My mini hiatus is over.  

Back and not so recharged from a quick trip to Sayulita, Mexico.  Sayulita is a small town lined with cobblestone roads, tons of hills, and a million dogs running around like they work downtown and they’re late for work. Seriously, they always looked like they were running with a purpose as they jogged by.

Leading up to the trip the hours I’ve spent in my life watching and reading about Mexican cartels definitely messed with my mind a little bit.  But Sayulita being a coastal town apparently makes it much more safer - which it really was.  Now don’t get me wrong, everyone and their mother was constantly offering me drugs as we walked around the markets and what not but I’d say that’s to be expected anywhere in Mexico/Caribbean.

I went for the tacos, I stayed for the tacos.

I was actually there for a wedding but the tacos took over once the wedding was done.  One of my favourite restaurants in Toronto is called Campechano, home to some of the best tacos you’ll ever have...at $10/taco.  So it was a nice change to spend 20 pesos/taco for the best tacos I’ve ever had in my life.  

But then I also spent something like 240 pesos for a slice of pizza in the airport, which I’ve now realized is like $20 CAD, which is also more expensive than the $15 burrito I once had in the San Francisco airport.  Damn, the pizza was that much??  

Well that trip summary sure took a sharp turn into a dark place, didn’t it?

This week's issue is a 3 minute read:

🚗 Prius for the rest of us

🐝 Dating app crisis?

🏒 Cashing in on old hockey cards

Not the nerd car anymore

If you’re thinking of getting an EV and Tesla is staring at you straight in the face may I first remind you of the grandfather of hybrid electric cars aka the Toyota Prius?  I had a hard time believing it but THIS is a Prius:

The car that started the electric-hybrid revolution off back in 1997, is BACK.  The Automobile Journalists Association of Canada just recently named the Prius as their 2024 car of the year.  And yes I know, it’s not fully electric but I’ll get to the point of this in a second.  Firstly let us not forget that that founders of Google, a couple of the most wealthiest people in the world drive Prius’, a status symbol of the wealthy according to Forbes back in 2012.

Not only has the Prius been named as car of the year by AJAC, but it has also been named as the greenest car in the US - a car that still takes gas, who would’ve thunk it?  In fact, in the top 12 “greenest” cars, none of the typical EV’s like Tesla are listed based on the ratings produced by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). 

According to the council, they take into consideration how the car is manufactured alongside its emissions and what effect both have on pollution and human health.  It turns out the Prius scores the highest out of any car sold in the US while the Mercedes Benz G63 AMG scores the worst in terms of how green the car is - the G in G-wagon definitely doesn’t stand for green. (har har)

All of the sudden Prius’ don’t seem like they’re just for Silicon Valley nerds anymore.

Bumble stumble

So this next one is partially written vicariously through my single friends as I don’t exactly know a whole lot about this space other than what I see on social media.  Bumble, the online dating app where the girl has to message the guy - at least that’s what I’ve heard (is it still like that?), will be axing 350 of its employees as the app faces sluggish growth.  Case in point, 79% of college and graduate students in the US don’t use dating apps according to a study by Axios and Generation Lab.

The writing should have been on the wall for Bumble given Tinder posted 8% declines in growth in the 4th quarter of 2023 because, again, their primary demographic of college students were using much more traditional means to meet people.  

This all said, the initial premise of dating apps like Tinder and Bumble was to make it mindlessly easy to meet people to go out with.  I guess Gen Z and younger millennials would rather go through the work and effort that us older generation had to go through. 

Remember calling your crush on the phone to ask them out?  I have no idea how today’s generation does this if they aren’t using dating apps?  Instagram DM’s?  Snapchat?  OK I’ll stop, I feel way older than I ever anticipated feeling writing this.

When cleaning out the basement pays off

If you’ve got old unopened boxes of sports cards in your basement (like me), you might be sitting on a gold mine.  Or you might just be literally sitting on unopened boxes because that’s all they’re useful for.  Well, I’m here to tell you that a family in Saskatchewan recently sold a bunch of boxes of hockey cards from 1979 for $5M in an auction.  The kicker was they were left in their basement for 40 years thinking that they were junk!

What was so special about these boxes you ask?  They were fresh boxes that could (probably) contain sealed Wayne Gretzky rookie cards.  Apparently there are only 2 PSA 10 rookie cards in the world with the last one selling for $3.75M two years ago.  For context, PSA is a grading system used for collectible cards with 10 being the equivalent of mint condition, essentially the highest grade you can put on a card. 

Apparently the owner had 16 cases of this 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee hockey card set meaning they potentially could have been sitting on about 25-30 Gretzky rookie cards according to how many cards there were in total within the 16 cases.  But instead of trying their luck and opening every case and every pack, they decided to auction all 16 cases off to an anonymous Canadian bidder.

Here’s a fun one - would you rather $5M or try your luck and see if you could find those potential rookie cards and cash in an estimated $75M - provided you kept the cards in mint condition to get PSA 10 grades on them.