The Economist
Wired
Weird but True
Water Stuff
Personal Finance
300
This country controls 90% of the world's rare earth mineral refining and processing.
Rare-earth minerals are crucial for making EVs, TVs, smartphones, solar panels, and missile-defense systems.
China
Additionally, ~67% of the world’s lithium and cobalt—essential for electric cars—is processed in China. The country is the source of nearly 60% of aluminum, also used in EV batteries, and 80% of polysilicon, an ingredient in solar panels.
300
Which one of these is *not* an AI model:
ChatGPT, Bard, Orion, LLama 2, Gemini, MPT, Guanaco, Falcon, Bloom, Alpaca, Flan-T5, Anduril
These are not: Orion & Anduril
These are: ChatGPT, Bard, LLama 2, Gemini, MPT, Guanaco, Falcon, Bloom, Alpaca, Flan-T5
300
The poultry industry has made <bird name here> almost twice as big through selective breeding. 99 out of every 100 grocery store-bought <bird name here> is a product of this selective breeding.
Turkey
Broad Breasted White turkey has been bred to emphasize the breast of the Turkey. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s making them unable to walk or procreate naturally.
300
The estimated national cost to install treatment facilities and processes to remove PFOA and PFOS at drinking water facilities to levels required by the U.S. EPA’s proposal exceeds <$______billion>.
Bonus: Annual operating costs exceed <$ million>
$47 billion, which is approximately $35 billion above what would be required to meet current state-established PFAS limits.
It will require, on a national basis, more than $700 million annually for operating costs, which is approximately $500 million more than what would be required to meet current state-established PFAS limits.
300
This is the *most important* financial contract that most people sign in their lives. With a ~55% failure rate. Despite this, it comes with no disclaimers.
Marriage (U.S.) - opting out of the title system.
~50% of first marriages end in divorce.
~+10-20% stay married for other reasons.
~60-70% of second marriages fail.
Very poor or very wealthy experience high divorce rates. Couples w/ incomes b/w $200,000 to $600,000 experience the lowest divorce rates (25-30%).
400
The following American Country will elect its first female President in 2024
Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile
Mexico
Claudia Sheinbaum, a physicist with a doctorate in environmental engineering and a protégé of Mexico’s current president, ___________________, will face off against the opposition’s top contender, Xóchitl Gálvez, 60, an outspoken engineer with Indigenous roots who rose from poverty to become a tech entrepreneur.
400
What is this?
A quantum computer
This is encased in storage canister kept at 15 millikelvin (-450 degrees Fahrenheit). This is colder than any place on earth. Colder than outer space.
400
Harley J. Earl, a visionary exec at <this car company>, pulled together 10 female industrial designers to form what was known as the "Damsels of Design" to give the automaker’s car interiors a feminine touch - in the mid 1950s.
General Motors (GM)
Car design is largely geared toward men, even though women buy >60% of all new cars sold in the US. Many car design teams are run overwhelmingly by men.
400
List 2 of 5 cities that are one natural disaster away from a catastrophic water crisis.
St. Louis, MO
Buffalo, NY
Prichard, AL
Central Coast, CA
San Juan, PR
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/02/us/water-infrastructure-failure-us-cities-climate/index.html
400
% of actively managed equity funds that outperform their benchmark (e.g., S&P 500) over a 15-year period.
Acceptable answer includes a +/- 5% margin of error.
12%.
Across all domestic actively managed equity funds, 88.4% underperformed their respective benchmark over the last 15 years, according to an analysis of the S&P SPIVA report.
600
Which of these Middle Eastern countries experienced the highest numbers of millionaires migrating to it in 2022?
Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Egypt.
UAE - United Arab Emirates. There is currently no personal income tax in the United Arab Emirates.
600
What is the current (est.) valuation of OpenAI?
- 1 - $26 Billion (AWK market cap)
- 2 - $79 Billion (Duke Energy mkt cap ~72 billion)
- 3 - $103 Billion (BP mkt cap ~100 billion)
- 4 - $124 Billion (NextEra mkt cap ~123 billion)
OpenAI is in talks to strike a deal involving employee shares that would boost its value to $80 billion, according to recent reports. That number is 3x its valuation in January.
That would make OpenAI the third most valuable private company in the world—leapfrogging fintech Stripe and fast-fashion retailer Shein to land right behind ByteDance, parent of TikTok, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, respectively.
600
This country continues to experience - and legalize - child labor within its borders with companies like GM, Ford, Walmart, and J.Crew employing children as young as 12 to work dangerous jobs with little oversight.
The United States of America.
In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J. Crew shirts, bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. Middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.
600
This country has ~17% of the world's population, but just 4% of the world's freshwater resources, making it one of the most water-stressed countries on the planet and raises questions over the future of food production.
India. The problem of water scarcity in India is mostly associated with improper management of the available resources.
600
A 2018 study asked those with a net worth of $10 million+ to rate their happiness on a scale from 1 to 10. For any number below 10, they were asked predict how much more money they would need to move one point higher. Over half said they’d need this much more percent money to be “happy.”
(5% margin of error)
"Wealth would need to increase by at least 50% to move one point higher."
Humans amazingly overstate their ability to adjust to both good and bad events in their lives. (Hedonic Neutrality Model + meta studies).
800
How many countries will hold a nationwide election in 2024 impacting this many people?
A) 400 million+, ~22 Countries
B) 550 million+, ~35 countries
C) 1 Billion+, ~60 countries
D) 2 Billion+, ~75 countries
More than 50% of the people on the planet live in 76 countries that will hold nationwide elections in 2024. This is the first time this milestone has been reached.
43 will enjoy fully free and fair votes (27 EU);
28 do not meet the essential conditions for a democratic vote. Eight of the ten most populous countries in the world—Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia and the United States—will hold elections in 2024.
800
Fact or Movie: "Brainchild of a billionaire, this autonomous drone-killer nicknamed "Roadrunner" can fly as fast as 700 mph. It launches vertically from a climate-controlled box called Nest that keeps the drone ready to go for months. It can be deployed solo or as part of an autonomous fleet squadron. Imagine a swarm of pitch black autonomous drones hovering over you. It is terrifying."
Fact.
800
A business school student from MIT is single-handedly responsible for marketing this delicacy across the U.S. as both desirable and palatable resulting in 100,000+ tons of it consumed every year.
Squid - Calamari.
A business-school student named Paul Kalikstein published a master’s thesis asserting that Americans would prefer squid if it were breaded and fried. Promoters suggested calling it “calamari,” the Italian word, which made it sound more like a gourmet dish. (“Squid” is thought to be a sailors’ variant of “squirt,” a reference to squid ink.)
800
It is estimated that the average person consumes five grams of <______> every week—mostly from water. About 95% of the tap water in the United States is contaminated with <_____>
Plastic. Equivalent of eating a credit card every week. To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine, according to a 2020 study published in Nature.
800
Approximately ____% of wealthy families lose their generational wealth by second generation and ___% by third generation.
70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and a stunning 90% by the third, according to the Williams Group wealth consultancy.
1000
How much money do you have to make to be in the richest 1% of the world?
Single person, no children, after-tax (10% margin of error)
$60,000 a year after tax and you don’t have kids.
If you have a household income of $130,000 after tax and you’ve got a partner and one kid.
Or if you have a household income of $160,000 after tax and you’ve got a partner and two kids.
1000
Name 3 of the "magnificent seven" companies. Measured by market value, they account for 29% of the S&P 500. Each has had a market capitalization of $1 trillion or more at some point.
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla
1000
This billionaire commissioned the world’s largest sailing yacht, at estimated cost of $500 million in order to minimize the criticism of his carbon footprint.
Jeff Bezos - Koru - a 476 feet sailing yacht.
Trailed by Abeona, a gas-powered 246-foot support vessel which with a helipad and enough range to follow Koru from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean — a common course for yachts — on a single tank of gas.
1000
Drought in Panama Canal led to a record payment of $<________> at a last minute auction allowing this company to jump the queue and transport its cargo ship carrying LNG to the U.S. (20% margin of error acceptable)
$4,000,000. Japan’s Eneos Group paid $3.975 million in an auction in Nov 2023 to secure the crossing, bidding documents show. That comes on top of the regular transit fees companies pay, which can be hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
1000
What's the probability that your "well-researched" individual stock outperforms the market (i.e., benchmark index (e.g., S&P 500))?
Roughly 16.66%. 1 in 6 chance that you beat the market w/ positive returns.
