A lot of progressive values are the default if you’re poor. Eating less meat, not using cars, consuming less electricity, buying local food. While someone in Brooklyn will pay exorbitant amounts (and attention) to bicycle to work, eat organic food and minimize their carbon footprint, this is what a poor Sri Lankan does by default.

Ah, good science writing. This is a post from the Throckmorton File about a scientific study on stripper, specifically, how their tips are effected by their menstrual cycle. And they are. Very interesting. In scientific terms, this would be a study of the economic effects of female estrus. In common parlance, they’re asking whether ovulating strippers get more tips. Apparently they do.

Do you know how humans dealt with economic crisis (crises? crisi?) in the past? They moved. They got up and moved. This great and constant migration out of Africa is why we’re here in the first place, or wherever you are. Yet this same type of migration is now illegal. But that’s just a consensual hallucination, and it’s not the way it has to be. And it may not be helping. Free trade is a widely espoused belief (though rarely practiced). Why not free migration?

In short, because we’re connected. Because we live together. Because we need each others help. There are a few studies detailing why we’re altruistic, but few explaining how. To that I would posit, because we have an identity and a face. For example, we went to this alley bar in Mount Lavinia that actually serves a decent lunch. On the way out our car was boxed in by two guys. This would often be a problem, but this time it wasn’t. People were so nice that it left me confused. Why?

Whitening creams are medically and socially toxic. And they’re spreading. The new body part women should be insecure about is their armpits. Seriously. On Indian TV and Colombo billboards the latest thing is whitening deodorant. Armpit is the new face.

Innovation is adaptation. It’s evolution. Business is not that different from life in the jungle. You have to survive, thrive, and that means you have to adapt. That’s all innovation really is. Artificial adaptation. To understand innovation you don’t need to think like an MBA, you need to think like a monkey.

An average of 10 people per day get killed by trains in Mumbai. With intelligent signage and design, however, they’ve managed the deaths on one line (Wadala) dropped from 23 (every six months) to 9 (in the same period). What makes the design more effective? It wasn’t more expensive (it was free), nor was it more restrictive. It was simply more scientific, dealing with the human brain as it is, not as we’d like it to be. Both economics and marketing presume that humans are rational actors, which we’re not. We’re monkeys with pants. Having some understanding for the brain can produce positive results. Which also look better.

The housekeeper’s father sold her for a bottle of booze when she was eight. Many lower income men are the same. They don’t work and what money they do get is spent on booze. I know countless families where women are the main breadwinner, whether they’re working here or forming the majority of workers abroad. What’s surprising, however, is that many upper income men are the same. Not on the same scale of cruelty, but they also don’ work.

The best policy for any aspiring dictator is birth control. If you aspire to be the father of a nation, you might want to limit the number of mouths to feed. If you don’t, there’s a high probability of revolt. If you look at the map above, youth (under 25) make up around 50% of many countries. Those countries are also prone to revolt. If you think about it, young people are strong, they can stay up all night and they have little to lose. If they don’t have numbers it’s possible to suppress them, but if they have more than 50%, resisting change will be tough. It’s a common idiom that change only comes when old people die. You could add that change also comes if there are enough young people to retire them.

Rain makes the plants grow, animals eat the plants, humans chase animals, humans populate the world, forget the whole cycle. Until it floods. Rains have flooded Sri Lanka now, twice. In Colombo we notice this as a vague chilly patch with dampness of feet. In the north-central and eastern provinces, however, this is known as calamity. Roads submerged, and scourged. Houses flooded, fridges ruined, classes closed, paddy lost, money gone. I get SMS’s of statistics which somehow have little or no impact. After the first flood, the media is like, this again? It seems like another personal disaster, just affecting more people. That is, however, still a disaster.