The Economist looked at the greying ski resort business:

• The average skier is getting older and ski resorts are looking to attract younger blood.
• One ski resort offers a ski-in ski-out Starbucks.
• Others are looking to make resorts more family-friendly with play zones, yoga lessons, and snowmobiles.
• This has the added benefit of making ski-resorts destinations that can be visited all year and has led resorts to consider activities such as zip lining.
• Vail Resorts offers an app that lets users track their skiing statistics and share them with their friends.
• Terrain Parks are areas where skiers can perform tricks, record videos of them, and share them online.
• One terrain park has a barn with foam pits, trampolines and half pipes for more spectacular tricks.

Read more about how much skiers have aged, how ski slopes are being redesigned and more over here.

Source: The Economist

The Super Bowl is less than a week away. While you’re watching spare a thought for the poor cheerleaders writes Olga Khazan:

• Cheerleaders for professional American sports team have to train ten months a year and attend countless rehearsals.
• They often won’t be paid for this and they ultimately make about $5 an hour.
• Some teams require them to pay for their own hair, makeup, travel and other business expenses.
• Another team requires that the entire squad re-audition ever year meaning that veterans are in constant danger of being excluded from the team.
• However cheerleaders are often able to use the job as a launching pad to lucrative show-business and modeling engagements.

Read more about the team that pays for its cheerleaders with game and parking passes, the tours that cheerleaders may have to go on, and the penalties for bringing the wrong pom-poms over here.

Source: The Atlantic

A study by Birmingham University (UK) on 36 Brit hit men (and one woman) was done by off the record interviews, meetings with offenders and court records. They found the following:

• Most hits were carried out for fairly mundane reasons. Business relations gone sour, or domestic disputes.
• The average cost of hiring a hit-man was £15,180 ($25,056). The cheapest was £200 ($330) and the most expensive £100,000 ($165,000).
• The oldest hit man was 63, the youngest a 15 year old.
• There was a wide spread in ability of killers. The best have never been brought to justice, such as the killer of “gangland boss” Frank Mcphee who was taken down with a .22 rifle bullet. The less ruthless include legal clerk Orville Wright, who entered his target’s home armed with a knife but was talked out of the deed by his victim.
• Te Rangimaria Ngarimu, a Maori who lived in London, is the only known female contract killer. It took two attempts to kill her victim (the second as he lay in hospital). She fled to New Zealand, but returned to the UK to confess.

For more insights, including weapons used and why a 10-year old boy was intentionally shot, head on over here

Source: The Guardian

The poorest workers live on minimum wage, and so a rise in minimum wage helps the poorest the most. Right? Well…

• Economists Subia and Burkhauser looked at state level variations in minimum wages between 2003 and 2007. They then predicted that if the federal minimum wage was increased to $9.50 an hour then:
• Of the workers officially defined as ‘poor’, 11.3% would benefit.
• 63.2% of workers who would gain would be those who live in households with incomes equal to double or more the poverty line.
• 42.3% of workers to gain would be those in households with three times or more the official poverty threshold.
• Burkhauser suggests that for those on the poverty line, there are many non-monetary benefits that their employer gives, and can take these away if there is an increase in the minimum wage.

For the original summary, head over here. Or, if you’re interested, we’d highly recommend checking out Tyler Cowen’s thoughts on the original article and its critics over here.

Source: Library of Economics and Liberty

Via: Marginal Revolution

The ‘Star Spangled Banner’ has been the US national anthem since 1931, and “God Save The Queen” has been around since 1745. The Swiss, after having a ‘National Psalm’ for just 33 years, are already looking for something new:

• The ‘original’ Swiss national anthem was written in 1811, but set to the tune of “God Save The Queen”. This caused some understandable confusion at sporting events, and was scrapped.
• In 1841 a Swiss monk composed a hymn that became a hit, and surged to popularity, becoming the ‘Swiss Psalm’ in…1981.
• The lyrics of the Psalm are now causing an issue. In a secular nation, singing about God (plus mountains and thunderstorms) feels a little uncomfortable. Though, most Swiss don’t actually know all the lyrics anyway.
• And so there is to be a contest to choose a new anthem. With a jury of 30 including yodelling experts, a slam poet, a theology professor and a rapper, but even if they can agree the government may not.

For more information, check out the Economist over here, or the BBC over here

Source: The Economist

The Economist took a look at the shortage in cadavers:

• Demand for cadavers has grown. They are used for medical training, organ transplants, public display, disaster dog training and car safety tests.
• Yet supply has fallen. Improved means of communication mean there are fewer unclaimed bodies.
• In countries such as China and the Middle East bodies are treated with respect and so aren’t as commonly donated.
• For the bodies to be useful they have to meet certain standards. They must be young and relatively healthy. Such dead bodies aren’t easily available (many would say that such living bodies are rare too).
• While paying for dead bodies is illegal some medical schools get around this by paying for elaborate funerals.

Read more about alternatives to cadavers, and other ways that people have started paying for bodies over here.

Source: The Economist

Every day Google updates its front page with a new take on its logo commemorating significant dates or individuals. The bastards. So writes Justin Moyer:

• We’d criticize McDonald’s and Coca-Cola if they used images of Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi to sell their product.
• Yet Google does the same and gets platitudes for it.
• The company now decides who is and isn’t worthy of recognition. This used to be a role reserved for the creators of stamps.
• Yet in contrast to the stamp commemoration process which includes a Citizen’s Stamp Advisory Committee, Google’s doodles are determined undemocratically by 10 technocrats.
• There is also an element of hypocrisy. While Google celebrates African American leaders it refuses to release statistics on minority hiring.
• Supporters argue that the doodles help bring attention to forgotten icons. After Google featured Zora Neale Hurston her 75 year old book rose to #173 on Amazon’s best seller list.

Read more about how this links to Google’s wider trend towards being evil over here.

Source: The Washington Post

Mad Men has single handedly reinvigorated the sales of Lucky Strike and Canadian Club writes Liam Boluk:

• Since the launch of Mad Men the sales of Lucky Strike – a cigarette brand prominently featured on the show – have increased 44%.
• Mad Men helped boost sales because it made smoking seem cool – something that has been difficult in an era of giant warning labels on cigarette packages.
• Canadian Club whiskey had seen declining sales for years. After Mad Men featured it, sales spiked.
• Canadian Club even built on its image by releasing an advertising campaign “Damn Right Your Dad Drank It” influenced by the TV show.

You can read the full article here and find out other examples of entertainment media turning around the fortune of products, and excellent charts that illustrate the effects that Mad Men had on the sales of the products.

Source: Ivey Business Review

According to the historians on Reddit, Romans couldn’t just go to Ticketmaster to purchase tickets to watch events at the Coliseum. Here’s what they did do:

• The tickets were free. They were given out in bulk by the organizer, and those who received them would further distribute them to those they wanted to show favour to.
• There was tiered seating. The richer and more powerful you were the closer you got to sit to the action.
• The tickets themselves were etched into broken shards of pottery called ostraca and had information on the section, row, and seat.
• To prevent counterfeit tickets, shards from the same pot were used for each group of seats so that the tickets could be put together to re-form the pot.

Read the wider discussion about Coliseum events over here.

Source: Reddit