I am not sure custom curricula are a good idea. Education is more about how it's learnt and less about what is learnt.
Beware of technology's cognitive biases too, see how TV is transforming education into entertainment. Computers have their own biases, just see the difference between today's teenagers and teenagers from 15 years ago.
Mourning is more like an act, a ceremony of showing sadness.
Saudade is the little pain that lingers on long after the mourning; the settlement of mourning that never heals. As brazilian singer Chico Buarque says "Saudade is like a sting on a limb I lost long ago" or "Saudade is the boat that makes an arc and can't reach the harbour". In saudade there's a constant questioning of "what could it have been only if..."
One thing that can be both a quality and a problem, is that The Wire is very demanding. A lot of what happens is implicit or not directly seen on camera. Also, episodes are not as self-contained as, for instance Mad Men, where you can watch one stand-alone, without needing too much background on who's who, and what happened before.
I noticed this as well and came to the same conclusion considering I've never met a single Red Sox fan on the left coast. Although, it could be that east coasters all rally around one team, where as we're split between the Dodgers and the Giants, which would present a false bias.
The irony.
Looks like a typo, it should be around 500bn$. 3500 would be Germany. Proof that "fat finger" human mistakes can do as much damage as algos gone wild.