Building, criticizing, complexity in cities, art, and darts
another krappy newsletter #11
Bonjour!
I am back in California. My second pandemic cross country flight went about as well as it could have gone. I ate two bags of Cheez-Its, drank a couple bottles of water, slept for 3 hours, and watched the second installment of the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson/Kevin Hart “Jumanji” series: 2 Jumanji 2 Jumanjious. The Rock makes the best plane movies.
For whoever is questioning whether or not they should do that trip to their family, I would recommend it (specifically on Delta and Alaska). Not saying return to “business as usual” travel frequency, but the occasional trip is statistically very unlikely to give you COVID. Here is an article that touches on the most up to date flying stats.
Key statistics cited:
“The risk of a passenger contracting COVID-19 while onboard appears very low. With only 44 identified potential cases of flight-related transmission among 1.2 billion travelers, that’s one case for every 27 million travelers. We recognize that this may be an underestimate but even if 90% of the cases were un-reported, it would be one case for every 2.7 million travelers. We think these figures are extremely reassuring. Furthermore, the vast majority of published cases occurred before the wearing of face coverings inflight became widespread,” said Dr. David Powell, IATA’s Medical Advisor.
Wear your mask. Go see your loved ones. And most importantly, watch a movie with The Rock during your flight.
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This edition of another krappy newsletter is going out to 56 homies. Which is 10 more homies than last week.
Sup, homies? Feel free to reply to this email to say what’s up. I will answer.
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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Dare to build
This week, a company called Boom came on to the national stage by announcing a plan to build a supersonic passenger plane.
Starting with a single seater prototype: the XB-1.
Here is an article that goes over the specifics of the aircraft.
I absolutely loved their live announcement for two reasons:
Awesome mission statement.
Boom is focused on making the world dramatically more accessible.
The CEO, Blake Scholl, spoke about how people don’t see their loved ones because it takes too long to get there and it is too expensive. Which is why the long term future of Boom is "4 hours to anywhere in the world for $100 or less."
As someone who lives on the opposite side of the country from their family, the mission got me emotionally invested in the company. It seems so obvious that it is good for society to have someone working on this problem. Even if it doesn’t work out.
Building when the world wants you to be a cynical dick.
In the middle of a pandemic, someone dares to build a better world. Shouldn’t we be excited about this? Not if the media has anything to say about it!
America’s hottest cultural trend right now is nihilism/cynicism. Anything new or exciting ends up being shot down in public by trash journalists who make their entire living talking about how much people suck.
To summarize their criticisms:
“It hasn’t even flown yet! And when it does, you won’t be able to go supersonic over land!”
“This concept is flawed because you can’t monetize it!”
“The environment doesn’t need this!”
Doom, gloom, and dunking on people get more eye balls than definite optimism of a better future. These journalists want to eat your brain and make you into a nihilistic zombie just like them. But you are better than that. You should support people who are building the future/new things.
Are there barriers to designing, developing, and building a commercially viable supersonic passenger aircraft? Um. Yes...it is kind of a hard problem. But we used to embrace hard problems like going to the moon. Now we mostly sit at home and broadcast our pessimism and smug complacency to any miserable person who will listen.
America is at its best when we dare to create something, not when we sit at home and complain. It is time to build.
Plus the world is a cooler place if we move at supersonic speeds. I don’t think you can argue otherwise.
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When it is OK to criticize
After all my faux guru positive stuff about building above, I would like to make a quick note about criticism and cynicism.
It is hard to tell when a criticism is warranted versus when you are being unnecessarily critical. When are you actually right to criticize and when are you just psychologically bringing people down because you are a sad lonely man on Twitter? I struggle with that distinction.
But there are two categories where it makes sense to criticize:
When something is just bad
Occasionally you will happen upon something that is so horrendous that you need to say something.
Example 1: The Circle is one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
It pains me to watch this movie. But it pains me because there are good criticisms to make about working at Big Tech companies and somehow through 110 minutes, the people who made this movie touched on NONE of them. I am 100% confident that they have never worked at one of these companies and it offends me.
Example 2: Prom during COVID.
I have never felt more uncomfortable than watching that video. Why have a prom at all when you are required to put your date into some intricate arm bar wrestling move to dance? Could only imagine the pageantry around pinning the corsage…
COVID won’t be the only thing these kids won’t be getting tonight. That’s a lack of teen sex joke.
When something is structurally broken
I am a big fan of taking personal responsibility for fixing things. However, I nod to the fact that sometimes there are systemic things that are working against you. You need to call these out and name them in order to start making progress on fixing them. Not everything is in your control.
Example of someone wrongly attributing an event to themselves:
It is empowering to start from the assumption that you can change something, but be open to asking for help when you need it.
But remember that the goal in and of itself is not criticism, it is fixing the issue. The criticism draws attention. Then you need to actually fix the problem with your newly acquired resources.
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Complexity and city building
Speaking of building, my friend Najla put together this Twitter thread on how cities evolve. It is mind blowing.
Our mind is wired to think in simple cause and effect terms.
A happens therefore B happens.
But often times, there is a cascading effect of interdependencies that actually lead to the final result.
Sometimes it is A leads to X which leads to Y which leads to B under a particular set of conditions. However, if you did the EXACT same thing under a different set of conditions, it would yield a completely different result.
This applies to the evolution of cities. Great cities evolved into great cities around the set of constraints the city had in place. Constraints such as how commerce is done in the city, how people moved, and how people interacted. The city evolved to meet the needs of the people and there are many hidden interdependencies of why it evolved that way.
In this thread, Najla talks about why that matters to people who try to plan cities from the ground up:
Designers have tried to replicate the beautiful intricacies of ancient cities, but have failed. They tried to control scale through spatial sequence of buildings, vary richness of how buildings looked, and bring high density back into the city. It didn't work in practice.
Urban planners often attempt to design a city in an “optimal” way called a “tree”. However in doing so, they strip the city of its beauty and functionality.
They believe they can capture all the nuance and interdependencies and short cut evolution. They are often times wrong.
Maybe we aren’t smarter than evolution. Or maybe its Maybelline.
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This is art, get it?
This pencil drawing took this dude over 250 hours to complete. This is building. It is creating something that did not exist before for the purpose of creating something new.
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I am the master of darts
This is not a humble brag. It is a good old fashioned regular brag. I had a turn in a game of darts (specifically in a game of cricket) where I hit a double 19, a triple 18, and a triple 17. It was the single greatest turn I have ever had in my storied darts career.
I know you most likely don’t know what this means. But isn’t it enough that it means a lot to me? Does everything have to be about you? No. It doesn’t. But it has to be about me, I guess.
Anyway. Here is the picture of the dart board:
Peace out,
K. Rapp