Saturday, February 1, 2025

Sat Stats



This week a Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 61% of U.S. adults support “downsizing the federal government,” while just 35% oppose it.
In the latest Economist/YouGov poll, respondents who favor “requiring all federal workers to work in person rather than remotely” outnumber those who oppose the idea by 11 percentage points—48% to 37%.

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Ryan Michael English was arrested at the Capitol on Monday. English, who surrendered to officers, told them he had traveled to Washington intending to kill Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or Speaker Mike Johnson—or burn down the Heritage Foundation. He was armed with Molotov cocktails.


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William Stanley Jevons was a 19th century economist who observed that as steam engines became more efficient, overall coal use increased. His name comes up whenever improved efficiency drives resource consumption higher.
“As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket,” Microsoft's Nadella said as DeepSeek's efficiency revealed.


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Six more current or former tennis players linked to a match-fixing syndicate in Belgium were given suspensions of varying lengths — one was barred for 15 years — and fined, the International Tennis Integrity Agency said Friday.
That brings the total to about 30 players punished for their connections to the syndicate run by Grigor Sargsyan, who was previously given a five-year custodial sentence.

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A British-Israeli woman who was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza for 15 months says she was detained for some time at United Nations facilities.

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Sat Stats
 

“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”--
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.

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The TSA intercepted on average 18.2 firearms per day at security checkpoints in 2024. 94% were loaded.


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The pay gap between a typical college-educated man ($95,000) and male teachers ($65,000) in 2023 was $30,000, according to a WSJ analysis of census data stored at the University of Minnesota. The comparable gap for women was $12,000. T
eachers say pay is one of the reasons for men’s limited interest in teaching, leaving boys with few male role models in the classroom.

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O'Leary says r
egulations are 40% of the cost of house building.

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64,000 girls participated in high-school wrestling last year, up from less than 10,000 in 2014.

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The Department of the Interior manages roughly one-fifth of the United States' lands and waters. 20% of the nation.

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As of recent data, to be considered among the top 1% of wealthy Americans, you would need a net worth of approximately $11.6 million. This figure starkly contrasts with the national average, highlighting the significant wealth disparity in the United States.

Moving down the percentiles, the top 2% threshold is about $2.7 million, while the top 5% begins at $1.17 million. The top 10% of wealthy Americans have a net worth starting at $970,900.

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Median vs. mean:
As of 2022, the median net worth of all families in the United States was $192,900. This figure represents the “middle” point, where half of all families have a higher net worth and half have a lower net worth. It starkly contrasts the wealth thresholds discussed earlier, highlighting the significant wealth gap in the country.

The mean (average) net worth, on the other hand, was much higher at $1,063,700. The substantial difference between the median and mean net worth underscores the impact of high-net-worth individuals on the overall average, pulling it significantly higher than the median.

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Nvidia shares tumbled 17% Monday, the biggest drop since March 2020, erasing $589 billion from the company’s market capitalization. That eclipsed the previous record — a 9% drop in September that wiped out about $279 billion in value — and was the biggest in US stock-market history.

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Fully electric vehicles accounted for 96% of all new cars sold in Norway in the first few weeks of 2025, according to the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.

Last year, nine out of ten new cars sold were fully electric,

Many gasoline and diesel cars are still on Norway's roads.
At the national level, about 28% of owned cars are fully electric, and in Oslo, the figure is over 40%.

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The reading skills of American students are deteriorating further, according to new national test scores that show no improvement in a yearslong slide.











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