Results for “markets in everything” 1878 found
The wedding culture that is Argentina markets in everything metaphors of decline
With fewer and fewer young Argentinians getting married for real, groups of friends in their 20s and 30s are instead paying around $50 (£32) each to attend staged events.
“It all started two years ago with a group of friends: we realized we hadn’t been to a wedding in a long time because hardly anybody is getting married anymore,” says 26-year-old publicist Martín Acerbi. Together with four friends from the university town of La Plata, 32 miles (50km) south of the capital city of Buenos Aires, Acerbi decided to organize a fake wedding instead.
To their surprise the event was a roaring success, and the one-off wedding became a business: Acerbi and his friends founded the Falsa Boda company in November 2013 – and have had steady work ever since.
The company hires real wedding locations, caterers and DJs for the parties, Acerbi said. “These wedding professionals have become our strategic allies, we organize it like it’s the real thing, except the marriage itself is fake,” he said.
Hired actors play the bride, groom and a surprise third party: a spurned lover or secret boyfriend who arrives “unexpectedly” – and with dramatic results.
“Our guests get all the fun of a wedding party with none of the commitment, or the problem of finding someone who is actually getting married,” says Acerbi.
A typical “fake wedding” hosts about 600 or 700 paying guests, with soap-opera style drama and a party lasting until 6am the next morning – the normal timetable for a real wedding in hard-partying Argentina.
The full story is here.
Detroit squatter markets in everything
Wanted: One good squatter.
It’s no joke. In a remote pocket of northwest Detroit along the Rouge River, neighbors are so desperate to stop a cycle of abandonment and blight they’re recruiting a squatter to occupy a home whose longtime owners left last weekend.
That’s because neighbors fear the onetime farmhouse on Puritan and Hazelton will be stripped and torched if it remains empty for long. Eight nearby houses burned in the past two years. A few blocks away, there are more weedy lots than homes.
A co-founder of one neighborhood group explained:
“You want someone in the house when it’s still functioning. Otherwise, it will be destroyed in 24 hours.”
In this case the homeowners are asking potential squatters for references, so as to avoid drug dealer squatters. How about some Syrian squatters?
Technically, squatting in Detroit is against the law but it is often tolerated. But not all settlement attempts pass legal muster:
“The over-arching theme is that the city of Detroit does nothing, so we’re forced to do our own thing,” said Brown, 34, a Wayne County Community College professor.
Brown also made headlines last year. That’s when she and her husband, David, bought a $2,000 house in the neighborhood in hopes of forming a kibbutz, a Jewish communal settlement. City officials seized backyard goats and charged the couple with violating ordinances.
The full article is here, hat tip goes to a loyal MR reader.
Refugee markets in everything
The annual report in 2013 from a multibillion-dollar London private-equity firm that counts a French pastry baker and a Dutch shoemaker among its holdings touted a new opportunity with “promising organic and acquisitive growth potential.”
That investment was the management of refugee camps.
“The margins are very low,” said Willy Koch, the retired founder of the Swiss company, ORS Service AG, which runs a camp in Austria that overflowed this summer with migrants who crossed from the Balkans and Hungary. “One of the keys is, certainly, volume.”
The WSJ story is here, or maybe here. And here is a related business:
In Sweden, the government paid a language-analysis firm $900,000 last year to verify asylum-seekers’ claims of where they were from.
Look for more stories along these lines. Hat tip goes to Hugo Lindgren.
Auction markets in everything
Elephants, giraffes, lemurs, and even a cockroach at the Oakland Zoo have been exploring their creative sides to produce colorful paintings that will be auctioned for charity.
The painting sessions were conducted by zoo keepers who used only positive-reinforcement, including plenty of treats, as they worked with the animals, zoo spokeswoman Nicky Mora said.
Elephants were helped to hold paintbrushes in their trunks and giraffes in their mouths and produced their artwork one stroke at a time. Goats, lemurs, and meerkats had their hooves, paws or claws dabbed with nontoxic, water-based paint and ran over a blank sheet of poster board while chasing a treat.
Thirty-two of the works will be auctioned on eBay starting Thursday.
Andy, a Madagascar hissing cockroach, scurried around a canvas and the result was a piece in purple, green and yellow tones.
Maggie, a Nigerian dwarf goat, had her hooves dipped in blue, green and yellow paint and the keeper coaxed her with snacks to walk on a canvas.
I recall once reading that de Kooning was quite impressed by the paintings of an elephant. There is more here.
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs
Sosa is a gynecological teaching associate, and she holds one of modern medicine’s most awkward jobs, using her body to guide med students through some of its most delicate, dreaded exams. Every week, she lies back for dozens of the next medical generation’s first pelvic and breast screenings, steering gloved fingers through the mysteries of her own anatomy and relaying the in-depth feedback they’ll need out in the wild.
She is not, in the traditional sense, a medical professional herself: A 31-year-old theater actor, she has also worked recent jobs at a bakery and Barnes & Noble. Yet what she lacks in faculty prestige, she and her compatriots — including a squad of male urological teaching associates, who teach genital and prostate exams — make up for in humor, candor and endurance. For nervous students, she is like an enthusiastic surgical dummy, awake through the operation and cheering them on…
In New York and Los Angeles, the simulated patients are often actors; here, in eastern Virginia, they are part-time or former professors, baristas, retail workers and house spouses, all contract workers paid by the session, and not extraordinarily so. Gliva-McConvey, the program director, said wages were confidential but added, “All I can say is, we don’t pay them enough.”
Vocabulary becomes hugely important to avoiding clumsy wording. Teachers are taught to neutralize sexual language — it’s a “table,” not a “bed”; a “drape,” not a “sheet” — and cut back on awkward phrases: Say “footrests” instead of the too-equestrian “stirrups”; “lots of pressure” instead of “this is going to hurt.” Students aren’t supposed to “grab,” “stick in” or “pull out” anything, though in the moment, instructor Kelene Williams said with a laugh, “sometimes neutral doesn’t come out.”
The article is…unsettling…throughout, kudos to Drew Harwell, and I thank M. for the pointer.
Forthcoming Uighur markets in everything
Another sign on the door says that a new restaurant will be replacing Charlie Chiang’s and will be “opening soon.”
The new restaurant will be called Amannisahan and will serve Uyghur cuisine, according to the sign. In an indication that a quick reopening may indeed be in the works, Amannisahan says it’s currently hiring restaurant managers and waiters.
Take that Bryan Caplan! And that’s for Crystal City, VA, by the way here is the Jorma Kaukonen song.
For the pointer I thank Michael Makowsky.
Cryotherapy markets in everything
While Anastasia Garvey, an actress and model, doesn’t have office pressure, she says she is constantly on edge wondering if she’ll get a certain job. She has developed a regimen of ways to disconnect: meditation, acupuncture, cupping therapy, monthly trips to a reservation-only spa and most recently cryotherapy — as in spending some time being blasted by air cooled to minus 260 degrees.
It only lasts three minutes, plus time to warm up again on a stationary bike, but it costs $90 a session, she said. She goes three times a week.
“The first time I did it I couldn’t remember my name,” she said. “You’re in a freezer. You’re so cold you can’t think of anything.”
There are many interesting ideas and bits in this NYT Paul Sullivan piece: “As for the seeming contradiction of the Buddhist boxer…”
Ad-blocking software markets in everything
…Adblock Plus has become the internet’s advertising sheriff. That’s because its software, by default, allows some ads through its firewall—ads it deems “acceptable,” meeting a series of strict criteria it came up with in conversation with internet users around the world. The criteria essentially eliminate most of the ads on the market today, rolling back ad technology to the 1990s: text only, no animations, no popovers, no placement in the flow of text. In the two months since I’ve installed the software, I don’t recall seeing any ads that meet the criteria.
Websites must apply to get “whitelisted,” and an Adblock Plus employee then works with the site to make sure that the selected ads comply with the criteria. Ben Williams, a spokesman for Eyeo, told me that 700 publishers and bloggers have been whitelisted. The whitelist is how the company makes money. Eyeo charges large for-profit publishers a cut of ad revenues to be on the list, a scheme some critics have called extortion. Williams declined to say who is paying or how much, but the Financial Times recently reported that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon were among those paying Eyeo for their acceptable ads to appear to Adblock Plus users.
There is more here, from Michael Rosenwald.
Will ad-blocking, over time, decimate the free web?
Hurrah for Singapore birthday markets in everything
Rolls-Royce will be celebrating Singapore’s 50th year of independence with a special bespoke luxury car, the first time the carmaker has commissioned a car to celebrate the anniversary of a country.
Based on the Ghost line of vehicles, the limited edition “SG50 Ghost Series II” bears the red and white colors of Singapore’s flag. The white exterior will feature red trim, while the interior seats are dark red in color, with the city’s iconic half-fish, half-lion Merlion symbol stitched into the four headrests.
Unfortunately only one model will be released for sale, for $290,000. And that is not all:
Singapore’s independence day falls on August 9, and is slated to be the country’s biggest anniversary celebration ever. Other brands that have released special products to mark the day include Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Singapore Special Edition watch, a Singapore Airlines plane bearing a special motif, and Ayam Brand’s specially designed sardine cans.
The story is here, and perhaps I will be blogging Singapore a bit more as the country’s fiftieth anniversary approaches. Who would have thought?
Markets in everything sandcastle butlers those new service sector jobs
Building the biggest and the best sandcastles is an absolute must for children on beaches.
Now a travel company is stepping in to secure the all-important bragging rights for them – by launching the world’s first sandcastle butler service.
From Disney castles to favourite TV characters, the talented concierge staff will be on hand to transform a simple mound of sand into anything guests’ imaginations can conjure up.
Oliver’s Travels, a family villa specialist, is introducing the VIP service at selected destinations in Europe.
When guests book the service they will first get a sandcastle brainstorming session with the butlers in order to create an elaborate sand design.
Potential meteor shower markets in everything
Skywatchers hoping to see a shooting star may soon be able to order them on demand.
A group of Japanese scientists say they have a shooting-star secret formula — an undisclosed chemical mixture packed into tiny, inch-wide balls that the team hopes to eject from a satellite to create on-demand meteor showers, AFP reports.
A Japanese start-up company called ALE is partnering with researchers at multiple universities to create the artificial meteor showers, which will cost around $8,100 per meteor for buyers. The researchers said the manufactured meteors would be bright enough to be visible even in areas with light pollution, like Tokyo, assuming clear weather.
The story is here, from Sarah Lewin, and for the pointer I thank Michael Komaransky.
Forager markets in everything
Apparently the institutionalization of small-scale food foraging is part of the new food chain for restaurant supply, and it has become an “intensely secret” and “ultracompetitive” world:
FreshDirect, the online grocery-delivery service, offers packs of foraged lambsquarters for $4.99 each. Chef David Waltuck, who’s bought ingredients from foragers at his New York restaurants since the ’70s, says the picking operations have gotten more sophisticated to keep up with the market. “Foragers sell to purveyors now,” he says. “It became more of a business. Back in the early days, there was nothing like that.”
With the explosion in popularity, though, the foragers themselves have had to become even more protective of their wares. “You’re looking at limited resources,” says Matt Parker, a West Coast–based purveyor of foraged ingredients who works with a small network of gatherers and sells to restaurants such as Spago and Gjelina. “Foragers live and die by the seasons and what’s available, so of course they are protective of their spots — that’s how they make a living.” Parker sustains a roster of “seven to nine guys, depending on how reliable they want to be,” but none will reveal their “honey grounds” to him. Waltuck adds, “They might take you out with them, but they’ll blindfold you.” Indeed, when another prominent New York chef offered to send me out with his preferred forager in Jersey’s Delaware Water Gap, he agreed to do so only if I’d wear a pillowcase over my head for the entire car ride. Eventually, the forager got cold feet and reneged on the deal altogether.
That is from Edna Ishayik, via MR reader Jeremy Yamada.
Markets in everything 3-D printing arbitrage to curb rhino poaching
A San Francisco biotech startup has managed to 3D print fake rhino horns that carry the same genetic fingerprint as the actual horn. It plans to flood Chinese market with these cheap horns to curb poaching.
And this:
The company plans to release a beer brewed with the synthetic horn later this year in the Chinese market.
Markets in everything does this violate a zero profit condition?
Henceforth you will be tipped a rupee to pee at the right spot! The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) is toying with a new idea of paying people money if they visit the nearest public toilets.
This idea was first implemented in Darechowk in Katmandu in Nepal and had worked well.
In Ahmedabad, the AMC will implement the scheme in 67 nuisance spots in the city with a public toilet nearby. Once successful, the scheme will be implemented across all public toilets in the city.
The full article is here, and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
Self-constraint markets in everything
For most people, weight is a private issue. That looks like it could be a thing of the past for anyone who gets a WiFi Body Scale that has come to the market. It is set up to auto tweet, or auto post to Facebook each time you step on it. Is this designed to keep people accountable, or just plain stupid?
This scale is retailing for just under $150 by a company called Withings. Previous versions of this scale allowed you to track your weight and other data such as heart rate and body fat percentage from your Apple Iphone. I guess they needed to take it a step further and allow you to auto tweet or facebook your weight for the world to see.
There is more here, via Fred Smalkin.