10th edition: newsletter lessons, rules that backfired, voting, rockets, a fan made me a graphic
another krappy newsletter #10
Hallo!
Coming to you live from New York. Entering my last week here before heading back to California.
I have not followed the progress of the California wildfires, but by the way the media in New York talks about it, I am assuming that this is what the entire state looks like:
(Quick aside: this is a photo of firefighters at Fairwinds winery who saw that the entire winery was going down to the fire, but decided they couldn’t let the flag go down with it. Re-normalize being proud to be an American.)
This edition of another krappy newsletter is going out to 46 homies. Which is 9 more homies than last week. Sup, homies?
If you think someone else in your life would enjoy receiving a weekly email from me about nothing, feel free to forward this email to them and have them push the button below:
Here are my finds and thoughts from this week:
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10th edition of another krappy newsletter
I have somehow been doing this for 10 weeks already. 10 is a nice round number that seems like a good time to pause and reflect.
Few learnings from 10 weeks with a newsletter:
People read their email. I find it shocking because I am so bad with email. Like “16,994-unreads-in-my-Gmail” bad. Two kinds of people in this world: 1. people who visibly cringe when I tell them that, 2. people who scream “OMG SAMESIES!” when I tell them that.
Weeks move quickly. Another Tuesday, huh? One function of this newsletter has been to remind me what day it is. No other real way right now to know that time actually passes.
You can see exactly who opened and read your email. Even the time they open it. It feels creepy to look, but I do it. I like to position myself like I am above that type of thing, but make no mistake, I look. Especially when someone says “omg love the newsletter”, I can be like “damn Imma fact check that shit!”
Looking forward to sending more!
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A rule that backfired
Nothing makes me smile more than well intentioned people trying something and making the problem worse. So you could imagine my joy in coming across the following Twitter thread:
One of my the more outrageous ones:
9/ In Alberta, strip club patrons must keep a 2m buffer from dancers The only currency that can travel that far are metal loonie ($1) & twoonie ($2) coins:
"The goal was to protect the safety & dignity of dancers but the dancers have become reduced to fleshy coin toss targets”
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On Voting
I am not sure if you have read about this, but there is an election coming up.
Every election year, we have this sprint leading up to the election where we get barraged with:
Political ads
Breaking stories that conveniently have not had a chance to be validated
Hot takes
People opining about what other people probably think right now
I find a lot of this stupid…but I cannot help it. I get sucked in. I am the guy in the group chat who wants to tell you how suburban white women are going to vote this year. I have a problem.
Why do I care what undecided voters think? At this point, if you are like “I don’t know…I gotta see debate 2”, you have serious issues.
Other people’s opinions are not in our control.
The only thing that is in our control is showing up to personally vote and working on getting people to participate in the behavior of voting.
If we truly care about a democracy, we should focus on maximizing the number of people who vote rather than on figuring out what they think.
The problem of people not voting is significant. Consider that if abstention from the vote was counted as a vote for “Nobody” then “Nobody” would have won the 2016 Election.
I believe it is a better use of our time to try and convert the apathetic voters to voters (not to be confused with voters that agree with the candidate I like).
Behavior change expert BJ Fogg shares some knowledge on how to increase voter turnout:
Designing for one-time actions (e.g., getting people to vote in 2020) is different from designing habits.
That said, all behavior types (incl. one-time actions and habits) are the result of Motivation, Ability & Prompts.
B=MAP
If you want voting to happen, you can focus on either:
[HARD] Motivation: How can I convince you that 2020 is the most important election ever? This is fleeting. We are hoping that people maintain that feeling well into November. This is the reason for the bombardment. Cause if they stopped before the election, you would get all caught up in the death of Van Halen and forget the date.
[MEDIUM] Prompts: Reminders to vote. Whether that be with commercials, community outreach, emails, text messages, or beeps.
[EASY] Ability: Make it easier for people to vote. Open up more polling stations. Double down on making universal access to mail in ballots (with obvious safety precautions). Make a smartphone app that securely allowed you to vote.
My recommendation is that we should focus less on what people might think and focus more on getting them to the actual polls and finding out. The lowest hanging fruit to get more people to the polls is to make it easier for them to vote.
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A crooked shaft still works
A rocket scientist built a real life, working rocket (shown on the right) inspired by a Gary Larson cartoon (shown on the left),
It truly is amazing what humans can do/ spend time on.
h/t Ben Jarvis
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Random visualization someone made for me
The other day, I mentioned to a friend that I think hardware engineering jobs (and perhaps more broadly jobs in general) fall into two buckets: building the future or maintaining the past.
He posted it on Twitter and this artist @helloSketchSumo picked it up and created this sweet graphic:
I don’t think I know this person. But they took a thing I said and made it into an inspiring graphic. I am basically an influencer.
Have a great rest of your week!
Arrivederci,
K. Rapp