The American women might have won the world cup, but they’re losing the battle against wage inequality writes Mary Pilon:

• Female football players have salary ranges from $6,000-$30,000 which means that some of the players are earning less than the poverty line in the cities they compete in.
• In contrast the men have a salary cap of $3.1 million.
• Women are also unable to make much money from brand endorsements. One American forward earns $92,500 a year after endorsements. Their male counterparts can make millions.
• What makes it particularly unfortunate is that the women’s team seems to be more successful than the men’s, being ranked #1 in the world, compared with #27 for the men.
• While this is all largely because women’s football generates less attention than the men’s game, this maybe a chicken and egg problem. Few people may watch the game because few broadcasters properly advertize it.
• The attention that female tennis players get indicates that there is a market for women’s sports if broadcasters are willing to invest in it.
• The worst comparison is the prize money. When Germany won the men’s World Cup last year they got $35 million. This year’s female winners received $2 million.

Read about how other sports deal with this problem and more over here.

Source: Politico

When a new car is launched it is reviewed by automobile experts such as Matt Hardigree, who delved into the economics of handing out cars for reviewers to write about:

• Those who loan out a car to be reviewed carefully analyze the journalist that it is being loaned to and ensure that the car is loaded with the additional optional features that the reviewer likes.
• The car is also customized for the environment. If it is going to the north east then it’ll come with steering wheel and seat warmers.
• They don’t necessary get all the options. For example a review car probably won’t have the sun-roof feature because this can hurt fuel economy and manufacturers don’t want that written about.
• After the car has been selected it is ‘broken in’ by being driven a few hundred miles to make sure that there are no issues with it.
• Before the car is delivered the gas station closest to the reviewer is found so that the reviewer gets a full tank. They are not required to refill it before returning the car.
• The reviewer normally gets to drive it for around a week before it is handed off to the next reviewer.
• Manufacturers will monitor what the reviewer has to say and upgrade any parts that are getting negative reviews.
• Parts such as polished chrome wheels will be replaced rather than repaired to ensure that the vehicle gets the best possible press.
• Each car will be driven by around 15 journalists. Manufacturers make sure it ends with less than 10,000 miles so it can be auctioned off. Final buyers don’t know that it was a press review car once.
• In general sending a car to be reviewed costs about $2,800 per journalist – assuming that there is no damage to the car which reviewers are not liable for.
• If journalists write positive things about the car then the manufacturer may pay the publication to use quotes from the positive reviews in advertizements.
• All of this can create a conflict of interest. This is why some publications such as Consumer Reports outright buys the cars it reviews – in secret so the car manufacturer can’t fine tune the car for the reviewer.
• Hardigree, the author of the article, goes through about 25 review cars a year.

The full article takes a much deeper dive into the economics of the industry and provides many more fascinating details. It is worth a read over here, and worth considering the next time you read a car review.

Source: Jalopnik

Katia Moskvitch wrote that in-flight tv screens might be coming to a gentle end:

• The TV screens that often come embedded in airplanes cost $15,000 a seat or almost $8 million per aircraft.
• They’re the biggest driver of maintenance costs, after engines and landing gear.
• With planes increasingly coming with Wi-Fi there’s less of a need to keep passengers entertained with movies. While they won’t be able to stream Netflix in the air, they can do some internet reading and chatting.
• Other airlines are handing out devices to passengers. Openskies a French Airline distributes 500 tablets to passengers pre-loaded with videos. This costs $250,000 per plane which is much cheaper than built-in systems.
• Another airline, Trasavia, has trialed giving out Occulus Rift virtual reality headsets to each of its passengers.
• Aircraft can also come with movies on a central server which are then streamed to passengers’ own personal devices. Since the movies are stored onboard passengers don’t have to pay absurd charges to access the movies.

See how other airlines are cutting costs, the future of in-flight holograms, and much more over here.

Source: BBC

Ryan Healey wrote about how McDonald’s capitalized on China’s One-Child policy to become successful in the country:

• The one-child policy has led to the “little emperor” phenomenon where each child will have two parents and four grand-parents focusing all their attention solely on them.
• The burger restaurant realized that the parents and grand-parents would take the children wherever they wanted to go, and focused its advertizing on the kids.
• It also realized that the little emperors were lonely with no siblings to play with. So the restaurant had playgrounds in each of its restaurants where children could come to socialize and talk.
• McDonald’s would often hire actors to play “Uncle Ronald” and “Auntie McDonald” to oversee and co-ordinate their play.
• To ensure that parents felt comfortable sending their children to McDonald’s the restaurant chain promoted it as a place of education, running essay writing competitions and awarding scholarships.
• Executives also realized that as people stopped living in extended families, McDonald’s could be advertized as a place for family get-togethers, as the children played away in the distance.

Read more here.

Source: Lucky Peach

The Cleaver Quarterly took a look at how fruits, vegetables, and spices are referred to in Chinese:

• Several food items first arrived in China at a time when China believed it was the epitome of civilization and everything outside of China was an uncivilized wasteland.
• Therefore foods brought in from abroad were given names that signified their foreign, barbaric origins.
• While they may be widely used in Chinese cooking today, linguistically they are still referred to as alien foods.

Some foods with more interesting Chinese translations include:

• Tomato: Barbarian Eggplant
• Potato: Foreign-Devil Mercy Root-Tuber
• Sweet Potato: Barbarian Yam
• Walnut: Foreign Peach
• Carrot: Foreign Radish
• Black Pepper: Foreign Pepper
• Honeydew – Wallace Melon – this is because US Vice President Henry Wallace played a role in first making them popular in China in response to a drought.

See how these food items are now used in China, and read more of their individual histories over here.

Source: Lucky Peach

Sonali Kohli wrote that adults increasingly like to spend time with colouring books:

• A colouring book is #9 on UK Amazon’s best-selling books, and has been in the top 100 for 113 days.
• There are Facebook groups for adult colouring book clubs, and Game of Thrones will soon be releasing one.
• Some think that colouring may help release stress or increase motivation, as well as recall happy childhood memories.
• Publishers have latched onto this, marketing colouring books for adults as therapeutic, to get away from any stigmas associated with adults indulging in what is usually a children’s activity.

Read more here.

Source: Quartz

Back in 2011 Jenny Davis wrote about some of the more troubling aspects of automated mobile assistants such as Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana:

• Both voice assistants, despite being digital, are very clearly set up to be female.
• Since they’ve been personified they’ve also been sexualized. Both systems come with pre-programmed responses to the sexual questions that programmers knew would inevitably be asked of them.
• The systems are designed to play subservient roles. They’re meant to be there when you need them, and to disappear when you don’t, and they’re expected to anticipate and fulfil your desires.
• The sexism and misogyny this implies is concerning.

Read more here.

Source: Cyborgology

History is riddled with mistakes and wrong turns. This can sometimes lead to war, famine, and a tribal regression to hedonistic apathy. Other times it leads to bad taco emojis according to L.A. Taco:

• There has long been a campaign to get a taco emoji on smartphone keyboards.
• Supporters of the movement point out that there are five different types of sushi emoji, yet the popular Mexican dish is nowhere to be found.
• Last year the campaign got a big boost when Taco Bell, with its fat wallet, got behind the campaign to officially recognize the taco.
• The campaign was successful and what resulted from it (pictured) makes sense. The yellow shell, green lettuce, orange cheese, and red tomato is recognizable even when the taco is shrunk down to emoji-size.
• However, while this might be what a Taco Bell taco looks like, it’s nothing like an authentic taco. A proper Mexican taco has a whitish tortilla, and contains meat, onion and cilantro. It is not meant to have a florescent orange shell, and it’s certainly not meant to include cheddar, tomato or lettuce.
• More than anything the emoji that was recognized is an incredible win for Taco Bell. Now anytime a taco emoji is used, people will immediately associate it with the Bell’s own products.
• Given that emojis seem to be the new way that people communicate this would be as if Taco Bell was able to convince Webster’s dictionary to show its products when somebody looked up Mexican food.

See what an alternate, more authentic design would look like, and read about the need for an enchilada emoji here.

Source: First We Feast

Sarah Laskow wrote about trees that have achieved some degree of fame:

• The most famous trees have specific heritages and families, and live in posh districts such as Central Park or Riverdale in New York.
• Trees might become famous if they’re really big, have a really long history, commemorate a soldier or battlefield, be planted by someone special such as a head of state, or even if they are shaped weird.
• But most famous trees aren’t just idle celebrities coasting of off their fame. Since they’re usually large and old they have different types of branches and riddled barks that provide a multitude of habitats for ecosystems to thrive.
• They’re often hard to find. Those who compile lists of the most famous trees don’t always put exact locations in order to protect them against over-zealous fans.

Read more about these trees and see some incredible photos here.

Source: Atlas Obscura

The Economist took a look at the rise of “sugar babies”:

• Today three quarters of all American graduates leave college in debt.
• This is up from the roughly half of all graduates that left with debt in 1995 – and the amount of debt carried these days is a lot higher than before.
• In contrast two thirds of those who sign up to be sugar babies – typically women who trade companionship and sex for money – leave college without debt.
• The monthly “rate” for a sugar baby is around $3,000, although some of the wealthier men pay much more.
• Websites such as SeekingArragement help facilitate the transaction. They got a big boost during the most recent recession, and have continued to grow rapidly, with one almost doubling in membership size in the past two years.
• In fact SeekingArrangement has done so well that it no longer needs to advertize, though back in the day its adverts would pop up if anybody searched for terms such as “student loan”.
• Those in the industry argue that this is not prostitution. Since the participants establish a relationship that usually lasts for at least a few weeks, it is labelled as “compensation for companionship”.
• Any attempts to ban this could inadvertently ban marriage.

Read more here.

Source: The Economist