12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, November 6, 2024

It’s kind of a tough question, and the answer changes every second. Counting cash only, it’s around $8 billion. The world’s GDP, meaning all the value in the world, comes out to around $105 trillion.

College sports stadiums have begun adding “talent fees” and “athletic surcharges” to concession stand items, designed to go to the payment the athletes now receive.

Japan imports 15 million bottles per year, the U.K. imports 25 million and the U.S. tops the list at 27 million, which works out to $876 million per year.

A study that looked at academic, social and economic opportunities for students ranked Orlando, Florida at number three, Ann Arbor, Michigan at number two and Austin, Texas at number one.

In 2004, there were 23 Americans who donated $1 million or more to a political party or its PACs. This year, there were over 400 aspiring oligarchs trying to put their thumbs on the scale.

The 2016 election saw $6 billion in total donations, and that number ballooned to $15.1 billion in 2020. The projected total for 2024 is $15.9 billion.

One study found that candidates in the U.K. and Germany bring in one-fortieth the amount of U.S. candidates on average, and Canada’s 2021 federal election brought in a meager $69 million in donations, total.

A lock of Washington’s hair will be sold at auction, with a starting price of $15,000. Should a powerful witch, mage or necromancer get their hands on it, they may be able to reanimate his body, or retrieve the national security secrets known only to him.

Authorities intercepted a suspicious package in Germany, and another in the U.K., and have just revealed that they were personal massagers packed with a “magnesium-based flammable substance.” They traced them back to Lithuania, and now say that it’s part of an effort on Russia’s part to see how easy it would be to attack North America through our own mail.

The “God of Chaos” asteroid will swing close enough to Earth in 2029 that our gravity may cause quakes and landslides that reshape the surface of the asteroid.

So far in 2024, people have bought 38 million TVs that are 97 inches wide or larger, which is 10 times the amount sold up to this point in 2023. That’s largely because the price has more than halved in one year, from an average of $6,662 to $3,113. Thanks a lot, Joe Biden.

Meta wants to build a nuclear power plant to fuel its A.I. slop machine, but a protected bee species was discovered living on the site, forcing them to scrap the plan.