gap actually intensified consumer interest in the iPhone. People might have lost interest in a lesser gizmo in the interim.

Only Apple has Apple Stores. Their magnetic attraction to consumers was an ingredient in iPhone mania that, say, Samsung could not call on even if it had a phone that was dramatically more exciting than an iPhone. And for years, one of the most efficient ways to get a new iPhone has been to buy it from one of the major wireless carriers’ stores, which live outside of Apple’s reality-distortion field.

The hype machine would have to be set at 11. Apple mastered the marketing of technology products early in its history and remains its grand master, but its single greatest run of success may have been the decade that kicked off with the introduction of the first iPod in 2001. I’m not sure if the current Apple could whip up so much hoopla to such a potent effect, no matter what it was selling. I’m pretty confident no other tech company could.

Lining up would have to be mandatory. Apple only started taking online orders for the first iPhone at the same time it went on sale in stores. In later years, preorders became the norm, and it was possible to become one of the first people to get an iPhone from the comfort of your own home. An explosion of online orders isn’t as compelling a phenomenon as one that involves people descending upon retail establishments, even if the volume of purchases is identical. And by the launch of the first Apple Watch in 2015, Apple marketing honcho Angela Ahrendts explicitly decided she didn’t want lines outside stores and put a reservation-only buying system into effect.

People will continue to get giddy about interesting new products, as nearly a quarter-million folks did last year when they put down $1,000 deposits on Tesla Model 3 cars based on pre-announcement mystique and an Elon Musk event that did not come close to being a full reveal. But iPhone mania was a product of its time–and if some other gadget ever matches its fervor, it will likely do it in an altogether different way.

“Right now, I’m representing a 1-year-old facing deportation to El Salvador, where her life is in danger,” says Allegra Love, an attorney and founder of the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, a legal nonprofit serving immigrant youth. Tens of thousands refugees have fled El Salvador due to rampant gang violence.

Another client includes a Mexican immigrant who was separated from his 4-year-old son on the border several months ago. He is in jail, while the child remains detained in El Paso.

Love is a lawyer tirelessly devoted to an immigrant sector most in need of legal aid: the rural one. In 2014, she launched the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, which serves immigrant families where there is traditionally no legal aid. Love and her team of three other lawyers go out to the people—via a roaming RV office, community center, and church pop-ups, and by organizing community leaders.

The Project primarily focuses on assisting individuals in deportation defense (specifically political asylum and special immigrant juvenile status) and through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) process, the immigration policy founded by the Obama administration in June 2012.

DACA allows certain undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and receive eligibility for a work permit. Currently, more than 750,000 people are part of the program, and 1.5 million are potentially eligible.

With total staff of just eight, the Santa Fe Dreamers Project counts 500 immigrants as clients. It runs three programs: in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and via a van that runs across the state called Dreams on Wheels.

“All these people were driving in [for legal advice],” recalls Love, “so we thought: Why not bring the services to them?”

“Kids Just Stopped Going To School”

This catalyst for her mobile legal aid clinic came in 2006, before she was a lawyer. At that time Love was a  24-year-old third grade public school teacher.

She was teaching a class of 20 children in a small immigrant town in the Santa Fe school district when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted a raid on her school. The next day, her class was reduced to just three.

“Kids just stopped going to school,” says Love.

Appalled at the politics in play within her classroom, Love decided she wanted to advocate for these families whom she had grown to respect and cherish during her brief teaching career.

“Why were we terrorizing these people?” she wondered. “They’re good people … They work hard.”

After learning that legal resources were scarce for immigrant families, Love applied and enrolled in the University of New Mexico School of Law. Following her graduation, she worked with a nonprofit called Adelante that helps children from homeless families within the Santa Fe school system. There, Love learned the complications that arise with children from immigrant and lower-income families, specifically in terms of legal status.

With that experience, Love began fundraising for her own endeavor, the Santa Fe Dreamers project, to guide youth through the labyrinth-like DACA process. Two years ago, she hired another attorney and hit the road in her old, kitschy turquoise van, an attempt to bring a playful aspect to an otherwise dreary sector.

The Project partnered with United We Dream, the largest national immigrant youth-led organization, which executed the fieldwork in rural areas prior to the van’s arrival. United We Dream’s community organizers reached out to schools, churches, and community centers to drum up interest. Then, each weekend, Love and her colleague would drive out to meet their potential new clients.

In fact, several of her clients included a handful of her former students.

“It takes a lot of management–and customer service,” says Love. “You’re working with clients who are very traumatized and very scared.”

“Being A Lawyer Means Standing By Someone’s Side Till The End.”

From the RV, they help immigrants fill out forms, understand legal language, and set up teleconference calls to keep tabs on their progress. Scheduled videoconferences, weekly calls, and checking in on documents is part of the job.

“The case isn’t over once you submit [the application] to the government,” explains Love; “that’s when all the trouble starts.” In fact, the majority of the legal work she provides is in the form of government correspondence following filed applications, or as she puts it, “when the shit hits the fan.” This a full service that guides immigrants from first to last steps, no matter the complications that come in between.

It’s also why, she explains, it’s so difficult to recruit volunteer lawyers. They need to be able to commit all the way through. “You need more than one day in a gym with someone,” asserts Love. “Being a lawyer means standing by someone’s side till the end.”

Theoretically, immigration processes are meant to be done without the assistance of a lawyer, but they are so complicated, says Love, that even a competent person who speaks perfect English “would find it mind-boggling.” Expecting a 15-year-old immigrant for whom English is a second language to go to a government website, download the instructions, and figure it out on his or her own is “so unreasonable.” Legal help is simply a necessity, she says.

Not that legal aid is even in reach for most. On average, immigration lawyer services on the private market run $2,000. “That’s rent money,” says Love.

The Santa Fe Dreamers project, in comparison, charges $150. Although, it isn’t as simple as setting up shop at the local diner with clients flocking for affordable help. A portion of immigrants fell victim to scammers claiming cheap, easy legal services. Others, meanwhile, were simply guided through the initial steps. Setting up a reputation as a reliable full-scale service, says Love, is a crucial part of the process. One can’t Skype their way to building a community relationship.

In that sense, Love and her colleagues will travel out to a district, set up a booth, and then come back the very same time the following week—for several weeks. On average, 10 people would show up to an initial pop-up. But after two weeks, 50 people wait for the RV.

“You have to be there [physically],” she says. “You have to establish trust in the community.”

Once they earn the community’s support, clients quickly spread the word to neighbors, cousins, church members. Then community organizers express interest in helping facilitate the next drop-in. Most recently, a mariachi school offered their studio space to The Project.

“But you can’t do it unless initially present,” cautions Love, “you need the face time.”

Community support not only minimizes the amount of effort the lawyers spend getting the word out, it’s also essential in the fundraising process. A year ago, The Project’s budget hovered around $60,000. Now, it’s nearly quadrupled, but so has the staff. The Project does not receive any federal or state funding. Instead, its relies on donations–the majority ranging from $20-$200–from community members who believe in the cause. (There are a few “big donors,” says Love, though she did not disclose specific amounts.)

The Trump Effect

The RV was on, well, a roll till this past winter. Once Donald Trump was declared the presidential victor, Love and her team of lawyers found themselves flooded with inquiries. President Trump has yet to make a firm decision on the future of DACA, but his stance on immigration has made her clients nervous. The DACA program’s existence depends on the discretion of the president, and could potentially be dismantled without congressional approval.

Since January, Love reports fielding hundreds of calls from “terrified” immigrants. That effectively halted the progress of the mobile clinic, decreasing its outings by nearly half, as the lawyers focused on mounting cases in their main Santa Fe office.

Love and associates now have to provide more than just DACA services. In January, for example, they set up an event in an elementary school gym for parents to write power of attorney documents in case they were arrested. Over 500 showed up.

“[These parents] are afraid something is going to happen to them and they will be separated from their children,” Love says with a hint of emotion. “Just one of those conversations is enough to wreck you.”

She routinely deals with parents from Central America whose children faced physical and sexual abuse in their home country. Other parents, she says, refuse to show up to spousal abuse cases because they fear U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be there.

Apart from the emotional and physical toll of her workload, Love is frustrated. She says that so many plans and programs in the pipeline have since been paused. This includes setting up a deferred action-to-home-ownership pipeline, establishing an economic incubator for immigrant women, and expanding the roaming mobile clinic to more areas.

“It’s a huge wasted opportunity,” she sighs. “Instead, we’re having to respond and react to this onslaught from the Administration. But we’re slowly getting back to life, it’s just taking a minute.”

Why Effective Immigration Policies Are Good Business

The Santa Fe Dreamers Project considers itself more than a charity. Love wants to highlight how effective immigration policies go beyond humanitarian reasons—it’s just good business. She intends to change the public’s narrative, shifting the focus to what communities can expect by investing in young immigrants. “We need to stop talking about [immigration] as if it’s charity,” stresses Love. “We need to start crunching numbers.”

DACA youth, says Love, will ultimately contribute to the U.S. economy in innumerable ways, if just given the chance. They go to college, become health care providers, own a home—as long as they have access to social services and work papers.

“It changes the game,” she says.

And she has the numbers to support it. Love has built a case with data from DACA and the New Mexico government, a model she intends to bring to other states.

According to the data that she’s compiled as part of her DACA project research, she found that Santa Fe has a 65% high school graduation rate, but deferred action children boast a 90% rate. “This investment we’re making into them is immense,” she says. “We call it a ladder out of poverty.”

On a larger scale, New Mexico immigrants contribute $915 million annually in state and federal taxes, nulling the idea that immigrants don’t pay their dues. Meanwhile, 11,440 New Mexico businesses have been founded by immigrants, and 12.6% of business owners are immigrants, with nearly 24,000 New Mexicans employed at firms owned by immigrants. In general, immigrants are nearly twice as likely to start businesses as native-born Americans.

They are also integral to New Mexico’s agriculture economy, which contributes $1.6B to the state’s GDP. Immigrants compose 51% of agriculture workers.

The Project’s marketing campaign touts individual success stories and numbers from the DACA program, promoting the idea that DACA is less like a handout and more like an incubator program. The focus is on economic and community development.

“What if instead of wringing our hands and pitying [immigrants]… we built them up for success? Could we create momentum and get long-term data about how that impacts not just their individual progress, but their family’s wellbeing, and the overall wellbeing of our community?”

Community support has opened the non-profit into new territories, including that of prisons, to defend deportations of vulnerable children and victims of domestic violence. “All of this is through the focus of: let’s stabilize the individual and pull them in from the margins so they can contribute to our very struggling state.”

Love is remodeling the RV to prepare it for an aggressive summer tour. It is being stripped of its bed and microwave and “tricked out” with more computers, wifi hotspots, and a printer. The goal is have it better serve as “an office on wheels” so as to limit the amount of times it needs to come back to Santa Fe headquarters. It will hopefully be on the road for weeks, perhaps even months, at a time.

Love is also “perfecting” the process of her services and setting up a model for other states to follow suit. She’s outlining how fellow lawyers can ride their own mobiles into new territories and scale the service with high quality.

With that, she’s adamant on pushing her chief message—that immigrants can be a boon to one’s community and state.

“We want the community to make the initial investment and they can expect a return on it” says Love. “We want to let them know this model works.”

“I can’t stop the Trump administration,” she continues. “I don’t have the tools to do it. So I’m trying to have faith in the idea that we can create true sanctuary for our clients if we make them indispensable—if they become integral to our communities, schools, hospitals, economy, workforce, universities … people will come around when that’s in place, that’s how my heart is getting through these times.”

Much has already been said and written about the global impact of the iPhone. I won’t add to the pile of superlatives. But given how important the device has become over the past decade, it’s fun to watch the footage on and leading up to the day the iPhone launched a decade ago on June 29, 2007.

Jobs Sets The Stage In January

After months and months of hype and speculation, Steve Jobs officially set the stage for the launch of the iPhone when he announced the device at MacWorld Expo on January 9, 2007. “This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,” Jobs said, referring to the time interval between the envisioning and completion of the iPhone.

One interesting thing about the announcement (at 2:05 in the video): Jobs described the iPhone as three things, in this order: an iPod (wild applause), a phone (wild applause), and an internet communications device (tepid applause). The world, apparently, wasn’t quite ready (or didn’t know it was ready) for an always-with-you internet in your back pocket. That would change rapidly after the first year.  

Jobs Talks To ABC On iLaunch Eve

There is a major breakthrough headed for American consumers–it’s the iPhone, an iPod, a cell phone, and a portable internet all in a little lightweight package, said host Cynthia McFadden to open the segment. Jobs told ABC: “We don’t really worry about that. We just try to build products that are wonderful and that people might want.”

Launch Day

The iPhone didn’t exactly fly off the shelves in the first year, but there was still a lot of excitement among tech nerds and Apple faithful on launch day.

The Mossberg Review

“In my 16 years of reviewing tech products I can’t remember any product having this kind of hype and expectations around it,” said the Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg to open his review of the iPhone. He was one of four journalists who got one in advance, and he mostly loved it.

1,001 Unboxings

People who waited in line at the local Apple Store hurried home with their booty afterward and hurriedly hooked up their web cams. Carefully and reverently, they revealed the new iThing to the world on YouTube. Touching, in a way.

Do you remember where you were on June 29, 2007?

I’ve raised around a billion dollars in funding from venture capitalists and have been an angel investor in dozens of companies, so I’m not surprised when founders ask me for pitching advice. Having been on both sides of the table, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t many times over.

And what works is pretty simple: Winning pitches paint a grand picture. They unveil a huge need, show a broken problem, and present a great solution. There’s validation from customers right from the get-go, and a real business model that shows how big this company could get if it’s given the opportunity.

But if that’s the main thing, it’s not all there is to it. Here are three quick tips I’ve found to be crucial every single time.

Related:Why $200 Adult Security Blankets Are A Stroke Of Startup Genius

Never Pitch Without Practice

Entrepreneurs can get stuck in the weeds. I’ve seen presenters spend 40 minutes on just one piece of a pitch and never tell the whole story. You can usually avoid pitfalls like this just through practice, but that doesn’t mean rehearsing in your boardroom. You need real-world practice.

When I work with entrepreneurs here in Los Angeles, I tell them to meet with four or five VCs locally. If they knock it out of the park in the first couple of meetings and get the terms they want, then great. But often in those first couple of meetings, they get asked questions they weren’t prepared for—and that’s a good thing.

This way, when they go up to Silicon Valley for those next five to six meetings, they’ll have slides that answer those questions—they’re at the top of their game and will be totally on the ball. Which leads me to my next piece of advice . . .

Make Pitches Five Through 10 The Ones That Really Count

No matter how much rehearsal and prep you do, you’ll never be as good in your first pitch meeting as your fifth. You need the rounds of feedback from high-stakes pitching to get the gaping holes in your story pointed out and to fill them in. With every refinement, you’ll be fixing smaller and smaller problems.

This way, you’ll be sandpapering the small scratches out, and once that’s finished you’re ready for the big show. Remember, you only get one shot.

Related:How I Successfully Pitched Investors As A 22-Year-Old Startup Founder

Put Your Punchline First

Skip the wind-up. There will be situations when you’re out networking and socializing, and you unexpectedly have a chance to give a VC your three-minute pitch. Lots of entrepreneurs will use that time to tell a story but never get to the punchline.

Investors want the punchline upfront and then the story behind it. I typically ask entrepreneurs, “You’re going to have three minutes to pitch someone, so what are the three most compelling points you can share?” And they tend to give me five. So I’ll say, “No, give me three—and you need to be able to do it in 60 seconds or less.” Don’t be afraid to get straight to the point.

Stick To A Formula

As with many things, figuring out your three-points-in-60-seconds formula is the hard part—but do that, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. Once you’ve nailed down an approach you like, following it should be easy. To help you find the formula that works for you, start by answering these questions as truthfully as you can:

• What’s the big problem I’m solving for?
• What’s my solution, and what makes it special and compelling?
• Do I have customer validation?
• What do I think the unit economics would be?
• How much cash would I need to hit profitability?
• Over the next 12 months with X amount of cash, what are the three things that I could tell the investor at the end of the 12 months that say, “You successfully invested your money”?

If you can’t answer those fundamental questions, then most investors will have a hard time pulling the trigger.

A final note about pitching: You need to make sure you have the right team. In rounds one, two, and three, most investors will tell you that they’re investing in the team. You can have an idea that knocks it out of the park, but if the VCs don’t think that the team can pull it off, they aren’t going to invest. Immense talent, experience, chemistry, and a history of success aren’t bad qualities to look for when you’re building the team that can pull off your vision. After all, that’s what VCs are looking for, too.

John Suh is the CEO of LegalZoom.

If you own a nice piece of ocean-front property, and I decide I would like that piece of property, and my cousin works in the land registry where we both live, I don’t need to buy the property from you to have it for my weekend parties. I can contact my cousin and ask him to transfer the record over to me.

Yes, that would be illegal, but in some developing countries, I might get away with it. With the application of a bribe here and there, it’s easy for me to change a public record, and hard for you, as the property owner, to rectify the situation. It’s basically your word against the public record, which you have no means of controlling. It happens all the time, according to corruption experts.

“It allow citizens of Georgia to validate the integrity of their record and have that record recorded publicly,” says Tomicah Tillemann, cofounder of the Blockchain Trust Accelerator, which helped to develop the project.

Until 2014, Tillemann worked as a State Department advisor on civil society and democracy-boosting technology. He helped set up a peer-to-peer network for democracies in transition, and, as revealed by one of the Clinton email leaks, he once went 100 hours without sleep as he finished a speech for Secretary Clinton about internet freedom.

“The critical challenge facing society right now is the breakdown in trust in institutions,” he tells Fast Company. “Blockchain was designed from the ground up to address that, creating systems that are highly secure, highly transparent and resistant to corruption.”

Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer showed how far public faith in institutions has fallen. In half the 28 countries surveyed, governments were the least trusted institutions; 14 countries showed falling trust levels from the year before.

Blockchains are decentralized ledgers with no singular control. They’re made up of “blocks” of data–say, transactions of bitcoin currency–stored simultaneously across computers making up a network. They create inviolable records that can only be amended under strict conditions and by the consent of network members. Thus, they’re very hard to corrupt. Before my cousin could sign over that beachfront property (bless him), he would need to amend the records on all the computers making up the blockchain (as well as the blocks in the chain that refer back to your block)–which is thought to be impossible.

Georgia’s need for more trustworthy public records dates back to the chaotic post-Soviet period when officials were accused of changing them at will. Today the country has a reputation for administrative transparency–at least compared to its neighbors–and Tillemann says it’s keen to maintain that reputation by adopting new approaches. The land registry project started as a pilot before being approved for full implementation. And the government is considering putting other registries and notary services on blockchains.

Another of the accelerator’s projects involves TechSoup, a network linking up hundreds of international nonprofits with technology tools. In March, it announced it was creating a blockchain-based registry allowing NGOs to identify themselves and validate key information in countries where non-profits are under government scrutiny or attack.

Tillemann says his work at the State Department was often stymied by basic technology deficits. “Even when [foreign] leaders had committed to doing the right thing, their underlying systems were broken,” he says. “There was so much potential for waste, fraud and corruption and it was very difficult to get the type of change citizens were looking for. All of this led us to an analysis of blockchain.”

The accelerator was founded by the National Democratic Institute, a non-profit that spreads democracy around the world, BitFury, a commercial blockchain service firm, and the New America Foundation. It’s part of the Bretton Woods II initiative, and aims to bring together technologists, funders, non-profits, and the public sector. Tillemann says it’s currently evaluating 25 projects across voting integrity, aid dispersal, and government efficiency, and is set to make some new funding announcements soon.

For-profit applications of blockchain are now receiving billions in funding, notably financial services. Tillemann calls that good validation for technology, but he thinks it would be a shame if only bankers got to enjoy the benefits. “We realized that billions are going into fintech, but some of the most compelling uses are around social impact and governance and addressing the needs of citizens,” he says.

Startups get a lot of advice. And for good reason–there are millions of decisions to be made as you begin the journey of building a company.

Some of the advice is clear-cut, and some less so. One of the most confusing piece of advice is perhaps the question of when and how a company should add HR or People functions.

There are a lot of reasons why this is particularly contentious territory:

• Tech companies often prize a relaxed environment (think: hoodies and office kegs) that blurs the line between work and social.
• Admittedly, HR doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s often associated with liability or the times when things go wrong.
• Startups generally pride themselves on being fast-moving, driven by philosophies like “done is better than perfect” and “move fast and break things.” They don’t want to get too bogged down by heavy policies and procedures.

As a result, tech startups with 100 or fewer employees have half as many HR professionals as same-size companies in other industries, according to data from PayScale.

Related:Everyone Knows HR Is Broken: Here’s How To Fix It 

But no matter what industry you’re in and at what stage of growth, all companies face some similar, important challenges that someone should be focusing on: keeping your company on track, creating a diverse and engaged team, and cultivating a culture your team is proud to identify with.

How HR Became People

HR’s tarnished reputation may explain why the discipline has increasingly been rebranded to “People” or “People Operations” in the tech world.

Google got the ball rolling on this trend by adopting the moniker of “People Operations” in 2006. As the change has progressed, it has proved more than just cosmetic. Instead, it’s been a catalyst to rethink the ultimate goal of the-area-formerly-known-as-HR: more data, less bureaucracy. More focus on the individual teammate, less time spent being a mouthpiece of management. More culture innovation, less legal tail covering.

If “old HR” is about managing, rules, and policies, People Operations is about designing work so that you want to be there.

So which one do you want for your team? According to Greenhouse, it depends on your goals.

• Traditional HR: ensuring compliance and decreasing liability issues
• People teams: maximizing employee value through talent acquisition and management, employee experience, and culture

At Buffer, we gravitated toward a People team.

When To Start A People Team

Buffer’s very first People team member was Deb, our former culture scout and current people success manager. Deb joined Buffer in October 2015. The overall Buffer team was more than 40 people at that point, and Buffer had been around for 3-plus years. Thinking back, the main reason we began to form a People team seems to have been our rate of growth during that time.

Consider Team Size And/Or Growth Rate

Project Include, an organization that provides resources for building meaningful, enduring diversity and inclusion into tech companies, recommends making HR one of your first 25 hires:

Someone needs to build culture, set boundaries and expectations of behavior, communicate them clearly, and make sure people comply. HR should be responsible for both recruiting and retention, and reinforce the company’s commitment to D&I. It must set up fair processes for people ops and hiring, onboarding, promotions and compensation, and performance reviews. It should drive and provide operational transparency. This includes processes like building organization charts, training for both employees and managers, building the code of conduct, and determining and implementing benefits.

Start Before You Need One

While there’s perhaps no hard-and-fast rule about when to start a People team, the main thing is to make sure someone is thinking about work structure and culture from an early stage.

From Uber to Tinder to Github, the tech world has had the opportunity to learn from many examples of leaving HR as an afterthought or eschewing it entirely.

Related:The Future Of HR And Why Startups Shouldn’t Reject It 

If you’re starting a People team because:

• You’re forced to by conflict on your team,
• You want to cover yourself legally, or
• Your culture sucks,

It might be too late–and your results might not be what you want them to be.

4 Reasons To Start A People Team

An important element of starting a People team is understanding your own company’s motivation for adding this role into the mix.

Reason One: Because You Want To Change The World

Okay, startups deservedly get a lot of flack for thinking every new app will “change the world.” But people really are looking for more than just a place to work these days. In a report from the recent Great Place to Work For All conference in Chicago, Ellen McGirt shared a news bulletin about what employees are looking for from employers today:

It’s not just snacks and foosball. Across the board, employees want their organizations to be stabilizing forces in society, openly tackling social ills like race, poverty, and unequal opportunity. Everyone I talked to found this trend to be a thrilling and terrifying prospect that was going to reshape business systems and thinking at every level.

As workplace culture grows and expands to include even world culture at large, People teams are poised to be the front lines of this change.

Reason Two: Because You Care About Building A Diverse Team

Focusing on diversity and inclusion is the path I took into the world of the People team, and it remains a key priority for Buffer.

Though most startups like to keep things loose, diversity is one area where more rules and “bureaucracy” can actually be quite beneficial. Using data on young high-technology companies in California’s Silicon Valley, this study found evidence that “bureaucratization improves employment prospects for women in core scientific-technical roles.”

People teams can provide the explicit structure needed to bust bias and open the door to underrepresented groups. Without this structure, it’s tempting to fall back on hiring people like you, and place too much emphasis on the nebulous concept of “culture fit.”

Reason Three: Because You Want To Succeed

An eight-year-long study conducted during the first dotcom boom found that companies that tended to bring in HR expertise first were the fastest to go public and the least likely to fail.

Reason Four: Because You Want Your Teammates To Grow and Succeed

Perhaps the most obvious reason to start a People team might be this: You want your people, and therefore your company, to succeed.

From Google’s data-driven People Ops blueprint came Project Oxygen, an attempt to figure out exactly what makes a great manager. From the guiding question of, “What if every Googler had an awesome manager?” Project Oxygen identified eight common behaviors among the best managers–and those behaviors now guide management development programs.

The team has been able to show an overall improvement in management at Google by helping managers get better at coaching, empowering teams, managing team energy, staying results-oriented, communicating, developing teams, and sharing a vision.

A version of this article originally appeared at Buffer and is adapted with permission. 

Diversity, or lack thereof, is still a hot button issue in tech. Not having a balance of gender, age, race, etc. in any company can have far-reaching repercussions. Yet while an Uber exec recently scoffed at transparency, claiming such reporting does little to move the needle, Alphabet/Google continues to soldier on, releasing its latest report today.

The numbers still show that the company is largely white and male, and progress has been incremental. A blog post penned by Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice president of People Operations, asserts that women now make up 31% of employees. Those in tech roles have increased to 20%, and female leadership is now at 25%. Black employees in non-tech roles make up 5% of the total U.S. staff and Hispanics comprise 4%.

The tech giant pioneered the reporting of diversity numbers back in 2014 when it became the first major tech company to release data on the gender and ethnic makeup of its staff–visualized by a doodle. At that time, women made up 30% of the global workforce (of 73,000+) and held just 21% of leadership roles. Blacks and Hispanics combined comprised 5% of the U.S. team. Employees outside the U.S. are not required to self-report race and parent company Alphabet no longer shares U.S.-only or Google-only staff numbers.

Google subsequently invested $256 million on various efforts and initiatives to diversify its staff, including internships, computer labs for underserved middle school students, and the Howard West engineering residency sponsored by Google vice president Bonita Stewart. There’s also  the ongoing Google in Residence initiative, which embeds Google engineers at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and is aimed at tackling the pipeline problem. Yet as Naughton acknowledges, “clearly, there is much more to do.”

That’s why the report is accompanied by the announcement of a new vice president of diversity. Danielle Brown, the former vice president and chief diversity officer for Intel, starts in July. Brown has been on the front lines of Intel’s 5-year, $300 million plan to boost diversity and inclusion, which had started to shift the balance of a global staff of more than 107,000 employees. Biannual reporting revealed similar incremental gains, as well as areas for improvement, which drove new initiatives. As Brown told Fast Company this February, “We are not doubling in size every year,” so a 2% increase among 50,000 employees in the U.S. alone is a still a large number of people.

Brown faces a similar climb at Google, coupled with a demand for transparency. As Naughton writes, “More than other industries, the technology sector is extremely open about its challenges in creating a diverse and inclusive workforce. We all welcome the conversation and the scrutiny; it helps us raise the bar in terms of this important work and our commitment to it.”

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it can also make fiction stranger.

While creating the law enforcement meta-comedy, Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg interviewed a lot of cops–adding a layer of realness to the thug-busting behaviors they’d conjured up. In order to achieve the same effect with his zippy heist movie, Baby Driver, however, Wright decided to go another way and interview, well, the opposite of cops.

As Wright developed the screenplay for the just-released Baby Driver, a music-driven passion project two decades in the making, he reached out to ex-cons as a primary resource. He spoke to getaway drivers and armed robbers, to get a sense of how his story of a hearing-impaired wheelman might actually play out in real life. As a result, it’s not just the 95% practical effects-generated, surgically choreographed action scenes that make the film feel real; it’s the details cribbed from actual criminals.

“As an English middle class kid,” the director says, “it was sort of important to me that if I’m gonna write an American crime film, the only way I can authenticate this is to speak to the real deal.”

Wright tracked down some of the ex-cons through rehabilitation programs, and others he discovered as writers—either crime novelists or nonfiction chroniclers. His research team would screen each of the contributors with initial interviews, and then he ended up meeting with a handful himself, both in London and Los Angeles.

“I asked them very general questions about their jobs, and some very specific questions about what I’d written,” Wright says, “and it really helped flesh out the details of the movie.”

The interviews surfaced priceless nuggets about process, along with some ear-bending anecdotes and lines of dialogue. Ultimately, these details helped separate Baby Driver from the churn of Hollywood heist movies, with an injection of lived-in wisdom. For instance, the idea put forth by many other such movies that getaway drivers prefer muscle cars turns out to be fantasy. (Real wheelmen are determined to blend in.)

“Getaway drivers are there to help you rejoin the flow of traffic,” Wright says, “so their main job isn’t about having high-speed chases but removing yourself from the freeway and disappearing into normal traffic.”

Other process points that made it into the film–warning: lightest possible spoilers ahead–include stealing cars from a long-stay parking structure so they’ll stay unreported for a long time, doing it on the day of the job, and switching both cars and drivers after evading police so any descriptions are no longer accurate. It’s all simple subterfuge that has proven successful. Well, except for whenever the people telling Wright about these experiences eventually got caught.

They also gave the director lengthy accounts about particular heists. One ex-con, the author and TV writer Joe Loya, had so much to contribute, Wright kept him on board throughout filming as a script consultant. Loya had committed 30 bank robberies and gone to jail for 10 years before becoming a professional writer. Some of his stories and dialogue ended up directly in the film

“When I asked Joe Loya if he’d ever listen to music on the way to a job, he said, ‘On the way? Never. I got enough demons up here making music,'” Edgar recalls. “And I knew right then that was going right in.”

Indeed, Jamie Foxx devours that line, word for word, in Baby Driver.

Richard Marinick, an ex-armored car robber from Boston who authored the book, Boyos, also found his words in the finished film. When Wright asked him the same question about music, Marinick told a story about getting spooked on the way to a job. One member of the crew he’d been working with took it as a bad omen that the Guns ‘N Roses cover of “Knocking On Heaven’s Door” was blaring out over the radio. He considered it a hex on the heist to come and convinced everyone else they were doomed. The heebie-jeebies proved contagious and the team bailed on the job. Wright ended up writing a brief scene around the anecdote.

Taken together, all these details helped inform a movie that should play with ex-heisters the way Saving Private Ryan does with veterans. They will feel seen. After Joe Loya watched the film, he told Wright that Baby Driver perfectly captured the mania of what it’s like to be in the middle of a heist and getting away.

Of course, sometimes the truth is too fiction-like for fiction. Another one of Loya’s music choices–he would play “Smooth Criminal” by Michael Jackson after completing a getaway–was deemed too unrealistic for the movie.

If you live in Texas or Louisiana, your community will be harder hit by climate change than cities in New Hampshire or Oregon. By the end of the century, if emissions continue unchecked, some parts of the U.S. will see far greater economic damage from climate than others–and because the communities that will be affected most tend to be poorer, the shift will also widen income inequality.

A new map shows the projected county-by-county damages for the last two decades of the century, with the counties facing the heaviest burden shown in dark red. Those in green are likely to see some economic benefit, though as temperatures continue to warm, those benefits may be temporary. The impacts are highest in the South, where temperatures are already hotter.

In Phoenix, for example, where temperatures regularly reach well over 100 degrees already, an increase in average temperatures would mean an increase in deaths. Agriculture in the area would struggle with the heat and lack of rain. Workers would get less work done, especially outdoors. Energy bills would go up. In a cooler location, such as Seattle, climate change might have the opposite effect: an increase in temperatures could actually reduce mortality rates and energy costs.

“You get this pattern where the north benefits and the south is really harmed because it’s already so hot,” he says. “But it also happens to be the case that the south tends to be poorer today, due to a variety of historical circumstances, and the north tends to be richer. If the south tends to be damaged more, and they tend to be poorer, you end up widening inequality.”

The level of detail in the analysis, which took four years, goes beyond anything ever achieved in the past; prior studies often used rough estimates or limited models that looked at the continental scale, not individual counties. The researchers pulled 116 other studies into their model, using a system designed to be updated as more studies become available (the damages will be more significant than it is possible to estimate now–it isn’t yet possible to easily assign a cost to the loss of biodiversity that will also come from climate change, for example).

Advances in computing also made it possible for the researchers to run 29,000 simulations of the national economy. “This took a huge amount of cloud computing time and power… That’s the kind of thing that would have been impossible 10 years ago, and unimaginable 20 years ago,” Hsiang says. “Now that we know how to do these types of things, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be doing them in real time. Not just for climate change, but for everything–for deforestation, for global fisheries- we should be leveraging these tools in ways that we haven’t applied them in the past.”

The new analysis could be used in two key ways: First, to help people better understand the consequences of decisions made on climate policy now, and second, to begin to better prepare for local impacts. In a 2016 survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, most Americans agreed that global warming was happening, but few thought it would harm them personally. Opinions on whether it would ever harm people in the U.S. were mixed, particularly in some of the counties that will be most affected. (It’s worth noting that climate change has already been linked to impacts in the U.S., and though the map shown here focuses on the end of the century, more damage will occur earlier).

“It’s not like the response should be uniform across the country,” says Hsiang. “We want to tailor it to what we expect to matter most in different parts of the country. This type of analysis lets us see where we should focus.”

Now, the researchers are working on a version for the rest of the world. “This project started four years ago, and partway through, we realized this is working,” he says. “We’re going to achieve many of the things we wanted to achieve. So we’ve taken the methods and innovations here and are scaling them up to the entire planet.”

Earlier this week Facebook announced that it hit 2 billion users, which is no small feat. For context, that’s over a quarter of the world’s population—making it without a doubt the most popular social network in the world. And founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quick to tell us–the world–that he’s only getting started. “We still have a long way to go to connect everyone,” he wrote in a Facebook comment.

Left unsaid was that Facebook is also still trying to figure out its role and its responsibility for how those billion of users connect with each other. Once again, that challenge was made all too clear with a blockbuster ProPublica exposé, divulging a secret handbook used by the company’s content moderators. According to the leaked documents, Facebook had a very strict system for determining what sort of speech is and isn’t permissible on the site—but it had the unintended effect of harming the most vulnerable groups.

White Men, Not Black Children, Are Protected

These rules included almost legalistic specifications about what is written in a flagged post, advising content moderators to look out for posts that attack “protected” categories. According to ProPublica, these “PCs” are people who are grouped by “race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and serious disability/disease.” But when one of these categories is grouped with a non-protected category, they lose their “PC” status. It’s an algebra of cultural control, leading to perverse results. For example, one training slide asks which of the following three groups are protected from speech on Facebook: female drivers, black children, or white men. “The correct answer: white men,” reports ProPublica. Why? Because both descriptors are considered “protected,” whereas the other two groups included non-protected descriptors like “drivers” and “children.”

These rules are meant to create an orderly and expedited process when dealing with the millions of posts uploaded to Facebook each day. But in their color-blindness, they remain strictly theoretical with no sense of real-world dynamics, protecting the powerful and harming the powerless.

The New Yorker’s Adrian Chen tweeted yesterday, in response to the ProPublica story, that “concerns about Facebook “hyper-democratizing” media tend to ignore all the ways it’s biased towards the powerful.” He was specifically highlighting how, despite headlines of globalized and interconnected social media helping oppressed voices during the Arab Spring, Facebook’s rules actually ended up favoring “elites and governments over grassroots and racial minorities.”

Facebook tells ProPublica that many of these rules are no longer in effect. That may be beside the point. Facebook, for all its posturing about being the open and connected platform for everyone, is essentially a black box. The workings of its internal mechanics is not visible to the public. When people question its algorithm and ask how it surfaces content, the company says as little as possible. We only ever learn more about its internal processes via tiny announcements (such as the recent press release saying that the company is going to hire more content moderators) or unsanctioned leaks like this.

A Company “Run By A Bunch Of Ivy League Graduates”

Before this news came to light, I spoke with privacy activist Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. According to her, one of the most alarming problems with Facebook is that we know so little. “I want them to be more transparent about how content moderation works,” she says.

With every change the company makes, York says, Facebook is implicitly admitting that it plays a huge role in what sort of speech is acceptable. And every time it tweaks an algorithm or moderation system, it has huge implications for digital culture and how speech is disseminated. Despite all this, says York, “they don’t admit they have a huge problem.”

Only when the public sees that Facebook trains moderators to protect white men instead of black children do we get a sense of its definition of “free speech.” By creating a one size fits all system about how to censor content for billions of people representing millions of cultures, Facebook necessarily creates two distinct buckets for whom it protects and whom it doesn’t protect. And vulnerable groups are the ones who suffer.

One thing Facebook should do, says York, is finally open up. A company that is “run by a bunch of Ivy League graduates” is only going to propel this problem “unless they bring in real experts.” If a group of white men are making the decisions for Facebook, it becomes pretty obvious who will be considered a protected group. Creating an algorithm to comb through content won’t cut it. “This is not a technological problem,” says York.

Facebook, now bigger than any government in the world, wants to be the social network for everyone. As things stand now, it’s a hubristic mission. Mark Zuckerberg wants to get the remaining 6 billion people signed up. Yet will Facebook look out for them and protect them from harm?

If you ask the company, it will point to its new mission to be a “global community.” Phrases like “free speech” and “connectivity” will likely be thrown in. The slides from ProPublica, however, tell us a different story by showing the real-world consequences of its approach.

Not many of life’s great adventures begin in a hotel function room, the kind with putty-colored walls. I walk into the Flamingo Room of the Renaissance Hotel just east of Fort Lauderdale to find rows of straight-backed chairs, each with a blue tote bag on the seat, each tote bag with a name tag clipped to it.

This is looking less like the ride of a lifetime and more like a corporate retreat.

As people drift in, a staff member—Terese Brewster, the CEO of this outfit—calls out, “Please find the tote bag with your name on it. You’ll find a flight suit inside. We need everyone to put on their flight suits.”

I’m not big on adventures that require me to change my clothes, especially so I look just like everyone else. I lean over and under my breath ask Brewster, “Why do we need to put on flight suits?”

She gives me a sidelong glance. Maybe I’m going to be trouble. “Because,” she says, “flight suits are fun.”

When I get back from the men’s room, zipped into my flight suit, I stand in front of the mirror on one of the walls of the meeting room. You know what navy blue flight suits do? They make everyone look like Tom Cruise.

Ma’am, zipped up and squared away, ma’am.

It doesn’t hurt that this morning, three actual pilots are chatting their way reassuringly through the crowd, all wearing the same getup that we are.

The name tags of the newcomers are upside down. That’s significant. By longstanding tradition, American astronauts wear their name tags upside down until they’ve floated in space and returned the first time.

I’d already given Brewster a moment of quiet, on the phone, talking about the challenges of taking a reporter to zero gravity.

“I’m wondering what the experience of trying to take notes in zero-g is going to be like,” I say.

Silence. “Not good,” Brewster says. “It’s hard to write in zero g.”

“Wait,” I say, “I take notes on everything. I’m taking notes right now. I just wrote, ‘Not good. It’s hard to write in zero g.'”

This doesn’t impress her. “It’s not going to work very well during the zero-g segments,” she says. “And on the high-gs, we recommend you not move your head at all.”

A couple of hours later, we’ll be on an aging Boeing 727 nicknamed G-Force One, 39,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, flying a series of hills and valleys through the air to achieve zero gravity at the top, then pulling two-gs coming out of the zero-g at the bottom. If you move your head too much in the two-g stretches, you end up space sick. They call it the vomit comet for a reason.

No notes in zero g. No notes in two g.

It’s a measure of how ridiculously naive I am about what I’m about to do that I think, How lame. She wants me to wait to take notes on being weightless until I’m not weightless anymore? We’ll see about that.

As part of the reporting for a book I’m doing on the race to the Moon in the 1960s, I decided I needed to understand what those first astronauts experienced when they rocketed free of gravity. In 55 years of going to space, we haven’t sent a single reporter. Not many people who have gone to zero gravity have come back to tell the tale. Weightlessness hasn’t inspired nearly as much writing as fly-fishing.

But as interest in space tourism and the emerging space economy has grown in the last several years (as I wrote about recently), now any tourist with $5,000 is welcome to book a flight on Zero Gravity Corp.’s G-Force One. In the United States, Zero Gravity has largely taken over the training and research flights NASA used to do itself. (I took both a tourist and a scientific research flight.) Worldwide, G-Force One is one of only three planes making regular zero-gravity flights.

Zero-gravity flights using airplanes have been going on since the mid-1950s, the dawn of space travel. They come with an important caveat. On G-Force-One, you never leave the planet, so of course you never leave gravity behind. G-Force One remains firmly attached to Earth. The crew and passengers remain firmly inside G-Force One, and we, too, are all fastened to Earth.

That’s also true of the astronauts on the space station. They’re all floating, of course, but the station is firmly in Earth’s gravitational grip, just like the 2,000 satellites currently in orbit, just like the Moon. That’s what it means to be in orbit.

What G-Force One does is use acrobatic flying to slip loose from gravity for a few moments, achieving high-speed free-fall. The sealed plane rockets into the sky at 45 degrees, an incredibly steep angle for a passenger jet, then comes over the top of its four-mile-high climb, and starts to streak down the other side of the hill. During those moments when the plane noses over the top of the arc, the force of gravity is perfectly counterbalanced by the plane’s course and speed toward Earth. The plane literally falls out of the way of its occupants at exactly the same rate that its passengers would be falling to Earth. For those moments, gravity is erased, and everyone inside is weightless. The zero-g hills follow the curve of a parabola, and that’s what each loop is called: a parabola.

That weightlessness lasts about 27 seconds. Scientists call it microgravity, because it’s never quite zero gravity. But this isn’t some fakery. It’s the same weightlessness you’d be in if you were 100 days out of Kennedy Space Center, streaking for Mars.

Indeed, weightlessness on the International Space Station works the same way. ISS is in free-fall around Earth. The force of Earth’s gravity pulling on ISS is perfectly balanced by the station’s orbital velocity. The gangly 100-yard-long station streaks through space at 10 times the speed of a bullet leaving a gun. ISS is falling, but falling in a circle, around Earth.

On tourist flights, Zero Gravity flies 15 parabolas for its passengers. They ease you in: The first parabola mimics Martian gravity, which is one-third of Earth’s gravity. The next two are lunar gravity, what we saw the astronauts bouncing along in, one-sixth of Earth.

Those first three are a little confusing. You’re not stuck to the floor of the plane, but you’re not floating, either. The 27 seconds flashes by, with Zero Gravity staff urging you to try push-ups. It’s hard to get the second push-up done, because you’ve push-upped yourself into the middle of the fuselage.

Then comes the loop they call out as “Zero One!”

My whole body drifts up slowly from the floor mats.

My instinct is to try to get some traction, to swim or grab something. But moving my arms and legs does nothing except make me feel silly. For just a moment, it’s the oddest sensation: There’s no force on me at all. It’s like someone told me to relax, and I did. Relaxation as a physical feeling, from the outside and the inside at the same time.

I’m sure I have that zero-g first-timer’s expression on my face — eyebrows up, eyes open, half-smile, with that look that says, “Whoa! What is happening here?”

Before I can get my bearings—where is my body? Where are the mats? Where are my fellow travelers? Which pocket is my notebook in?—one of the Zero G staff calls out, “Feet down! Coming out!”

Before we took off, Brewster warned us to take this announcement seriously. Because of the arc of the parabolas, we come out of zero-g right into two-g: You go from weighing nothing to weighing twice what you normally do. You don’t want to be caught drifting up near the ceiling, only to come slamming down onto your neck or ankle with twice your weight.

The next two parabolas are much the same. I’m so busy trying to analyze weightlessness and get something out of it that it’s over before I know it.

Those first few loops remind me of something very clearly: what it’s like to ice skate when you don’t know how. I grew up in Miami, so I didn’t have much ice-skating experience. I remember vividly finding my balance on skates, and zooming across the ice at Polar Palace, thinking, This is exactly what this is supposed to be like . . . but it’s an accident and I am totally out of control, Whoa! Crash!

Someone drifts my way, and I redirect him with a single finger. It’s at that moment that I realize what all our motions feel like. We’re like helium balloons, like the parade floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We are lighter than air, but we still have mass. Once I see other people as parade floats, I realize that’s what I am, too. I’m just like Bullwinkle, without the guy-ropes.

During the last five parabolas, the Zero Gravity staff open a bag of Skittles and float them around the cabin for us to try to catch in our mouths. They do the same with globules of water. I try a couple Skittles and a couple spheres of water, fail utterly, and decide not to waste precious seconds in weightlessness on tricks (the glistening, morphing spheres of water are amazing as they float by, as if they were created by special effects masters).

I learn to navigate the cabin.

I lie on my back during 2G and try to lift a leg. I’m not quite as strong as I think I am.

On the last few loops, I stand straight up during the 2G periods—not to resist gravity. It’s not hard to stand motionless in 2G. What I want to feel is the opposite, that strange sense of freedom as we slip into zero-g, traveling up from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. For the briefest of moments, my feet, knees and hips are in zero g, while my torso, shoulders, and head are still in gravity. That sense of release, of being liberated from all force, is palpable. It’s like your whole body has been mummified in a tight bundle, and zero-g unzips the wraps from bottom to top.

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962—and the first to experience an extended period of weightlessness—talked about it so much during his official NASA debriefing that at his post-flight press conference, Glenn said, “Someone told me last night after I had been talking so enthusiastically about this, it sounds like I was an addict to it. And I think I probably am. It was a wonderful feeling.”

Inside G-Force One, after being weightless for about three-and-a-half minutes, I’ve already got the matter-of-fact ease you’d expect from a guy wearing a navy blue flight suit. Kind of. I’m sitting cross-legged, the floor three feet below me, the mats three feet above me. In easy reach in front of me float my notebook and my pen. Glenn was right: Floating in zero-g is richly intuitive. Which is crazy. I didn’t have to think before parking my pen off to one side of my head, pulling my notebook from a zippered pocket, then reaching back to find my pen where I’d left it . . . floating in midair. Weightlessness feels normal almost instantly. If you don’t think that’s weird, imagine the opposite—being weightless your whole life, then having to deal with gravity.

For convenience, people often compare weightlessness to being quietly submerged in water. Indeed, NASA astronauts practice spacewalks, wearing regulation spacesuits, in a pool so large it contains submerged mockups of the space-station modules. But being in water isn’t a good comparison at all, because the water presses on you from every direction. Any time you move—even just to turn your head or move your arm—the water pushes back. In weightlessness, you are free from all pressure. You have the freedom of the helium balloon. You are the helium balloon.

People taking Zero Gravity’s flights think they are about to have the thrill of their lives. But a zero-gravity ride isn’t a thrill ride at all. No one comes out of weightlessness with that flush-faced, heart-pumping sense of excitement of teenagers tumbling off a roller coaster.

Rather, it’s the opposite. Zero gravity provides total tranquility. Floating weightless is like meditation for your whole body. As Glenn discovered, it’s quite seductive. The end of each parabola gives me a physical sense of regret. It’s like the moment you have to leave the bouncy house at the birthday party. Can’t I stay just a little longer?

The scientific research flights are completely different. For these, G-Force One is loaded with scientific equipment, all bolted in place. The Zero Gravity staff installs straps and handholds all over the plane’s interior to give researchers and students a place to brace their hands and feet. Still, trying to work in zero gravity—trying to get actual experiments done in 27-second snippets—is disorienting and hard. It’s hard to even type on a laptop keyboard without gravity.

Weightlessness will always be the defining feature of going to space. Because human beings are the result of gravity, the way our bodies work, the way our minds think. Even if living in space becomes commonplace, for each new person, the leap to weightlessness will never be routine.

When G-Force One lands after that Saturday tourist flight, we line up at the rear exit to disembark. The Boeing 727 has a set of stairs that drops down at the back. You walk down the steps, onto the tarmac, beneath the plane’s tail, not unlike you might if you had landed on another world, and lowered your hatch.

As I exit, Brewster, Zero Gravity’s CEO, is standing at the bottom of the stairs. She smiles, shakes my hand, and reminds me to turn the name tag on my flight suit right side up.

Charles Fishman (cnfish1@gmail.com) is a longtime contributor and founding staff member of Fast Company. He is at work on a book on the race to the Moon in the 1960s.

Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.

Strict underwriting criteria are part of the reason that online lender Oportun has been hailed by many as a responsible outlier in a subprime market where “payday lenders” dominate. The company, which primarily targets Latino borrowers, declines half of all applicants.

So it was perhaps no surprise to meet one hopeful applicant, Salvador Rivera, outside Oportun’s storefront office in Altadena, California, after he had just been turned down for a loan. He had arrived at the office with his cousin and stepdaughter in tow. A letter suggesting that he could “build a better financial future with an unsecured personal loan” had led Rivera to try his luck at obtaining a $1,000 loan to put toward a deposit on a first apartment, one he’d share with his girlfriend and her daughter.

Instead, the 22-year-old received a lesson in tough financial love. “They told me I failed,” said Rivera, unsure of his next steps after being promised that another letter would be mailed to him–one explaining why his loan was denied.

Founded in 2005 and based in Redwood City, California, Oportun has managed to operate profitably while making a dent in a difficult-to-serve market—the 45 million people that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau identifies as having little-to-no credit history.

The company has made nearly two million installment loans and earned, from the U.S. Treasury Department, a Community Development Financial Institution certification that is reserved for companies that meet the financing needs of underserved communities.

Because Oportun reports to credit bureaus, its customers have the opportunity to build credit histories and access less expensive credit in the future. Credit scores are also used as screening tools by employers and landlords.

A Lot Of Tech, A Little Bit Of Tradition

A key ingredient in Oportun’s secret sauce is advanced data analytics. The company has developed the ability to score applicants, even if they lack a FICO score—as do half of Oportun’s borrowers.

That scoring system, developed with the help of $260 million in venture capital, contributed to Oportun’s reaching profitability just over two years ago, according to Vazquez. Another key to its profitability has been the company’s ability to reach scale all while adhering to a business model that recalls earlier days of consumer finance.

“While some institutions continue to close physical branches, we have added over 150 locations in the last five years,” wrote Vazquez in an email during his paternity leave. He notes that Oportun has more than 230 locations in six states, some of them stand-alone offices, while others are housed inside Latino-oriented grocery stores. In all, the company has 1,500 employees.

Oportun swims in the same waters as a handful of fintech lenders that are attempting to step into a space left vacant by traditional banks and serve the underserved. They include Elevate, LendingPoint, and Ascend. These companies offer credit to customers at subprime rates, use data analysis to score loan applicants, and may promise them lower rates in the future by helping them build credit. Many of them, however, have only an online presence. They are, in some sense, the tech sector’s response to the increasing income volatility and economic insecurity that have been on the rise since the 1970s.

But unlike some of its competitors, Oportun is also a throwback. It resembles the middle and working class-oriented consumer credit firms of the 1950s, like Household Finance Company, says Todd Baker, a senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at Harvard Kennedy School, who published a working paper about the fintech industry last month.

“What Oportun did is combine the technology for credit analysis with a very high-touch, office-based delivery system to help customers succeed,” says Baker.

Beyond Loans: Building A Credit History

Stephanie Gonzalez worked on Oportun’s front lines as a customer service representative handling the holiday rush at an El Super grocery store location in Huntington Park at the end of 2015.

She processed paperwork for loans and reviewed contracts with customers whose lack of knowledge about the importance of building and maintaining good credit “really opened [my] eyes,” she said. It concerned her that many of her customers—especially young people and borrowers she thought might be undocumented immigrants—seemed focused on securing a loan but would “not know the importance of maintaining a good credit score.”

Nevertheless, the data suggest that a significant number of Oportun’s customers are seeing improvements in their credit scores. Over a four-year period, 61% of borrowers who took out multiple loans increased their credit scores, according to a California Department of Business Oversight report. In 2014, the change in score for all customers was a net positive of 198 points. Yet the report lacks data on the percentage of customers who saw declines in their credit scores.

What about the loan product itself? Consumers Union’s Suzanne Martindale says she would like Oportun to offer lower rates to borrowers, but understands the company is trying to strike a balance.

“I know that they have tried really hard to thread that needle and to make their loans affordable while, obviously, sustaining their business,” says Martindale.

A sample $1,000 loan listed on Oportun’s marketing literature can be repaid over the course of 13 months in fixed bimonthly payments of $49 for a total cost of $295 at an average percentage rate (APR) of 49.1%. That rate is significantly higher than that of a high-cost credit card (which is about 23 percent), but once borrowers repay, they can earn their way toward lower rates on their next loan.

The average interest rate—which, unlike the APR, doesn’t take into account fees—across the Oportun portfolio is 33%, according to Vazquez’s recent interview with Lend Academy’s Peter Renton.

Targeting this demographic is “very expensive to do,” according to Nick Bourke, consumer finance director of the Pew Charitable Trusts. “A company has to spend a lot of money finding and acquiring those customers.” Banks have easy access to capital and a built-in customer base but, says Bourke, federal regulations make it difficult to for them to engage in so-called small dollar lending.

The Big Challenge Of Small Loans

Going back decades, banks have not had much of a track record making small loans, says Harvard’s Todd Baker. They typically will invest in the high-risk consumer lending businesses “during the early parts of the credit cycle when losses are low,” but “don’t have the stomach to stick with them” when the going gets tough during the latter part of the cycle, according to the working paper Baker published last month.

Payday lenders, whose storefronts outnumber McDonald’s in the U.S., have filled the gap left by banks with loans that have triple-digit interest rates and are notorious for creating debt traps. When borrowers can’t repay those loans, they must take out another loan and another. Auto title loans, another alternative to traditional banks, put borrowers at risk of losing their means of transport.

It was this state of affairs that led founder James Gutierrez to launch Oportun–first called Progreso Financiero–as a booth inside a San Jose grocery store when he was just out of Stanford Business School. He’d grown up in Southern California’s Inland Empire in a Mexican immigrant family and wanted to find a way to serve a community with “high moral capital” but poor access to financial resources, he says.

He began by administering a lengthy eHarmony-like questionnaire, says Gutierrez, but over time the information requirements have been whittled down. Today a would-be borrower is simply asked to bring in a pay stub or bank statement, her landlord and work supervisor’s contact information, identification, and five references.

“You can’t actually build wealth if you don’t have access to capital,” says Gutierrez, who left the company in 2012 and started another, Insikt, which has developed a platform that allows other companies to lend to a similar demographic.

In 2010, Gutierrez worked with California legislators to craft a pilot program, since revised twice, that permits Oportun to impose higher interest rates than what is allowed under current lending law for consumer loans between $300 and $2,500. In exchange, the company committed itself to strict underwriting standards, mandatory reporting of loans to credit report bureaus, and a set of other requirements. (Oportun recently failed to expand into Florida by winning similar concessions in that state.)

More Scrutiny, Legal Challenges

Oportun’s social mission has not prevented it from facing some legal difficulties. In March, a borrower from Montebello seeking class-action status accused the company of violating California’s debt collection law. The borrower’s lawsuit alleged that the company’s debt collection letter threatening legal action listed an amount several thousand dollars in excess of the $2,500 than it intended to–and is permitted to–sue for in small claims court. The litigation could increase regulatory scrutiny of the company’s compliance with consumer protection laws, according to a report by the Kroll Bond Rating Agency published in May.

Oportun declined to comment on the litigation. “We always strive to ensure that our collections efforts are compliant with all the applicable laws, rules, and regulations and that they are also aligned with our overall mission,” Marivi Lerdo de Tejada, a company spokesperson, wrote in an email. Lerdo de Tejada added that the company will always try to work with a borrower before taking legal action.

California consumer advocates offer qualified support for the work Oportun has done under the pilot program and they have joined together with the company on some legislative efforts, as well.

“Oportun isn’t perfect. The pilot isn’t perfect,” says Liana Molina, director of community engagement at the California Reinvestment Coalition. “I think they’re really trying to be the good guys, and we have a friendly relationship.”

But loans are not always the answer for communities struggling financially, she adds. Good public policies that guarantee living wages, access to health care and to safety net services are key.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, go get a loan,’ and solve your problem today, but then you’ve just created another problem that’s going to last for who knows how long—months, years?”

Oportun seems to have found the customers who can, for the most part, avoid those debt traps. Its loss rate has remained in the single digits, according to Vazquez.

Arturo Banuelos is one customer that Oportun is willing to bet on. He lost his job as a waiter at a country club after injuring himself playing soccer. He took out a $3,000 loan to tide him over until he found a new job.

Interviewed as he made his way to his car after visiting Oportun’s Altadena office, he appeared pleased that he been able to reduce his $89 biweekly payments to make them more manageable. He acknowledged the interest rate was high, but, he said, “they helped me a lot.”

He still had a noticeable limp from his injury but seemed optimistic about his future. He had found work as a plumber’s assistant.

And on the second flight, there was no crash.

On May 22, Facebook put its Aquila drone–a Boeing 737-sized autonomous aircraft that weighs about the same as a car and is meant to deliver internet connectivity to underserved areas–in the air for the second time. For nearly two hours, the giant flying wing soared over Arizona before finally returning safely to the ground just after dawn.

Facebook first unveiled the Aquila program in 2015, promising to deliver Internet at 10 gigabits per second to parts of the world that have no existing broadband infrastructure. It was meant to be a part of the tech giant’s Internet.org initiative, which aims to bring low-cost internet connectivity to millions of people around the world who have little or no access to it today.

Aquila’s first flight took place on June 28, 2016, and in the days afterward, the narrative was that the test had been a success. But buried deep in a long blog post about the flight was the revelation that, in fact, something had gone wrong–Aquila had broken apart after a very hard landing. News about the crash emerged months later when it was revealed that the National Transportation Safety Board was investigating what had happened.

It’s no, ahem, accident that word of the aircraft making it back to the ground in one piece is in the first paragraph of Gomez’s post, given the backlash against how Facebook placed the description of the accident last summer way down in that post about the first flight. Afterwards, the company said it had been unable to say much more, given the NTSB’s inquiry.

In the post, Gomez noted that the Aquila team incorporated a number of lessons learned from that first flight, making numerous modifications to the drone before sending it airborne again.

Among them were the addition of spoilers on Aquila’s wings that were meant to “increase drag and reduce lift during the landing approach.” This was clearly a design intended to avoid a second crash landing, which Facebook said last year had been due in part to the aircraft going too fast as it approached the ground.

In addition, the team added a “horizontal propeller stopping mechanism to support a successful landing,” as well as hundreds of new data-gathering sensors, modifications to the onboard autopilot software, new radios for Aquila’s communication subsystem, and more.

Not long after takeoff,  Gomez wrote, there was just one surprise, and a “happy” one at that: “The climb rate–at 180 [feet per minute] was nearly twice as fast as on our first flight.” That was apparently due to some of the improvements on the new Aquila, most notably a smoother finish that had been incorporated prior to the test.

The purpose of the second flight–beyond making returning Aquila to Earth in one piece–was the collection of mountains of data. “We flew lengthy test points at constant speed,” Gomez wrote, “heading, and altitude to measure the airplane’s drag. The data from these ‘trim shots,’ as they’re called, will be used to refine our aerodynamic models, which help us predict the energy usage and thus optimize for battery and solar array size.”

One of Aquila’s interesting design elements is that it doesn’t have traditional landing gear. This no doubt contributed to the damage it experienced during last June’s flight. But the design, in which the plane “lands on Kevlar pads bonded to the bottom of the motor pods,” was aimed at reducing the aircraft’s weight and drag.” Still, that design means that Aquila must land almost perfectly in order not to break up upon hitting the ground too hard.

So it was no small deal when the plane began its landing approach on May 22. First, the autopilot shut down the propellers so that they would lock in a horizontal position, ensuring they wouldn’t be damaged upon touchdown. Unfortunately, Gomez wrote, only one of them locked in the proper position.

Still, Aquila came down “very gently” on the gravel landing pad, and stopped completely after about 10 meters. “It was absolutely perfect,” Gomez wrote, before adding that, “similar to driving a car on a gravel surface, landing a plane on gravel causes a few minor, easily repairable dings, but otherwise, Aquila landed in great shape.”

Keith Lemer remembers being a third-year student at Syracuse University’s Business school when his professor handed him a 700-page textbook that, to Lemer’s mind, looked like it would take a lifetime to get through. He’d wanted to read the material and write the subsequent term paper, but his mind wouldn’t cooperate. As the deadline approached, the young man’s attention kept snapping back to a printed fraternity directory he’d recently seen on a visit to Arizona State University. He simply couldn’t control his impulse to begin work on a Greek Directory of his own. Eventually he just gave in, and–instead of writing–built a new one that turned into a thriving business before the end of the semester.

“Everyone is lining up to turn in their papers,” Lemer says. “I told the professor: ‘Hey I started a business and I’ve already sold $50,000 in ads at 50% margin.'” The professor was impressed. He told Lemer he had done excellent work, but then failed him for not following directions. Lemer would go on to turn the project that got him an F (which he changed to a D after some cajoling), into a thriving multi-campus business. Today, he is the CEO of WellNet Healthcare, a $150 million a year health insurance provider.

Lemer’s story is typical of what Syracuse researcher Johan Wiklund found drives those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) into successful entrepreneurial endeavors. They get hyperfocused on a problem that captures their attention, especially when the tasks they “should” be working on seem boring or impossible to a less-than organized mind. When that hyperfocus leads them to some measure of success, they are told that their achievements are not welcome. So they set out on their own. Not so much because they intended to be entrepreneurs, but because their consistent habit of acting without thinking nudges them onto their own path.

Wiklund says understanding this habit is key to understanding ADHD in entrepreneurship. Double booked appointments. Projects started that can’t possibly be finished. Commitments quickly made, but then just as quickly forgotten. These are the maddening downsides of this behavioral approach. But Wiklund says that acting more implusively may give ADHD individuals a sizable advantage when it comes to entrepreneurship. “Those with ADHD tend to spur themselves into action regardless of uncertainty,” Wiklund told me. “An impulsive inability to wait comes with a willingness to take risk. The [ADHD entrepreneurs] I studied struggle. But if they had a chance to be like everyone else, none of them would take it.”

Wiklund says that in extremely uncertain environments, neurotypical entrepreneurs risk getting stuck trying to gather enough data, mitigate risk, and predict an ultimately unpredictable situation. As the stakes get higher, they often got locked into a mode of endlessly thinking without acting. Wiklund found that often ADHD entrepreneurs follow a “logic of impulsivity” in which they think more about how right an action feels internally.

“If you always make decisions on the fly, you make a lot of mistakes,” Wiklund says. “And you learn from your failures, so you become very good at operating this way. You develop an ability to rapidly read a situation and quickly choose a course of action.”

Wiklund’s research is groundbreaking because while there’s long been anecdotal evidence that entrepreneurs often have ADHD, the evidence to back it up has been almost non-existent. He says a major event in his personal life led him to fill the gap.

“Five years ago I was diagnosed with ADHD,” Wiklund says. “It explained some of my problems, but I’m also a successful guy. I began to wonder if there might be positive traits that go with these so-called problems.”

So Wiklund began to interview entrepreneurs. One of those he studied, whom he calls Mary, says she often finds herself in unexpected situations, meeting with people she doesn’t recognize about topics she isn’t prepared for. But after so much exposure to these challenges, she says she has come to enjoy improvisation and gets a rush from facing the unexpected. High pressure pitches, difficult conversations and shifting strategy are less emotionally and cognitively taxing for Mary than they would likely be for others. This makes people like Mary extremely effective, Wiklund says, in startup phases of a business. Those advantages can dissipate as a company grows, becomes more bureaucratic and loss tolerant of improvisation.

WellNet’s Lemer has also learned to turn manage and even gain advantage from his non-typical ways of operating.  I found him to be overflowing with enthusiasm and confidence. But he says he struggled mightily as a student until at 20, he was diagnosed with ADHD.

Lemer says there are two things that make gleaning advantage from the disorder possible. The first, is honesty. “I don’t hide it,” he says of his ADHD. “I wear it as a badge of honor and I use it as a point of authenticity to connect with my team and my clients.” Lemer’s on to something: Because they’ve often been punished or devalued starting at school, ADHD entrepreneurs can be defensive and secretive about their weaknesses. Being honest, Wiklund’s found, allows team members to acknowledge both the gifts and challenges an ADHD boss or colleague presents, and to take breakdowns in follow through or communication less personally

Lemer’s second success factor was finding close collaborators who give him honest reflection and offer strengths where he has weaknesses. Indeed, Wiklund found that many entrepreneurs with ADHD struggle to accept help filling in for weaknesses they won’t admit to having which can lead to failure as a business matures.

ADHD occurs in about 5% of the population. But Wiklund’s research indicates that if you work in entrepreneurial endeavors your chance of having ADHD or working closely with someone who does is far higher. Thus, it is every organization’s interest to learn to manage ADHD’s downsides and harness the advantages that Wiklund has taken from the realm of rumor into solid science. This is particularly important now when standard operating procedures and long-held best practices are quickly becoming obsolete. Flexible thinking that is comfortable with improvisation and unpredictable situations is an increasing advantage–an advantage that may make the next generation of entrepreneurs more neurodiverse than those that have come before.

Jonah Sachs is a cofounder and partner at Free Range, a purpose-driven design and innovation firm. He is the author of Winning the Story Warsand the upcoming book Unsafe Thinking, which will be published in spring 2018.

On a day like June 29–the iPhone launch’s 10th anniversary–it’s natural to wonder where Apple’s iconic device will be in another 10 years. It’s also tempting to prognosticate that the iPhone will be radically different by 2027, or that it will be overrun by new devices and approaches to personal technology.

A number of thoughtful articles have been published around the anniversary imagining what the iPhone will look like a decade from now. But some of the more fundamental changes the writers envision, I’d argue, just aren’t going to happen by 2027.

The iPhone of a decade from now will be far more powerful than the iPhone 7, allowing it to run apps that nobody’s even contemplating today. It will also benefit from innovations in screen technology, input methods, and other areas. The phone’s design will probably be at least slightly thinner and lighter, and its front will be taken over by pure display, eliminating the bezel. However, I think that the iPhone will remain largely recognizable–and will remain the center of many people’s computing universes–in 2027, for a few simple reasons.

The Screen

I’ve heard smart people talk about a future where personal computing disappears into our bodies and/or into the environment. That’s probably far off, because we still need screens. Smartphone-sized screens.

In a way, tech companies and consumers have worked together to arrive at the optimal mobile screen size. Companies like Apple and Samsung introduce the devices, and consumers vote with their dollars on the screen sizes they want. Most people want a screen large enough to make video enjoyable, yet small enough to hold in one hand and easily squeeze into a pocket or purse. That’s why smartphones have gotten larger in the past five years, not smaller.

It’s difficult to see some other device ready to replace that convenient screen size by 2027. Will we have augmented-reality glasses good enough to present high-definition video in the way the iPhone does now? I’m betting not by 2027. AR glasses face some real technical challenges–like finding a battery technology that’s small enough and powerful enough to make for an all-day-wear experience. Putting enough processing power in a free-standing AR wearable is another obstacle.

Into The Glass

If current screen sizes are about right and unlikely to give way to something else in the next decade, the only thing to shrink on the iPhone is its thickness. But there are real barriers there, too. Wired‘s David Pierce points out that Corning has been working at embedding computer circuitry within the display glass. That sounds like a promising way to thin down the phone, but there’s only so much you can inject into glass.

Corning probably won’t be able to inject a battery into a pane of glass anytime soon, either, and the battery is the biggest barrier to reducing the form factor of devices today.

That’s because making batteries smaller and more powerful is a chemistry problem, not a design or coding problem. It resists the tenets of Moore’s law. The dominant power supply for today’s consumer tech is lithium ion, and science has already wrung most of the power efficiencies out of that material.

Can a completely new power source emerge for a mass market product like the iPhone in just 10 years? Long-range wireless charging (which Energous and uBeam are working on) seems like the best candidate. The technology, in theory, would constantly send power over the air to top off batteries inside mobile devices. That could permit the batteries to shrink while still providing all-day power.

Apple’s coming iPhone 8 reportedly has wireless charging, but it’s inductive–the phone must rest atop a transmitter device. Apple holds at least one patent on its own wireless charging tech. If long-range charging is added to the iPhone, the need for a big bulky battery goes away, and the “pane of glass” concept suddenly becomes much more doable. But, alas, the viability of that long-range wireless charging technology seems far off.

The Body Area Network

The idea of the iPhone as a pane of glass ties into a larger concept where many of the iPhone’s current functions are decentralized and farmed out to a set of wearables and sensors we carry on our bodies, all loosely tied together in a “body area network.” Siri would orchestrate interaction between all of the pieces.

It’s another cool idea, and I fully agree that the phone may not be the best singular interface for Siri. I think in 10 years a future version of Apple’s AirPod wireless earpods might become our main interface with Siri. And the AR glasses may not be far behind by then.

I doubt, however, that consumers will like the idea of carrying numerous component devices around with them. There’s a limit to the number of tech gadgets people want to tote, and for most non-nerds it’s about two. I carry a phone, a watch, and AirPods, and two of those things–the watch and the AirPods–often get left at home on weekends. The phone is always with me.

Even if that “body network” of small devices works perfectly as your personal life concierge throughout the day, the iPhone–because of its display–will still be needed. And unless that display is foldable or rollable (maybe!), the temptation will be to retain the functionality and computing power in that device to justify its position in pocket or purse. For a number of technical and privacy reasons, Apple is deeply invested in the idea of locating processing power and sensitive personal data inside its devices, not in the cloud. It seems unlikely that the company would reverse on that within a decade.

3,650 Days

Part of the reason for my skepticism about the iPhone changing profoundly is that tech moves slower than we think, and time moves faster. Ten years really isn’t that long. While some things in tech change very quickly (like the growth of Uber), most things evolve incrementally over time. It depends on the type of product and its price, too. Here’s how Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin put it in a brief on Thursday:

Consumers adopt solutions to pain points very quickly. Consumers adopt new experiences very slowly. Any time a consumer is faced with something foreign, or unknown, or viewed as somewhat risky because they don’t know how they will use it, they adopt it very slowly. This is why things like smartwatches, future wearables, VR, drones, AR glasses, etc. will have very long adoption cycles. From the viewpoint of how humans behave and adopt technology, the next big thing is still a long way away.

Consider wearable tech. In 2012, many of us thought wearables would soon take over the personal computing landscape. I was excited about the combination of 3G smartwatch and wireless headphones replacing the smartphone as my can’t-leave-home-without device. But consumers in general have been relatively slow to adopt wearables, other than those used to track fitness.

And there’s ample precedent for tech products surviving in recognizable forms for decades. Apple’s own Mac has gotten sleeker and more powerful over the years. But today’s MacBook Pro is immediately identifiable as the direct descendant of the first PowerBook from a quarter century ago.

Besides, Apple may be less concerned over the next decade about radically changing the iPhone and more focused on getting the devices in the hands of far more people. The major markets for smartphones have become saturated in recent years, making new customers harder to find. The best chance for continuing the iPhone’s momentum may be getting it into the hands of more consumers in developing countries. A recent Ovum study, commissioned by Upstream, shows that only 18% of mobile users in emerging markets use iOS, while 78% use Android.

Without the iPhone, Apple wouldn’t have become the world’s most successful company. No one device can dominate consumer tech forever. But I’d wager the iPhone has some good years and great new technology in its future.

Shoppers love to browse online, but somewhere between filling up their cart and checkout, they change their minds. In 2016 alone, consumers left $4.6 trillion of merchandise abandoned in their carts, according to Business Insider.

Retailers want to reduce that painful number, and they are turning to installment loans as a potential solution. In the U.S., consumers buying a mattress from Casper or a bike from Peloton can choose to “Buy with Affirm,” a financing option that breaks the total cost into a series of monthly payments, plus interest.

In Europe, online installment loan financing is now ubiquitous thanks to Klarna, a Swedish company that handles 450,000 transactions per day. Both Affirm and Klarna pay the retailer in full at the time of purchase.

Now Square, run by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is angling for a piece of the action. This week the payments company unveiled an installment loan pilot program for the small businesses that use its invoicing software. A couple planning a wedding, for example, could opt for a Square loan after receiving an invoice from their florist. The florist gets paid immediately, and the newlyweds-to-be pay off the bill over the course of three, six, or 12 months.

Unlike CEO Max Levchin’s Affirm, Square will not vary the interest rate it charges based on a consumer’s credit history. Instead, all consumers approved for a Square loan will pay an APR of 9.99%. Loan amounts will range from $250 to $10,000. For now, Square will keep the loans on its balance sheet, and take on the risk of default. (Many online lenders package their loans and sell them to outside investors.)

The installment loan product allows Square to simultaneously establish a direct relationship with consumers, while at the same time continuing to serve the small business owners that represent its core base. Earlier this year the company unveiled a prepaid debit card, another indication of its consumer-facing ambitions.

Affirm’s track record suggests that Square merchants may see a lift if consumers embrace the loans. In announcing its 1 millionth installment loan this past April, Affirm said that its retailers see conversion rates increase by up to 20%. Order values and revenue per visitor increase as well, on average.

Square’s loan product, because it is based on an invoice and not a checkout cart, will not produce all those same benefits for merchants. But it does have the potential to help them get paid faster—which for a small business, can make all the difference.

If there’s one thing that unites the world, it’s bottled water. From Kansas to Kowloon, sales of plastic water bottles are surging, despite all the disastrous effects on the environment from the deluge of plastic waste. The latest figures show that we’ll consume more than 580 billion bottles by 2021–up from about 300 billion a decade ago.

Sales of reusable bottles are also climbing fast, at least. The shapely stainless steel S’well bottle, for instance, is now a fashion item and a business worth at least $100 million. But disposability rules in most places. Driven by escalating demand in developing or recently developed countries, the world now buys 1 million plastic bottles a minute, according to the Guardian, which got exclusive access to a survey from Euromonitor, a market research group.

Euromonitor’s head of packaging, Rosemary Downey, blames China for most of the increase in bottled water production. Last year, it consumed 73.8 billion bottles, up more than 5 billion from 2015. “It is a critical country to understand when examining global sales of plastic PET bottles, and China’s requirement for plastic bottles continues to expand,” she says.

“This increase is being driven by increased urbanization,” Downey continues. “There is a desire for healthy living and there are ongoing concerns about groundwater contamination and the quality of tap water, which all contribute to the increase in bottle water use.”

Another option is simply to ban sales of plastic water bottles, as San Francisco has done on its government properties. But beefing up recycling efforts and changing perceptions about recycled bottles seem like better bets, at least for PET plastics. More than half of the waste plastic entering the oceans comes from five countries–China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand–all of which are consuming bottled water at a faster rate than their recycling infrastructure can handle. Nonprofits like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which focuses on the circular economy, argue there’s a need for greater international standardization of plastic types, and more recycling technology transfer to developing countries.