› added 9 years ago

354

TIL that 42-year-old Dmitry Agarkov, a Russian man, took a piece of spam mail for a pre-approved credit card, re-wrote the terms, sent it in, got it approved, and when the bank tried to renege on the deal, successfully sued for 700,000 USD.

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8exN4 TIL Ada Lovelace died from uterine cancer at the age of 36
yk8e TIL that Haiti, cholera free for > 100 years, suffered an extreme outbreak after Nepalese UN relief workers dumped raw sewage into a stream. Hundreds of thousands sickened, around 10,000 dead and cholera is now endemic in the nation.
rR5Ee TIL that during prohibition, the US government forced companies to add more chrmicals to industrial-grade alcohol to stop people from stealing it and distilling it. It didn't really work. In the end, about 10,000 people died because of this.
mxAZO TIL that in 1961 a DC-8 airliner broke the sound barrier for 14 seconds while in a dive.
1aGkP TIL Marvel's near collapse led to dominance. In The 90’s they desperately sold film rights to their characters for operating capital. A few hits(Blade & X-Men) led studios to consider the comic movie viable. Failure by most caused many of the rights to return to Marvel, who created Marvel Studios.