It’s The Daily Mail which means it should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but Becky Pemberton wrote about a fairly legitimate looking service to help children build sandcastles:

• A travel company is offering to dispatch butlers to various locations in Europe in order to design and construct sandcastles.
• It starts with a brainstorming session to help the patron understand what they want their finished project to look like.
• Then blueprints are created, and the butler will find a good location with high quality sand to build the castle.
• The butler will take the lead in building the castle, and, if so inclined, the patron can help as appropriate.

Read more about the service, see some photos of how it works, and get some tips to build sophisticated sand castles here.

Source: The Daily Mail

Via: Marginal Revolution

Michele Petruzziello looked at some interesting facts about the fashion industry:

• The fashion industry is expected to double in size to $5 trillion in the next ten years.
• As a whole fashion employs more people in the United States than automobiles, fast-food, and video games.
• Other countries get a big boost from it as well. 88% of Haiti’s exports relate to clothes.
• Sadly there is still sexism in the C-Suite. Less than 20% of the major fashion brands have female heads, and only about a quarter of all board members are women.
• The industry is thirsty. A t-shirt “costs” 1,083 gallons of water to make when things such as land for grazing or agriculture is considered.
• It also leads to a lot of waste. The average American throws out 70 pounds of clothes a year.

Read about Fashion Revolution day, why millennials give the industry hope, and more over here.

Source: Agenda – World Economic Forum

Every image or video we see has its colours altered. Annie Sneed wrote about how these changes affect your emotions:

• Warm orange-yellowey colours are friendly while blue is usually considered to be more distant.
• This is why in political ads candidates have an orange glow around them while their opponents are depicted with hues of blue.
• Green can be a mixed bag. Outdoors it’s a positive colour and so if the aim is to create a somber outdoor scene then greens are desaturated.
• Indoors however it elicits a sense of disgust and so the green is ramped up – as in The Matrix films.
• To indicate a dream sequence or a flashback contrast is added which creates a sense of distance from reality.

See what colourists do to create foreign worlds, why we have these colour associations, and visual examples here.

Source: Fast Company

You don’t see as many water fountains as you used to these days. Kendra Pierre-Louis looked into what happened:

• In the old days the poor would drink water bottled from sewage infested sources.
• Then in 1859 London installed the world’s first clean water fountain in a ceremony watched by thousands. The fountain was so popular that at the peak 7,000 people used it a day.
• In the next 20 years London installed 800 fountains and American cities soon followed.
• Bottled water soon lost favour as it was thought that only low-class places which couldn’t afford modern plumbing were forced to use it.
• Then in the 1990s companies saw an opportunity to expand sales of bottled water by creating doubts in people’s minds about the safety of tap water.
• The advertising campaigns were successful and soon people felt that tap water wasn’t safe – even though it has been shown to be about as safe as bottled water.
• Since people stopped trusting tap water they stopped trusting water fountains.
• A water fountain can cost up to $4,500 to install so cities could save on costs by cutting back on an amenity that was becoming increasingly unpopular anyway.
• This has health consequences. People, for example, resort to sugary drinks instead of water when there are no fountains around.
• And all the oil based plastic bottles aren’t that great for the environment.

Read about a possible renaissance for water fountains and more over here.

Source: The Washington Post

Paul Sullivan took a look at the arduous task of figuring out your private jet travel:

• When it comes to flying around in a private jet there are a lot of factors to consider and most people don’t make such a purchase frequently, so there are consultancies who help you figure out your options.
• For example if you decide to charter a jet the consultancy will provide safety support by doing a background check on the pilot to make sure they actually have experience flying that particular type of plane.
• They may also recommend programs similar to international minutes for phone cards. Customers purchase ‘hours’ that they can use on a private jet, and they’re eligible to spend those hours whenever they want.
• They can always top up the hours if they run out.
• The costs usually comes out to $16,000 an hour – before membership fees and fuel surcharges.
• This is substantially cheaper than the millions of dollars that purchasing your own jet costs.

Read more about the factors that Centives readers should consider when they next drop in to their local private jet dealership over here.

Source: The New York Times

The Economist took a look at the market for passports:

• Passport holders of countries in the Caribbean get visa-free travel to various European countries.
• There are many people who’d like to visit Europe but who would have…trouble getting a visa approved or don’t want to go through the hassle of it all.
• Spotting a market opportunity, Caribbean countries are willing to sell citizenship to those who are able to pay.
• The “donation” required for this can be as little as $250,000.
• Some require that you at least spend some time in the country before getting its passport – usually a long weekend will do it.
• The business is lucrative. St Kitts made $100 million from the business – 13% of its GDP.
• It can lead to awkward situations though. Iranians have apparently been using St Kitts passports to circumvent American sanctions.

Read more about the different countries and the amount of money they’re willing to sell citizenship for, and how countries around the world are responding over here.

Source: The Economist

The era of the self-driving car is nigh and cities could suffer due to them writes Alex Davies:

• Self-Driving cars won’t break speeding, traffic light, parking or drunk driving laws.
• Cities make hundreds of millions of dollars from those violations. Everything from fines to towing fees go to city coffers.
• People will also probably buy fewer cars which means that cities won’t make as much money from car registrations.
• It’s not all doom and gloom. If there are fewer accidents then money will be saved from not having to treat victims.
• Increased productivity from people being able to do things like work in their car could also contribute to economic growth and thus tax income.
• There’ll be less pollution as cars will use fuel more efficiently, creating health savings.
• Cities will be able to re-allocate a whole lot of traffic cops to fighting crime.

Read more about other sources of revenues that cities could consider, and other implications of a self-driving future here.

Source: Wired

Partially as a result of China’s one child policy, China’s fertility rate – the number of children that an average woman will have – has dropped to 1.6, below the 2.1 required to prevent population decline. This means that the country is rapidly ageing, which Japan’s experience indicates could lead to an economic crash. The Chinese government has taken steps to loosen the one child policy and encourage more children but the initiatives haven’t been successful. The Economist took a look at the reasons why:

• Years of government propaganda about the importance of only having one child has been imprinted on people’s minds and many still believe it’d be unpatriotic to have more children.
• The country’s pollution and traffic problems are blamed on over-population further convincing people that the population needs to shrink.
• The country has grown used to a one-child policy. Hotel rooms for families with two children cannot be booked online.
• Play vehicles are set up with space for two parents and a child.
• Even toothbrush holders usually assume a two parent one child household.
• The cost of education and healthcare means that many parents feel that they cannot afford a second child.
• Since both parents are often working, grandparents help take care of children. But people are having children at older ages which means that grandparents can barely keep up with one child let alone two.

Read more about the effects that the one-child policy had on the country, the next steps that the government might take, and other details here.

Source: The Economist

For a while there it was unclear if we would ever be able to eat Greek yogurt again. But it seems like the Eurozone has figured out a deal, and Greece will stay in the European Union. Peter Berlin took a look at the role that being the host of the 2004 Olympics played in contributing to Greece’s current financial crisis.

• The games are thought to have cost Greece €7 billion, and the country continues to pay the debt from those games.
• Meanwhile the International Olympic Committee made close to $1 billion from the event.
• The IOC seems reluctant to award the games to countries that do things affordably.
• One solution would be to make a country – probably Greece since the Olympics originated there – a permanent host of the games.
• As Greece still has all the facilities from the 2004 games which largely sit unused, it would be a boost to the local economy, and would save other countries from expensive construction projects.
• The 2016 games in Rio, for example, are expected to cost €13.2 billion.

Read more here.

Source: Politico