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TIL The Japanese Yakuza use a racketeering practice known as Sōkaiya to extort money from businesses. They buy enough shares to have a seat at meetings, then threaten to show up and disclose secrets about company leaders. This usually works because Japanese fear shame more than anything.

0waw5 TIL a 'barrel' of crude oil is not today's standard 200L/55G barrel of commerce, but was originally the 40 gallon whiskey barrel before settling on, in 1866, the 42 gallon (159L) wine tierce established by English King Richard III in 1485, which we still use today
4kp8J TIL that the only sound recordings in existence of someone born in the 18th century speaking, are of Helmuth Von Moltke the German field commander.
nGb7 TIL That Hungarian psychologist László Polgár wrote a book on how to raise a genius. He showed his ideas to his teacher, they got married and raised their three children to be chess grandmasters, two of them are record breakers and one became the first female to beat the top-ranked male.
J1LOj TIL a 5-year-old girl from Oklahoma defeated 52 other children to win a regional spelling bee and qualified for the 2017 national event. She is the youngest participant to secure a spot in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. She spelled such challenging words as jnana, sarsaparilla and Baedeker.
KYD1G TIL US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is the frontman for his own band called Ablinken, with songs such as “Lip Service” published on Spotify