LEGO employees that had 25 years of employment at the Hohenwestedt, Germany factory were given a solid gold LEGO brick as a token of appreciation. The brick was the size of a standard 2x4 brick and weighed 25.65g of 14K gold.
If you have one, you might want to sell it, as they're fetching about $15,000 nowadays.
For 32 years, Lexington Avenue and 43rd Street had one of the strangest house ever. It was 104 feet long, but only five feet wide. It was known as the Spite House. The story is this: a man named Hyman Samer wanted to build apartment houses on his property. There was a tiny strip of land he didn't own on the block, and he sought the owner: Joseph Richardson. He offered Richardson $1000, but Richardson wanted $5000 and they couldn't reach a deal.
They argued some more and things became tense between them. When Richardson saw the building that Samer was constructing; he noticed that there were going to be windows overlooking his tiny strip of land and decided to have a little revenge on him.
He built a tiny four-story house with eight suites. It had staircases so narrow, only one person could use it at a time. Only the smallest furniture could fit. However the biggest effect was that it blocked out all the light going into the apartments that Samer had built!
There's a lot more to read about the story of this house, check it out here.
When he was 15, Steven Ortiz traded his old cellphone for a newer one. Then, he traded that for an iPod Touch. That's when things took off. He traded those for a series of dirt bikes, which he turned into a Macbook Pro. And so on and so forth he traded up in life.
At some point, he traded a car for a 1975 Ford Bronco. The car was a collector's item worth $15,000, which he eventually turned into a 2000 Porsche Boxter S. The kid got so much attention and he's gotten a lot of requests from people who want him to trade an old phone for a car.
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You've probably received one of those ridiculous Nigerian Prince e-mail scams. Someone in Nigeria needs help getting a large sum of money out of the country. All you need to do is lend them a smaller (but still hefty) sum, and they'll give you a cut of the fortunes that this prince has hidden away in the African country.
Have you ever wondered why they're so ridiculous? Why they're so poorly written? If they've been doing it so long, they must know how to make it believable enough to catch more people right? Well there's a reason for why the scams are so… bad.
Scammers need to throw a LOT of feelers out before they can catch a prey. If they make the scam sound too realistic, they might attract more people in the beginning, but as the process goes along, they will lose a lot of them. By making it ridiculous from the beginning, they ensure that the people that DO respond are way more likely to fall for the whole thing and actually send them money. Basically they don't wanna waste the time with people who will be smart enough to figure out it's a scam before it's too late.
We've talked about this one-story building that has over 285,000 businesses, including American Airlines, Apple, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart and other big names. They, of course, have no staff in this building. It's a glorified drop box.
The reason Delaware is so popular with businesses has to do with their low corporate tax policies. Some people criticize the state as working like a domestic haven not too dissimilar from the oft-derided Cayman Islands.
In any case, the state has become a magnet for corporations. Last year, 133,297 new businesses were incorporated in the tiny state. In fact, that number made it so that there were more corporate entities than people in the state. To be exact, there were 945,326 corporations, compared to 897,934 people; a difference of 47,392!
