RateSupermarket looked at the price of finding somebody, courting them, and then marrying them:

• A year of dating, and then a year-long engagement is assumed.
• The first year of dating is estimated to cost almost $7,000. The second year costs $10,000. This includes the cost of movie tickets, beach vacations, and ‘apology flowers’. Arranged marriages never seemed more appealing.
• The wedding itself will cost you another $27,000.
• All in all the complete price tag for true love comes out to $43,842.08.

Centives, for one, thinks that investing that money into an Xbox with a host of assorted games will ultimately be more fulfilling. At least that’s what we tell ourselves as we prepare to order take-out. Check out the entire infographic over here.

Source: RateSupermarket

Via: Marginal Revolution, The Globe and Mail

Last year it was pointed out that the word ‘artisan’ doesn’t mean anything anymore. S.T. VanAirsdale thinks the same is now true of the word “fresh”.

• Consumers have gravitated towards ‘fresh’ food because eating is no longer thought of as fuel for the day. It’s meant to be an experience in itself.
• Fast food restaurants like the word ‘fresh’ because it sounds good but doesn’t require any investments in high-quality or health conscious ingredients.
• Yet food marketed as fresh can be sold at a premium.
• For those who can get it to work, the strategy is effective. Domino’s share price has increased 400% since its successful freshness campaign. Subway beat McDonald’s to become the largest food chain because Subway was perceived as fresh.
• Taco Bell is currently trying to compete with Chipotle by releasing its own line of ‘fresh’ products while Arby’s is trying to throw doubts about Subway’s freshness by raising questions about where the meat is sliced.

The full article has many more fascinating anecdotes and points about the freshness wars. It’s well written and you should head on over here to read it.

Source: Slate

The Economist took a look at the technologies that banks are currently using, and might start using, to analyze your social media profile for clues about your likelihood of default:

• One startup validates your employer based on the number and nature of connections you have on LinkedIn.
• Another uses text analysis to determine your credit risk. Those who type entirely in upper or lower case are more likely to default.
• Experts are also looking to see if posting racist comments on Facebook correlates with higher credit risk.
• A lender in Hong Kong asks friends to vouch for your trustworthiness as a borrower. If you fail to pay back your loan, then your own credit history, as well as those of the friends who recommended you, is hurt.

Read more about the other ways that banks could start using social media to learn about you, the privacy concerns that this raises, and how users are getting around it over here.

Source: The Economist

Want to be the American ambassador to France? It’s not about your skills or background. It’s about the money according to a study reported on by Brad Plumer:

• The American President gets to name ambassadors to countries all over the world.
• About 55 of those positions are generally reserved for appointees who were either wealthy donors to the President’s campaign or top fund-raisers.
• These individuals can get posted to stable, developed countries such as France, Japan, or Canada.
• The ambassadorship to the United Kingdom, for example, requires, on average, about $1.1 million personal donations.
• The most expensive is Austria where an ambassadorship has on average cost $1.3 million in donations.
• In fairness to the President rich countries might be getting rich ambassadors because their job consists of throwing expensive parties that the state department’s budget can’t always cover.

Read more about the findings of the paper, as well as further links to more information about the topic over here.

Source: The Washington Post

Pope Benedict XVI has become the first Pope to retire in almost 600 years. L.V. Anderson answered a few questions about what the Pope will do now:

• After retiring Pope Benedict will go to the Pope’s summer residence, and then onto a monastery of nuns in the Vatican. Where he lives after that is up to him.
• Popes have no formal retirement pension plan – and in fact have no compensation plan while they’re employed. The Holy See merely pays for the Pope’s expenses and this arrangement may continue. The Pope will also have continued access to the Vatican’s lavish healthcare plan.
• He won’t automatically get his old job back. If he wants to become a Cardinal he’ll have to be reappointed by the next Pope.
• Officially the Pope will have no say in who is successor will be. But he will likely have influence since he has appointed 67 of the 118 individuals who will select the next Pope.

Read more about what happens to his name, and his twitter account over here.

Source: Slate

KFC’s plans to expand into African countries are facing one big hurdle: chickens. Drew Hinshaw writes:

• Chicken farmers in Ghana don’t meet KFC’s professional standards and so chains are forced to import their chicken from other countries.
• However Ghana’s currency is depreciating which makes imports more expensive, menu prices higher, and sales lower.
• To cut costs KFCs in Ghana are encouraging patrons to use shito – a local hot sauce – instead of more expensive imported ketchup.
• Nigeria doesn’t allow the import of chickens. This has driven Nigerian KFCs to add fish to the menu.
• Kenya doesn’t allow chicken imports either. There is just one local supplier who meets the chain’s professional standards and they charge a large premium for it.

To read more about the struggles for KFC and what chain owners have to say about it, as well as why developing a professional domestic chicken industry will be difficult for African countries click here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Via: Marginal Revolution

Kathleen Hennessey and Christi Parsons looked at the people who have to write the State of the Union speech that the President delivers:

• Writing the State of the Union is thought to be one of the most difficult tasks for a Presidential speechwriter. Interest groups and other parties constantly interfere with the hopes of being mentioned in the speech.
• The speech is delivered at 9pm Eastern Time and there are fears that audiences will doze off. So speechwriters not only have to present something of substance, they must also make it interesting and engaging.
• Nixon’s speechwriter used amphetamines to stay alert during a three day writing binge for the 1970 address. Nixon ripped it up.
• The speeches have gotten longer with time. This is in part because people applaud “every time the President sneezes”. Bill Clinton has the record for longest speech.
• When done right the speech can set the agenda. Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil” continues to shape America’s foreign policy.

Read how speechwriters describe the process, how Reagan did things differently, and about the person who will be writing Obama’s speech over here.

Source: Los Angeles Times

As the East Coast of the United States recovers from “Nemo” the importance of weather forecasting has once again become clear. The Economist looked at an elegant solution to an age-old problem: measuring rainfall. Highlights include:

• Rainfall is now measured either through satellites – that lack detail – or old fashion rain collection gauges – that have detail but don’t cover much land.
• Rain can degrade cell phone reception and researchers have now come up with a system that uses cellphone signals to determine the amount of rainfall in an area.
• This provides the detail of rain gauges with the wide coverage of satellites – since most regions have cell phone reception.
• This information can also be measured in realtime unlike both satellites and gauges.
• There are areas without cell phone coverage and perhaps in the future weather forecasters will help build cell stations in those areas to better measure weather data and provide cell phone reception to the people who live there.
• The technology has limitations: it’s not that great at measuring snow or hail.

Read more about the technology, its limitations, and test runs over here.

Source: The Economist

The American military is looking at how its land-based nuclear missile system will work post-2025. Sharon Weinberger described the ideas being discussed so far:

• Nuclear weapons are all about deterring the enemy from daring to hit you in the first place, and so it’s important to convince the enemy that even if they manage to strike the country, the United States can still launch an annihilating counter-attack.
• The current system does this by spreading nuclear missile silos across a vast expanse of land.
• However this system is expensive and requires the maintenance of lots of missile silos dispersed across wide ranges.
• An alternate idea would have a nuclear ‘subway’ that would randomly transport nuclear weapons through various underground tunnels. The enemy would thus never know precisely where the missiles are.
• Another idea would have the missiles transported on specialized vehicles that would venture on public roads or even into off-road areas to prevent the weapons from becoming a static target.

Read more about other ideas, as well as the idea that the military is most likely to pursue over here.

Source: BBC

Centives previously looked at the lengths that Pret A Manger goes to in order to ensure that employees are perky. Perhaps they’re afraid that without this policy their servers will act more as they did in the former Soviet Union, writes Peter Frase:

• When Pizza Hut opened its first outlet in the former Soviet Union in 1990 international managers had to teach local stuff how to smile, make eye contact, and generally interact with the customer.
• A Soviet teenager asked why as a McDonald’s server he was expected to be nice to the customers. After all – he reasoned – he had control of the burgers, and the customers didn’t.
• All of this likely happened because under the Soviet Union people had housing, education, and health care. They had no reason to do a good job and be passionate about their work.
• In the service industry, the product and the worker are inseperable.

Read more about what this says about capitalism over here.

Source: Jacobin