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This Week on the Lindy Newsletter
Are there differences between generations? I think a little bit. Especially if technology is involved. One difference between baby boomers ( and gen-x) and millenials is that millenials really emphasized breaking routines and creating experiences. The rise of startups, or side-hustles, including the big middle-class travel boom served as a way to avoid a fixed pattern day after day.
If you look at the contemporary tourism boom, it only really began 15 years ago. Middle class Americans didn’t see visiting Europe or Asia as a necessary journey until quite recently.
This coincided with the rise of social media, Instagram, Airbnb and sharing your life online. Cameras on phones became better than professional cameras. Millenials cared about creating memories.
Weekend Reads
Power laws eat everything. That means the book publishing industry is probably not as big as you would think. Maybe we should be publishing books to resemble medieval manuscripts. They are really nice to look at instead of just black print on white paper.
Here's the NPD BookScan chart of last year's top 25 books:
— Jason Colavito (@JasonColavito)
8:10 PM • Jan 30, 2023
For most of human history, the children grew up and usually did the same type of work as their parents. I think the 20th century was a time when people did radically different things because the economy was so open-ended. But now you’re seeing a reversion to the mean in the 21st century.
You’re 24x more likely to become a doctor if your parents were doctors, compared to those whose parents did any other type of work. Similarly, you’re 17x more likely to become a lawyer if your parents are lawyers. Here’s how it varies among the elite professions.
— Basit Mahmood (@BasitMahmood91)
9:12 PM • Jan 29, 2023
There’s a large YIMBY vs NIMBY battle going on right now. This article is about the housing crisis in California and the suspension of zoning to increase the amount of homes in certain cities in California. How will deregulation influence this market more generally?
A reminder about the local and the universal
Humans are designed for local not universal.
Our consciousness devised for local, becomes harmful in universal.
Universal righteousness converge to harm when applied to multi-dimensional multiplicative interactions.
Repeatedly the right thing in higher dimensions maps to harm.
— Paul Portesi (@PaulPortesi)
7:11 PM • Feb 2, 2023
The Kalahari Bushmen score low on IQ tests. But what is it really measuring? Here is an article on the intelligence of bushmen and the inherent restrictions of IQ tests that are particular environments that hunter gatherer populations don't exist in.
This is really a classic look. Although I’m much more sensitive to the cold now, and I don’t pull this off anymore.
February is an honest month, unlike March which promises you good weather and then never delivers.
the worst month of the year starts next week and this is still the best video on the internet
— Alexis Benveniste (@apbenven)
4:25 PM • Jan 26, 2023
I think the world population is going to shrink very fast soon. No one has a real answer to the fertility crisis happening.
If only gvmnt paid for good family welfare, there was a mandated maternal leave, free kindergarten, free college and decently priced houses, low criminality and an homogeneous population, people will have more children, they say.
Yeah sure
— Lucio Martelli (@LucioMM1)
11:01 PM • Feb 2, 2023
Coffee has experienced a technological revolution, on a par in its own way with the invention of the jet engine or the smartphone. You can see where espresso making goes from progress to pure refinement culture, in the last paragraphs and especially that last image (an espresso machine with a digital readout that looks like it belongs in a car tuning shop).
The Taliban get office jobs and learn about the 4HL
Taliban fighters from rural Afghanistan struggling with integrating into the group’s administrative structure in Kabul is fascinating. TB ministry personnel with little to do spending their days scrolling on Twitter & complaining about fixed office hours httpp
— Hugo Kaaman (@HKaaman)
11:48 AM • Feb 3, 2023
Interesting thread
The West Coast has many more Spanish names (like California, Oregon, SF, or LA) than the East Coast. Why?
Because of China and the rotation of the Earth:
— Tomas Pueyo (@tomaspueyo)
7:29 PM • Feb 3, 2023