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TIL that 80% of the world’s painkillers are consumed in the US, and consumption has quadrupled since 1999

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wOV1 TIL the Space Shuttle Constitution had it’s name changed to Enterprise following a letter-writing campaign by Star Trek fans.
QJX1M TIL that in the 60s, the CIA sponsored a Harvard study where an undergraduate student was humiliated and subjected to "brutalizing psychological experiments". The student who had the worse reaction to the experiment was Ted Kaczynski who later became the Unabomber.
Yaax TIL that two amazon booksellers using automatic algorithms to set their prices once each accidentally based their pricing on the other. The automatic programs created an upward spiral of competing prices that eventually topped $3 million for a textbook.
ja1j TIL: one of the reasons America has Electoral College is because James Madison was worried about “tyranny of the majority”, which involves a scenario in which a majority places its own interests above those of a minority group.
DRlg TIL the designer of the Porsche 911, Butzi Porsche, was kicked out of industrial design school in his first year for apparent lack of talent. When he went to work for his father at Porsche, the company’s design director rejected his ideas, so he had the 911 prototype built by an outside contractor.