Interesting stuff

  1. Read: People don’t hate work; they want better jobs
  2. Read: Too much happiness is a bad thing. Related: Choose enjoyment over pleasure.
  3. Listen (x3): The world for sale — how commodity traders traitors enable corrupt kleptocrats. Related: How the Brits became the “butler” to the corrupt and how to stop them (and Putin).
  4. Read: Ukraine’s fighters have pivoted warfare.
  5. Read: Deaf DJs are making a scene on the dancefloor
  6. Read: Behind the Accidentally Resilient Design of Athens Apartments
  7. Read: Ezra Klein has some wise thoughts on liberalism (vs authoritarian-populism)
  8. Read: Ten useful pieces of advice on bitcoin
  9. Read: What’s the REAL cost of your consumption?
  10. Listen: Ireland’s history

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: Six months in, El Salvador’s bitcoin gamble is crumbling. Related (and good) — listen to two Salvadorians explain how badly it’s going. Related (and amazing): Desperate people are playing the crypto-casino
  2. Listen: Many myths of male “biological” advantages debunked.
  3. Listen: Animals are too neat to eat.
  4. Read: Some people are dropping “smart” for “dumb” phones, to save money and their sanity.
  5. Read: Boomers are retiring to Margaritaville, and it’s all party, no responsibility (except to each other).
  6. Listen: A great discussion on how to really do higher ed
  7. Read: Are we (humans) entering an entirely new era?
  8. Read: Exercise is great; the “exercise industry” not so much
  9. Read: Transparent (public) salaries reduce discrimination against non-White-males
  10. Read: California’s anti-inflation policy is a total fail

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: American cars have been rated by the superior gallons/100 miles (same as liters/100km) for over 10 years, but people haven’t noticed!
  2. Read: The suburbs also encouraged corporations to create their “perfect” (=artificial, high modern) campuses (as seen all over Silicon Valley)
  3. Watch: Bikes should NOT be taxed out of people’s budgets.
  4. Read: Why is Covid-death in the US (nearly 1 million so far) treated so casually?
  5. Read: The scientists behind the accuracy of Covid-tests
  6. Read: Schwarzenegger’s message to his Russian friends
  7. Read: People Deserve to Know Their Houses Are Going to Burn
  8. Read: This piece criticizes the way that Daylight “savings” is being stopped, but they are mixing up the problem of jumping clocks with the need for teens (and others) to have light in the morning.
  9. Listen: Texas’s electrical grid is a market and government failure

H/Ts to CD and PB 

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: Russia’s Economic Blackout Will Change the World, via some serious breaks in trade and supply chains.
  2. Read: Our quest to attention threatens our mental health and society.
  3. Listen: This is how a professor should think and teach. He sounds like the kinda person we should have as our next Dean!
  4. Read: An expert on Stalin discusses Putin, Russia, and the West
  5. Read: The influence of politics on public health (tl;dr: more deaths in Republican states)
  6. Listen: The story of “Build-a-bear” as a start-up
  7. Read: How to break (or start) a habit
  8. Listen: Witchcraft as a tool.
  9. Read: Race is not scientific. Skin color is… but what about hair?
  10. Ponder: Price of full tank of gasoline (60 l) as a percentage of average monthly net salary across the world:

Interesting stuff

  1. Listen: An interview with the author of Jackpot: How gambling conquored Britain
  2. Read: What happens when Americans stay in the same house forever? “No one is suggesting forcibly moving Americans via strategic lava flows. But there are costs to taking the steps that”
  3. Listen: An excellent discussion of the economic impacts of sanctions on Russia. Related: A discussion of Russia’s political options and The end of “the end of history” as Russia goes rogue (and the privatization of war?). Read: These are the Russians the Netherlands can squeeze.
  4. Listen: Why are there so many bad bosses? The Peter principle is true!
  5. Listen: An amazing series — According to Need — looks at the institutional weaknesses prolonging homelessness in the Bay Area (near San Francisco).
  6. Read: “The new owner of Argentina’s de facto national treat stopped paying his majority-female workforce — so they seized control of the entire operation.
  7. Read: UC Berkeley has been forced to reduce student numbers as fixed housing supply and increasing demand drives home/rental prices ever higher.
  8. Read: The grandsons of “Doctor” Bronner are using their soap profits to fund research into and legalization of psychedelics. Nice.
  9. Read: Social sciences need to improve on their medieval standards of evidence and logic
  10. Watch: Remember to wash your hands… to save grandpa and just to spread fewer germs!

H/Ts to JH and MG

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: The rise of un-populism (politicians mis-representing their voters)
  2. Read: Web3 is all about data sovereignty, but do people know what that means?
  3. Watch this video from 1988 on the decline of salmon in California rivers due to dams and irrigation diversions. (Their situation has not, to my knowledge, improved.)
  4. Read: The speed of climate change is unbalancing the insect world
  5. Read: Farmers in Valencia have sustainably managed their water commons for over 1,000 years.
  6. Read: The violent mafia cutting down Romania’s old growth forests and selling the wood to Ikea
  7. Read: The great resignation rebalancing of life-work balance.
  8. Read: Romney (unlike Obama and wtf Trump) was right about Putin‘s threat to global stability. Related: Seize the Russians wealth ill-gotten gains
  9. Read: Advertisers are turning from cookies to fingerprinting to track you all over the internet
  10. Listen: A Ukrainian CEO reckons with the war.

H/Ts to BK and TB

Interesting stuff

    1. Read: A really cool experiment showing that mafiosi are more “loyal” than normal criminals or students in prisoner’s dilemma games.
    2. Read: “Web3 [defi, blockchain] is the future, or a scam, or both” [good overview]
    3. Read: The Great Faculty Disengagement
    4. Read: Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race
    5. Listen: An excellent podcast on the value added by VC firms
    6. Read: How fires across the world have grown weirder
    7. Read: A Dutch university is caught taking €€ from China for a “human rights center” that was curiously uninterested in human rights in China.
    8. Read: The myth of sustainable fashion
    9. Read: A small share of “super abusers” are responsible for much of the ugly content on Facebook, and Facebook is promoting them as “engaging”
    10. Listen: A podcast series on the OneCoin Ponzi-crypto-scam

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: Why mine gold that’s just going to sit in a vault. The process is massively polluting. (Why mine bitcoin? At least it’s not going to sit in a vault? 🙂
  2. Read: “How to make time with someone bad at making time“)
  3. Read: Forget the “great resignation” — take a sabbatical! Related: Teachers are quitting at record rates.
  4. Read: “The diminishing returns of productivity culture,” which reminds me of my post on Keynes and why we turned productivity into consumption rather than leisure.
  5. Read: The IRS and other USG departments are using facial recognition. Given the government’s total incompetence in protecting personal data (let alone selling it), this will not end well.
  6. Read: My “20/80 rule” inaction [sic]: “20% of Brits Are Eating Less Meat To Actively Fight Climate Change“… so the other 80% don’t care, right?
  7. Act: I’ve asked Amazon for all the data it has on me. You should too.
  8. Read: “political hacktivists” are attacking governments whose policies they dislike.
  9. Read: The Dutch like to tout their water management expertise as a consulting export, but the key to success abroad is not Dutch ingenuity but political processes and connections.
  10. Read: One of London’s most successful estate agents (realtor) is making big deals but trying to avoid mafia money launderers.

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: Black parents are breaking a tradition of (stress-induced) bad parenting. (This advice applies to non-Blacks, of course!)
  2. Watch: Limits to Growth update: MIT Has Predicted that Society Will Collapse in 2040
  3. Read: A great analysis of the current “superbubble,” which will make the 2007-8 crash look like a walk in the park when it bursts. Get ready!
  4. Listen: A really interesting podcast with a founder of the Pirate Bay on copyright, Swedish vs American “justice,” and access to information.
  5. Read: This Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty post gives some useful tips on converting uncertainty to risk via qualitative methods and institutional modeling, which is an improvement on typical models that are too cheap (=no effort) and inaccurate.
  6. Read: In 1970, Bruce Kirby created the perfect single-person sailboat. What made the Laser so unbeatable?
  7. Read: It’s not conservatives (in the US) who are spreading fake news, but “low-conscientiousness” conservatives that want the system to burn down.
  8. Listen: One of the better discussions of the “hot” watch market, collectors and poseurs
  9. Listen to this interview with Stuart Brand. He’s 83 and has many wise things to say about humans and nature.
  10. Read: ‘The treeline is out of control’ — the Arctic is tipping fast towards climate chaos.

H/Ts to AB and MM

Interesting stuff

  1. A bunch of university-educated types are worried about “1 million missing students” in the US. I am not so pessimistic (1) because a lot of university education is bullshit, (2) because some young people should wait for university, as they need time to figure out what they might want to study and can use their experience to get a better education, and (3) because there’s good money and good work in some trades — read Shop Class as Soul Craft!
  2. Listen: Poles Apart: Why We Turn Against Each Other and (related) Liberalism in Dark Times
  3. Read: Some theatre types in the US announced they would only accept vaccinated guests. They received many angry emails but no cancelled tickets. The angry people weren’t even customers.
  4. Watch: China’s high speed rail system (like its dams) have go so far as to become a (political) liability.
  5. Explore: Import Yeti allow (relational-database) lookups for sea-based shipping supply chains. It’s a gold mine for anyone trying to understand/investigate global trade. Here’s a related site with trade data. Bonus: Cost of living comparison between cities
  6. Read: The challenge of making new friends when you’re middle-aged.
  7. Read: The long history of pregnant women (mostly) failing to claim their fetus allows them to use the carpool lane.
  8. Read: Omicron makes “endemic” Covid more likely, which means a return to infecting each other as business-as-usual rather than life-threatening.
  9. Read: Venice is taking my advice and trying to attract digital nomads. There are a few issues on both sides, in terms of expectations (Wifi or caffé?)
  10. Read: These “innovation prizes” are so over-the-top that I can’t tell if they are trolling. This is the entry from Global Mayors Challenge Winner Rotterdam:

    Unemployment in Rotterdam is double the national average and rising. But public budgets, stressed by the pandemic, have limited funding for employment programs. Rotterdam is creating “Rikx,” a new digital marketplace that connects local social entrepreneurs to investors so that they can deliver innovative projects, while helping the city’s most vulnerable residents find work. Through Rikx, private-sector partners can purchase digital tokens that monetize social impact generated by entrepreneurs, similar to “offsets” in the carbon market.