Sat Stats

A word processor for DNA may have been discovered, whereas before we had newspaper clippings and scissors.

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Biden declared on X that “the Equal Rights Amendment is now the law of the land.”

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Sat Stats



Consumption of red wine in France has fallen by about 90 per cent since the 1970s, according to Conseil Interprofessionnel du vin de Bordeaux (CIVB), an industry association. Total wine consumption, spanning reds, whites and rosés, is down more than 80 per cent in France since 1945, according to survey data from Nielsen, and the decline is accelerating, with Generation Z purchasing half the volume bought by older millennials.

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Transsion Holdings is the world’s fifth-largest mobile phone maker, but commands 40% of Africa’s market.

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Owning a major US sports team in the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL has handily outperformed the S&P 500.

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Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946, according to data collected by Uppsala University in Sweden and analyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two institutes have identified 28 state-based conflicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 countries, more than in any other region in the world and double the count just a decade and a half ago. That tally doesn’t include conflicts that don’t involve government forces, for instance between different communities, and whose number has also doubled since 2010…

The continent is now home to nearly half of the world’s internally displaced people, some 32.5 million at the end of 2023. That figure has tripled in just 15 years.

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In 2022, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, according to an October report by the American Immigration Council. They also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.

Additionally, undocumented immigrants make up about a quarter of U.S. farm workers, one-fifth of maintenance workers, and 17 percent of construction workers, according to Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

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EU Fertility studies:

Official statistics show Germany’s birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN’s “ultra-low” threshold of 1.4 — characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse.

Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries — including Spain, Greece and Italy — that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman.

With young people reaching milestones, such as buying a house, later in life, the average age of EU women at childbirth rose to 31.1 years in 2023, a year later than a decade ago.

Austria reported a fall to 1.32 children per woman in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year. In Estonia, the rate hit 1.31 in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year.

Birth rates have fallen across Europe — even in countries such as Finland, Sweden and France, where family-friendly policies and greater gender equality had previously helped boost the number of babies. In Finland, the birth rate was above the EU average until 2010, but it dropped to 1.26 in 2023, the lowest since the record began in 1776, according to official data.

France had the highest birth rate at 1.79 children per woman in 2022, but the national figures showed it dropped to 1.67 last year, the lowest on record.

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We estimate productivity growth in England from 1250 to 1870. Real wages over this period were heavily influenced by plague-induced swings in the population. Our estimates account for these Malthusian dynamics. We find that productivity growth was zero prior to 1600. Productivity growth began in 1600—almost a century before the Glorious Revolution. Thus, the onset of productivity growth preceded the bourgeois institutional reforms of 17th century England. We estimate productivity growth of 2% per decade between 1600 and 1800, increasing to 5% per decade between 1810 and 1860. Much of the increase in output growth during the Industrial Revolution is explained by structural change—the falling importance of land in production—rather than faster productivity growth. Stagnant real wages in the 18th and early 19th centuries—“Engel’s Pause”—is explained by rapid population growth putting downward pressure on real wages. Yet, feedback from population growth to real wages is sufficiently weak to permit sustained deviations from the “iron law of wages” prior to the Industrial Revolution.--a paper

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The Department of Health and Human Services has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds carrying out President Biden’s DEI initiatives, according to a new nonprofit government watchdog report released Tuesday.