The peer-less writers over at Cracked looked into the business of professional funeral mourners:

• Funerals are sad. Funerals where nobody shows up are even sadder. So family and friends may hire mourners.
• Being able to cry on demand is key. Preparing by watching movies like Titanic and Schindler’s List before the event can help.
• Some women in the business have been known to track their menstrual cycle to determine how difficult it will be to cry.
• Professional mourners have to come up with convincing back-stories to explain why they’re so distraught over an individual’s passing, but have never been seen before by most of the deceased’s acquaintances.
• The actors need to have a working understanding of how people from different religions and cultures commemorate their dead.

Ian Sample wrote about a rather upsetting study:

• Researchers found that women earn 20% less than men when selling the same products on eBay.
• The effect is due to both male and female shoppers bidding less for items sold by women.
• It’s especially confusing since past research has indicated that women generally have better reputations as sellers on eBay’s system than men.
• There are some categories where women are able to command a higher price than men. These include Barbie dolls and, oddly, pet food.
• Men, on the other hand, command a 270% premium on Nintendo Wiis, 61% on folding knives, and 20% on golf balls.
• The researchers suggest that eBay bidders start looking for female sellers – they’ll get a discount, and eventually, as more people catch on, the disparity will disappear.

The full article has many more details and can be found here.

Source: The Guardian

Via: Marginal Revolution

The Economist wrote about an industry that hopes you stumble in your quest for true love:

• Financiers offer loans to individuals seeking a divorce to cover legal costs.
• In exchange the financiers get a cut of the assets that a party wins from the divorce.
• The loans themselves typically have interest rates of 18% and are usually worth about a third of the expected payout.
• In New York one firm’s average loan is for $306,000.
• The biggest problem is when a couple aborts divorce proceedings and decides that they were right the first time, and stay together. No divorce means no sold assets, and no return on investment.
• The firms point out that parties in a divorce would probably have to settle for much less if they couldn’t afford the high end lawyers that the loans allow.

Read more here.

Source: The Economist

Conventional wisdom says that self-driving cars will be good for the environment. Algorithms will ensure that cars drive in the most fuel efficient way possible, and should lead to a future where gas isn’t wasted on things like traffic jams. Yet, David Roberts reports, there’s a flip side too:

• Because self-driving cars will be safer, legislatures may agree to allow higher highway speeds which would lead to more energy use per mile.
• No longer planning to drive, passengers may deck out their vehicles with amenities like televisions and other luxuries which increase the weight of the car, requiring more fuel to be burned.
• Since people can now take a nap in their car on their way to work, people may choose to have longer commutes to live further away, increasing overall time spent on the road.
• Automated cars also mean that suddenly people who couldn’t drive before, can now get around in cars, further increasing car usage.
• According to projections run by academics if driving becomes too easy then we’re likely to see energy use increase as a result of self-driving cars rather than decrease.

Read an in-depth analysis here. And read our previous write-up on why self-driving cars could bankrupt cities here.

Source: Vox

Via: Marginal Revolution

David Axe wrote about the use of Syria as a testing ground:

• The Syrian conflict is a relatively low risk one for US fighters, with the enemy being targeted lacking serious anti-air capabilities.
• The Air Force is thus using the battle to test out aircraft it might consider for future operations.
• Interestingly they’re not testing the most cutting edge in technology. Instead they’re looking at the performance of propeller aircraft from the Vietnam war.
• Such aircraft are substantially cheaper than jet fighters, costing just $1,000 per flight hour, versus $40,000 per hour for an F-15.
• They require less maintenance and can take off from rough airfields, which future battlefields may be full of.

Read more here.

Source: MSN

In January J.J. Abrams dropped the trailer for a movie that nobody had known was being made. Meredith Woerner wrote about the secrecy this entailed:

• The actors were told about the movie by their agents, but, unusually, the agents weren’t given a chance to read the script. They were merely told that JJ Abrams was involved.
• The scripts themselves self-destructed after the actors read them.
• The movie largely takes place underground, and once the actors arrived on set, they basically weren’t allowed to surface.
• Interestingly this may have helped them better embody their characters. Mary Elizabeth Winstead says that being underground for so long meant that the set eventually began to “bleed into reality”.
• All this secrecy – including a fairly unilluminating trailer – was done so that audiences would be able to watch the film with a fresh perspective without anything being spoiled.

Read more about the movie, and what the actors thought about it here.

Source: Los Angeles Times

You can buy insurance against your celebrity spokesperson doing something disgraceful:

• Brands like to get celebrities to endorse their products. But when celebrities like Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods go onto become the center of a scandal it can hurt the brand’s image.
• To insure against this companies can buy celebrity disgrace insurance, which pays out if a celebrity does something controversial.
• The number of companies that have purchased this insurance has risen 30% since 2013, and it is now a £500 million market.
• The growth is driven in part by the rise of social media which quickly circulates embarrassing headlines and sometimes connects it to brands that pay some of those involved.
• The insurance contract may allow a company to recoup the cost of paying for an endorsement.
• It could also allow the brand to recoup some of the lost profits from a celebrity going crazy and an associated brand being tarnished.
• Premiums start at 0.25% of the amount insured.
• One of the trickier tasks is to determine what counts as a “scandal”. It matters what the celebrity’s reputation was before a gossip inducing event. If they already had a “bad” image, then it is harder to win a payout.

The full article is fascinating, though requires a subscription. You should read it here.

Source: Financial Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

Large parts of the United States moved clocks forward by an hour for Daylight’s Savings time, giving people mild jetlag. Brian Resnick wrote about some of the consequences:

• A study found that there is a small but statistically significant increase in the number of auto-accidents the Monday after clocks more forward.
• The number of deadly accidents rises from 78.2 on a typical Monday to 83.5.
• Fatalities don’t seem to rise on Sunday itself – the day of the time change – presumably because people can sleep in.
• Another study found that Daylight’s Savings time may have been responsible for an additional 302 road deaths over a ten-year period.
• But it’s not really anything to worry about. The increase is marginal given that 30,000 people die each year because of traffic accidents in the US.
• Daylight’s savings time may also marginally increase the rate of workplace injuries and heart attacks.

Read more here.

Source: Vox

The end of the movie actress was proclaimed three years ago. Now The Economist is willing to say the same about actors in general.

• Deadpool, with a relatively unknown star, has dominated the box office recently. Meanwhile movies such as Joy and Concussion, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Will Smith respectively, have struggled.
• These days audiences seem to go to the theaters to see special effects, and any relative unknown in a superhero costume can act in that.
• In fact, the stars of today owe their success in part to action flicks. Lawrence made her name from The Hunger Games, and Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley seems to have gotten a similar bump, being in consideration to play Lara Croft.
• Yet movies will continue to feature big name attractions. If nothing else a studio head that approves a flop with a mainstream star will likely face less blowback than if a similarly failed film had starred an unknown.
• Some actors continue to be able to pull in audiences though – mostly comedic ones such as Kevin Hart and Melissa McCarthy.
• This seems to be in part because such stars signal to the audience exactly what kind of film they’re about to see.
• Meanwhile some stars such as Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts continue to get movie offers even though they’ve been pretty consistent in making a poor string of movies.

Read more about the star power of Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger in markets abroad, the racial implications of all this, and other details here.

Source: The Economist

In 2006 Don Equis launched a ground-breaking ad campaign featuring Jonathan Goldsmith as the “most interesting man in the world.” Now they’ve announced that the hero of the ads has decided to set his sights beyond our own world and is looking to conquer our sister planet. He will be appearing in a final spot going off to Mars. E.J. Schultz wrote:

• The “most interesting man in the world” campaign was immensely successfully and has been rated the number one ad campaign in the beer industry.
• Sales more than doubled in the five years after the campaign launched – and even in 2015 sales grew 10.2%.
• The campaign’s success is thought to be in part because the brand eschewed the use of younger actors that other beer brands are fond of.
• Instead by having an elderly man as the star it is thought that he is not a threat or reminder of what viewers haven’t achieved yet. Instead he is an ideal to strive for rather than a mirror for comparison.
• The work was lucrative for the actor who got the role after a general casting call – he is thought to potentially earn over $1 million in 2016.
• The actor, however, is 77, and Dos Equis now sponsors the College Football Playoffs. The brand is looking to find a new star that better suits its image as brand sponsor.
• Executives are consulting with the people behind James Bond – believing that their expertise in picking different actors to play spins on the same character is the way forwards.

The full article has quotes from Goldsmith and describes the transition that the brand is trying to make. Read it here.

Source: Ad Age