› added 9 years ago

189

TIL Oil is cheaper than water in Venezuela.

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via reddit.com

6ELyw TIL that China has restricted the use of geographic systems to only specific authorized entities, causing crowdsourced mapping efforts such as OpenStreetMap to be unlawful. They use a specific coordinate system known as GCJ-02, that intentionally offset places from their true location.
VMEgk TIL over a century ago, poultry producers would pamper their flocks as winter approached to encourage hens to continue laying eggs. Today, the industry instead uses a technique of starving hens for 1-2 weeks. The practice is banned in the EU as inhumane, but is widely used in the US.
08mA TIL that smallpox is the first and only disease that has ever been eradicated. Smallpox now only exists in high security labs in Russia and the US. Vaccinations played a major role in achieving this eradication.
GVp5 TIL From 1998-2010, hedge funds earned $379 billion in fees, while the investors in them earned $70 billion in gains.
v1Dvj TIL that the "Jonny Quest" (1964) theme was written by the composer Hoyt Curtin to be impossible for the Trombonists to play correctly, after getting ribbing from his Trombone section about writing music that was too easy to play.