Neverbeaten

After watching many, many episodes of antiques roadshow, I’ve come to a conclusion about what kinds of things appreciate and become investments and what things are worthless.

Anything marketed and sold as a “collectible” is worthless after the fad has died down. People will hang on to them despite the bubble popping, in some sort of hope they’ll be valuable again someday. This guarantees they won’t become valuable because so many people have large collections and preserve them well.

The things that are actually valuable after 30+ years all have two things in common.

1. They are things that hold some sort of sentimental, cultural, or historical significance
2. They are rare. Maybe they were mass produced things that were basically commodities but no one valued them enough to preserve any. The few that are preserved (usually by a handful of unrelated individuals that may be compulsive or eccentric) become valuable because of a large group of people nostalgic for those items coinciding with scarcity. Or maybe they’re historical documents or artworks that are truly one-of-a-kind.

The things that become investments are exactly the things no one thought about collecting, but that were ubiquitous and loved enough to engender some kind of nostalgia or significance to a large group of collectors. If the demographics of the bulk of the collectors are in the 1% for some reason, then the values can get truly astronomical. But these also fluctuate in value as these rare items come into fashion to collect (or fall out of fashion). The more ephemeral or fragile in nature an item is, the more rare it is to survive for lengths of time and therefore the more value it could potentially have… things like cardboard toys from the 1920s can be incredibly valuable if they’re in great condition. Those were the cheapest toys and likely considered somewhat disposable back then. No one really valued them at the time, so very few were preserved.

All that said, anything lots of people keep as mint as possible in their boxes will likely never be as valuable as when they were initially sold as new. Especially if “collectible” was a key marketing point for it.

It looks like Brak.

We need post race interviews with team strategists after important, win-affecting calls like that.

Tesla is the original meme stock.

I’m convinced that there’s nothing that can redeem it. The only reason it’s still on the calendar is that the teams and FOM love going to Monaco (and all the oligarchs that are VIPs). It’s a terrible ~~race~~ parade and has been for many decades. They’ve tried so many things to spice it up and they’ve all failed miserably. Bottom line: it’s a week long party around the most boring F1 parade of the year.

The two pit stops “made it so unpredictable” according to people before the race, but how different was the finishing order from qualifying? It just made RB and Williams run 5-10 seconds off the pace for most of the parade. Epic fail.

My best idea to make it fun to watch is to put all the drivers in go karts. Don’t even bring F1 cars. They’re too big to facilitate any kind of overtaking. Instead of armco barriers, straw bales. But then it wouldn’t be F1 (just the drivers).

Make this the last Monaco race. I beg that every year. The only way to fix it is to take it off the calendar. Go back to Portugal, instead. That was a fun race to watch.

Mosquitos interrupted by daily rain and a hurricane or two every year.

Detectorists

Northern Exposure

Abbott Elementary

All Creatures Great and Small

Black Books

Bored to Death

Bridget & Eamon

The Cafe

Cheers

The Cleaner

The IT Crowd

King of the Hill

Letterkenny

Peep Show

Shameless

Spaced

Tacoma FD

Taxi

I will laugh so hard if he beats Max on Sunday.

That will come. He’ll also stop payments on Treasury Bonds. Not paying agreed upon obligations is his MO in business.

This is why I shop at Aldi and Costco and my local grocery co-op. No secondary prices. No coupons needed. No rebates that aren’t automatically applied at point of purchase.

Don’t shop at garbage places that do pricing shenanigans.

When I tried to go into a driver’s live onboard feed on F1 TV on Sunday, it no longer had the car audio and radio messages. It was the regular broadcast audio, which was super disorienting because you weren’t hearing the car you were looking at.

I hated it. I want the old onboard audio and radio back.

Acknowledge Polerviking’s meat!