Significant Digits For Monday, April 23, 2018


You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.

1 week

An April 16 resolution in Nicaragua to lower pensions has been cancelled after a week of deadly protests. President Daniel Ortega was pressured by everyone from the U.S. to the pope to stop the violence. [Reuters]


4 murders

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” taught us that people love reading about murders in Northern climes. This has led to one interesting side effect: a ton of fictional murders happening on the remote yet beautiful Faroe Islands. One crime series kills 20 people over 10 novels, for example, and it’s not the only series slaughtering people on that spit of land between Iceland and Norway. All this despite the fact that there have only been 4 murders among the 50,000-ish actual Faroe Islands residents in the past 30 years. That’s like setting your surfer novel in Iowa, or a techno-thriller in colonial Williamsburg, or a heartwarming story in Philly. [The Wall Street Journal]


16 states

An E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce has spread to 16 states and at least 53 cases. Most of those affected have been hospitalized with a particularly nasty strain, thus prompting the C.D.C. to discourage salad consumption. Perhaps America can now finally come together and find an alternative way, besides romaine, to shovel Ranch Dressing directly into our faces. [The New York Times]


70 percent

The U.K. Labour Party has rolled out a proposal to link government tax breaks for film productions to gender equality and diversity on set. As it stands, more than 70 percent of British film, television and radio workers are men. Britain already offers tax breaks to productions provided they satisfy three requirements: a film must be slated for theatrical release, it must get the British Film Institute to certify that, yep, this movie is rather British, and 25 percent of expenditures have to be in the U.K. [The Guardian]


$28,446

That’s the median annual income for a worker at Amazon, which is quite different than other tech companies. While some of its competitors have median compensation well over $100,000, Amazon’s median wage is more similar to logistics companies and big box retailers. [The Wall Street Journal]


$3.59 billion

JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America saved a collective $3.59 billion in the most recent quarter thanks to the GOP tax law’s changes. Prior to the tax cuts, the banks paid 28 to 31 percent of income each year to federal taxes; now the banks project that number to fall closer to 20 to 22 percent. [The Associated Press]


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