Quick Hits Archive 2024                                                                                                     Quick Hits Archive 2023

                                                                       Quick Hits Archive 2022

                                                                       Quick Hits Archive 2021        

                                                                       Quick Hits Archive 2020

April 23, 2025

• Food stamps account for 5% of Coke’s US sales.

• The UAE intends to use Artificial Intelligence to write new laws (and amend existing ones).  No word if this applies to its Sharia or civil laws.

• The formal mutual defense treaty between the US and Taiwan expired in 1979.

• 37% of Harvard’s budget is paid from its endowment.

• China supplies about 70% of the world’s rare earth minerals.

• Rare earths are 17 metals in Group 3 of the Periodic Table.

• On his company’s conference call, the Zions bank CEO asked ChatGPT for an economic outlook.  It answered with a limerick.

• Chipotle is opening its first restaurant in Mexico.

• Taco Bell has zero restaurants in Mexico (it tried opening stores twice).

• In Birmingham, England, garbage collectors have been on strike for six weeks.

• There is a cabinet position in the UK government called “Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.”

• All four of the American “original six” NHL teams missed the playoffs for the first time ever.

• NHL TV viewership is down 27% vs last year.

• Steve McMichael, the late, great defensive tackle for the Bears during the 80’s, once kicked off for the team.

• The population of Japan has declined for 14 years in a row.

• Nirvana had the best MTV Unplugged performance of all time.

April 18, 2025

• China, Taiwan, and Singapore just celebrated a holiday called Tomb Sweeping Day.

• We have been corrected on John Qunicy Adams.  Our source is from Braintree, MA which used to be the same as Quincy, MA.  We shall defer to his expertise (and we honestly do not remember our source).

• John Qunicy Adams referred to himself as JQA.

• At a recent week’s tour stop in San Antonio, a PGA golfer was able to take free relief because of fire ants.

• The real name of the president of Nintendo America is Bowser (gotta have young kids to get this one).

• A pack of cigarettes in New Zealand can cost up to $50 (online says highest price is $35, but our boots on the ground tell us otherwise).

• One of the largest politically-driven hacking organizations in the world calls itself NoName057(16).

• The No Name Golf Tournament directors disavow all knowledge.

• Over a third of all men’s basketball players have entered the transfer portal (for the second year in a row).

• There are over 9100 CVS stores in America.  Arkansas has 23. 

• There is a new state law forcing CVS to close its stores in Arkansas.

• Wesley Snipes never threw a baseball in Major League.

• There is a Major League Baseball player with a batting average higher than his on-base percentage.

• Airplanes in the 1930s had wicker chairs.

• The 12th President, Zachary Taylor, died 16 months into office after eating too many cherries and drinking spoiled milk at a 4th of July celebration.

• After 141 years of conspiracy theories circling Taylor’s death, neutron activation on his remains proved that he was not poisoned.  He died from gastroenteritis.

• India has cut its tariffs on American whiskey from 150% to 100%.

April 3, 2025

• A single company owns 75% of the apartments in Irvine, California.  The same company owns almost every shopping center and office space.  It also owns the local newspaper

• Newsmax was worth 30% more than News Corp.

• China is selling so-called “green” bonds.

• A 1968 Volvo has the record for most miles driven: 4mm through 2020.

• The Final Four has all four #1 seeds for only the second time ever.

• Tea is called “chai” in some countries if it spread there by land.  If by sea, then it is “tea.”

• Japan has a “right to vanish” law.

• Quincy was not a true part of the name of John Quincy Adams.  He was just born in Quincy, MA (pronounced Quinzy).

• Sign languages in the US and the UK are different.

• Rivian is spinning off a division into a new company called Also.  (One of our long-running theories is that dumb names are bad for stocks.)

• The list of items targeted by Canada for retaliatory tariffs include flame throwers, fake beards, church bell cases, live monkeys, decoy birds, grenade launchers, rolling papers…and manatee meat.

March 26, 2025

• El Salvador went to the IMF looking for a $1.4b loan.  The IMF said ok with one condition:  El Salvado could not buy any more Bitcoin (El Salvador was the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender).  El Salvador agreed, got the money…and immediately bought more Bitcoin.

• Contractors for Stub Hub stole 993 tickets to Taylor Swift and other events.  The crooks sold their bounty on Stub Hub.

• A Chinese aluminum trader has been sentenced to life in jail after creating fake inventories and scamming the market for about $1b.

• The new Prime Minister of Canada is not a current member of Parliament.  He will have to sit in the public gallery during House of Common debates.

• Brazil has destroyed an eight-mile stretch of rainforest in order to build a highway for a one-time event…the COP30 climate summit.

• A North Dakota court has ruled that Greenpeace must pay Energy Transfer almost $700mm in damages caused from the group’s illegal protests over a pipeline.

• The median monthly rent in Manhattan reached a record in February at $4,471.

• Harvard offers a class in remedial math.

• Only two underdogs reached the sweet sixteen in March Madness.

• March Madness averages 8.5 upsets for the tournament according to the NCAA.

• The NCAA describes an upset as a team beating another that was five seeds better.

• Texas has the 9th longest streak of making the NCAA tournament at 14 years (1999-2012). 

• Kansas is number #1 at 28 years (1990-2017)

• Door Dash is starting a program that will allow customers to finance their food orders.

• Pharmaceutical commercials account for 15% of all TV ads.

• Disney has sold over $2.6b in retail products of Lilo & Stitch.

• Snow White’s opening box office was Disney’s worst live acts remake ever.  It cost over $350mm to produce (cost data never includes marketing…many investors in movie projects had discovered this the hard way) while generating $43mm.

• Spielberg’s flop 1941 made $95mm in 1979 dollars (not just opening weekend).

• 50% of all new nuclear power generation is being built in China and India.

• China and India are building coal powered electricity generation at over five times the amount of nuclear.

• China is building more coal-powered generation than all existing coal powered plants in the US.

• Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar for $9b in 2015.  It is now selling it for $1b.

• There is a mountainous rock formation in the Tasman Sea called Ball’s Pyramid.  It is taller than it is wide (562m vs 300m…pardon our use of the metric system).

March 5, 2025

• New tow-trucks will be illegal in California once the 2024 inventories are sold.

• A 1950 law was introduced to keep the federal workforce below 2m people.  This was the birth of contract and grant workers.

• As of 2020, there are more than three times as many contract and grant workers as federal employees (6.8mm vs 2.2mm excluding USPS.)

• In 1975, 20% of Americans moved homes every year.

• Today, fewer than 7% of Americans move each year.

• The first zoning laws in the country were prohibitions on laundry mats.  This was a not-so-subtle attempt to segregate communities.  Obviously, it was in California.

• Berkeley, California was the first city to impose zoning laws that prohibited apartment buildings.

• Citigroup accidentally posted $81,000,000,000,000…that is 81 trillion…to a customer account.  It was supposed to be a $280 payment.

• The CEO of Palantir does not know how to drive a car.

• Back in 2019, after protesting an oil pipeline in North Dakota over environmental concerns, Greenpeace left behind 48,000,000 pounds of garbage.

• The Strategic Petroleum Reserve can drain 4.4mm barrels of oil per day.  It can refill  barrels at only 0.785mm bpd.

• There is a basketball player for Florida Gulf Coast University with over 2mm social media followers.  He is a walk-on whose social media theme is “Road to 1 point.”  He finished his college career with 0 points.

• Trump’s address of the joint session of Congress last night was not a State of the Union speech since he was just elected.

• In 2023, someone bought all the tickets in the Texas Lotto to guarantee himself the winning combination.  He won.  He even asked the lottery commission beforehand if he could do this…and they said yes!  (Matt Levine uncovered this one for us.)

Feb 26, 2025

• The median age of homebuyers in the US is 56.  This is up from 45 in 2021.

• 82% of the world’s population lives in the Eastern Hemisphere.

• Parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia are in the Western Hemisphere.

• Central America is part of the continent of North America.

• Central America is not part of the region known as North America.

• The SS United States, the iconic cruise ship built in 1951 which has sat in disrepair for over 30 years, is being remediated to be sunken as an artificial reef.

• The SS United States still holds the transatlantic speed record.  It used only 2/3 of its power to set the record.

• Lede is spelled this way supposedly to avoid confusion with lead (which Webster says referred to the strip of metal that would separate lines of type when printing newspapers).

Feb 19, 2025

• The average age of a passenger car in the US is 14 years.

• Much of the architecture at the University of Texas El Paso is Bhutanese.

• A headline from the Cleveland newspaper in 1925 read, “Cross-word Mania Breaks Up Homes – Neglected Cleveland Wives Plan Divorces.”

• The best Super Bowl square is 0-0 (expected value of $6.83 in a $100 pool).  The worst square is 2-2 (expected value of only $0.02).  (We will try to post this in a timelier fashion next year!)

• The strongest job growth in 2024 was in Rochester, MN (+6.5%).  The worst was in Ocean City, NJ (-6.7%).

• The holiday on Monday is legally known as Washington’s Birthday.  There is no such thing as Presidents’s Day.

• The origin of the modern day “aid industry” is thought to be the famine in Nigeria in 1968.  This aid package is thought to have extended the Nigerian civil war by 18 months (per the New Yorker which is saying something).

• Louisiana has the third longest state coastline in the US.

• Mexico is only 137 miles wide at its thinnest point (Isthmus of Tehuantepec).

• All three vans are the same size (go ahead, measure them).

Feb 12, 2025

• 335k people let (fled) Hong Kong for Canada when the territory passed back to Chinese hands in 1997.

• Chinese/HK immigrants comprise 5% of Canada.

• A Polish javelin thrower who won the silver in Tokyo decided to auction off the medal to help an infant get heart surgery.  A Polish supermarket chain won the auction for $125k.  It then returned the medal to her.

• The DraftKings odds of a golfer hitting a hole-in-one on the Saturday of the WM Phoenix Open was +450 (bet $100 to win $450).  There is a reason we are long DKNG.

• Cocoa prices have tripled in the last year.

• 21% of Hershey’s profits in 2024 was from Cocoa derivatives ($460mm out of $2.2b).

• John Deere was a hit back in 1837 because he invented the self-cleaning steel plow.

• There is some new academic research declaring that there are Unintended Consequences of Rebalancing by pension fund managers.  When presented with the paper, comments from the managers included, “We know about that.”

• The worst secret on Wall Street in the 1990’s was that the State of New Jersey rebalanced its portfolio every Tuesday at 1pm.

• 62.8% of total gaming revenue in Nevada is generated by public companies.

• For these public companies, gaming is less than 36% of total revenue.

• Energy Transfer is suing Greenpeace for illegally shutting down its pipeline in North Dakota a few years ago (this is one of many lawsuits, but this one is coming to a head as the trial starts later this month).

• Greenpeace is suing Energy Transfer in the Netherlands for violating the EU’s new freedom of speech laws.  Greenpeace hopes to “send a message to corporate bullies.”

• Disney is removing some warning language before movies including Dumbo and Peter Pan.  The old warning read, “the film includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.”

• ESPN is doubling down on not understanding how a sports conference can “only” have a .500 winning percentage playing against each other.

• California plans to levy a $1b assessment on the private insurers to help cover the claims from the Los Angelese fires.

• New Yorkers made $2.48b in sports bets in January.

• Super Bowl betting in Nevada dropped 20% versus last year.

• Nevada sports books set a record for Super Bowl revenues at $22.1mm.

• When Kansas City was down 24-0 in the 2Q, the in-game line was KC +14.5.

• Someone bet $71k on the coin flip.  His Tails call won.

Feb 5, 2025

• As recently as 2023, Iraq flared as much excess gas as the country consumed.  Iraq says it has now cut this flaring by 70%.

• The Norwegian parliament has collapsed after the ruling Labor party forged ahead with the EU’s clean energy “directives.”  Collapsed = coalition parties withdrew, and ministers resigned.

• If you go through the Panama Canal starting in the Caribbean, you sail from the northwest to the southeast.

• Bally’s is being sued for conducting a stock offering only open to women and minorities (the one we discussed recently that was offering 99% leverage on the deal in order to get the women and minorities in the door).

• Trump will be the first sitting President to attend the Super Bowl (how can this be?).

• Robinhood announced it was taking bets on the “Pro Football Championship.”  The NFL owns the rights to “Super Bowl,” and Robinhood was surely not going to pay any licensing fees.

• The CFTC (Commodities Futures Trading Commission) shut down Robinhood’s attempt to accept sports bets via futures contracts.

• Olive Garden is being accused of using hotdogs buns instead of bread sticks.

• The Grammy’s peak viewership was in 1984 thanks to Michael Jackson and his Thriller album.

• The brief resurgence of the Grammy’s in 20212 was due to a tribute to Whitney Houston.

Jan 29, 2025

• In order for Bally’s to open a casino in Chicago, 25% of the ownership entity must be comprised of women or minorities.

• Bally’s has created a new entity which will do a public offering.  Bally’s very creative bankers have structured the deal whereby some investors can buy equity at a 90% discount.  Bally’s will lend you the rest of the money (nonrecourse to you, you just cannot take profits until the loan is repaid).  But you get the full voting rights.  Voila, women and minority owned!

• Chinese bankers are offering to run the CATL (the giant EV battery maker) IPO in Hong Kong for 0.01% fees.

• Coffee accounts for 69% of caffeine intake in America.  This is up from 54% about 10 years ago.

• Energy drinks represent 6% of caffeine.

• When your EZ-Pass does not pay the $4 toll in Delaware, you get assessed $87.50 in fees.  One of these is a $15 fee labeled “Combat Violent Crimes.”

• According to Redfin, 71% of real estate agents did not close any deals in 2024.

• The city of Los Angelese says it will cost $170k to clean up each burned house.

• People cannot warm up their cars in Ottawa for more than one minute according to a new city by-law.

• The head coach of the Rhode Island basketball team is unimpressed that the SEC is “only” 54-54 in conference games.

• One of the proposed remedies for global warming is to sprinkle diamond dust in the atmosphere so the sun’s light is reflected into space.

• There is a bill in the US Senate that aims to address the impacts on global warming from anesthesia.  The Department of Ecology would be tasked with studying these “greenhouse gases.”

• The US, apparently, has a Department of Ecology.

Jan 22, 2025

• The snowplow operator who cleared a spot for the New England Patriots kicker in 1982 was on work release from Walpole State Prison.

• In 1954, British dentists blamed buck teeth on kids watching tv on their stomachs with their hands under their chins.

• The president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, wants to “liberate” Puerto Rico, and he wants to do it with “Brazilian troops.”  He made these comments at the International Anti-Fascist Festival in Caracas.

• The “wisdom of the crowd” concept was derived from a guess-the-weight-of-an-ox contest in 1907.

• Texas Wesleyan has won 75 national championships in table tennis since 2002.

• Melania Trump is 54 years old.

• Spy vs Spy was created in 1961.

• The US is building a new embassy in South Sudan at a cost of $784mm.

• South Sudan’s annul GDP is about $7b.
  Hary Caray, the late great Chicago baseball announcer, kept a drinking diary.  During the early 70’s, he averaged 3.5 bars per night (2604 bar stops from 1970 to 1971).

Jan 15, 2025

• Almost 6% of all workers in Virginia and DC are employed by the federal government.

• South Dakota has the lowest percentage of workers that are federal government employees.

• The federal government owns about 80% of the land in Nevada.

• The federal government owns less than 2% of the land in Texas.

• US bought the US Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917.

• Greenland’s population is 57k.

• The toll for the largest ships to pass through the Panama Canal is $100k.  This is up from $80k last year. 

• Scorigami!  Houston’s drubbing of San Diego 32-12 was the 1091st unique score in NFL history.

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to regulate Robux (the pretend money inside of the video game system Roblox).

• There is an arcade in New York that has a “claw” machine.  It costs $50 to play.  You can win an Hermes Picotin bag worth $3600.

• When we used to walk through Harrod’s London on rainy days on our way home from work, we always noticed an uptick in security when we walked near the Hermes bags.

• One of the popular markets on the betting/prediction site Polymarket is if New York City will abandon its congestion pricing regime by this summer.

• Over half the cigarettes smoked in California, New York, and New Mexico are illegal.

Jan 8, 2025

• Colorado wants to start transporting stored energy via rail.

• 50% of all Nvidia employees are worth over $25mm.

• The Democratic Republic of Congo produces over 75% of the world’s raw cobalt.

• China produces over 75% of the world’s purified cobalt.

• Javier Milei has four cloned Mastiffs.

• Facebook said its fact-checkers were the problem with misinformation.  The Fact-checkers fact-checked this as false (for real).

• Facebook is getting rid of fact-checkers.

• During the Houston-Tennessee game, CBS cut to the studio to show a highlight of the Houston-Tennessee game.

• According to U-Haul, the top five states that people moved to in 2024 were South Carolina (1), Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee.

• The new TGL golf league, the indoor golf played on a screen, is paying “fans” $200 to fill seats in the studio.

• Our beloved Cleveland Browns have had 40 starting QBs since 1999 (we update this one every so often).

• Walmart, Amazon, and Costco make up 17% of all retail sales in the US.  It was 11% in 2014.

• Kirby Pucket’s Sam’s Club ID card sold at auction for $270. 

• A Notre Dame football player had his name on his jersey written in Chinese for the Sugar Bowl.

• Jack Nicklaus’s first career victory as a professional golfer was the US Open.

​​

Quick Hits Archive 2024

Quick Hits Archive 2023​

Quick Hits Archive 2022

Quick Hits Archive 2021

Quick Hits Archive 2020

​