Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Saved

The Verge offers a fascinating report on how the generation that grew up with Google doesn’t organize files on their computers. University professors are baffled:

Professor Garland asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

Another professor: “Students have had these computers in my lab; they’ll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized.”

2. Dead Heads

Ted Gioia makes 12 predictions about the future of music. All are worth reading. But the most provocative is about the future lives of dead musicians:

Dead musicians will start showing up everywhere—via holograms, biopics, deepfake vocals, and other technology-driven interfaces. These resurrected performers will capture an increasing share of industry revenues, and put a squeeze on living artists. (This will eventually happen with dead movie stars and other celebrities too, but deceased musicians will lead this trend because it’s simpler and cheaper to fake an audio than, for example, a commercial film.)

3. Elon Musk Spaces Out

In his latest quarterly report, super investor Ron Baron, one of Tesla’s earliest and biggest investors, explores how Elon Musk’s SpaceX will compete. Baron details how the commander, Jared Isaacman, prepared for a recent flight:

Jared chose his crew for his civilian mission and was responsible for melding them into a functioning unit. Jared believes it is difficult to create a problem-solving culture like that of SpaceX’s, which is oriented to First Principles. For example, when Jared learned to fly a fighter jet as a civilian several years ago, he was required to memorize 100 pages of instructions. As the commander of this mission, he was required to study and learn 3,000 pages of instructions and undergo three FRRs, “flight readiness reviews.” All were chaired by Elon. The first lasted 18 hours, the second 10 hours, and the final 3 hours. The objective was for the space crew to “do things a certain way, every time.” Day-to-day tasks were all documented, reduced to a checklist, and embedded in operational training. Everything references a procedure. Check 405, for example, if a light bulb is not turned on. Everything is intended to preserve mindshare so that your brainpower can be focused on what hasn’t been considered. No “going rogue” by this crew.

4. Lost Generation

In his review of Bobby Duffy’s new book, The Generation Myth, Louis Menand blows up the idea that people belong to a single generation. The claim has no basis in biology or anything else. But European scientists and intellectuals embraced the notion of the “generation” to make sense of social and cultural change:

There is “just about no evidence,” Duffy says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” Duffy worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

5. Want Fries with That?

Everyone knows that Wendy’s bacon pretzel triple cheeseburger is not part of a healthy diet. But a new study reported in MedPage Today finds that fast-food chains are not the only culprits in America’s rising obesity rates:

[The study] showed that about 70% of meals at fast-food restaurants were of "poor quality" and just 30% were even of "intermediate" quality. At full-service restaurants, 47% of meals were of intermediate quality and 52% were poor quality. Perhaps most striking, fewer than 0.1% of meals consumed at these restaurants met the American Heart Association's definition of "ideal quality," which are meals high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and low in processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, saturated fat, and sodium.

6. Has America Lost Its Magic?

American birth rates are falling. According to Nick Eberstadt, it’s part a broader decline of American ambition:

Dynamism in our economy and society is on the wane in some significant and easily verifiable respects: Simply put, America’s vitalizing “churn” is heading down. The ratio of start-ups and new enterprises to total establishments has been declining for decades, as has the net rate of new jobs created by these new businesses. So too the mobility of the population as a whole. On the eve of COVID, the percentage of Americans who changed residence was barely half as high as it was 30 years earlier.

Websites Worth Reading

Carefree Households: Heatmaps of where people live in the US without cars

Two Ways to Tell the Story: MLB: Greg Mankiw’s blog on the minimum wage debate

Maps of Walt Disney World: Data storytelling: 50-years of maps showing how the park has changed

Feeds We Follow

@typesfast: Flexport CEO on supply chain solutions

@RickRieder: Blackrock’s best market commentator

@JennyCafarella: The study of war