Weekend Reads

This Week on The Lindy Newsletter

Do you see the picture above? The desk is not facing the wall. Desks never really faced walls. About 20 years ago people started working on computers regularly and now all desks face walls.

How has technology other rooms? Click Here to read more…

Weekend Reads

As cars got more increasingly technological, they were supposed to be harder to steal. That didn’t happen. Car thefts went up last year. Some Kia and Hyundai ignitions have a particular vulnerability that's really easy to exploit using a USB cable. There was a TikTok showing how to do it has led to a massive increase in car thefts across many — though not all — US cities with available data...The video was up for less than two weeks but the impact on auto thefts throughout the nation has been immense.

in 1999, an employee at work late at night went outside for a smoke in NYC. He went back in to finish his work and got stuck in the elevator for 48 hours. The worst part of the story? He quit his job thinking he would get millions in a settlement. He only settled for low six figures

This article looks at how much safer construction has gotten over the last 100 years. Total occupational injuries are down 86% since the 70s & still falling steadily through 2020.

Why did the Convertible die? Convertibles – once a sign

of open-air freedom and summer adventures – are increasingly fading away.

Vinyl records outsell CDs for the first time since 1987. Is Vinyl making a comeback? I think it’s an enjoyable niche product but isn’t coming back anytime soon. Half of the people who buy vinyl records do not own a turntable. It’s more of an art piece at this point.

Is plastic recycling real? The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills. The amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced.

Sports gambling was legalized in the United States a year ago. There are reports that the WWE is trying to get states to legalize gambling. How do you gamble on a fake sport? America takes things to the extreme.

We use smartphones when we are bored, but they may not relieve boredom, and in fact increase it. In fact, this small longitudinal study of PhD students found that short breaks from work to use a phone were correlated with MORE boredom & fatigue afterwards

I like New York. I used to live there and I enjoy the energy when I visit. However, theThe scaffolding really ruins New York. You're constantly walking under ceilings when you're outside. The sky is highest ceiling and we can feel that.

Will remote work promote more family formation? A new paper puts forth a fascinating theory: Maybe remote work is making it easier for couples to become parents—and for parents to have more children. They concluded that female remote workers

were more likely to intend to have a baby than all-office workers, especially if they were richer, older, and more educated. What’s more, remote workers in the survey were more likely to marry in the next year than their nonremote counterparts.

I write about a concept called refinement culture. It involves the removal of diversity in domains of life. For example, in housing. Or cars. Or Sports. It’s nice to hear about an NBA coach being very honest about what is going on.

Would you rather do the van life or live on a cruise ship? You have options now. People are doing the Van Life. Although, I’d probably would go crazy living on a cruise ship for 3 years.

 Economically integrated buildings in 19th century Paris did not lead to social mixing: “tenants rarely had social intercourse with neighbors above and below”

Maybe the phones really are hurting young people. Teens who meet up with their friends 'almost every day' is down from 50% in the 90s to 25% today. Falls off a cliff around 2010, alongside the rise of smartphones and social media.

I wonder what sports like this will end up looking 40 years from now. We’ve reached some optimization that it may look completely different, with robots, or completely the same. This beautiful footage from the 60s is much more interesting, although you can tell it was so amateur compared to today.

I recently had someone reach out to me to test their new app. Apparently, it’s not even songs, it’s just snippets. I listen to music during work. Many people consume media at work now, whether it’s podcasts or youtube. Snippets of songs would be very distracting and over stimulate me. I think classical music will have a good future in our media world because classical doesn't take your attention away from work.

This chart does not surprise me. It may seem like everyone is an entrepreneur if you consume media. But that’s not the place. The US is a place where you can make a good living as an employee. Not many other countries that have that. For many other people outside of the US, entering the corporate American structure is the dream. It provides great pay, structure and benefits. I’ve written about what employment means, so has Nassim Taleb.

Music

Francoise Hardy’s first big hit

was a cover of a rockabilly song by Bobby Lee Trammell in 1958

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fA6ygkD7N8