Caroline Winter provided a glimpse into a day in the life of a mermaid:

• There’s an entire industry around helping two-legged mouth breathers become mermaids.
• It has its own pun-filled terminology. To buy a tail you go to a “mertailer”. Those who book gigs are known as “entrepremermaids” and they put on “merformances”.
• High end performers need custom tails that can cost as much as $5,000.
• But celebrities like Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, and Justin Timberlake like having the novelty at parties, and prices start at $1,000.
• One particularly glamorous mermaid also puts out Youtube videos that bring in several thousand a month.
• It’s not for the faint of heart. The tail is heavy, you’ll constantly have chlorine or salt in your eyes, and you have to smile underwater while holding your breath and not swallowing too much of it.
• Fortunately, you can get classes. In New York, a two-day class on how to mermaid costs $375.
• Disney is planning a live-action Little Mermaid movie. Demand is only going to go up.

Read more, and watch the (auto-playing) video on Bloomberg.

In a wider look at the challenges facing the gambling industry, The Economist had tidbits about how casinos were planning for the future:

• Young people don’t gamble as much. But they do like video games. And so casinos are planning to have “skill-based” games for players to bet on.
• Experiments include “gravity-free” rooms where players can climb up walls, and LED screens that change the interior scenery.
• Mixed virtual reality shooter games may allow friends to band together to fight monsters – and bet on the number that they’d be able to kill, or their overall accuracy.
• Casinos might also consider offering bets on televised e-sports.
• And then there are less ambitious initiatives like offering Game of Thrones slots.
• It’s unclear if any of this will be able to save casinos in a world where slot machines look like dated technology and fantasy sport betting is just a few taps of a smartphone away.
• Perhaps the future of casino towns like Las Vegas is to forget their gambling origins, become host towns to conventions, and maybe offer the young a night of debauchery through a happening night-club scene.

Read more at The Economist

Stephen Snyder presented some baffling research on ceasefire agreements:

• The vast majority of ceasefires – about 80% – fail.
• But the best predictor of if a ceasefire will succeed is a high number of prior failed ceasefires.
• This seems to be driven by a deeper commitment to secure peace after previous failed attempts.
• With more experience, negotiators address the weaknesses of previous ceasefire agreements, ensuring more durable attempts in the future.

Read more at PRI.

All of us have phones that tell the time. Why then do people pay thousands of dollars for watches? Simon Garfield delved into the industry:

• Entry level luxury watches cost about £42,000. Others can cost as much as £1 million.
• They’re expensive in part because of the complexity of luxury mechanical watches. They can have as many as 1,366 miniscule parts – about six times the number of bones in the human body.
• Due to the need for precision these parts are expensive. Even the smallest screw can cost $10.
• And then there are the wages for the few craftsmen that are skilled enough to spend their time meticulously building the watch by hand.
• One of the reasons demand is high is because for men it is one of the few forms of broadly acceptable jewelry.
• Watches have also taken on the air, of, well…timelessness. A person’s name can be etched on it, as, say, a wedding gift, and the recipient could conceivably use it for the rest of their life, in a way that would never be true of a luxury smartphone.
• The purchase process is unique. Flagship stores will take customers back to an earlier era with shops that lack any type of digitization. Clerks are taught calligraphy so that they can create receipts by hand.
• Private rooms are available for customers to spend time with the watch and get to know it before making the decision to purchase. If they go ahead with it, then they can expect the store to bring them a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
• The Swiss dominate the market. They sell just 1.7% of the world’s watches, but command 58% of the revenue.
• Time plays a weird role in the world of watches. Top watches will often have a waiting list as the few craftsmen that can build them usually have a backlog.
• The industry also plans in advance. One company recently approved designs for its 2028 collection.

The full article talks a lot more about the industry, its history, and much more. Read it at The Guardian.

Oddity Central wrote about the market for premium potato chips:

• St. Erik’s, a Swedish micro-brewery, was upset by people enjoying their premium drinks with regular over the counter chips.
• So they set out to make their own. The luxury chips are packaged in black boxes that hold just five.
• The boxes cost $56 – or $11 a chip.
• Each chip is hand-made and has its own flavour. The selection includes a chip made with Matsutake mushrooms found in the wild pine forests of northern Sweden, and another made with Leksand onions grown on the outskirts of a small Swedish town.

Read and see more photos on Oddity Central’s website.

Via: Marginal Revolution

There’s been talk recently about the formation of a new conservative news outlet. There might be room in the industry given the downfall of the most recent entrant, as Michelle Fields wrote:

• Glenn Beck launched The Blaze, a conservative news site, in 2010. It did incredibly well and by October 2014 it had 32 million unique visitors a month.
• Today though it manages just 8 million a month.
• The website’s New York newsroom has been shut down and staff are being asked to work from home.
• In fact, they’re being asked to make sure they don’t leave home. Travel and phone stipends have been eliminated.
• What happened after such a promising start? It seems to be failure of senior management. The infant company has already been through four CEOs – managing to go through two of them in one particularly bleak six month period.
• One of the former CEOs is currently fighting off a lawsuit alleging fraud and mismanagement.
• There has also been infighting about editorial independence versus aiding the conservative cause.

The Huffington Post goes into details about what the website is doing to try to turn things around in the full article.

The Economist wrote that your desk lamp could become a powerful communications device:

• Lights can be made to turn on and off at a frequency that makes the flicking imperceptible to the human eye.
• This can thus be used to transmit information. It’s like Wi-Fi except instead of radio waves to encode 1s and 0s, waves of light are used instead.
• The main drawback of using it to replace Wi-Fi is also the technology’s main feature. Light can’t penetrate walls so you can’t ensure reliable internet across a home. But many businesses wish they could keep the internet within their walls for security reasons.
• Light might also be the best way to transmit information wirelessly on aircraft or in hospitals. While the effect is marginal, traditional wi-fi still has the tendency to interfere with the signals generated by sophisticated equipment.
• Since airplanes come with reading lights anyway, cabins could re-purpose them to save on the weight of cables and bring down fuel costs.
• Currently mainstream tablets and phones don’t have the technology to transfer information via light. But a simple USB dongle can enable the functionality. And it’s possible that smartphone cameras can be used for the task.
• The technology might even be embedded in street lamps to provide internet connectivity across a city.

The Economist has many more details about the technology.

Lindsay Goldwert wrote about the stand up comedy world:

• Amateur comedians actually have to pay to perform – and hope that they build their name or maybe get some tips at the end.
• But even the world’s top comedians will perform for free. They’ll do it to test out new jokes before releasing it to a more serious paying audience.
• A topical joke – say about something that one of the Presidential candidates said – can be told for about six months, but loses potency soon after.
• Jokes also follow the laws of supply and demand. If there are multiple comedians making jokes about Donald Trump’s hair, then the audience will soon tire and stop laughing.

Read the full article, which goes onto talk about stolen jokes in the age of social media, on Quartz.

Richard Davies wrote about inherited wealth:

• One study found that parents with more transferrable wealth – such as housing or bonds – received more visits from their children.
• The best way to get attention from children was to be sick, wealthy, and to have multiple offspring that might be competing for a prime spot on the will.
• Parents respond to incentives too. In some farming communities it is the youngest that inherits the family’s lands. This ensures that older children leave the home and make something of themselves. But there’s still a strapping young child around to take care of the parents in their old age.
• Today the wealthy struggle with structuring inheritances so that the next generation can’t blow it on booze and other distractions.
• One popular method for doing so is an “incentive trust”. This ties inheritances payments to the achievements of certain milestones – like graduating college. Or it might incentivize hard work by agreeing to match a scion’s salary – rather than replace it entirely.

Read more about inter-generational wealth transfers on 1843.