› added 12 years ago

246

TIL blacks were given ‘ghetto loans’, which were higher-interest subprime loans normally reserved for customers with bad credit ratings, even if they qualified for a normal loan. It found out that high-income blacks were almost twice as likely to end up with subprime mortgages as low-income whites.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

M7GZ7 TIL Louis XIV had an elephant at Versailles, a gift from Portugal's king in 1668. The animal became part of the Ménagerie, the palace's zoo, and was fed 80 pounds of bread, 12 pints of wine, and two buckets of soup daily. It is the only African elephant recorded in Europe between 1483 and 1862.
NJXP TIL of a quarantined leper colony in Hawaii that, when the patients were cured, was made into an independent county where the patients could stay as residents. To this day no one under the age of 16 is allowed in, and the only visits allowed are officially sanctioned tours.
7yOP TIL that a Japanese gymnast, Shun Fujimoto, once broke his knee at the Olympics in 1976 but didn’t tell anyone and performed miraculously despite his injury, winning his team the gold medal
W7p0A TIL: Most people can legally buy a personal commercial airplane such as a Boeing 737 as long as they can afford to pay 10s to 100s of millions of dollars for one.
QNDvM TIL about the 1936 Literary Digest Presidential Poll which was so wrong it destroyed the magazine's credibility. It projected Republican Alf Landon to defeat Incumbent Franklin Roosevelt easily. Roosevelt ended up winning 48 states and the popular vote by 24 percentage points