In pursuit of decent coffee
All of this may sound a bit ridiculous. It is just coffee, after all. But while jokes about $10 lattes and millennials who will never be able to afford homes might persist, I do think there is something special about the way we are able to make little parts of our life better. We turned what was once gulping out sludge to get out of bed into a truly culinary activity in the morning—and of course you are still able to drink the sludge if you prefer it.
The infrastructure behind ATMs
Everything you ever wanted to know about ATMs and payment rails
And so the most common transaction at an ATM is not a withdrawal so much as it is a sale. You are buying some paper with a mystical property associated with it, in return for money, and often paying a convenience fee.
The Style Guide for America’s Highways
The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. This is beautiful 😍. I’m partial to the Standard Alphabet — probably a function of growing up with it.
The internet wants to be fragmented
Noah Smith:
Humanity does not want to be a global hive mind.
People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local culture.
Everything is a cult
So take everything you see and hear with a giant grain of salt. When they start touting numbers, put them in perspective. The devil is in the details, never mind outright lying.
Little rules about big things
Morgan Housel:
Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever, because great times plant the seeds of their own destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their own turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving.
His new book on personal finance isn’t too bad, by the way.