Epic Vault

Wild numbers, interesting stories, and things worth talking about.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

Americans are now tipping an average of nearly 14% on takeout orders.

I understand tipping someone who waits on your table. I’m still not sure when picking up your own food became a tipped service.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

One study cited by the FTC found ordering food through a delivery app cost nearly 80% more than picking up the same order. We somehow normalized turning a $20 dinner into a $35 dinner because driving 10 minutes sounded inconvenient.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

Companies keep pushing AI customer service while nearly 8 in 10 Americans would rather talk to a person.

At some point “innovation” is just a company figuring out how to make you do more work so it can hire fewer people.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

@Yester_World @Google please help him @YouTube @YouTubeCreators

[Mark's Yesterworld @Yester_World]

I’ve now lost over 4 WEEKS of Ad Revenue on my YouTube channel because of a glitch @Google REFUSES to look into and/or fix. It is destroying the way I make a living.

What happened? My Gmail Account (which I use for Adsense) was falsely suspended, then successfully restored after an appeal, then suspended again a week later. The reason? An AI program flagged it as being created by a bot…even though I’ve been using it with my channel for almost 10 years without a single issue.

I’m now completely locked out of the account and unable to appeal again due to a glitch @Google is 100% aware of (I have email proof of them acknowledging it).

I managed to correspond directly with Google support, and while they admit that this is a glitch on THEIR end, they refuse to offer any way to resolve it other than, ‘Try again in another week.’

Meanwhile, this ‘known’ glitch is ruining the livelihoods of myself and others.

Video explaining the situation:

https://t.co/0agxVt3sxU

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

@NickSmitty3 He's honestly exactly what they need.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

@GuyTalksFinance Got 135k right now

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

@BetMGM Completely different era of football

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

The average U.S. household that pays for streaming now spends $69 a month.

And 68% of streaming subscribers are paying for at least one service that still shows ads. We really spent a decade getting rid of cable just to rebuild it one app at a time.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

You now need to make about $110,000 a year to afford the median-priced home in America. The median household makes about $88,000. No wonder so many people with decent jobs still feel completely locked out of buying a house.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

@Wm_Galloway probably make that in a season doing airbnb

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

The average new car payment in America is now $785 a month. And the average loan lasts almost 6 years.

We somehow turned buying a normal car into a second rent payment.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

U.S. airlines collected $7.4 BILLION in baggage fees last year.

That’s about $20 million every day, and it’s more than the industry’s entire $6 billion after-tax profit for the year.

Bag fees stopped being a little add-on a long time ago.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

The penny got to the point where it cost way more to make than it was actually worth.

The U.S. Mint produced about 3.2 billion pennies in FY2024. At 3.69¢ each, that’s roughly $118 million spent to make just $32 million worth of pennies.

Basically, the government was spending nearly $4 to make $1.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

The U.S. once accidentally dropped two hydrogen bombs on North Carolina.

One of them went through nearly its entire arming sequence.

A single safety switch prevented a nuclear explosion.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

In 2010, one of the most powerful interactive computers in the Department of Defense was built around PlayStation 3 hardware.

The Air Force Research Laboratory linked 1,760 PS3 processors with 168 GPUs and 84 server nodes to create the Condor Cluster, a 500-TFLOPS supercomputer.

The part that gets me is how much sense it actually made financially.

The entire system cost about $2 million. Air Force officials said getting comparable computing power through conventional hardware would have cost 10 to 20 times more. Condor also used less than one-tenth the power of comparable supercomputers.

And it wasn't built as a stunt.

The system was intended for work involving artificial intelligence, radar enhancement, image processing and pattern recognition.

Gaming companies had already spent years making extremely powerful hardware affordable enough to sell to regular consumers. The Air Force realized it could take advantage of that instead of paying traditional supercomputer prices.

So for a while, hardware designed for video games was helping power serious military research.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

@EmmanuelAcho they got 11 million views in 9 hours, if anything they should get a promotion.

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

A runner cramped up right before the finish line at the Boston Marathon, and a few other runners stopped to help him get across

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

This guy is an absolute hero, the city should hire him and pay him a huge salary

[Epic Vault @TheEpicVault]

Fun fact: Quentin Tarantino discovered The 5.6.7.8’s after hearing them play in a secondhand clothing store in Tokyo… and immediately flew them out to star in Kill Bill