You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
25 percentage points
Gov. Bobby Jindal’s approval rating among Louisiana Republicans has dropped 25 percentage points since 2012, and Jindal, who announced he’s running for president Wednesday, is joining a crowded field and polling below Donald Trump. Let me put it this way: Jindal is a rounding error away from polling at the same level Iam for the GOP nomination. [FiveThirtyEight]
40 years
Gang-smuggled meat. That’s what Chinese custom officials are dealing with. Those officials have seized more than 100,000 tons of frozen meat, and some of it is more than 40 years old, reportedly. I am not a butcher, but I assure you that is not how to age meat properly. [NPR]
77 percent
The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs launched a “sting operation” involving 120 grocery stores all over town to find out how many were overcharging consumers for pre-packaged food priced by the pound. Of the 80 types of food tested at Whole Foods, every one had an inaccurate label according to the agency, and 77 percent of grocery stores overall were hit with at least one violation. [New York Daily News]
92 percent favorable
Did you know that the Philippines thinks the United States is great? I did not! The U.S. has a 92 percent favorable in the Philippines, the highest in a new Pew survey of 39 countries. The Philippines even makes Canada look like that friend that never texts us back. Oh, also, Russia hates our guts. [Pew Research Center]
100 times
Fun fact: Human activity releases roughly 100 times as much carbon dioxide as global volcanic activity does. Wait, that’s not a fun fact. That’s not fun at all, really. Either way, global warming isn’t because of volcanos. [Bloomberg]
250 lobbyists
That’s how many lobbyists Uber has registered in statehouses across the U.S., not even counting municipal lobbyists. Given how tightly regulated the transportation industry tends to be in metropolitan areas, the tech company has found a fairly old-school way of cutting through red tape. [Bloomberg]
$2.9 million
That’s New York City’s laughably tiny budget for rodent control. The day New York manages to control this city’s rats with that amount of money, I promise to take the ARC tunnel train into the city, skip on over to the Second Avenue Subway, take it to the West Side Stadium they built for the 2012 New York Summer Olympics and then eat my “Re-elect Trump 2020” hat in front of the entire New York Jets Super Bowl victory parade. [The New York Times]
$500,000
Doctors made fun of a patient while he was under anesthesia, and the patient sued for malpractice and was awarded $500,000. The patient originally wanted $1.75 million, but he received a middling $500,000 because two jurors — one thinking he should get nothing, one thinking he should get a lot more money — compromised and figured a half-mil should do the trick. [TIME]
410 million years
That’s about the age of a fossil that appears to show the earliest evolutionary incarnation of tooth-esque protrusions. Basically, researchers in the Netherlands found one of the first things on earth to learn how to masticate. [Phys.org]
$500 million
The Australian Navy seized about two-thirds of a ton — $500 million worth — of heroin from a sailing vessel in the Indian ocean. [BBC]
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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer. @WaltHickey
