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Weekend Reads
May 2022
This Week on the Lindy Newsletter
I wrote about two separate phenomenas. why people today look much younger than people in past eras.
I also touched upon the variety and scale. The more scaled up something is, the less variety
I use the American craft brewery IPA revolution as an example. It's inexpensive to make IPAs, but it takes much more money and skill to create an excellent pilsner.
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Weekend Reads
There is a lot of wisdom in the way cities are built when they are not designed for cars.
Things I learned today: Narrow (very narrow) streets are surprisingly cool (and ventilated) on a scorching day; the bottom is only directly exposed to the sun for <15 min when the rays hit at a narrow band around a 90 degree angle. htt
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb)
1:21 PM • May 24, 2022
As the Yakuza lose influence, foreign criminals are seizing the reins of the Japanese drug market.
Your credit score is a powerful thing in life. The bad news is its easy to destroy, the good news is credit scores recover quick, you could cause six figure loses to a bank by short selling your home and still have workable credit within 2 years
Why the gas you’re buying this weekend is so expensive: yes, oil is expensive, but refinery capacity has shrunk in the past few years, meaning that gas is expensive — and refinery profits are sky
Tom Cruise has a new big blockbuster movie out. I think he may be the last real movie star left. Hollywood actors just aren't very famous anymore. I don't think I would recognize any of them if they walked into a restaurant.
young tom cruise starred in movies with jack nicholson and dustin hoffman...now he's in a movie with...miles teller? glen powell? we used to build things in this country
— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin)
3:51 PM • May 26, 2022
Maybe you haven't fully realized how much demand for Uber / Lyft has crashed as the prices rose: “The companies collectively drew at least 20% fewer riders and posted 35% fewer trips in the first quarter than three years earlier”
The shift to remote work explains over *half* of the 24% increase in US national home prices between Dec 2019 and Nov 2021, according to this working paper from researchers at UCSD and the SF Fed
Chart-topping original movies have gone extinct
And literature. Until 1990, it was pretty remarkable for one author to have multiple top-10 bestselling books. Now it happens almost every year.
— Adam Mastroianni (@a_m_mastroianni)
2:22 PM • May 2, 2022
Scale Wins. Historically, the composition of a town’s Main Street was fairly consistent; All communities had a grocery store, a bank, a barber shop or salon, a few restaurants, and perhaps a dry goods store or boutique. But nearly every one of these stores was locally owned, so even if two towns had the same type of stores on paper, the character, personality, history, and complex interpersonal dynamics imbued into those places would have such a radically different impact that one could hardly say that either town was very much like the other at all
