This Week on the Lindy Newsletter

I have been working a lot lately. So I decided to go through my outbox to see the patterns of emails I send. It turns out, I send out emails in bursts. It's probably the same for you as well.

It's not just email. Bursts are how everything happens in life. Life is fits and starts. This is how energy is used successfully by nature. Nature operates in bursts. There is no escaping our paleolithic rhythm. Resting ensures you have the physical and mental reserves to pounce. However, modern scheduled lifestyle leaves many exhausted and has convinced us to spread our available energy throughout the workday.

Weekend Reads

Are TV shows any good? I'm someone who doesn't watch much television. I prefer maybe a youtube video. But are their structural reasons TV so bad? Tyler Cowen comments on why he doesn't like TV

Why can't America build quickly anymore? People always bring up China building a hundred subway stations in a month, which is an unfair comparison since it is a dictatorship. But even Europe, where the environment is a significant consideration, also builds subways (and other things) at significantly faster speeds and lower cost than the US. If you look in any detail, it's not a matter of some magic the Chinese or whoever have, it's matter of the corrupt nexus of interests that have come to soak up any transit spending in the US, in particular.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison has a hobby: he curates a list of examples of “people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.” Sadly, of his examples from the physical world⁠—like ports and skyscrapers and railroads⁠—most come from before 1970.

Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable.

- teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs

- teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture

- Performing cutting edge research

- minor league sports teams

The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities.

Olive consumption goes back 100,000 years to early homo-sapiens

The West has imposed a lot of sanctions on Russia. The thing with sanctions is they don't come off easily. Moscow's largest airport, Sheremetyevo is furloughing 40% of its staff - around 7k employees - cutting their pay by a third. Russia only has direct flights with a dozen or so countries these days after unprecedented airspace bans have crippled the aviation industry

Every faction on the America political spectrum are uniting around the idea that high gas prices are America's biggest problem.

Italian demographics do not look good

Climate data can help us understand history

Lindy Music