› added 11 years ago

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TIL that Madison Square Garden has not paid property taxes since 1982 because a 10 year tax abatement was inadvertently made perpetual due to a clerical error. This has cost New York City (and saved MSG) about $200M.

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via reddit.com

9ww0Q TIL that the first person to break the sound barrier wasn't Chuck Yeager. That record belongs to Nazi test pilot Lothar Sieber, who crashed his rocket powered (partially) wooden aircraft into the ground at just over Mach 1 in 1945.
oR67 TIL The Malaysian government sprayed DDT to rid infested areas of mosquitos. This caused an ecological imbalance that ultimately forced planeloads of cats to be parachuted into the country.
grXJL TIL Technetium was the first artificially created element of periodic table filling the gap of Eka manganese noticed by Mendeelev.
LkQjV TIL NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia banned pinball in the 1940s as gambling that emptied the "pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money". All pinball machines were rounded up and smashed dramatically by the mayor, before being dumped into city rivers.
yOOv TIL Domino’s reported a large rise in pizza sales in the 15 minutes before the OJ Simpson verdict. When the announcement began, the orders stopped, however; “not a single pizza was ordered in the United States for five minutes between 1 o'clock and 1:05”