This is actually a little painful to go through: a list of Apple hardware prices combined with what that many dollars’ worth of Apple stock at the time would be worth today.

I bought a PowerBook G4 800 DVI-Ti in 2002; it was and remains the most expensive machine I’ve ever purchased. It’s certainly served me well, and I still have it, but if I’d put that money into Apple stock at the time, my Apple stock would now be worth a shade over $72000.

Even though I’m posting it, I’m not sure what the point of this chart is. It’s not useful for predicting the future, so really it seems like a comprehensive exercise in enabling regret, but regret is one of the least useful states of mind. It might fire our dopamine receptors and convince us we’re gaining information, but it’s low-value information. Despite this realization, my feeling of “why didn’t I even consider buying Apple stock at the time?” is strong enough right now that I’m going to post it anyway.

I’ve recently been doing some online banking reorganization, and have realized just how inconvenient a lot of the services are. The main issue is that they’re all different services, where I want centralization.
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It’s approaching the end of 2010, and I just paid my rent online for the first time.
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My wallet—not the metaphor, but the physical object I use to hold money and other things—has become worn and ragged. It’s time to buy a new one.

By “new one”, I mean ideally a new wallet of exactly the same model. This wallet has served me extremely well, and I don’t see why I would want to change its configuration given that it’s worked perfectly for years.
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A David Harvey lecture on the recent crises, animated:

An NPR broadcast on how falling real wages have been compensated for by expanding easy credit.

A reminder that money is not real.

Some thoughts on why higher education correlates to higher political self-delusion in Britain. (Also, on why economists and other intellectuals are so likely to construct theories defending even utterly ludicrous levels of inequality.)

The Consumerist has a really good one. Hopefully you weren’t planning to use any of those services anyway, but if you were—don’t.