David K Gibson wrote about a surprisingly anachronistic practice in automobile design:

• Before car designs are approved they are first modelled with clay.
• Clay has the advantage of allowing iterations – the design can be added to, removed from, or changed around at will.
• It’s also collaborative. Multiple individuals can stand around and work on it.
• Each car company has its own proprietary blend of “clay” that it uses to make car designs.
• Ford, to take one example, goes through 100 tons of the material a year.

Read more about the process of car design, and find out what happens to the clay models on BBC.

Meredith Heil outlined a chef’s perspective on weekend brunch:

• Know how a lot of stuff closes on the weekend? That includes food delivery vendors. What you’re eating for brunch on a Sunday is probably leftovers from the preceding week.
• Speaking of weekends, professional kitchen staff enjoy their time off too. The people making your brunch are the B-Team who don’t have the kind of seniority or experience to avoid the weekend shift.
• Not that you need professionals making brunch food. A waffle, after all, comes from a waffle-maker. But while costs are low, the prices are almost as high as for a regular meal, making brunch a profitable offering for restaurants.

Read more confessions of brunch makers on Thrillist.

We at Centives love Disney World. But you should know it doesn’t believe in all 50 states, as Cracked explained:

• Disney World has hundreds of American looking flags flying all over the place. But if you look closely, you realize they don’t have all the 50 American stars that their normal Yankee brethren have.
• This is because there are specific rules around flying American flags. They must be taken down in the rain. They must be well-lit. The President might order them to be flown at half-mast.
• But Disney doesn’t really want to ruin the singular Disney World experience. By having a different number of stars, it technically isn’t flying the American flag, and doesn’t have to abide by the flag code.
• Moreover, Disney saves some money by not having to pay people to abide by all the provisions of the flag code.

Cracked’s full article talks about other serendipitous cost saving measures hidden in our everyday world.

Hotels across the United States used to have bright “No Vacancy” signs that would light up to let travelers know that there’s no point stopping by. Paul Lukas explained why you don’t see them anymore:

• Hotels now usually belong to a chain, and if they’re full, they still want potential customers to come in, so they can refer them to a sister branch.
• Travelers, for their part, now prefer to book online rather than traverse highways looking for hotels with vacancies.
• The concept of “vacancy” itself is beginning to mean less anyway. Hotels will frequently overbook since not all guests show up. Arrive late enough and a hotel might just decide to give you a room reserved for someone else.
• And then there’s good old fashioned prejudice. Don’t like the guest trying to find a room? Tell them you’re full!
• As the signs become less popular, their end becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are now precious few engineers who know how to perform maintenance on the neon signs.

Read more on Bloomberg.

Olivia Vanni wrote about an app that could allow you to dine on the fare of expensive restaurants at affordable prices:

• Food for All is a startup that aims to connect restaurants which have leftover food at closing time, with individuals who would buy it for a 50-80% discount.
• In addition to creating a useful market, it would help cut down on food wastage.
• Of course restaurants want to prevent patrons who might pay full price from using the app. That’s why the service won’t tell you in advance what the leftovers will be. It’ll be more of an “evening surprise” kind of meal.
• One could imagine that if the services becomes popular, restaurants may feel pressured to list themselves on the app to prove that their ingredients each day are fresh.

Read more on Bostinno

Via: Marginal Revolution

Brands like TOMS donate a pair of shoes to children in need, for every pair bought. The Economist looked at the impact this had:

• While 90% of children wore the shoes, communities that received the free shoes didn’t see any increase in shoe ownership, health, or self-esteem.
• It seems that all the free shoes did was cause individuals to throw away perfectly good existing shoes.
• On the bright side the freebies didn’t hurt the local shoe retailing industry, as some would have expected.
• But critics who believe that aid fosters dependency were given some ammunition. Those who received free shoes were more likely to believe that others should provide for their family.
• TOMS, the company that deserves acclaim for funding the impartial study, is responding to the findings by requiring children to contribute to community building projects in return for the shoes.

Read more about the study and its findings at The Economist.

Weddings can be expensive affairs. In China you can add the cost of a professional bridesmaid to the list:

• At Chinese weddings bridesmaids are sometimes expected to drink on behalf of the bride. And since each guest might be toasted “bottoms up” individually, this has been known to lead to alcohol poisoning and death.
• It can also be tradition for the bridesmaid to stand between the groom and the bridal suite, acting as a final symbolic hurdle. With all the alcohol, the groom and the groomsmen can become rowdy and violent.
• Bridesmaids are subject to intense scrutiny, and may be objectified. The beauty of the bridesmaid is seen by some as a signal of the couple’s status and wealth.
• Still things are better now. In ancient times the bridesmaid would dress up like the bride and be her double, in case there was a kidnapping attempt by a rival clan.
• But the pressures remain strong enough that some close friends will decline the offer to be a bridesmaid.
• Enter the free market. Companies have sprung up that offer “professional bridesmaids” for about 800 yuan (US$120) per wedding.

Read more at Quartz.

Mark Hill spoke with some hand models to learn about their industry:

• Hand “super” models can make $75,000 a year. It’s not much by typical modelling standards, but given that hand models have longer careers than traditional ones, it can end up being more lucrative.
• An aspiring  hand model should have long fingers and nailbeds, with small knuckles.
• There are different categories of hand models. There are “mommy hands” for ads which involves doing the dishes. “Glamour hands” for things like cosmetics. And “kid hands” because the job requires enough skill that adult hands usually have to pretend to be kid ones.
• It’s not just ads. Some actresses are infamous for having unattractive hands. So, whenever you see a close-up of Megan Fox’s hand in a movie, it’s probably a hand model.
• Other times they’re used in movies because an actor’s time is too expensive to bother filming close-up hand shots.
• The industry is a secretive one. Hand models will know what a movies heroes and villains will look like before the first trailer launches, as they shoot spots for the toys.
• Since it’s the modelling industry the use of photoshop is rampant. In fact, it’s even more prevalent because there’s never a popular backlash against airbrushing a hand model’s body.
• And so, you’ll rarely see a hand model with knuckle wrinkles, or any other line. Photoshopping is so extensive that white hands may even be used to play the role of black ones.
• While it’s the nature of hand models to be anonymous, some find wider recognition. The owner of the hands on the front cover of the Twilight book goes to conventions to sign autographs and pose with fans.

Read the full article at Cracked.