Lily Kuo wrote that China was concerned about a military made up of children from one-child families:

• The one child policy was expected to create a generation with more resources and familiarity with technology, thus being a boon to the armed forces.
• However government publications are writing that it may, instead, have created a generation of “wimps”.
• The military runs programs specifically designed to toughen up ‘spoiled’ soldiers.
• Other concerns about the military include the fact that as a wing of the Communist Party, officers are required to spend 40% of their time on ‘political training’ learning Communist Party songs and lessons.

Read more about the specific causal mechanisms that may lead to one-child children being less effective fighters, why the concerns are likely overblown, and more over here.

Source: Quartz

Reddit’s AskHistorians section discussed the history of flag design:

• Ships used to fly flags to show what country they were from. A rectangular flag catches the wind the best.
• Soon the idea of flags being used to represent countries at sea turned into flags being used to represent countries in general.
• European colonialism then spread this idea to the rest of the world.
• There are exceptions. Nepal’s flag has a non-rectangular shape because it’s based on the royal standards of its Kings.
• The Swiss flag is a square because the flag is based upon its military colours which across Europe are usually square.
• The Swiss naval flag, however, is rectangular.

Read the entire discussion here and see what flags in the past used to look like.

Source: Reddit

Not sure if an appropriate amount of time has passed before it’s safe to make jokes about a traumatic event? Science has your back:

• Jokes about a traumatic event before it takes place (such as an upcoming hurricane) are generally well received.
• The perceived humour of post-tragedy jokes falls up to about fifteen days after the tragedy.
• After that jokes about the event seem funnier. They seem funniest 36 days after the event.
• The perceived humour of jokes falls after that – but mostly because the memory of the event fades with time and so it’s harder to relate to jokes about it.
• It also depends on the quality of the joke. Two weeks after 9/11 The Onion released an issue with jokes about the event that was well received due to the quality of the writing.

See graphs that show when you can make that joke you were holding onto and more over here.

Source: New Republic

Via: Marginal Revolution

The Economist took a look at some numbers related to alcohol and college:

• The more that colleges in Cambridge spend on wine, the better their academic results tend to be.
• This is probably because richer colleges are able to spend more on alcohol…and also programs that actually boost academic performance.
• Older colleges also attract more upper class students – the types who would enjoy wine and have the cash to give themselves an academic boost through extra tuitions and coaching.
• Most of the wine probably isn’t drunk by students anyway. It’s spent on functions for alumni to help raise money.

Read more over here.

Source: The Economist

We’ve previously covered China’s mistress culture. Junheng Li, Bethany Allen, and Ana Swanson provided more details:

• On a weekend night one can find lines of limos waiting outside of universities to whisk young women away.
• Having a mistress has become a type of social status within China and just one of many luxury accessories that the rich frequently purchase.
• The biggest difference between China’s mistress culture and prostitution is that prostitutes are usually paid in cash. Mistresses in China are paid in expensive gifts.
• This is because cash encourages freedom while gifts such as apartments create dependency.
• It is difficult for women to find work in urban areas. They earn on average a third of their male counterparts, and jobs often have a maximum age cutoff of 26 for women.
• All this has consequences for the typical Chinese man. By 2030 more than a quarter of Chinese men in their late 30s are projected to be unmarried.

Read more about the material culture that drives this phenomenon, why mistresses must have a college education and social skills, and how one of the mistresses feels about the trend over here.

Source: The Daily Beast

Jason Hickel argued that it’s not poor countries that are corrupt; it is the rich:

• The United Kingdom’s upper house of parliament is filled not by elected politicians but by appointment and tradition.
• The LIBOR scandal showed that London’s banks were rigging the global financial system to make $100 billion in profits.
• Institutions such as the IMF and The World Bank give effective veto power to rich countries – even though they represent a minority of the world’s population.
• If any of this had been true of developing countries they would be decried as corrupt. Yet rich countries aren’t.
• In fact corruption is responsible for only about 3% of the amount of public money that is lost in developing countries.

Read more of the argument here.

Source: Al Jazeera

Sam Kamin and Joel Warner wrote about the struggles faced by the marijuana industry:

• Banks in Colorado and Washington refuse to offer loans or accounts to pot shops since while a couple of states have legalized weed, federal law still treats it as a drug and banks could get into trouble for working with “drug money”.
• With $2.34 billion in sales the marijuana industry is likely the largest without access to financial services.
• Even if banks could offer loans it’s unclear what they could take as collateral. Not the business itself since laws might change. And certainly not the plants.
• Some legislators have suggested a state-owned marijuana bank unconnected to the federal financial system and thus not covered by its laws.
• For an industry that’s forced to operate mostly in cash, the authorities appear to be doing their utmost to deny the businesses proper security.
• The DEA for example pressured armoured car companies to stop working with marijuana shops. And the Denver Police Department banned off-duty officers from doing work at marijuana stores.

Read more about the challenges of running a marijuana store here.

Source: Slate

The Economist took a look at Braille, the writing system that represents letters as dots for blind individuals:

• The number of blind children has fallen in the rich world. This has led to fewer people learning the language.
• Increasing numbers of individuals are losing their sight later in life and they’re unwilling to invest in learning a new language, further reducing the number of people who know it.
• Technology has made it easier to be blind without knowing Braille. Text to speech programs aid those without vision.
• The language itself is a little unwieldy. The final Harry Potter book is over a foot tall when converted to Braille.
• All this has meant that the language is now “on life support”.
• However technology maybe coming to its rescue. Tactile touchscreens and alloys that can mimic dots on a tablet may save the language and help it live alongside audio technology.

Read more about the benefits of Braille, the reason why the incidence of blindness in children has fallen, and more over here.

Source: The Economist

Rachel Feltman took a look at the amount of water logged in common food items:

• Each egg requires 53 gallons of water to produce. This includes the cost of water-intensive grain feed and drinking water.
• A classic Hershey bar requires 317 gallons of water to produce.
• A typical pizza slice costs 42 gallons of water. That includes the water for the dough, the cheese and the sauce. Mozzarella in particular is water heavy.
• However water use varies by region. A French pizza slice only costs requires 21 gallons of water.

Read more about the water embedded in every day food items here.

Source: Quartz

Ten years ago Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson performed a controversial Super Bowl halftime show where Timberlake ultimately exposed part of Jackson’s breasts. The ensuing controversy came to be known as Nipplegate. Marin Cogan looked at some of the impacts of the controversy:

• The controversy put TiVo on the map. After the event 35,000 new customers enrolled for the ability to rewind live television.
• One individual wanted an easy way for people to be able to go back and look up clips of the video. Two years later he would launch YouTube.
• Howard Stern who frequently tested the boundaries of the FCC became collateral damage and was fired from his radio show. He would then sign on with the struggling SiriusXM and since then premium radio has been a force to reckon with.
• For the next six years Super Bowl halftime shows were performed by middle-aged men.

Read more of the story behind the story, how the controversy torpedoed Jackson’s music career, and why this was “the last primal scream of a public marching inexorably toward a new digital existence” over here.

Source: ESPN