You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
10 years of tax returns
Bernie Sanders says he will release his tax returns by Monday. “We wanted to release 10 years of tax returns,” he told the New York Times. “April 15, 2019, will be the 10th year, so I think you will see them.” He also acknowledged that he was a millionaire: “I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too,” Sanders said, demonstrating a keen and helpful view of the writing business in 2019. [The New York Times]
$8 million island
A Florida man, who also owns a house in Key West where the “Real World” was filmed, recently bought an $8 million island off the coast of the city. Shortly after, he was arrested in a scheme to steal $300 in household goods at a Kmart. The man, Andrew Francis Lippi, is said to have purchased items and then returned their original boxes stuffed with other things — a Keurig coffeemaker box, for example, contained a basketball. Lippi told a reporter that the theft allegation was “complicated.” [Associated Press]
Between $611 million and $2.6 billion
There used to be a good economic argument to be made for $1 coins — coins are more expensive to make, but last much longer than paper money. But now, driven in part by our increasingly cashless world, that’s no longer the case. In 2011, a typical paper dollar lasted for a little more than three years — now it lasts nearly eight. The Government Accountability Office estimates that the government would lose between $611 million and $2.6 billion over three decades by eliminating the dollar bill. [NPR]
4 Brooklyn ZIP codes
New York City officials declared a public health emergency yesterday. In what is the “broadest vaccination order in the United States in nearly three decades,” the city ordered mandatory measles vaccinations for four ZIP codes, in an attempt to stem an outbreak concentrated among ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. At least 285 people have gotten measles in the city since September. [The Washington Post]
0 for his last 49
Chris Davis, a first baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, has zero hits in his past 49 at-bats — a new Major League record. (Congrats, Chris.) Davis broke a nearly eight-year-old record set by former Dodgers infielder Eugenio Vélez, who went 0-for-46 over a 30-game span that lasted more than a calendar year, my colleague Neil Paine writes. [FiveThirtyEight]
25,536,442 minutes
A toddler whose father is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker, tried repeatedly to unlock the family iPad. But the toddler failed. And thanks to a security feature of Apple devices, the more times an incorrect password is entered, the longer the lock-out time grows. In this particular case, the lock-out time was 25,536,442 minutes — or about 48.6 years. One respondent to Osnos’s tweet about the incident suggested he put it in a bag of rice. [CNN]
From ABC News:
News headlines today: April 10, 2019
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