Category Archives: Musings

Tompkins County Write-In Candidates

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In the Fall 2012 elections, our district’s State Senatorial contest featured only a single unchallenged Republican candidate, Thomas O’Mara. Given Tompkins County’s progressive bent (our Mayor recently has started lobbying for legalization of marijuana), it seemed to be just downright wrong to be represented by the GOP.

Some friends and I, gathered for coffee and games, were discussing this; three days before the election. Our friend Mallory Roberts was there. I forget who suggested it, but the idea of voting him as a write-in candidate for that seat became a topic of discussion. He had business cards; on the reverse, he wrote something like “Vote me for State Seante, I am not evil.” We left them all over the coffee house and I think he left some at other locations nearby as well.

His campaign, as it were, was underway. (I have a few thoughts on this, if anyone else is interested in running as a write-in candidate, but I’ll save them till the end, at the bottom)

On election night, my friends and I were checking the local election progress. The state senatorial race was being updated, but only listed votes for registered candidates (O’Mara), “Write-ins” and total votes cast. There were actually a substantial number of write-in votes cast — I want to say about 10-15% by the end of the night. We were all very curious about how many Mallory got.

After the election, I realized that I could find this out, with a FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) request. It was surprisingly easy, Tompkins County actually has a really convenient form for filing these requests. I was able to send my request, and get my response, electronically.

FOIL requests can be submitted for any public records. I was told mine would be filled by the Board of Elections, and would take approximately 3 weeks; I don’t know how long other requests would take. My request was free, but other requests may cost money, particularly if they require many hours of labor.

Below the jump are the details of my request along with the complete results of the write-in candidates for Tompkins County district NY State Senator.

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BEST MARKETING EMAIL EVAR

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So, a while back, I shelled out $5 for comedian Louis C.K.’s “Live at the Beacon Theater” standup video. He made a button of money, and gave a lot of it away to charity and the people that helped him produce it. Professionally and business-wise, he’s a really decent guy (I only qualify that because I don’t know him personally).

Part of that signup was an agreement that, on a rare occasion, he is allowed to contact me. Well, I finally got an e-mail from him, letting me know about some recent stuff he put up.

But wow. It’s just… this is the best marketing e-mail I’ve ever read. I read through the whole thing, twice even. It just DRIPS authenticity. When I read this, I can actually hear his voice in my head reading it to me. And you know what? It really makes me want to buy his stuff, and makes me HAPPY that I am on his mailing list. This is someone who took 10 or 15 minutes (maybe 20 or 30, he might be a really slow typist, or may have been dictating) to actually compose the e-mail himself. Even though he doesn’t know me personally, I feel more connected to him in our anomymous glory-hole consumer/vendor relationship than I have with most other products.

One thing in particular was his note about:

I’m giving you this long and boring explaination because, as most of you know, I release about an hour or more of new standup material every year and folks can count on seeing a new show every year. This is old material, so I don’t want to be a dick and pretend it isn’t.

The closing paragraph is hilarious, as well. Give it a read. And go buy his shit.

(Full text of e-mail after the jump)

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The MPC (Marginal Propensity for Consumption) and Economic Stimulus

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The other day, I saw a recent video in Khan Academy’s Microeconomics series entitled “MPC and Multiplier” which is about the Marginal Propensity for Consumption (at its most basic level: if you received a windfall of $100 how much would of it would you spend). It’s only a few minutes, and I would suggest watching it before reading the rest of the post:

Ok, with that out of the way, I have a few ideas that I would like to put out there. IANAE (I am not an economist) and I welcome any critique of these ideas, but they seem pretty sensible.

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Restrictions and Creativity

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Years ago, I read an article by the Lead Game Designer Mark Rosewater wherein he explained that (paraphrasing) “restriction create breeding grounds for creativity“. His exact words were:

["Rules are obstacles to creativity"] is probably the biggest myth that causes people to lash out against the rules. The problem is that this myth is based upon a false assumption. People like to believe that a world of infinite choices is more conducive to creativity than a world of finite choices. Essentially, the more choices available, the more chance for creative thought.

Unfortunately, scientific exploration into the means of creative thought has proven this not to be true. Testing has shown that restrictions actually aid creative thought. How is this possible? The answer rests in the human mind. It turns out that the mind isn’t good at completely open-ended choices. When faced with total freedom of options the brain retreats to known pathways. It simply repeats what worked last time it was in this situation.

This idea, that constraints somehow force us to explore creative space more, is one that has stuck with me ever since reading that article. I had read elsewhere that a coping trick for feeling overwhelmed is to break your mammoth task down into smaller bits and manage those bits little by little, and this is sort of the same principle: our brains are not particularly good at tracking large sets of data.  Continue reading →

Deleting Facebook

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Well, it’s done.

I’ve talked about doing it several times in the past.

The first couple times was sort of teenage rebellion — “aw man, fuck their stupid ____ police, they can’t do that to ME. I’m out!”

More recently, when they completely changed the interface, adding the “timeline” and “live updates” features, I began to realize that I would have to re-learn a lot of the interface to be able to use it normally again; That’s when I realized I just didn’t know if it was worth it for me.

I’ve also noticed that Facebook’s “personal connections first” policy has shown me a lot more about my peers than I ever cared to know. I saw sides of my friends (and to be fair, they probably saw sides of me) that neither of us really should have ever seen. It’s sort of a package deal; yeah, they have the granular control over status updates so you can restrict who sees them, but I don’t think anyone has really bothered to learn it much. At least, it doesn’t seem that way.

When that happened, I decided I would try to back off my usage. I deleted the app from my phone, only checking it via the clunky mobile website interface; believe it or not, that actually significantly pared down my usage. At the computer, I only checked it about once daily. I really didn’t miss it that much.

I will miss many of my Facebook connections very much, particularly since that was the primary way I communicated with them. My “warning shot” this morning was a simple “Hey, I’m deleting my profile at the end of the day. Here’s my contact info.” It was nice to have a chance to say goodbye and make communication arrangements with some of my friends before sailing off.

Deactivating was a little surreal. It’s like taking a trip behind the curtain, to the forbidden area no one sees.

You can “download your profile data” (under “Account Settings” I believe) which includes every single one of your posts, photos, videos, etc. Mine took about 2 hours or so to assemble, and was 270MB.

When you’re ready to deactivate, which is oddly under “Privacy Settings”, it shows this screen:

TOTAL EFFING GUILT TRIP.

You’ll need to view that full to see it, but it shows 5 photos of you “with a friend”, and says “Soandso will miss you! [Send them a message].” As far as I can tell, there is no rhyme or reason to how those people are picked; it’s pretty random — same for the photos they chose.

Underneath those photos is a short exit survey. I kind of felt like I was being debriefed. For “Why are you leaving”, I chose “other” and wrote:

I’ve thought about it for about 3 months, and ultlimately, it’s ceased being a net positive in my life. I’ve learned far too much about people I’m only mildly associated with, I’ve learned how ignorant and biogted some of my friends are, and overall, being on facebook has, on more than one occasion, heavily challenged my faith in humanity. People just get downright UGLY on here, and I don’t have room in my life for that, despite the meaningful connections I’ve made with people I genuinely care about. In hindsight, that’s just really sad. I suppose I could choose better friends, but it seems more like a combination of human nature and the fact that FB basically exposes everything but their genitals to me.

And again, I include myself in those general statements about “people” — FB often brought out the ugly side of me, to my chagrin.

That wasn’t the only reason, of course — the different interface, desire to step away from addictive media, and wanting to be less tethered to the internet were all contributing factors. That was the only one I felt like writing about, though.

After filling that out, it asked me for my password one more time, then I had to fill out a CAPTCHA. That was a little weird. I guess they’re worried about people’s accounts getting hacked and the robots deactivating the accounts?

Then I got this email:

In the blurred box there are two links to sites that I have used “Facebook Connect” to register with. The links point to alternate ways to register an account with them. This was actually a very courteous and unexpected feature of deactivation, and I’m kind of surprised it was included, even if I don’t plan on taking advantage of it. Kudos to the FB exit team for that.

It feels weird.

But I’m glad I did it.

Climbing Wall Street

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The train was moving at a brisk pace; the New York countryside whizzing by as we made our way down the eastern side of the upstate portion. I sat in a seat row by myself, phone plugged in to the convenience outlet, alternating between reading pages from the latest book in progress (“The Trap“) and chatting on my phone. With a 2.5 hour ride from Albany to Manhattan, I was pretty sure that my phone would be fully charged by the time I got there, but I was somewhat anxious it wouldn’t be, since there was a good possibility I might not have access to a power outlet for over a day.

Earlier that day, my friend Jon and I drove from his brother’s house in Latham, NY (a suburb of Albany) to Buck Mountain, a hiking trail near Lake George in the Adirondack mountains. We had been planning a hiking outing for a couple months, and his brother knew of a good trail that we could do. The plan was to do the trail in the morning, finish by the afternoon and then I would take a train down to Manhattan and go to the Occupy Wallstreet protests in Zuccotti park (1 Liberty Plaza, downtown). Continue reading →