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  • #16
    Click image for larger version

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    • #17
      What free products are worth:

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      Survey respondents said that they would have to be paid $3,600 to give up internet maps for a year, and $8,400 to give up e-mail. Search engines appear to be especially valuable: consumers surveyed said that they would have to be paid $17,500 to forgo their use for a year.

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      • #18
        The United States has as many as 2 billion parking spots for about 250 million cars. “The area of parking per car in the United States is thus larger than the area of housing per human”

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        • #19
          Volkswagen is reversing course on the use of controversial weather-altering technology at a major Mexican car plant after local farmers complained that the system caused drought by preventing rainfall. The German carmaker had installed hail cannons, which fire shockwaves into the atmosphere, at its Puebla site to prevent the formation of ice stones that had been damaging finished vehicles parked outside its facility. But local farmers said the devices, which were set to fire automatically under certain weather conditions, caused a drought during the months that should have been Mexico’s rainy season.

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          • #21
            Bell Burnell realized she’d detected something important. She had discovered the swiftly spinning cores of collapsed stars, whose powerful magnetic fields produce jets of radiation that flash across the sky like the rotating beam of a lighthouse … In 1974, when a Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of pulsars, Bell Burnell’s adviser Antony Hewish was one of the recipients. Bell Burnell was not. No woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics since 1963.

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            • #22
              The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 annually on lottery tickets, which is nearly four times the $105 a year spent by the highest-earning households, according to a study released on Wednesday by Bankrate.com. And almost 3 in 10 Americans in the lowest income bracket play the lottery once a week, compared with nearly 2 in 10 who earn more than that.

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              • #23
                Young Adult Median Income Is The Same As It Was In 1977 adjusted for inflation.


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                • #24
                  Sears, circa 1970s:

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                  When business school professors or journalists would ask Sears executives which competitor they most feared, the answer that invariably came back was: nobody. The Sears brass simply didn’t believe that any other retailer could be considered a true competitor. Their pride, writes Katz, had become pridefulness.

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                  • #25
                    The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest battle in history. With it came equally superlative stories of how people dealt with risk.

                    One came in late 1942, when a German tank unit sat in reserve on grasslands outside the city. When tanks were desperately needed on the front lines, something happened that surprised everyone: Almost none of the them worked.

                    Out of 104 tanks in the unit, fewer than 20 were operable. Engineers quickly found the issue, which, if I didn’t read this in a reputable history book, would defy belief. Historian William Craig writes: “During the weeks of inactivity behind the front lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems.”

                    The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice.

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                    • #26
                      Last year, for the first time in four decades, something strange happened in New York City. In a non-recession year, it shrank.

                      We are supposedly living in the golden age of the American metropolis, with the same story playing out across the country. Dirty and violent downtowns typified by the “mean streets” of the 1970s became clean and safe in the 1990s. Young college graduates flocked to brunchable neighborhoods in the 2000s, and rich companies followed them with downtown offices.

                      New York is the poster child of this urban renaissance. But as the city has attracted more wealth, housing prices have soared alongside the skyscrapers, and young families have found staying put with school-age children more difficult.

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                      • #27
                        More Americans have Amazon Prime than vote for president or go to church:

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                        • #28
                          Hospitals in Britain were taking too long to admit patients, so a penalty was instituted for wait times longer than 4 hours. So, some hospitals had ambulances stall and drive longer to shorten in-hospital wait times....

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                          • #29
                            During the Vietnam War Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tracked every combat statistic he could, creating a mountain of analytics and predictions to guide the war’s strategy.

                            Edward Lansdale, head of special operations at the Pentagon, once looked at McNamara’s statistics and told him something was missing.

                            “What?” McNamara asked.

                            “The feelings and determination of the Vietnamese people,” Landsdale said.

                            That’s not the kind of thing a statistician pays attention to. But, boy, did it matter...

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                            • #30
                              Your willingness to believe a story is influenced by how much you need that story to be true...

                              Chronicling the Great Plague of London, Daniel Defoe wrote in 1722:

                              The people were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales than ever they were before or since … almanacs frighted them terribly … the posts of houses and corners of streets were plastered over with doctors’ bills and papers of ignorant fellows, quacking and inviting the people to come to them for remedies, which was generally set off with such flourishes as these: ‘Infallible preventive pills against the plague.’ ‘Neverfailing preservatives against the infection.’ ‘Sovereign cordials against the corruption of the air.’
                              The plague killed a quarter of Londoners in 18 months. You’ll believe anything when the stakes are that high...

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