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Significant Digits For Wednesday, June 6, 2018

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


0 Democratic shutouts

The big primary night worry for Democrats this week was that they’d be shut out of several California House races come November because of the state’s atypical top-two election system. But the primary results look OK for Democrats. Votes are still being counted, but as of now there aren’t any House races in which a Democrat didn’t finish in the top two. [FiveThirtyEight]


92 million accounts

MyHeritage, a popular online genealogy site, reported that the email addresses and partial passwords of 92 million of its users had been breached. Give it up, people; privacy is dead. To prove that point, my Social Security number is 478 … Oh, sorry. I got distracted. What was I talking about? [Stat]


139 taxi medallions

Evgeny “Gene” Freidman — once New York City’s so-called “Taxi King” and now a potential witness against President Trump’s embattled lawyer, Michael Cohen — has been foreclosed on and is being forced to sell 139 taxi medallions. Taxi medallions — required to operate a cab in New York City and once worth their weight in gold and more — have been losing value. According to Crain’s, “Five drivers — including two medallion owners — have taken their own life in recent months under the pressure of declining income and relentless competition between cabbies and e-hail drivers.” [Crain’s]


2 percent of all scientific studies

Depending on whom you ask, science may be in the midst of a crisis. But a touch of auditing could go a long way. “Randomly auditing under 2 percent of all scientific studies could significantly improve science’s credibility,” according to a paper published in PLoS One. But who will audit the auditors? [Pacific Standard]


137.11 miles of Subway sandwiches

Internal documents show that Tesla is burning through “an insane amount of raw material and cash” to produce its Model 3 cars. The company’s internal documents sometimes turn to to colorful comparisons to hammer this point home. For example, in one case the cost of scrap was measured as 137.11 miles of $5 footlong Subway sandwiches. Seems legit. [Business Insider]


60,000 kratom-related employees

In the jungles of Borneo, some 60,000 people are employed in the business of kratom — a plant that its boosters push as a natural alternative to synthetic painkillers but which American regulators maintain is not safe. Kratom is “a coffee-like evergreen that Southeast Asian farmers have long chewed to relieve pain.” [Bloomberg]


If you see a significant digit in the wild, please send it to @ollie.

Oliver Roeder was a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied game theory and political competition.

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