December 2021

This Week on The Lindy Newsletter

I wrote about cutting my social media addiction. It made me realize places like Twitter and Facebook can disappear but LinkedIn is here forever. You may move to another platform, but companies are not moving to another platform.

Weekend Reads

The Omicron variant is spreading really quickly throughout the world, is a moving target, but early signs point to it being more contagious and less deadly than the standard strain. But who knows what will happen.

Americans are rethinking where they want to live. I enjoy watching a couple of shows about home renovations. Two things always strike me as odd:

* People on that show always needs a shit load of space. Especially in the kitchens, for some reason. Sometimes they are a couple without kids or maybe have one kid but they want 2 ovens? And a huge island is a must.

* Houses made out of wood and walls that you can punch through. This is a different matter though.

Are movies actually getting less funny? Here is a Reddit thread on which are the funniest comedies. Not many recent movies on that list. 2008 seems like the limit of when movies stopped being really funny, and 1970-2008 a rough band. One of the funniest things I've seen lately is the Detroit Urban Survival Guy on Tik-Tok. It's physical comedy. Physical comedy is underrated. Curb Your Enthusiasm is great because it has elements of Marx Brothers/Three Stooges physical comedy. Something Seinfeld never had.

The sun goes down early these days. I think about sunlight and remote work. I remember being in offices for all those years not seeing much sun. “Nurses who had access to natural light enjoyed significantly lower blood pressure, communicated more often with their colleagues, laughed more and served their patients in better moods than nurses who settled for large doses of artificial light.”

It's surprising that the decline in Mormon fertility is in line with the collapse in fertility everywhere else. It seems like decline in fertility is a worldwide phenomenon. The future will be less populated. Italy's fertility recently plummeted all the way down to a little more than 1 birth per woman, which is within range of the lowest fertility countries in the world. Falling family formation in all the leading economies simultaneously is without a doubt the biggest story in the world and it is remarkably little commented on in the media. The Twitter handle @birthgauge is a great resource. Essentially no developed countries are anywhere close to replacement now. Here is one theory as to why

A Millionaire goes homeless to prove anyone can make $1 million dollars. Interesting idea.. but he should have picked someone else to guide if he was trying to prove anyone can do it. Feels like he only proved that he could become a millionaire again, which is still impressive but he does possess the same name, connections, and know how.

One mistake technocrats make, with both crime & inflation, is thinking they are phenomenon that can be micromanaged, massaged, & easily adjusted. Crime and Inflation both are non linear phenomena that are cultural & social. You can’t play around with having “just a little inflation.” Or just a little more crime. Non linear phenomena, or social phenomena, don’t work that way.

I like to check in with culture to see if there has been a massive shift yet. I wrote a while ago about how culture is stuck. It looks like we are still in the same zone. I think big companies notice and are buying up 20th century music catalogues because people will be listening to the same artists for a long time. Bruce Springsteen sold his music rights to Sony in a $500 million deal. A few months ago Bob Dylan sold his entire songwriting catalog to Universal Music for $300 million dollars. Mass impact requires mass shared media, which no longer exists. What remains of mass media = stuck in the past. The living culture = niche spaces in the fractured media ecosystem.

The Grammys announced their nominations this year. The Grammys made sense in the 20th century when the only music you could listen to was on the radio or on CD at the store. Today there's millions of artists on Soundcloud. The best album of the year is probably some band with 40 followers deep into the Soundcloud jungle. The counter argument to this is that art doesn't really exist unless it is shared within a scaled up community. Art can be "bad" but if it's a shared experience among people and they discuss it, then it can be turned "good"

The NBA player Steph Curry broke the all-time 3-point shot record this week. The game of basketball has changed dramatically over the years. I wonder if the game has reached some sort of optimization and this is how it will be played forever. In 1998, when Reggie Miller broke his record, Dale Ellis had the second most made threes of all time, now he's at 25th, between Wesley Matthews and Kevin Durant.

The news media focuses on government in an abstract way. It's about big narratives that don't really concern you as a citizen. However, as an individual you interact with government in a direct way. Such as filing taxes, flying, and dealing with bureaucracy. This seems like important and substantive new policy from the Biden admin that will have a pretty direct impact on a lot of people's experience of government services, so of course it's barely being discussed. The “end user experience” of government. It should be simple and accessible rather than Kafkaesque.

An interesting article on how you can get away with a crime in a small town. As long as everyone is on the same page, the police have a hard time investigating a case.

The life of an oil-field medic. Oil-field medics face long hours, grisly accidents, desolation, and low pay. So why do they do it?

Music

I could easily envision Bola participating in the major jazz movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He would have fit perfectly with the crossover projects pursued by the CTI label in that period. He also could have become a major force on the growing ‘world music’ scene. Or he might have flourished with a jazz-rock fusion band, or as part of the chamber jazz movement taking off overseas.