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Significant Digits For Thursday, March 5, 2015

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11 companies

Paying taxes is just a thing you have to do, really. Unless you’re one of the 11 profitable companies on the S&P 500 that didn’t pay any income tax in 2014. Two of them are Darden Restaurants and Goodyear Tire & Rubber. [USA Today]


54 percent

There’s a movement to cut the U.S. prison population in half by reducing sentences and changing parole rules. The minor issue here? Fifty-four percent of inmates in state prisons are in for violent crimes. It’s not too hard to persuade someone that some nonviolent drug offenders could get cut loose early, but violent offenders? That’s kind of a tough sell for “Cut50” advocates. [The Marshall Project]


60 percent of deaths

In New York City, 15 percent of streets account for 60 percent of pedestrian deaths. [Associated Press]


62 percent of BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed gets 62 percent of the images in its posts from just 25 online sources. Tumblr came out on top, followed by Instagram. [Priceonomics]


3,511 feet cubed

How big would a single building need to be to cram all of humanity — some 7.3 billion people — inside it? About 1.07 kilometers cubed, or 3,511 feet cubed. It’d take up basically all of NoHo and be 29 percent taller than the Burj Khalifa. [Wait But Why]


$50,000

John Sylvan, the inventor of the K-Cup coffee system, sold his stake in Keurig Green Mountain for $50,000 in 1997. The coffee pod company now makes $4.7 billion in revenue, and Sylvan says he now regrets ever inventing the K-Cup in the first place because the system is so wasteful. [The Atlantic]

3.3 million viewers

Fox News averaged the most viewers of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Second place went to CNN, which held an average of slightly more than 1 million viewers. The really interesting number here? A mere 558,000 of Fox News’ viewers were ages 25 to 54, and for some reason I’m doubting the rest of them were teens who love the news network. [TV By The Numbers]


$16.6 million

Remember “Blurred Lines”? Man that song sucked. There’s a big lawsuit over it, and now we’ve learned that it made $16.6 million. [The Wrap]


$1.93 billion

Etsy — an e-commerce site that allows individual (typically twee) producers to sell their (often artisanal) wares — is filing for an initial public offering. Sales last year through the site grossed 1.93 billion handcrafted, locally sourced and responsibly grown dollars. [Mashable]


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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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