Centives

Jason Notte wrote that Halloween is no longer a children’s event – something that, by now, must be clear to most people in the United States:

• $1.2 billion is spent on adult Halloween costumes – more than the $1.0 billion that is spent on children’s costumes.
• 43% of adults plan to dress up in 2013 – up from 34% in 2006.
• Seasonal Halloween themed beer sales jump during the season – making Halloween second only to New Year’s Day and the Super Bowl in terms of sales bumps.
• Hollywood has long known the power of adult spending at Halloween. R rated horror movies generate substantial revenues during the season.
• Adult Halloween parties include Key West’s Fantasy Fest which brings together 70,000 costumed partiers hosted by porn stars.

Read more about why children, on the other hand, have been increasingly unable to enjoy Halloween, and more over here.

Source: The Street

The United Kingdom will never see a King George Alexander Louis sit on the throne writes Christopher Lee:

• The current Queen is incredibly popular. However her immediate successor, Prince Charles, is less so and if he ever becomes King he’s unlikely to receive as much public support as his mother.
• The Queen’s passing will likely lead to Canada and Australia leaving the Commonwealth and opting for Republicanism.
• Prince William is third in line to the throne and while he’s currently popular, he and his wife are still new and young. It’s unlikely their popularity will last until they’re in their middle ages – when, realistically speaking, they’ll have a shot at the Monarchy.
• And then there’s Prince George. He doesn’t have a shot at the throne for the next sixty years at least. The Kingdom will be a different place by then.

Read about the role that the Church of England will play, what the British populace thinks, and more over here.

Source: New Republic

Sooner or later humans will be travelling the universe writes The Economist. (And perhaps destroying parts of it). What does this mean for economics?

• Relativity is the conclusion that spacecrafts travelling very fast will experience time differently. Whereas decades might go by on a planet, those on the spacecraft would only experience the passing of a few years. This has economic implications.
• One could, for example, invest a million dollars into something that yields 3% a year. They could then hop on a spacecraft, zip around the galaxy very quickly for a couple years, and return to the home planet where many more years will have passed and the investment will have grown substantially.
• This would mean that interest rates would be determined primarily by the price of starship fuel.
• Relativity will also meant that the net present value of shipments will be hard to calculate.
• Since information couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light it would be impossible to arbitrage away the price difference between solar systems.

Read more here.

Source: The Economist

Heinz ketchup has become collateral damage in the war between McDonald’s and Burger King writes Teresa F. Lindeman:

• Burger King’s former CEO has been appointed to run Heinz.
• However he will remain on the board of Burger King.
• As a result McDonald’s has decided to stop the use of Heinz ketchup in its restaurants across the world.
• Other Burger King competitors such as Wendy’s have yet to announce such a dramatic response.

Read more about the history of the relationship between McDonald’s and Heinz, how the ownership of Heinz and Burger King has become tangled up, and more over here.

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In a typical pun-filled article The Economist took a look at haunted houses:

• There are about 2,000 haunted houses in America – they generate revenues of about $1 billion.
• 158 million Americans will celebrate Halloween this year and a fifth will visit haunted houses.
• Most aren’t profitable. They’re only open during Halloween season and the increasing use of technology has substantially raised costs.
• However the biggest cost remains the actors stashed around the house.
• People see going to a haunted house as one step above a horror movie – this way they themselves get to be in the scene.

Find out other reasons why haunted houses are unprofitable, some of the more notable ones, and a picture of The Economist’s DC correspondent – a rare thing for the secretive newspaper to identify. Also the puns. Oh the puns. It’s all here.

Source: The Economist

Playing with Lego as a kid is something of a given for most people. Just as stepping on Lego bricks is a given for most parents. David Robertson talks us through the history of the global company:

• Lego was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen. A carpenter by trade, he started with a small catalogue of mainly wooden toys that sold well in Denmark.
• In 1946 he spent 2 years’ profits on a plastic injection-moulding machine, and began tinkering.
• Twelve years later he developed the now-famous “stub-and-tube” system and patented the idea.
• Robertson suggests that Lego is built on two fundamental choices that made it so successful. The first is quality. The second is that Lego is a “system of play”, all Lego bricks should be compatible with each other.
• However, Lego almost went bankrupt in the early 2000s, blamed on lines of toys that just didn’t sell: sets with too little building, action heroes that weren’t macho enough, products based on a tv show that never aired.
• The toy company has since changed its outlook, and returned to Kristiansen’s “system of play”. Lego has cut back on its number of products and made them interchangeable.

If you’re interested in what happened when Kristiansen’s son approved toys without enough coats of varnish, what the most profitable Lego lines are and how Lego is crowdsourcing, click here

Source: Wired

Janet Moore took a look at the economics of Halloween:

• Halloween is an important season for retailers that bridges the gap between Christmas and back-to-school.
• Last year each person in the United States spent about $79.82 on Halloween candy, costumes and decorations.
• That is expected to fall to $75.03 this year to $6.9 billion as a result of the economy.
• $330 million is spent on costumes for pets. Trending dog costumes include hot dog, Wonder Woman, and Ewok.
• About three times as much – $1 billion – is spent on children. The top costumes for them are police, firefighter, and vampire.

Read more about those trying to sell budget Halloween costumes, how much adults spend on costumes for themselves, and more over here.

Source: StarTribune

Aisha Harris looked at the past, present, and future of pop-up headlights:

• Pop-up headlights have been around since 1936 when the Cord 810 Convertible first featured them.
• They’re sold for their aerodynamic advantage, although the effect is extremely small.
• More likely they appeal to our predisposition towards anthropomorphism as they take the most human looking feature of the car – the eye like headlights – and add eyelids to them.
• The last real car to feature them came out in 2004 (pictured above).
• They seem to have been a victim of EU Regulations which require the front of cars to be more readily deformable for the sake of safety.
• While it’s possible to design pop-up headlamps around those requirements it’s expensive and not worth the cost.
• The regulations may only apply in the EU but since car manufacturers work globally those requirements have affected their designs around the world.
• Headlight innovation isn’t dead yet. Adaptive headlights are being developed that adjust light beams based on how the driver is driving.

See some photos of pop-up headlights through the ages, the American regulatory framework for headlamps, and why they were most popular on sports cars in the 1970s over here.

Source: Slate

Dating sites as we know them are going to die a quick death writes Amanda Hess:

• Dating sites currently rely on individuals answering questions about themselves and, let’s face it, lying about themselves on their profile.
• Tinder, on the other hand, is what the dating service of the future will probably look like.
• Tinder is a hook-up app that requires users to login through Facebook. This means that users get a more honest and comprehensive look at the individuals they’re interested in.
• Tinder requires users to choose each other before they can send messages to one another preventing creepy messages from being sent.
• The service automatically detects your location and only shows you those who are in your area.

Read more about the drawbacks of online dating as it currently stands, other features of Tinder, and more over here.

Source: Slate

Turns out that shredding cars can be fairly lucrative, at least according to Adam Minter:

• In developed countries old cars are typically shredded via giant metal machines. Magnets then separate out the steel and the rest of the metal is sent to China.
• In China workers hand sort through the metal to find valuables.
• The average car has about $1.65 in loose change that was lodged in the seats.
• Workers who get those coins are paid $400 a month – and since they go through millions of tons of scrap metal it’s a fairly profitable arrangement for the companies that hire them.
• The coins are then sold to Chinese tourists at a discount. One couple had over €3,700 in change.

See pictures, find out what happens to coins that are unusable, and more over here.

Source: Shanghai Scrap

Via: Marginal Revolution