The Economist wrote that there’s a case to be made for eliminating large denomination notes:

• Most Swiss merchants don’t accept them, yet the 1,000 Swiss Frank Note makes up 60% of all Swiss cash in circulation.
• The notes are popular with criminals. According to one investigation only 10% of high denomination notes are used for legal purposes.
• High denomination notes are so valuable that the unscrupulous will sometimes pay more than face value for them.
• They’re attractive because of their anonymity. They’re also easy to transport. The SFr 1,000 is, for example, worth 20 times its weight in gold.
• Some countries are looking to follow Britain’s example- where the highest available note is £50.
• Others worry that this is the first step towards a cash-less society where anonymous transactions will be impossible – vastly increasing the power of the state.
• And taking a note out of circulation is slow. Governments can stop printing new ones, but old ones will still spin around. 16 years after Canada stopped printing the C$1,000 note, 20% of them remain in circulation.
• Any one country eliminating high end notes probably won’t have much of an impact either since dealers and traffickers will just move to high denomination notes of another currency.
• Still governments may give it a go. It would, for example, make it easier to impose negative interest rates since savers would find it more difficult to take their money out of the bank and hold it all in small denomination cash.
• It could also make it harder to evade taxes – an attractive prospect for austerity weary governments.

Read more here.

Source: The Economist

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