SortStack #1298 — 2029-12-28

By price · Order from cheapest to most expensive.

1. One standard LEGO brick, on average $0.10

   LEGO bricks are molded to a tolerance of four thousandths of a millimeter — and bricks made in 1958 still click with bricks made today.

2. A plain slice of pizza in New York City $3.00

   The 'Pizza Principle' holds that a NYC slice and a subway ride have cost roughly the same for decades — when one rises, the other tends to follow.

3. A Dyson Airwrap hair styler $600

   Dyson spent about 100 million pounds developing the Airwrap, using the same tiny high-speed motor technology as its vacuums.

4. An average American funeral with burial $8K

   The funeral industry's pricing was so opaque that US law now requires itemized price lists — caskets alone often carry markups of several hundred percent.

5. Constructing the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building $1.5B

   It was renamed at the last minute for the president of Abu Dhabi, whose emirate bailed out Dubai during the 2009 debt crisis — it was to be called Burj Dubai.

6. Building the US Interstate Highway System, in the dollars of its day $114B

   Championed by Eisenhower after he saw Germany's autobahns, the system took 35 years to declare complete — the original estimate was a fraction of the final bill.

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