Animals felt the tremours first. Red ruffed lemurs win hands-down, a full 15 minutes of warning, if you knew what was coming, that is. Flamingos were also pretty clear in their signalling. Pandas proved useless in this instance.

Rest of the world has to pick up the slack.

So resistance to maintain online annominity is futile?

Cheating on tests, cheating on taxes, principle is the same: when people over-estimate other people’s tendency to cheat, cheating becomes rampant.

Boys are maturing faster too, but we are in general all growing up slower.

Global competition doesn’t spare any specific industry.

And the centre of the world keeps shifting, east and southwards.

Adoptions and corruption.

It’s this time of the year again, amusement park rides and fair foods.

The anxiety economy.

Social and political progress will always accompany economic progress.

Pepe Escobar writes for Al-Jazeera.

I get the feeling that it takes something the proportions of an Olympics to seriously assess a city.

Imagine if Chinese pagentry goes all hard-core tiger mom, this is but a start.

When does economy of scale when it comes to city management stops to make sense?

Will more reverse endorsements like this come about in the coming years? Imagine if Burberry offered British soccer hooligans to stop wearing its pattern.

This will not be without consequences. (h/t JW)

Big Pharma in my opinion is scarier than Big anything else.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about Ron Paul either.

Yet another example of completely unintended progress, this time in Brazil. This is the hilarious 5 point plan in crashing fertility:

1. Industrialize dramatically, urgently, and late, causing your nation to hurtle through in 25 years what economists used to think of as a century’s worth of internal rural-to-urban relocation of its citizens. Brazil’s military rulers, who seized power in a 1964 military coup and held on through two decades of sometimes brutal authoritarian rule, forced the country into a new kind of economy, one that has concentrated work in the cities, where the housing is cramped, the favela streets are dangerous, babies look more like new expense burdens than like future useful farmhands, and the jobs women must take for their families’ survival require leaving home for ten hours at a stretch.

2. Keep your medications mostly unregulated and your pharmacy system over-the-counter, so that when birth control pills hit the world in the early 1960s, women of all classes can get their hands on them, even without a doctor’s prescription, if they can just come up with the money. Nurture in these women a particularly dismissive attitude toward the Catholic Church’s position on artificial contraception. (See number 4.)

3. Improve your infant and child mortality statistics until families no longer feel compelled to have extra, just-in-case babies on the supposition that a few will die young. Compound that reassurance with a national pension program, relieving working-class parents of the conviction that a big family will be their only support when they grow old

4. Distort your public health system’s financial incentives for a generation or two, so that doctors learn they can count on higher pay and more predictable work schedules when they perform cesareans rather than waiting for natural deliveries. Then spread the word, woman to woman, that a public health doctor who has already begun the surgery for a cesarean can probably be persuaded to throw in a discreet tubal ligation, thus ensuring a thriving, decades-long publicly supported gray market for this permanent method of contraception. Brazil’s health system didn’t formally recognize voluntary female sterilization until 1997. But the first time I ever heard the phrase “a fábrica está fechada,” it was from a 69-year-old retired schoolteacher who had her tubes tied in 1972, after her third child was born. This woman had three sisters. Every one of them underwent a ligation. Yes, they were all Catholic. Yes, the church hierarchy disapproved. No, none of them much cared; they were women of faith, but in some matters the male clergy is perhaps not wholly equipped to discern the true will of God. The lady was pouring tea into china cups at her dining table as we talked, and her voice was matter-of-fact. “Everyone was doing it,” she said.

5. Introduce electricity and television at the same time in much of the nation’s interior, a double disruption of traditional family living patterns, and then flood the airwaves with a singular, vivid, aspirational image of the modern Brazilian family: affluent, light skinned, and small. Scholars have tracked the apparent family-size-shrinking influence of novelas, Brazil’s Portuguese-language iterations of the beloved evening soap operas, or telenovelas, that broadcast all over Latin America, each playing for months, like an endless series of bodice-ripper paperbacks. One study observes that the spread of televisions outpaced access to education, which has greatly improved in Brazil, but at a slower pace. By the 1980s and ’90s all of Brazil was dominated by the Globo network, whose prime-time novelas were often a central topic of conversation; even now, in the era of multichannel satellite broadcasting, you can see café TVs turned to the biggest Globo novela of the season.

And, finally, number 6: Make all your women Brazilians.

The biggest gender-bender – albeit in the other direction, in fashion since Chanel?

How many words do you need to describe emotions?

I really need one of those:

Thai ad agencies really have a lot of room to maneuver, did those actually air on TV?

One of my university classmates once entered into an inpromptu debate with our labour relations professor on the merits of more private goods. I think I’ve found the perfect rebuttal.

This is the problem with super homogenous societies. Everybody does something out of habit regardless of whether they like it or not, now the silent minorities (or maybe majorities) don’t like it anymore, and have to invent societies to curb it.

Warren Buffet wants to pay more taxes.

Short TED talk for China watchers.  Also, as far as interesting interviews are concerned, search for Zhang Xin at Charlie Rose, the female billionare founder of SOHO real estate corporation in China, self-made from factory worker. Sometimes I worry about how much Europe misses out on the emerging economies, sole because there’s so much 1) navel gazing, and 2) constantly looking up to the US as the ultimate measuring stick, even when the US has long moved on to the next bright thing.

It’s been almost a whole year since I last blogged. There were a few reasons, the biggest being that I just simply ran out of things to say, and bloggin became more of a burden than a pleasure.

Now after a year of separation, I think I might be ready to get back to somewhat reguglar blogging again. There’s a lot to catch up on, but first things first, some interesting reading for the weekend.

Unintended consequences

Michael Lewis at it again

Things to think through before killing off a character

Culling of the Middle Class – see also deflationry effect of the Internet, and effect of immigration to the UK on the top and bottom strata of society (still searching for the piece)

American manufacturing strikes back

If you are interested in language and culture, Economist’s Johnson blog always has something amusing to offer

• Made (by Chinese) in Italy.
• Erosion of safety at a J-burg park.
• Various ways of looking at the idea and the economic and political implications of “decline”.
• Preps of today.
• The history of Oktoberfest.
• But isn’t that what the oil reserve fund is for?
• Not just in France, America too.
• Group psychosis to blame for Japan’s less-than-stellar English.

• Eurozone and Germany.
• Public pensions and retirement.
• Polling caste.
• Memo to outsiders: trillion dollar bailout was just window dressing.
• “The unhappiest Spaniards are those who most embrace the modernist destruction of tradition, especially when it comes to traditional family relationships.” When measuring happiness within a particular country over time.
• Will an ever-diminishing Europe slip quietly into the night?

• On stitching up dead people.
• Finally, domestic bus services in Germany. Bizarre, since Europe-wide Euroline has little problems operating.
• Michael Lewis strikes again.  This time in Greece.
• Rewiring our minds to read better.
• American kid turns into Mexican drug pin. American kid turns into Al-Shabab terrorist. Two sides of the same coin?

• Al-Jazeera’s documentary on Chinese presence in Africa.
• Now everyone is in the EU, it’s harder for Brussels to tell eastern Europe what to do with their Roma.
• Sex for sale in Bollywood.
• Dhaka the megacity of the future.
• Who wants a Vietnamese wife?
• Vintage Japanese subway posters.

• Half of Luxemburg is filled with foreigners, although mostly from neighbouring countries. The UK’s foreign citizens % is surprisingly low.
• Neo-nationalism exerts more and more pressure on the European Project.
• Europe moving closer to the American model in higher education.
• No surprise, SAS most punctual airline.
• The divide is increasingly north-south, in addition to east-west.
• New study says African civil wars not result of climate shifts.
• This is how you write for the British tabloid.
• Behind “The Secret”.
• Post-Communist generation: “Skeptical about democracy, cynical about capitalism”.
• Is “more Europe” the solution to Europe’s problems?

• What is freedom in the American eye?
• The rambunctious Chinese opera is dying.
• Mostly American responses to German academia’s assertion that America should remain American and not European.
• Is Belgium finally on the verge of an orderly separation?
• Bliss at $75,000.
• Fuss over Craigslist is about something else.
• Another review on the “wrong continent” book. Conclusion? Homogeneity drives the welfare states.

The economics behind women’s tennis tournaments.

Eurozone’s dysfunctional internal markets.

Does the special relationship across the pond still exist?

How the German language evolved from the primordial Germanic soup.

Can the French economy be in better shape than the German’s?

Interesting short story from the perspective of a mail-order bride.

Nationalistic sentiments running high everywhere, including Japan.

EU project going into slow reverse?  Rather simplistic view draw from a distance, but causes much more nuanced in my opinion.

And I’m sure the next generation of palliative patients will have a different set of regrets.

How little thoughts we give to dying.

On the German versus American attitudes when it comes to labour.

How Trader Joe works.

Who has the freedom to travel without a visa?

What makes a global city?

What education should seek to teach.

No representation, low taxes.

On class, facial hair, and Turkish politics.

Things to know about start-ups.

The case for learning foreign languages not strong enough for the British.

Brussels’ image overhaul campaign.