Shanghai is to extend the one-child policy to man’s best friend after tens of thousands of people complained of being bitten last year – and to prevent dog mess spoiling the country’s showcase business city.
The rule has already been imposed in several other Chinese cities, but Shanghai’s size – it has a population of more than 20 million – has made the presence of thousands of dogs more problematic. Dogs bigger than 3ft will be banned from the centre of the city and so-called “attack dogs”, including bulldogs, will be banned completely.
The ruling is the latest instance of uneasy relationships between man’s best friend and the Chinese authorities. During the Communist era of Mao Zedong, pets were frowned upon as a middle-class affectation and government opponents were condemned as capitalist running dogs. But China’s growing openness, combined with its rising affluence, means that pets are making a comeback, and there are around 100 million pet dogs in China. However, from May, a one-dog policy will be introduced in Shanghai and more than 600,000 unlicensed dogs will be declared illegal – and killed because of fears of rabies.
related { The special bond that often forms between people and both domesticated and wild animals may be, paradoxically, part of what makes us human. | Seed | full story }
Consumers are hoping to cash in on last week’s state Supreme Court ruling that it’s illegal for retailers to ask customers for their ZIP Codes during credit card transactions, except in limited cases.
More than a dozen new lawsuits have been filed against major chains that do business in California, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., Crate & Barrel and Victoria’s Secret. More filings are expected in the coming weeks.
The flurry of litigation stems from a decision last week against Williams-Sonoma Inc. in which the state high court ruled unanimously that ZIP Codes were “personal identification information” that merchants can’t demand from customers under a California consumer privacy law.
…50-year-old Nobuhiro Komiya who for the last two years has worked tirelessly doing one of the most unlikely and mind boggling of jobs - censoring the unending torrent of hentai manga or pornographic comics which flood Tokyo’s book shops and convenience stores.
“It’s a tough job. (…) It’s totally different to reading manga as a hobby,” he says.
A visit to the Department of Youth Affairs and Public Safety on the 35th floor of Tokyo’s towering Metropolitan Government building, where Komiya and his small team of censors get down to the grisly task of comic book censorship, reveals we are talking about a lot more than the width of Wonder Woman’s bust.
Spread out over the white Formica table-top are the worst of the worst - a hand-picked selection of the weirdest and most shocking examples of hentai from the country which invented it.
“Normal sex doesn’t sell well,” Komiya remarks. School sex, tied-up sex, abnormal sex, sells. So this is what they draw.”
According to a recent study commissioned by the Japanese government, the country’s desire for sex is dropping quickly.
The biennial survey, originally designed to gauge the success of the country’s birth-control education, revealed that 36.1 percent of Japanese males between 16 and 19 had no interest in or even loathed sex. In 2008, that number was 17.5 percent.
Of girls in that 16–19 age group, 59 percent had no interest in sex, up 12 points from 2008.
Forty percent of married people admitted to not having sex within the last month.
Overall, the fertility rate in Japan has dropped to 1.37 births per woman. It’s 2.06 in the U.S. Such a low rate, if it continues, could have major consequences for the Japanese economy.
{ How the U.S. Secret Service pulls off the most complicated security event of the year, from counter-surveillance to counter-assault, hotel booking to event schedule. | The Atlantic | full story | Chart: The Presidential Motorcade }
Nasa has 18 facilities across the US, from Maryland to California, and its major contractors, companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, have dozens more. But no place has assumed the identity of the country’s space programme quite like Brevard County. A mosquito-bitten slip of coast, 20 miles wide and 70 miles long, it was somewhere people used to drive through on their way to Palm Beach, until the US army decided to start testing its missiles there in October 1946.
And then, quite suddenly, it was colonised. The arrival of Wernher von Braun, designer of the V2 rocket, and the other founding fathers of the US space programme, made Brevard the fastest-growing county in America. Nasa, founded in 1958, built bridges and water systems, and when the space race reached its exorbitant heights in the mid-1960s, Brevard was the edge of the world. Astronauts raced their cars on the beach, newsmen camped out on their lawns and the county was given the dialling code 3-2-1 after the launch sequence. In 1973, Brevard put the Moon landing on its county seal.
The Apollo boom was followed by bust: 10,000 people lost their jobs when the programme was cancelled in 1972. But since then, Brevard has rebuilt itself around the space shuttle, Nasa’s longest-serving spacecraft and one of the most recognisable vehicles ever to fly. The parts may be manufactured elsewhere and its missions managed from Houston, but for the past three decades Brevard County and KSC have been, in Nasa-speak, where the rubber hits the road. The tourist-friendly launches and everlasting work of 132 missions have made the shuttle the central activity of America’s Space Coast—the stuff of daily life and conversation. (…)
Brevard hasn’t escaped the property crash. Property values in Brevard County have fallen by 45 per cent since 2007 and are still falling—more than 10 per cent last year. (…) Yet it is nothing compared to what is to come, because the rockets and the recession are about to collide. There will be at least two or maybe three missions this year: Discovery, planned for February; the official final flight, Endeavour, scheduled for 1st April; and possibly a “final final” mission if Atlantis gets the go-ahead, most likely in June. But at some point in 2011, the space shuttle will fly for the last time.
The president was too polite to mention it during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, but here’s a quick summary of the problem: The U.S. is broke. The hole is too big to plug with cost cutting or economic growth alone. Rich people have money. No one else does. Rich people have enough clout to block higher taxes on themselves, and they will. (…)
Whenever I feel as if I’m on a path toward certain doom, which happens every time I pay attention to the news, I like to imagine that some lonely genius will come up with a clever solution to save the world. Imagination is a wonderful thing. I don’t have much control over the big realities, such as the economy, but I’m an expert at programming my own delusions. (…)
As a public service, today I will teach you how to wrap yourself in a warm blanket of imagined solutions for the government’s fiscal dilemma.
To begin, assume that as the fiscal meltdown becomes more perilous, everyone will become more flexible and perhaps a bit more open-minded. That seems reasonable enough. A good crisis has a way of changing people. Now imagine that the world needs just one great idea to put things back on the right track. Great ideas have often changed history. It’s not hard to imagine it can happen again.
Try to imagine that the idea that saves the country is an entirely new one. (…)
Convincing the rich to accept higher taxes on themselves.
Tens of thousands of New York City employees who did not report for work during the snowstorm on Thursday could lose a day of leave — even though Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sent out a predawn message that day saying that all city nonemergency offices and schools would be closed.
A memo went out to the heads of all city agencies on Monday saying that office employees will lose a day of vacation or comp time unless they write an acceptable excuse note.
You’re probably wondering how on earth microbes have anything to do with the 3 feet of snow you had to dig your car out from under last week…
I have two “believe it or not” statements for today:
First, believe it or not, microbes are ubiquitous in the Earth’s atmosphere (Bowers et al. 2009, and others). “Ubiquitous” is a fantastic word that simply means “absolutely everywhere” and it’s especially true with microbes. (…) Microbes are also extremely abundant in the air around us, above and beyond our reach, floating in the breeze and being carried thousands of miles on trans-oceanic trade winds. (…)
[Two]: many of those atmospheric microbes have been found to nucleate ice (Bauer et al. 2003). What I mean by “nucleate ice” is that they can serve as the starting point for ice crystals to begin to form.
Michelle Obama wouldn’t be pleased. Maine’s Legislature appears poised to make the whoopie pie the official state dessert.
The designation, supporters say, would give Maine bakeries a marketing edge and raise awareness that the pies are more popular here than anywhere else in the country.
But opponents say the legislation sends the wrong message at a time when the nation is struggling to fight childhood obesity, an issue the first lady has championed.
Whoopie pies are a New England cousin to Southern moon pies. They are chocolate snack cake “sandwiches” with a filling. Moon pies use marshmallow, whoopie pies use a cream filling.
The really surprising number you saw the talking heads on TV mention was the growth of consumer spending, at 4.4%. Is the US consumer back? After all, real final sales rose by 7.1%, a number not seen since 1984 and Ronald Reagan. But real income rose a paltry 1.7%. Where did the money that was spent come from?
Savings dropped a rather large 0.5% for the quarter. That was part of it. And I can’t find the link, but there was an unusual drawdown of money market and investment accounts last quarter, somewhere around 1.5%, if I remember correctly. That would just about cover it. But that is not a good thing and is certainly not sustainable.
Let’s see what good friend David Rosenberg has to say about those numbers:
Even with the Q4 bounce, real final sales have managed to eke out a barely more than 2% annual gain since the recession ended, whereas what is normal at this stage of the cycle is a trend much closer to 4%. Welcome to the new normal.
There is no doubt that there will be rejoicing in Mudville because real GDP did manage to finally hit a new all-time high in Q4. The recession losses in output have been reversed (though what that means for the 7 million jobs that have to be recouped is another matter). But, before you uncork the champagne, just consider what it has taken just to get the economy back to where it was three years ago:
· The funds rate moved down from 4.5% to zero.
· The Fed’s balance sheet expanded by more than 1.5 trillion dollars.
· The printing of M2 money supply of around 1 trillion dollars (the illusion of prosperity).
· Expansion of federal government debt of 4.8 trillion dollars.
All this heavy lifting just to take the economy back to where it was in the fourth quarter of 2007.
(…)
Thursday was the annual Tiger 21 conference, and the room held about 150 or so very-high-net-worth participants. The lunch session was Greta van Sustern interviewing Newt Gingrich. And yes, from what I heard he is going to run.
Over the last several months, 22,741 New Yorkers contacted the city’s Department of Sanitation and arranged for the pickup of refrigerators, air-conditioners and freezers. In more than 11,000 instances, the machines vanished before sanitation workers arrived in their white trucks to pick them up.
Who, then, is stealing the household appliances of New York City?
Scavengers, to be sure, abound in New York, especially during tough economic times. But the sheer magnitude of the thefts — 11,528 appliances, to be precise — over a relatively brief period suggests to some in city government and the recycling industry that a more organized enterprise may be at work as well.
The usual black bottom strip on those signs has been replaced by a colorful set of horizontal lines, evoking the aesthetic of the subway map. The transportation authority’s circular blue logo now sits atop the poster, astride a helpful “.info” to direct passengers to the authority’s Web site. The MTA worked with its longtime agency, Korey Kay Partners, the agency that created the “SubTalk” motto in 1993.
The Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, has come out with its list of Top Risks for 2011. (…)
1 — The G-Zero:
We are entering the era of G-Zero, a world order in which no country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage to drive an international agenda. The US lacks the resources to continue as primary provider of public goods, and rising powers are too preoccupied with problems at home to welcome the burdens that come with international leadership. As a result, economic efficiency will be reduced and serious conflicts will arise.
2 — Europe:
While the eurozone will undoubtedly remain intact in 2011, the region’s political crises will become increasingly unmanageable. There’s a real concern that core European countries (such as Germany) will become less committed to the peripherals, in turn hurting policy coordination and undermining market confidence in the EU.
3 — Cybersecurity and geopolitics:
In 2011, geopolitics and cybersecurity will collide. Whether attacks are waged for power (state versus state), profit (particularly among state capitalists), or pleasure (from info-anarchists, as in the recent WikiLeaks case), this is a key development to watch. Governments, corporations, and banks are all vulnerable to sudden, radical transparency, and a debilitating attack could be a long-term game changer.
{ It has long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest economies of the world. These days, it would rank eighth, falling between Italy and Brazil on a nominal exchange-rate basis. But how do other American states compare with other countries? | The Economist }
