Welcome to Monday, Apexians. J.D. here with another week of money stories to share with you all. I’m leading with yet-another story about electric bikes. (Can you tell I’m researching them for myself?)
“Electric bike, stupid love of my life.” [Craig Mod] — “In the past eighteen months I’ve put several thousand kilometers on my electric bikes. It feels like cheating in every best possible way.”
Contrarians are usually wrong. [A Wealth of Common Sense] — “Going against the grain at opportune moments can be a wonderful strategy. The best investment opportunities almost always occur when there is blood in the streets. The problem is you can’t be a contrarian at all times. Most of the time the trend is right and fighting it is a losing strategy.”
What really happens to the clothes you donate. [GQ] — “Only between 10 and 30 percent of second-hand donations to charity shops are actually resold in store. The rest disappears into a machine you don’t see: a vast sorting apparatus in which donated goods are graded and then resold on to commercial partners, often for export to the Global South.”
So, the video I have for you today is going to seem a little strange. This eight-minute segment is a training video for Bell Labs’ Holmdel Computing Center.
I found this video while researching my favorite architect, Eero Saarinen. Saarinen designed the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, and I thought it’d be fun to see what it was like to actually work there. Turns out the video is also fun because (a) it’s a soft of time capsule and (b) it highlights what computer technology was like fifty years ago. We’ve come a long way!
Okay, that’s it for today. I’ll see you all again tomorrow.