Umalu

Joined 16 years ago

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Comment · 11 years ago

Japanese parents probably were never warped by "milk carton kids" -- throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S., we'd see missing kids plastered on the sides of our milk cartons. It made people think that kids were being kidnapped by strangers all the time, when in fact nearly all the missing kids shown on the cartons were either runaways or were taken by a parent involved in a custody dispute (bad, sure, but not the same thing as a stranger kidnapping them). The national hysteria that resulted from this led to our current era of helicopter-parented kids. I was a kid just before all this happened, so I consider myself a member of the last generation of free range kids in the U.S.

For more information see http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2402/how-many-kids-...

Comment · 11 years ago

Two disparate observations:

1. US GDP per capita is still almost 8x that of China: $53,042 US vs. $6,807 China (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD). While there are other ways to measure this (such as the PPP Sam cites), the magnitude of difference remains large. So even if China's economy in the aggregate is larger than the US's, the US is still much richer per capita.

2. As China grows richer, I expect the US will too. In modern inter-connected economies with few trade barriers growth in one generally benefits the other too. One example would be as one country's citizens gain greater purchasing power, they become bigger consumers of the other country's goods and services.

Comment · 13 years ago

In 2007 The Believer ran what I think is the definitive account of the Codex Seraphinianus: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200705/?read=article_taylo...

The Codex was likely inspired by the Borges story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" which involves encyclopedia articles about an imagined world: http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf